Spam filters are part of each hosting service's "secret sauce". Wherever we end up, I can pretty much guarantee that legitimate comments will still go into spam, but for a different set of unknown reasons.
GftNC, updating my archive takes minutes and can be done right up until Typepad shuts the servers down. No real reason to stop posting and/or commenting yet. Most convenient timing might be when lj decides he's ready to move the last several posts and comments to the new site; I can update my archive and provide him with a file with those posts/comments that WP will import.
Just a thought, that if the archive site is also WordPress, all WP sites require some amount of ongoing maintenance even if the content doesn't. That's just the way WP has set things up. At some point, one or more of the WP version, the PHP version, the theme version, or the widgets version will get out of whack and the site will just stop running.
Each of the long-running blogs I follow that run on WP eventually puts up a post saying, "We have to upgrade. Sh*t will be broken."
WP's current import function appears to be robust enough that loading the old content is just tedious, not difficult. And can be done after the new site is running.
Back in the day they would have worked with WordPress to migrate anyone that chose to move There was a certain sensitivity to just killing people's content.... I am curious, I will look later, to see if anyone is offering migration.
GoDaddy, where I rent my domain and cloud server, offers to migrate sites from other platforms to WordPress for a fee. GoDaddy will do pretty much anything for a fee :^)
Typepad.com hasn't signed up new customers for Moveable Type sites for five years now. Two years ago, they came close to shutting down the Moveable Type service. I seem to recall from then that they offered to migrate people to a WordPress service under the same corporate umbrella. Guess they're on the "well, we warned you" plan this time.
I tested the WordPress import function against a subset of my archive today, and it worked fine. I think we're down to where it's just going to be tedious now.
Since there are a number of readers interested...
Typepad's export function appears to be broken, at least for content as large as Obsidian Wings'. I have updated my software for scraping the site content the hard way -- Typepad added more stuff to discourage scraping. I've updated my site archive to this morning and put a copy up in the cloud where the editors can access it. There may be some hiccups, but this was (imo) the critical step to preserve the site's history.
I admit to a certain amount of curiosity about how many other long-running blogs there may be for whom the export function is broken, who don't have access to a stubborn old software guy?
...and am about to order a buckwheat husk pillow. This is the brand I got most recently. There was a very faint dried plant material sort of odor for a few days. On the higher end price for a pillow, but I expect to use it for >10 years.
Priority item from my perspective... Verify the Typepad export function still works. Last time around, the Typepad update that fixed export broke my code that had scraped the site contents the hard way. If the export function is broken again, fix my code and scrape content newer than what I got previously. Once that's done, retrieve any images hosted by Typepad that are newer than my last checkpoint. Once there's a safe copy of the content, the rest is just details :^) I'll take on this task and let select people know when I have put a copy in a public place.
My initial opinion is that moving ObWi to a WordPress site is straightforward. That's not necessarily the same as either simple or easy. I'll write something more detailed in the morning for people to pick at.
I don't understand why one wouldn't be helpful to anyone one works with, or anyone at all. Just, why not?
During my time as a manager, our center (~100 people) was assembled from various parts of the old Bell System, and charged with delivering the legally required changes to the local telcos' networks. Half of that staff came from a part of AT&T where the working philosophy was, "You advance your career over the bodies of your colleagues." Most of the meetings I went to was for the purpose of keeping those *ssholes from stabbing us in the back.
I could understand it somewhat. Their part of AT&T had a zillion different levels and salary was closely tied to level. If you didn't get one of the two promotions from "junior assistant flunky" to "assistant flunky" in your organization this year, you didn't get a raise. I came from Bell Labs where almost everyone not in an administrative position was a "member of technical staff". Salaries for MTS covered a spread of perhaps 8x: an MTS with 35 years of experience and demonstrated brilliance might make 8x what a starting MTS made. More than 8x in special cases, like winning a Nobel prize :^)
At the moment, Bolton is merely a private citizen, who will have to impoverish himself to defend against charges that will eventually be dropped. Powell is still Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I know Trump has some serious nut cases at DOJ, but even those have to be somewhat reluctant to piss off most of the rich people in the country by attacking Powell on fictitious grounds.
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
"Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day." I once asked the waiter, when it was dessert time and based on a hint on the menu, if they had any single-barrel bourbons. She literally lit up, and started through the choices and their relative merits.
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
I suppose I should have written them down :^) They cover a wide range of topics, eg, "To the extent that the limits of technology and the budget will support, put the tricky parts in software." Following that one came close to getting me canned. What saved me was that it eventually got pushed high enough up the chain that my SVP could say to the other side's SVP, in front of the CEO, "But Mike's solution worked and we met the politically-sensitive goal. We're 18 months past the court-ordered deadline and your solution still doesn't work."
Since this is the recent open thread...
Mostly for wj, who purports to be an eventual user of what is currently a piece of toy software for dewarping images. After a small frenzy of coding today, here's a very simple-minded cut at color. I chose this image to see if it preserved the red-eye effect in the right eye. (After looking at the original Polaroid print under 5x magnification, this is surprisingly good.) Among the things on my mind as I kept cutting corners were: (a) how many serial color-space and gamma conversions am I ignoring here, and (b) how much information am I losing by forcing intermediate values back to eight-bit integers? Still, I'm not unhappy with the results. http://www.mcain6925.com/obsidian/dewarp/obsidian09.jpg
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on.
Hayek, writing in either the 1920s or 30s, said the US was so fabulously wealthy there was no reason anyone should want for adequate food, shelter, or medical attention. And that clearly the state had a role in providing those.
One of Cain's Laws™ says that modern societies need to establish a floor under outcomes, not just opportunities; not doing so will end badly. How high the floor and how to deliver it are open for discussion; anyone who argues against a floor is arguing for the pitchforks and torches to come out eventually.
Re the link in nous's 3:12...
I'm on the author's side, mostly. So I'll get my initial childish response out of the way: if you're going to argue numbers, for pity's sake format the numbers so they're legible. My normal response when given a table that I have to copy-and-paste into a different piece of software to read conveniently is to just stop there.
Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Long ago when I was a TA at the University of Texas, the state legislature proposed what was basically doing away with us and requiring full-time faculty to do the work. I went down to the Capitol the day they had public hearings. Two faculty members killed the bill. First, the head of the math department testified that with his current staff, the dept would have to drop the services they were providing to the engineering school: calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations classes. Second, the head of the engineering college testified that he would pretty much have to shut down if that happened because his faculty would go elsewhere rather than teach the math classes. Worth noting that the math department already segregated students. Both linear algebra and differential equations were taught in two versions, one for engineering students and one for people outside of engineering.
There's a thing in the education literature called "the Colorado Paradox". We are quite mediocre at getting resident kids through K-12, and into and through college. But we have the 2nd or 3rd most educated workforce in the country. Mostly it's an accident of geography and history, and is probably not reproducible.
Re TonyP's comment, and a general thought about Alaskan resources... Those would be oil, natural gas, and coal for the most part. Russia already has lots of those.
Spent some time off and on this week adding a first cut illumination correction to the toy software for processing images of documents.
Original snapshot taken with a handheld iPad here.
Result of correcting various geometry impairments -- curled pages, perspective, orientation -- here.
First cut at doing some illumination correction here. The approach I've taken seems to do well at correcting problems caused purely by the light source being off to the side (darker sections where page curl has the surface normal vector pointing away from the light, brighter where the normal vector is pointing towards the light). The shadow in the lower right corner is from the iPad and will require a different approach to identify and correct. Or more likely, when I get closer to production I'll arrange things so the camera doesn't cast shadows.
I would add that my perception of American English has both "crafty" and "cunning" as something that is intentionally deceptive, where "clever" is not.
For me, the difference between "smart" and "clever" is mostly about scale. Smart operates on a larger scale than clever. The phrase "too clever for their own good" is illustrative. In computer programming, it usually means things like really obscure code that exploits some odd aspect of the programming language to make this routine run faster today, but that will turn out to be a maintenance nightmare in months/years to come.
I've never been to either the Hearst Castle or the Carnegie Mansion in NYC. Are they really as dismally dark as they look in the photographs? Or is that an artifact of no-flash policies and old slow films?
Or alternatively, has four decades of living in Colorado where almost everywhere has huge expanses of glass spoiled me?
Other than a "this looks like pictures I've seen" sort of observation, I really don't have any room to criticize decorating choices. My wife and I always said that our style was "graduate students who occasionally had some found money" crossed with "people actually live in this room".
Earlier this year I got tired of having to climb out of the futon and bought living room furniture that I sat "on" rather than "in". It felt really strange to go shopping for furniture without my wife. Plain because I'm a graduate student at heart. Inexpensive because, well, I might only realistically need to get ten years out of it. Three pieces so that I can separate the granddaughters as needed to avoid "Grandpa, she's poking me!" Everything else in this picture has a back story.
Took a guided tour of the NCAR supercomputer facility in Cheyenne, WY yesterday. My son and his SO accompanied me. She runs a climate science group at the U of Wyoming. The computer, named Derecho, appears in the TOP500 list of world's fastest computers twice. The CPU partition is #139. The GPU partition is #256. It's one of the very few of the TOP500 machines where you can actually get into the machine room.
It's been too long since I've done my free-association questions thing, I'm out of practice. Did get a good run after asking about fire suppression in the machine room. (Water, with anti-corrosion additives.) What sort of fire detection? What else do the air sensors check for? Is anything else monitored that closely? How many sensors for all of that together? (120,000.) How does all of the sensor data get collected and sorted out?
The supercomputer resources are provided free of charge to earth science researchers. I was assured by the docent that if I submitted a proposal, it would receive the same consideration as all the others. Except that U of Wyoming proposals get some priority, since the State of Wyoming contributes to the facility. I turned to my son's SO and asked, "Do you need interns?" She paused and then answered "Paid or unpaid?" I never know when people are pulling my leg.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “What to do?”
Spam filters are part of each hosting service's "secret sauce". Wherever we end up, I can pretty much guarantee that legitimate comments will still go into spam, but for a different set of unknown reasons.
"
GftNC, updating my archive takes minutes and can be done right up until Typepad shuts the servers down. No real reason to stop posting and/or commenting yet. Most convenient timing might be when lj decides he's ready to move the last several posts and comments to the new site; I can update my archive and provide him with a file with those posts/comments that WP will import.
"
Just a thought, that if the archive site is also WordPress, all WP sites require some amount of ongoing maintenance even if the content doesn't. That's just the way WP has set things up. At some point, one or more of the WP version, the PHP version, the theme version, or the widgets version will get out of whack and the site will just stop running.
Each of the long-running blogs I follow that run on WP eventually puts up a post saying, "We have to upgrade. Sh*t will be broken."
WP's current import function appears to be robust enough that loading the old content is just tedious, not difficult. And can be done after the new site is running.
"
Back in the day they would have worked with WordPress to migrate anyone that chose to move There was a certain sensitivity to just killing people's content.... I am curious, I will look later, to see if anyone is offering migration.
GoDaddy, where I rent my domain and cloud server, offers to migrate sites from other platforms to WordPress for a fee. GoDaddy will do pretty much anything for a fee :^)
Typepad.com hasn't signed up new customers for Moveable Type sites for five years now. Two years ago, they came close to shutting down the Moveable Type service. I seem to recall from then that they offered to migrate people to a WordPress service under the same corporate umbrella. Guess they're on the "well, we warned you" plan this time.
I tested the WordPress import function against a subset of my archive today, and it worked fine. I think we're down to where it's just going to be tedious now.
"
Since there are a number of readers interested...
Typepad's export function appears to be broken, at least for content as large as Obsidian Wings'. I have updated my software for scraping the site content the hard way -- Typepad added more stuff to discourage scraping. I've updated my site archive to this morning and put a copy up in the cloud where the editors can access it. There may be some hiccups, but this was (imo) the critical step to preserve the site's history.
I admit to a certain amount of curiosity about how many other long-running blogs there may be for whom the export function is broken, who don't have access to a stubborn old software guy?
"
...and am about to order a buckwheat husk pillow.
This is the brand I got most recently. There was a very faint dried plant material sort of odor for a few days. On the higher end price for a pillow, but I expect to use it for >10 years.
"
Priority item from my perspective... Verify the Typepad export function still works. Last time around, the Typepad update that fixed export broke my code that had scraped the site contents the hard way. If the export function is broken again, fix my code and scrape content newer than what I got previously. Once that's done, retrieve any images hosted by Typepad that are newer than my last checkpoint. Once there's a safe copy of the content, the rest is just details :^) I'll take on this task and let select people know when I have put a copy in a public place.
"
My initial opinion is that moving ObWi to a WordPress site is straightforward. That's not necessarily the same as either simple or easy. I'll write something more detailed in the morning for people to pick at.
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
I don't understand why one wouldn't be helpful to anyone one works with, or anyone at all. Just, why not?
During my time as a manager, our center (~100 people) was assembled from various parts of the old Bell System, and charged with delivering the legally required changes to the local telcos' networks. Half of that staff came from a part of AT&T where the working philosophy was, "You advance your career over the bodies of your colleagues." Most of the meetings I went to was for the purpose of keeping those *ssholes from stabbing us in the back.
I could understand it somewhat. Their part of AT&T had a zillion different levels and salary was closely tied to level. If you didn't get one of the two promotions from "junior assistant flunky" to "assistant flunky" in your organization this year, you didn't get a raise. I came from Bell Labs where almost everyone not in an administrative position was a "member of technical staff". Salaries for MTS covered a spread of perhaps 8x: an MTS with 35 years of experience and demonstrated brilliance might make 8x what a starting MTS made. More than 8x in special cases, like winning a Nobel prize :^)
On “The Schadenfreude Express”
At the moment, Bolton is merely a private citizen, who will have to impoverish himself to defend against charges that will eventually be dropped. Powell is still Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I know Trump has some serious nut cases at DOJ, but even those have to be somewhat reluctant to piss off most of the rich people in the country by attacking Powell on fictitious grounds.
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
"Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day." I once asked the waiter, when it was dessert time and based on a hint on the menu, if they had any single-barrel bourbons. She literally lit up, and started through the choices and their relative merits.
"
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
I suppose I should have written them down :^) They cover a wide range of topics, eg, "To the extent that the limits of technology and the budget will support, put the tricky parts in software." Following that one came close to getting me canned. What saved me was that it eventually got pushed high enough up the chain that my SVP could say to the other side's SVP, in front of the CEO, "But Mike's solution worked and we met the politically-sensitive goal. We're 18 months past the court-ordered deadline and your solution still doesn't work."
On “Giving Away the Store”
Since this is the recent open thread...
Mostly for wj, who purports to be an eventual user of what is currently a piece of toy software for dewarping images. After a small frenzy of coding today, here's a very simple-minded cut at color. I chose this image to see if it preserved the red-eye effect in the right eye. (After looking at the original Polaroid print under 5x magnification, this is surprisingly good.) Among the things on my mind as I kept cutting corners were: (a) how many serial color-space and gamma conversions am I ignoring here, and (b) how much information am I losing by forcing intermediate values back to eight-bit integers? Still, I'm not unhappy with the results.
http://www.mcain6925.com/obsidian/dewarp/obsidian09.jpg
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on.
Hayek, writing in either the 1920s or 30s, said the US was so fabulously wealthy there was no reason anyone should want for adequate food, shelter, or medical attention. And that clearly the state had a role in providing those.
One of Cain's Laws™ says that modern societies need to establish a floor under outcomes, not just opportunities; not doing so will end badly. How high the floor and how to deliver it are open for discussion; anyone who argues against a floor is arguing for the pitchforks and torches to come out eventually.
On “Giving Away the Store”
Re the link in nous's 3:12...
I'm on the author's side, mostly. So I'll get my initial childish response out of the way: if you're going to argue numbers, for pity's sake format the numbers so they're legible. My normal response when given a table that I have to copy-and-paste into a different piece of software to read conveniently is to just stop there.
Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Long ago when I was a TA at the University of Texas, the state legislature proposed what was basically doing away with us and requiring full-time faculty to do the work. I went down to the Capitol the day they had public hearings. Two faculty members killed the bill. First, the head of the math department testified that with his current staff, the dept would have to drop the services they were providing to the engineering school: calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations classes. Second, the head of the engineering college testified that he would pretty much have to shut down if that happened because his faculty would go elsewhere rather than teach the math classes. Worth noting that the math department already segregated students. Both linear algebra and differential equations were taught in two versions, one for engineering students and one for people outside of engineering.
"
There's a thing in the education literature called "the Colorado Paradox". We are quite mediocre at getting resident kids through K-12, and into and through college. But we have the 2nd or 3rd most educated workforce in the country. Mostly it's an accident of geography and history, and is probably not reproducible.
"
Re TonyP's comment, and a general thought about Alaskan resources... Those would be oil, natural gas, and coal for the most part. Russia already has lots of those.
"
Spent some time off and on this week adding a first cut illumination correction to the toy software for processing images of documents.
Original snapshot taken with a handheld iPad here.
Result of correcting various geometry impairments -- curled pages, perspective, orientation -- here.
First cut at doing some illumination correction here. The approach I've taken seems to do well at correcting problems caused purely by the light source being off to the side (darker sections where page curl has the surface normal vector pointing away from the light, brighter where the normal vector is pointing towards the light). The shadow in the lower right corner is from the iPad and will require a different approach to identify and correct. Or more likely, when I get closer to production I'll arrange things so the camera doesn't cast shadows.
On “A New Gilded Age”
I would add that my perception of American English has both "crafty" and "cunning" as something that is intentionally deceptive, where "clever" is not.
"
For me, the difference between "smart" and "clever" is mostly about scale. Smart operates on a larger scale than clever. The phrase "too clever for their own good" is illustrative. In computer programming, it usually means things like really obscure code that exploits some odd aspect of the programming language to make this routine run faster today, but that will turn out to be a maintenance nightmare in months/years to come.
"
I've never been to either the Hearst Castle or the Carnegie Mansion in NYC. Are they really as dismally dark as they look in the photographs? Or is that an artifact of no-flash policies and old slow films?
Or alternatively, has four decades of living in Colorado where almost everywhere has huge expanses of glass spoiled me?
"
Other than a "this looks like pictures I've seen" sort of observation, I really don't have any room to criticize decorating choices. My wife and I always said that our style was "graduate students who occasionally had some found money" crossed with "people actually live in this room".
Earlier this year I got tired of having to climb out of the futon and bought living room furniture that I sat "on" rather than "in". It felt really strange to go shopping for furniture without my wife. Plain because I'm a graduate student at heart. Inexpensive because, well, I might only realistically need to get ten years out of it. Three pieces so that I can separate the granddaughters as needed to avoid "Grandpa, she's poking me!" Everything else in this picture has a back story.
"
(not to mention the aristocracies of the 1700s)
I was going to say that I get a Versailles-on-the-cheap sort of feeling from it.
On “An open thread”
If you were serious, apply and find out.
I would be the intern from hell on so many different levels :^)
"
Took a guided tour of the NCAR supercomputer facility in Cheyenne, WY yesterday. My son and his SO accompanied me. She runs a climate science group at the U of Wyoming. The computer, named Derecho, appears in the TOP500 list of world's fastest computers twice. The CPU partition is #139. The GPU partition is #256. It's one of the very few of the TOP500 machines where you can actually get into the machine room.
It's been too long since I've done my free-association questions thing, I'm out of practice. Did get a good run after asking about fire suppression in the machine room. (Water, with anti-corrosion additives.) What sort of fire detection? What else do the air sensors check for? Is anything else monitored that closely? How many sensors for all of that together? (120,000.) How does all of the sensor data get collected and sorted out?
The supercomputer resources are provided free of charge to earth science researchers. I was assured by the docent that if I submitted a proposal, it would receive the same consideration as all the others. Except that U of Wyoming proposals get some priority, since the State of Wyoming contributes to the facility. I turned to my son's SO and asked, "Do you need interns?" She paused and then answered "Paid or unpaid?" I never know when people are pulling my leg.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.