Disqus - Latest Comments for jonnytran

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:28:52 -0000

Sigh... I should really fix this.

That's actually Tumblr failing. If you've gone to your tumblr dashboard recently or a tumblr-hosted blog, you might've seen a gray page with bluish text saying "We'll be back shortly!". Usually if you refresh, it works. Well, the same thing is happening when the importer is trying to save your posts.

Unfortunately, the importer isn't smart enough to retry. So until I fix this, you'll need to work around it.

Look at the date for the last post successfully imported, and then add this to the end of your blogger feed: "?published-min=2009-10-04T00:00:00&published-max=2009-10-26T23:59:59" (w/o quotes) plugging in the dates from wherever it left off to the current date. Run the importer again with this new feed url, and it will start from that date.

Let me know if you need help.

Re: Blub by Convention (In Defense of Arc)

jonnytran — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:31:06 -0000

My pleasure! If it was thought-provoking, then I have succeeded.

Re: Blub by Convention (In Defense of Arc)

infrared — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:40:58 -0000

Now I understand your point better, although still I can't fully agree. ;-)

Your first point ("Many languages could be better than they are if they used different conventions") sounds sensible, but I think a broader context is needed. Let's get back to Common Lisp, since you mentioned it. There is a good reason why names like mapcar or lambda are the part of Common Lisp. When the standard was emerging those were the names that were most sensible and known to Lisp programmers. Goal of Common Lisp was to set a common standard for different variants of Lisp implementations that were in use at that time. It succeeded, and its use of already established names was a part of that success.

Of course good 20 years ago may not be good today. I think this applies to Common Lisp, at least in some regards, although after reading "Practical Common Lisp" I would still argue Common Lisp is a great language and even after those years still beats more popular languages in some areas. Generic functions are great, Clojure leads the way with multimethods, while Java/Python/Ruby are all only single-dispatch. Conditions and restarts are still quite unique to Common Lisp, while the best other languages can do is to unwind the stack and die.

Regarding your second point ("it's damn-near impossible to go against the conventions") I'd say it is an exaggeration. A team of people, especially one enough forward-thinking to use a Lisp, can agree on any sensible convention and it doesn't necessarily have to be a convention shared by the given language community. Don't look at Python with its PEP8 and other coding style documents. Look at an even older language, like C. Is there a single convention for writing C? I guess not. GNU devs have their own way, Linux devs have another and other teams (especially those working on closed source apps) even more different. Each one of those conventions work for the people that use them and one isn't particularly "better" than the other.

Regarding points 3 and 4 I generally agree, but you don't have to go upstream to make something new. Sometimes a team-level (or organization-level) improvement will be more than enough and actually doable. All Lisps share this unique property that they can be customized - the language itself can be build bottom-up to support a better description of a problem you're trying to solve. There are many problems to be solved and thus the need for different languages and conventions. Getting back to your second point, I believe Lisps are especially well suited to going against the conventions. Syntactic abstractions allow you to do anything with the language and bend it to your needs. The magic here is that Lisps allow you to make your inventions look exactly the same as tools built into the language, so the barrier to entry is really low.

Anyway, thanks for the thought-provoking post! :-)

Re: Blub by Convention (In Defense of Arc)

jonnytran — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:16:58 -0000

Thanks for the thoughts. All the comments for this have shown me that what I meant to say wasn't communicated very well. (The post you are referring to, I had written months ago, decided to post it, and then unposted it b/c I thought it was unworthy. Guess it already spread through the tubes, though.)

If I could redo this post, I would try to make it clear that what I meant was: (1) Many languages could be better than they are if they used different conventions; (2) it's damn-near impossible to go against the conventions; (3) conventions are difficult to change, more of a way of thinking of the community; (4) it's worthwhile to push good conventions into the core language/libraries, and if you do that, you're essentially making something new.

This really has little to do with Arc. Silly me for associating Arc with language design.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:30:31 -0000

One thing you can try is typing your feed url into the location bar of a browser window, and see if you can view all your blog posts. (I think the first 25 or so should show up.) Also, make sure they are the full entries, not just summaries for example. If it doesn't show up or the full entries aren't displayed, you'll need to tweak your Blogger Settings until they do.

Let me know if this helps or not.

Re: Setting Up Clojure

jonnytran — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:07:59 -0000

Tried helping gv0tch0 set this up on his machine... I'm using this commit of mdelaurentis/env.git 8d627334ee2bff9695c0f3791444575679e4759b

I have also deleted the setq line in emacs/clojure-stuff.el that references "/src/hmscommon-similarity/target/installed/bin/repl".

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:18:29 -0000

Tumblr doesn't support this... Everyone, bug them about it until they do!

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:05:36 -0000

That's a very good idea. I'm not sure Tumblr supports this through their API. I'll ask them.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:57:29 -0000

The full post bodies are not showing up in your feed URL. In other words, if you open that url (the one you linked to) in your browser, it only shows the summaries of your posts (like the first paragraph or so), not the entire entries. This is causing the import to miss your post bodies completely.

To fix this, from you Blogger dashboard, click Settings for your blog. Then go to the Site Feed page. Depending on whether you have Basic Mode or Advanced Mode selected you will see one of two things. Either an "Allow Blog Feeds" or "Blog Posts Feed" setting. You probably have this set to "Short". Change it to "Full". Then click "Save Settings".

To verify that you've done it correct, open/refresh your feed in your browser again (yeah, that url you posted) and the full text of your posts should show up now.

Now you should be able to import w/o a hitch.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 15:17:52 -0000

Fixed! Now if you use "feed://www..." for your feed url, it works as expected.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 12:56:32 -0000

Don't worry about it only showing 25 at a time; Blogger is just paging.

I wasn't able to find anything obvious. But I did try to test importing some of your entries, and it worked fine. So here is my suggestion... Import your entries in blocks. Try 25 at a time. (Note: this is unrelated to the 25 above; it's just a good round number.)

You can do this by importing starting at the end of your posts, and working backwards, specifying which entries to fetch in the feed url parameters. Like this...

First import this: http://jacobswellmusic2.blogspot.com/feeds/post...

Then this: http://jacobswellmusic2.blogspot.com/feeds/post...

Then this: http://jacobswellmusic2.blogspot.com/feeds/post...

... and keep doing that, changing start-index (the number at the end of the feed url) decreasing by 25 until it gets to 1. The reason I'm saying do it in reverse order, instead of starting from 1, is that this way, your latest entry will show up at the top of your Tumblr Dashboard when this is all done. And since you have 132 posts, a start-index of 126 getting 25 at a time will get the last entries.

If this still fails, we will have narrowed it down to a range of 25 posts. But this might solve the problem all together.

I know this is a little complicated; it would be much better if the app I made could do all this for us. But it would be a decent amount of work, and the time would be better spent working on another idea I have which will allow people to do things other than just import.

Let me know if you still have trouble or if that solves it.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

micahloomis — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:41:00 -0000

Hey Jonathan: Here is my feed url> What is odd is that I have ALL my posts listed when I am inside blogger however the RSS feed is only showing 25.

feed://jacobswellmusic2.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:42:56 -0000

Thanks. I appreciate comments like this. I would never have dreamed of typing in "feed://", so this really helps.

If anyone has other ideas for improvements, please comment! If people make enough noise, I may even make them...

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:36:48 -0000

Anything unusual about your blog? Non-English characters? Obscure Blogger options tweaked? I seriously whipped this app up in just a couple days, so there may be cases it simply doesn't handle.

Again, if you email me or somehow get me your feed url, I can try to look at it for you. I'd like to try to keep as much discussion in these comments, though, to hopefully help others with the same problem.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:22:41 -0000

About how many posts do you have? I heard someone use it on about 400 posts w/o a hitch, but it could be hitting some kind of memory or timeout limit. If you give me your feed url, I can try to look into it for you.

If you'd rather do it yourself, there may be a way to use Blogger's API to import the first chunk of your posts, then the next chunk, and so on.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:22:14 -0000

Have you checked the Feed URL you are using by typing it into your browser location bar and making sure that you can see your posts (possibly in an ugly XML format)?

Re: What makes you weird?

jonnytran — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:05:08 -0000

How do you discover what makes you weird? Or rather, how could I?

Re: immaterial | immortal - pneuma n. The soul or vital spirit. (contemporary...

jonnytran — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:03:23 -0000

Is this your skin? I must know.

Re: An Arc News Forum

pcorral — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 13:30:01 -0000

Thanks!

Re: An Arc News Forum

jonnytran — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:41:58 -0000

Link updated. Try this. Google also has a lot on the topic.

Re: An Arc News Forum

jonnytran — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:13:31 -0000

If you follow my instructions above to run the server in a thread, you can redefine things on the fly. The first time you do this, it might be a little confusing b/c of the way the lines get printed. It will look something like this:

$ mzscheme -m -f as.scm 
Use (quit) to quit, (tl) to return here after an interrupt.
arc> (= app (thread (nsv)))
#<thread>
arc> load items: 
ranking stories.
load users: 
ready to serve port 8080

But rest assured, when you see this, you are now at the Arc prompt again. So if you simply redefine news.css by typing...

(defop news.css req
  (pr "
body  { background-color: green; }"))

... and hitting enter, when you refresh in the browser, all your new bindings will be used, and you'll see an ugly green everywhere. You have to redefine the whole thing each time, so if you're going to be doing this often, you might want to look into changing the function to read from a separate file. And then you can put all your CSS in a file by itself.

Re: An Arc News Forum

jonnytran — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:47:57 -0000

Someone asked me over email how to run on port 80, which is a good question.

To run on a different port, here's what you have to do. First of all, since low port numbers require root access on Linux, you have to run mzscheme as root. Using sudo works for that. Instead of running "mzscheme -m -f as.scm", use...

sudo mzscheme -m -f as.scm

... when you start mzscheme, which will prompt for your password. Second, add the port number you want as a parameter to the call to nsv. For example, instead of "(nsv)", use ...

(nsv 80)

... to run on port 80. And that should print back to you, "ready to serve port 80". Your site will then be accessible at "http://<your-host-ip>/"!

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:36:54 -0000

Since Blogger's integration with FeedBurner, others might have this problem. I haven't used Blogger since I made the switch way back in June so I haven't kept up with the changes. But I'd like to continue helping people switch to Tumblr.

Any idea how I can change the program to ease the process for others? Did your FeedBurner URL default to RSS? b/c the code expects an Atom feed. It would be nice if it just worked on the FeedBurner feed.

btw, nice blog. Both layouts are nice, but the new one looks even cleaner and more organized.

Re: think4yourself - Joe Loves Crappy Movies

jonnytran — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:17:50 -0000

Yeah, i see it now. Cool!

Re: think4yourself - Joe Loves Crappy Movies

njgruber — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:15:29 -0000

I think i got it fixed. it wasn't intentional