A Busy Weekend to End a Busy Week
Tags: Perl, servers, sync, VMware
This weekend was just as busy as the week at work. It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m still going…
Reconstructing Maildir from Backups
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Moments ago, I found that my archive of the Coldsync mailing list in Maildir format somehow became corrupt, so attempts to copy those messages to Gmail failed using my Thunderbird trick.
I found an older copy that was in mbox format, and used the “Perfect” mbox to Maildir converter script to convert it to Maildir format.
Now I’m back to populating Gmail with my email once again (8,427 in Gmail now, with about 112,000 left to go).
Calendaring Conundrum
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Also this past week, I realized that my calendar in Outlook had somehow duplicated over 1,700 of my events. I’m sure it was the result of using things like PocketMirror and other sync tools for Palm with it. I’m going to be cleaning that up next. That requires manual, visual inspection of each event, to make sure I’m deleting the dupe and not the original (thus leaving the dupe copy on the calendar). Very odd.
Once that is done, I have to reinstall all of my Palm conduits on the Thinkpad X61s and get that all sync’d to my Treo. With everything on my Treo, I can then begin consolidating my various calendars and task lists into one clean interface.
Back to the Blog; 8 years of postings
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I also cleaned up 8 years of blog postings, reformatted them all and cleaned up the broken HTML that was the result of importing the diary entries from Advogato. That was 353 separate posts to go through by hand and clean everything up. Now it looks as it should.
Going back and reading through those old diary posts was… interesting. I didn’t realize how much I’d done in those 8 years, all of the people I’d met, projects I’d completed, places I’d been. I might turn the whole blog into a set of memoirs for my daughter Seryn for when she’s old enough to understand all of the things her daddy did in his life.
Movies, movies, movies!
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I managed to pack in watching 4 movies while I worked this weekend, but the two best ones were “Maxed Out” and “The Man from Earth“. Both of them were equally good, and worth watching. I highly recommend both of them.
“Maxed Out” was eye-opening, and depressing at points, because of the situation our country is in right now. People are literally killing themselves (3 cases are described in the movie) because of their debt. The industry specifically caters to those who can NOT pay their debts down, because those people are the cash-cow for them. These people pay their minimum payments for life and pass on their debts to their children. They don’t want people who pay their credit cards in-full every month to be their customers, there’s no profit in that. Watch the movie for the rest of the details.
“The Man from Earth” brings new ideas to our concepts of religion, biology, archeology and many other fields of traditional study. It reminded me somewhat of the information that was in the first 1/3 of “Zeitgeist: The Movie” (freely downloadable, or viewable online). The Man from Earth is a low-budget movie, but packs a punch in the back story. I won’t spoil it here, but definitely go rent it if you can.
AT&T WWAN in VMware
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I managed to get my physical Windows machine (an HP machine I purchased at BestBuy a few years ago), virtualized and configured in VMware using VMware Converter. I had to hack into it to get the vm to recognize my legitimate Microsoft Product Key, but after that, it was a snap.
Then I installed and configured the AT&T Communication Manager software to talk to the physical SIM card inside my laptop, so I can go online with the laptop wherever there is valid GSM signal, at 3G speeds.
I didn’t think the vm would recognize the physical card in the machine, if Linux didn’t see it natively… but it does. It’s a bit slow, but at least I can function with one laptop connected to the WWAN on the train with a larger screen at 1920×1200 resolution, instead of the smaller laptop with the 12″ screen at 1024×768 resolution.
The next step is to get the second laptop networking across the connection that the first laptop provides. That should be interesting to solve, since one of these is Windows, and the other one is Linux.
One possible solution would be to take the SIM card that is physically inside the laptop, put it into an external 3G PC-Express card (as in the image here), and then put that into a WWAN router, and carry THAT with me on the train. It has to be portable, of course…
But if I use that approach, not only can I share the connection with both of my laptops, I can also provide “free” wireless to anyone on the train who wants to get online. Maybe I can solicit free beer or donations in the cafe car to help offset those costs.
New Web SEO
- An old acquaintance from a Business Development Group in New London has recently contacted me asking me for help with his website. He pointed out that his site is losing customers to two other sites in his very narrow niche here in Connecticut.
I looked at the competition, and noted that they’re not doing anything special that would merit that increase in customers for them. But I also noted about a dozen problems with this person’s company website in question, that needs immediate attention. His site is ranking at PR0, and the other two sites are pushing PR1/PR2, with no real traffic.
So I think I might pick up a little side project to help him out, to bring his site up to where it should be, and up to the level of standards that I consider acceptable. It looks like it’ll be fun, and it should bring in more income to help fund some projects I’m working on in the background (mostly Seryn’s secret project :)
I make a decent amount of money with my websites now, and I think with the proper care and attention, he can too.
Wrestling MySQL
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Speaking of websites, a few months back, I started making some MFA 2.0 websites of my own, based on WordPress that are populated with hundreds of public-domain articles on niche content.
To do that, I wrote some tools (in Perl, of course) to spider the remote sites, pull the articles, and stick them into my WordPress databases, complete with proper author in the Author field, original posting date and so on.
Here’s one example that took me less than an hour to create and populate with articles, using these tools.
This particular site has 220 articles in it, but if you look at them articles, they’re all linked to external quality citations and resources. This site, with zero marketing, pulls in an average of about 6,000 hits a month. I have a handful of others, with between 200 and 1,000 articles in each, all of similar high-quality and care behind their creation.
The hard part is that in order to have an article attributed to an author in WordPress, that person has to be in the User table. That gets complicated to get right, but I managed to figure it out.
But I needed a way to ensure that the site’s content didn’t remain “stale”, so I came up with another trick to do that:
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_date='1999-01-01' + interval rand() * 3391 day; UPDATE wp_posts SET post_modified = post_date;
I put this in /etc/cron.weekly/, and now my articles are randomized on a weekly basis, so visitors or search engines coming to the site will constantly see “new” content.
So far, they’re doing well, and bringing in more than enough to cover the monthly costs of running the servers, bandwidth and power.
The Day Job
- The day job continues to go well, and I’m picking up significant speed on those projects.
The more I work within the system, the more I see where some “optimization” can be put into place, including some automation to make things much easier for myself and others in my group. I need to carve out some time to do exactly that, within the limits of my time allotted for the critical tasks that have established deadlines.
The commute has worked itself out and my routine is fairly static now, so that is no longer an unknown. Now I just need to get my foot in the door and keep things moving forward at a cheetah’s pace.
Fun times, definitely fun times. The positive energy has come back in rushing waves, and the good luck has overwhelmed me.