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What a Crazy Year

Arguably, three of the measures of adulthood are career, family and home. Over the past year, I started a new job, had a new baby and built a new house. How do I feel? Tired. . . :-)

It was a lot of balls to juggle at once, but thankfully I had a great support system at home and at work. That's not to say that it didn't drive me crazy sometime, but we got through it in one piece!

A lot of people has helped me along the way especially following a dark period of my life. I don't know if they realized how much they kept me going and not lose track that life goes on.

I'm super excited to move to the new house with the family and start enjoying the fruits of our labors.

How To Migrate from WordPress to Blogger

The actual migration from WordPress to Blogger was very easy.  The hard part was actually finding the information on how to do it.  With a medium to large WordPress blog, a little bit of technical knowledge on running command line scripts is needed, but here are the basic steps:

First, from your WordPress admin dashboard go to Tools > Export to generate a copy of your existing blog in XML format.  By default, WordPress exports everything including all the spam comments so I suggest you delete all the spam comments first (goto Comments > SPAM and delete them) and then do the export.  Some of the spam comments had bad data in them that could cause problems when you try to do the conversion to Blogger's format.  This was what caused me the biggest headache.

Once you have your export file, head over to http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/.  This is an open source project that will convert your WordPress export file to Blogger's import file.  Note that if your export file is greater then 1MB (most likely), you will need to download the script used by the site and manually do the conversion yourself (see below).

In your Blogger dashboard, simply import the the converted file and you're all set!

Manually Converting to Blogger Format

To manually do the conversion, you need to have Python which is commonly available on Linux and OSX, but doesn't come default on Windows.  Once you have Python, you need to get  the Google gdata client.  Go to the directory where you have the client and run:

sudo python setup.py install

You now have everything ready to do the conversion!  Download the conversion script from http://code.google.com/p/google-blog-converters-appengine and from where you uncompress the file do:

bin/blogger2wordpress.sh <you file here> > blogger_import_file.xml

Go to your Blogger dashboard and import "blogger_import_file.xml". 

Why I Migrated From Wordpress to Blogger

For the past 5 years, I self-hosted my own instance of a WordPress blog running on my hosting service, but I got tired of having to do my own upgrades and applying patches.  Admittedly, WordPress is pretty easy to upgrade.  I'm not a professional blogger who needs a lot of publishing features and I don't spend too much time customizing the look of my blog.  Initially, running my own blog allowed me to get what I wanted/needed, but over the past 2-3 years I've only upgraded because of security updates.   Services such as Blogger now provide everything I need so that I can just write and not have to worry about running a blog.

Choosing to use Blogger might surprise people since it's more common these days to go from Blogger to WordPress.  While being a employee of Google adds a little motivation to dogfood my company's own product, I was looking at Blogger even before joining Google.  Blogger is a simpler blogging platform then WordPress, but still have some advance features such as built in integration with AdSense and Amazon for monetization and blog statistics.

Blogger also have recently been geting some updates on its template system that allowed me to pretty closely match the look and features of my WordPress site.

What ultimately tipped the decision, however, was that I wanted to use my own domain name (lazyhacker.com) which Blogger provides for free while WordPress charge a fee.

Find out which app is using a port.

I always forget and have to do a search, but to find out the process using a port the following can be used:

lsof -i :<port>

or

netstat -p

Wrapping Up Another Year

It's hard to believe another year is ending. So much have happened this year following the difficulties of last year. Much of this year have been about healing and preparing to move forward once again. We're making progress in that regard and while the end of 2009 had a sense of relief that I got through it this time I look toward the new year with more optimism.

Happy new year to everyone!

End of Week 12:

This end of the week brought rain so I didn't take any pictures. We're still waiting for the roof trusses to arrive, so the major work completed with the installation of the new few fence along with some of the plywood sheath walls.

A small spice rack as an exercise in woodworking.

To practice the finer details of woodworking and get exposure to using more tools, I built a small spice rack. This is a pretty common woodworking learning project. The wood is a Walnut and for the finish I just used gel-polyurethane. Honestly, I have no idea what I would use this for in the house...

As for the heart, well, it was to practice using the scroll saw so I needed do to something with curves...

End of Week 4: Starting Foundation Form

The crew has been working hard to get the foundation ready for next week's pouring. The pillars have been poured already so those 10-17' holes from last week are all filled.



The plywood that is there is along the outer wall of the house and the floor will be about 4" above it.

There were some serious mud that gushed up as the pillar were drilled:

Do Engineers Want to Be Lawyers?

We engineers tend to be well educated and often very confident in our own abilities in and outside of our area of expertise. We often straddle the fine line between confidence and arrogance. How often have we rolled our eyes at lawyers and judges requesting our source code thinking, "Do they really think that they can just pick it up, read it and understand?"

Computer source code is very precise. It has to be so that a computer can process it and do exactly what we instruct it to do. "a = 1" is precisely what it says. This should make computer code easier to understand then the english language which requires a lot of context. "It's cool" -- what does that mean?!? Those of us in software engineering know that code is not necessarily easy to read or understand because even if the language is precise the meaning can still be difficult to decipher.

Just like programming languages in software engineering, Legal and Politics have their own language. Legal language is especially difficult because even though it uses English its structure and sentences have a precision that doesn't necessarily match that of common vernacular.

Just like how we know that a lawyer can't just start an text editor, read the code and be able to understand, how come we feel that we can read proposals and half researched news articles and declare ourselves as experts?

NBA Competitiveness

There's obviously been a lot of discussions on the Miami Heat's teaming of Dwayne Wade, Lebron James, and Chris Bosh. A lot of focus has been on Lebron James and how he handled "The Decision" while humiliating the city that adored him, but a bigger question has come up on how this impacts the NBA. Will top players now be trying to form "super" teams? What will happen to the competitive landscape of the league?

I had just read Magic and Bird's book a couple of months ago and they credited having each other as opponents to pushing themselves to excel and get better. Jordan said as much in his recent comments. We like watching competition and the ones such as those between Magic and Bird was what made the NBA great. While we might enjoy the occasional All Star game, it's not something we want to see night-in-and-night-out.

A lot of people are going to be watching the Heat next year, but are they going to watch basketball or are they going to watch celebrity players? While some people are criticizing Jason Kidd's comment, I kind of agrees with him that the NBA might get a short term boost from the Heat but it might not be good for the NBA in the long term.

Build your own desk with just a power drill and iron.

I've been itching to try to build my own computer desk, but I'm a total newbie when it comes to woodworking. I haven't done anything since probably middle school shop class, but it's something I wanted to try. I went to the local hardware/lumber store and bought myself some wood which I got the store to cut to size. I bought pre-built legs and just made the table top. The main thing I wanted was to have a way to conceals all the cables on my desk while still having easy access.

I used a power drill to make the holes for the wood dowels that holds the top of the table to the side supports. The top is plywood so it has that rough edge which is covered with wood edge strips that you use an iron to fuse it to the wood. Since it is real wood, you can stain it like the rest wood and have a smooth edge.

It took me about an afternoon to put this all together, but the staining took another 3 days as I had to wait for it all to dry, but for my first effort I'm pretty satisfied. :-)

Snake oil salesman.

It's fascinating to me how some salesmen can spin words to make the a bad situation sound wonderful and they can do it with a straight face. Take, for example, the sales pitch that comes from Summerhill's blog (a bay area home builder) which disguises itself as an informational site but is really a commercial.

In one article, they are reporting that the real estate market has turned around. The message is clear: better buy their houses now as they are flying off the self! For "evidence", they use their own sales figures such as how they've sold 14 out of 30 homes... over 12+ months. So that's a rate of about one a months, so hurry up before another 16 months go by and the last house is gone.

Notice that they they spin the words so that it says "40% sold out". What does it mean to have 16 houses available but is 14 houses sold out?

Seriously, though, do they really think consumers are that stupid?!? Do they really think that we don't know what these terms really mean?

Temporarily sold out - The market is bad and so we stopped construction and there is nothing to buy.
Next sales release – We don't have anything to sale now but give us some money and encourage friends to give us money and we might give you something in the future.
Priority list – Please, for the love of green points, please just say you're interested.
Sold Out – We’re sorry but there are no more homes of this plan or this community available for sale by us, but there are 16 other similar plans next to it that isn't sold out.

How can Facebook avoid the fate of social networks.

Social networking sites come and go. There hasn't been a social networking product that has really lasted. I believe it is because they were only a single product company and eventually people lose interest and move on to another product. Facebook, despite what they say, is also really a single product company. Everything they do is meant to get you to continue to use that single product whether it is with new features or apps (which are essentially features of FB that they got outside developers to build).

How can Facebook avoid the fate of other social networking sites? They only have to look to Yahoo. Facebook is not the next Microsoft, Apple or Google even though they're trying to be. The product and business offerings are just too different. What they are is really the next Yahoo. I think it's fortunate for them that their user demographic has changed to an older crowd similar to Yahoo's. If they didn't attract this crowd, they'd be like MySpace who lost the mindshare of their demographic and couldn't attract new users. The current Facebook/Yahoo crowd tend to not like change as much and are more conservative. At the same time, they also tend to be pretty loyal to what they know. While the media love to talk about the demise of Yahoo, the reality is that millions of users are used to going to Yahoo for news, sports, horoscopes and nothing will make them change their daily ritual.

This benefits Facebook even though there are short term pains as this group tends to be less open and more concerned about privacy so Facebook has to change itself to fulfill the needs of their current user base. Thus, I believe that Facebook has to decide if that is a future they want. Facebook likes to point out that they have surpassed Yahoo and they did it by becoming the next Yahoo. Now they just need to accept it.

Apple's Garden and Android's Openness

There are a lot of talk lately about Apple's iPhone vs Google's Android. There are comparisons on features, prices, market share, and growth. Since Google I/O, I've also started noticing that there is also a growing focus on the cultural differences between the two platforms.

Apple is, and has always has, been an advocate of control. They follow the school of thought where choice is not good for the consumer because consumers find it difficult to make decision when there are too many choices. It's a lot like Henry Ford's quote "Any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants so long as it is black."

Google believes in providing technology to the masses and letting the masses guide the direction and use of the technology. The consumer might not like having to chose between between 100 nearly identical choices, but the consumer will also eliminate the weak choices until the right amount of choices are left for them to comfortably choose from.

Between these two cultures, who will win? Both? Neither? Google? (Usual disclaimer: I'm an employee of Google but any thoughts here represent my personal views and are not necessarily that of my employer.)

VIM copy/paste/navigation in Insert mode.

A few months ago, I made a commitment to learn the VIM editor. I was primarily an EMACS user, but I wanted to become proficient with VIM since EMACS is not always available I found myself too slow when using VIM. To learn it, I pretty much told myself that I'm not allowed to use any other editor while programming and just immerse myself in VIM. For the most part, it worked. I've been using VIM daily for about 4 months now and I've gotten used to it... mostly.

I can see the reasoning and benefits of having a separate mode for inserting text, but for me it isn't as intuitive to use. Maybe my fingers are just to conditioned to be able to write chunks of text and still be able to copy, paste, etc. The way I work, I edit text while jumping around a lot and that mode leads to a lot of hitting ESC to the point where I'm using more key strokes then on EMACS (where the criticism is that it requires mult-combos to do an action such as 'C-x C-c'). So I found myself editing text, ESC, move around, 'i', edit text. For the most part, I was willing to live with that, but the breaking point is that I just kept making mistakes editing. I'd hit 'i' when I'm already in edit mode or be typing outside of edit mode leading to typos and jumping to another part of the screen. I figure that 4 months is enough and while I'll stay with VIM, I'll likely be in Insert mode a lot and so I want to reduce bouncing back-and-forth between modes.

I made the following changes to my .vimrc to allow me to do things like move around (without using the arrow keys) and copy/paste without leaving Insert mode:

" Key mappings in INSERT mode
" Tired of lifting hand to hit ESC or having ctrl-[
imap ;; 

" navigate without lifting hand off of keys
imap  
imap  
imap  
imap  

" paste in Insert Mode
imap  

" undo
imap  u

" Select text
imap  vgG

If I had some carpentry skills to build my own desk.

I'd want to build this desk.

WordPress for Android

Another app I've been waiting for has been released. WordPress for Android is now available. Each day takes me further from the iPhone.

Haagen-Dazs Green Tea Ice Cream!!!

10 years ago my wife and I took a vacation to Japan where we found one of the best tasting ice creams we ever had. It was the Haagen-Dazs green tea ice cream. When we came back to the States, we tried looking for it, but it seems that it wasn't a flavor that Haagen-Dazs sold in the US. We tried other brands' green tea flavors, but nothing really matched what we had in Japan.

Today, after 10 years of searching, we found this at our local grocery store:



Yay!!!

Approaching the End of the Decade

Did 10 years really just went by?!? I still remember when we were gearing up to tackle Y2K and we're now approaching the end of the first decade of the millennium.