Dogs see off the Swans

It was a successful return to the coaches’ box for Rodney Eade on Saturday as the Western Bulldogs advanced to the quarter finals of the Wizard Home Loans Cup but it might be his former apprentice Paul Roos who will go home the happier man.

In what was the first meeting as coaches between Eade and the man who replaced him as coach of Sydney halfway through the 2002 season, the Bulldogs won 1.11.15 (90) to 0.11.4 (70) after breaking the game open in the third quarter.

In fine Bulldogs tradition, leading by 9 points at half-time (low score due to bad kicking, not lack of opportunities), they took the lead to 40 in the 3rd quarter & then let Sydney back to within 16 points in the 4^th.

Why oh why can’t we hold on in the last quarter? If Sydney didn’t have Barry Hall, Stuart Maxfield, Paul Williams, Jason Ball, Michael O’Loughlin, Jared Crouch, Jason Saddington, Ben Mathews and Tadgh Kennelly all out, we would have been stuffed.

On a more positive note, Ryan Griffen looks to be the player to watch this season. A rookie with a good opening game & a solid history.

So I’ve had Wordpress installed for all of a week & then they go and release a new version on me. Sigh.

Anyway, I figure if I intend to keep up my web-nerd cred I’d better install it. So I’ve done that & I now need a way to import all my messages from this site to the new site. I’m not game enough to do the direct upgrade thing that’s descibed, I wanted a parrallel cut-over. That’s when I discovered one thing really lacking in Wordpress: There is no export function.

Wordpress has plenty of good scripts for importing posts & comments from other platforms, but nothing to go from one copy of wordpress to another, specifically from one version of wordpress to another. The upgrade instructions show you how to change your current blog from 1.x to 1.5, but not what to do if you want to have them both running at the same time.

In the end I had to do it by doing a DB dump and running the SQL script on the new DB, but I still needed to hack that slightly to get it to work. There are 4 tables that contain the information about the posts & comments: wp_categories, wp_comments, wp_post2cat, wp_postmeta & wp_posts. The only structural change as far as I can see is the removal of the ICBM data (i.e. the post_lat & post_lon fields) from the wp_post table. As it was far easier to modify the 1.5 database than to get the export script to exclude those fields, I just added those two fields to the wp_post table, ran the script then dropped the fields. See, easy!

This was way to fiddly for your average joe-user, there really needs to be a way to export all your posts & comments in a standard format that can be imported into other Wordpress blogs and also into other platforms. If you do need to do this, here’s the code:

alter table wp_posts ADD COLUMN post_lat FLOAT(12,31) after post_excerpt;
alter table wp_posts ADD COLUMN post_lon FLOAT(12,31) after post_lat;

alter table wp_posts drop column post_lat;
alter table wp_posts drop column post_lon;

Just replace ###INSERT STATEMENTS HERE#### with the insert statements from the database backup (procedure is shown here) for the tables mentioned above.

So anyway, the long and the short of it is that we’re now running on 1.5, and I haven’t changed anything yet. Time to start on a whole new template!. I’ve installed the very nice Greentrack theme and over the next few days/weeks I’m going to try and hack it into exactly what I want. Props to Sadish for his top work on wpthemes.

I’ve got a new Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape search plugin available for PEAR. Just follow the link and click on "PEAR Packages Search" and it will install automatically. I’ve submitted this to Mycroft, but it could be ages until it get’s updated there.

For those who are interested, here is the code. This plugin will produce the results list in the sidebar of Mozilla & Netscape as well as working as a Firefox search plugin.

# Status: Working beta
# Mozilla/Netscape 6+ plugin for http://pear.php.net/
# by Glenn Slaven<gdalziel at gmail dot com>
#
# Created: January 04, 2005
# Last updated: January 04, 2005
#
# The PEAR Package Search has many other options that could be used, see
# http://pear.php.net/package-search.php for more details.

# Needs to be changed to mycroft address once accepted
<browser
update="http://resources.slaven.net.au/mycroft_pear/pear.src"
updateIcon="http://resources.slaven.net.au/mycroft_pear/pear.gif"
updateCheckDays=3
>
</search>

Meme time! Daniel posted about this and it got me thinking, so here’re my answers:

1. Total amount of music files on your computer:
   2691 Songs -> (11.44GB, inluding about a 1/4 of that being from one of the other guys here on our shared drive)
2. The last CD you bought was:
   Seriously cannot remeber the last CD I bought. I used to buy at least one a week, but I seem to have other expences these days
3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?
   The Fly - U2. Funny, I’d just cracked out the U2 today myself.
4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.
   • One - U2. Although my feelings about all of Zooropa are about the same as Daniel’s
   • Frente - Ordinary Angels. I love this song - even though you own your own comet
   • Crowded House - Fall at your feet & all of the Together Alone album.
   • Jars of Clay - Worlds Apart.
   • The Cure - just in general.
5. Who are you going to pass this stick to? (3 persons) and why?:
   Whoever wants to, the three people that read this I guess.

Nick Bradbury has released FeedDemon 1.5, with 15 billion new features and bug fixes (If you’ve been keeping up with the bleeding edge beta versions, it’s not quite so much of a jump though).

Also Nick has offered us a glimpse into his development environment, which is great. It’s easy as a developer to get stuck into thinking that the language and procedures you use are The Way^™, but there’s usually more than one way to do it

As some of you know, I used Delphi to create all of my shareware programs (HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon), and I’ve been very happy with it (although I will admit that I’m toying with C# as well). One of the main reasons I use Delphi is because it creates fast executables that don’t require runtime DLLs. Before I created HomeSite I was a client-server developer working in Visual Basic, and VB’s runtime DLLs were a constant source of problems. I had enough trouble trying to support people in the same building who had DLL-related problems - I can’t imagine trying to deal with these same problems with shareware, where your application is used all over the world on countless different computer configurations.

Nick, I know your pain! DLL Hell is the bane of every Windows programmer. If I knew then what I know now I really don’t think I would have ever developed in VB6. .NET is another story however.

As Joel already mentioned, I’ve been toying with Wordpress, and I’ve decided to take the plunge and switch.

One of the main reasons (other than peer pressure) is the ridiculously huge amount of trackback spam I’ve been getting lately. Word is that wordpress handles this much better, so I’m going to give it a go. If all else fails I can always just switch back!

As is plainly obvious, as of yet I haven’t done much with the template design. I’ve only just started on the template design, this is on my todo list, along with a couple of other things:

1. Finish setting up .htaccess redirects from MT permalinks to the new Wordpress links (If any old links don’t work, please let me know)
2. Do up a nice template design
3. Implement the document revisions system (The stylesheet is already in place I just need to put the stylesheet switcher into the template. If you’re using Firefox you can see the revisions by selecting ‘View -> Page Style -> Show all revisions’)

We’ll see how it goes.