Blog – Page 8 – Arun Raghavan

July 12, 2009

It’s pronounced Gwahdec

I’ve been terrible about it, but here’s the big update — I just got back today after spending the last week at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, location of the first co-located GUADEC and aKademy. It’s been amazing, and I don’t know where to start. Let’s try the beginning.

The GNOME Foundation has funded a very significant part of my expense for this trip (making it possible at all), so a huge thanks to Travel Committee for giving me this opportunity. :) To summarise …

Of communities and respect

I feel old a lot, these days. It’s been about 17 years since I first sat in front of a computer (and, soon after, realised I’d be sitting in front of them for a very long time to come). It’s been about 11 years since I intrepidly stuck in a Red Hat Linux (before it was called PCQLinux ;-)) CD into my CD-ROM drive and started a voyage that continues to this day. And it’s been about 10 years since I saw the first flame-wars amidst the Indian F/OSS community. Not much has changed in all this time. I am still incredibly passionate about computing, I still love Linux and the F/OSS world for the freedom, and some Indian F/OSS communities still have a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot as soon as it starts to show some promise.

I don’t know what it is about us — perhaps we are inherently political animals, and have some basic need to take an opposing stand. Or maybe there are just enough of us that this automatically happens. Or maybe it’s not even inherently an Indian problem. It’s bound to happen in any group, and is not, in itself, a problem. What is a problem is respect. In any reasonably large group, there are bound to be people who don’t like each other. Sometimes they might even be able bring themselves to have a shred of respect for each other (an extreme that is unfortunately seen all-too-often). What is unforgivable, though, is failure to respect the community.

When you start arguing with someone, on IRC, a mailing-list, or even in person, always remember that by making the flames personal, you are disrespecting the community. By dragging everyone around you into the mud, you are sowing the seed of trouble and strife. You end up forcing people to take a side or walk away, effectively killing the community.

My post here comes from painfully watching this happen too many times. Even more so from watching it happen now. So here’s my request, nay plea — if you’re in the midst of such a tiff, take a moment to see what it’s doing to the community you’re in (I’m assuming we’re well past the “assume good will” stage here — you did start with “assume good will”, didn’t you?). If nothing else, find a way to keep what’s personal separate.

Addendum: If you’re one of the folks who shake their head and walk away when this happens, here’s my plea to you — don’t walk away. Point out to the people responsible that their personal quarrels are not germane to the community, and ask them to take it off the community’s channels of communication. If enough people did this, maybe some sense would prevail.

Note: I’m leaving comments open for constructive discussion.

Note2: In case I come off sounding like I am innocent of all this, these are lessons that I have learned the hard way.

April 26, 2009

The LiveJournal to WordPress migration

Thought I’d outline a bit of what I did to get all my posts and tags migrated from LiveJournal to WordPress 2.7.1. Note that this information will be redundant soon enough — there’s much better LJ import support in the latest WordPress trunk. It’ll even pull in your ‘Current Music’ and ‘Current Mood’ fields, which I couldn’t do. :-(

Some background first. LiveJournal lets you export your blog posts one month at a time. You can feed these files to the WordPress LiveJournal importer. I’ve been blogging there since December 2003, so that was definitely not an option. Some digging around eventually brought me to ljdump. This is a really nifty tool, even if you just want to back up all your posts. It dumps your data into a large set of XML files, which you can collate with the convertdump.py script for uploading to the WordPress LiveJournal importer.

There was one hiccup here — a lot of the XML files corresponding to my earlier posts (at least) had an extraneous ASCII character 4 at the end of some lines. I had to use a simple for i in /*xml; do sed -i -e s:$'\004':: before using convertdump.py, and things were back on track (sed ftw!). I used the script to make one big XML file with all my posts, and fed it to the LJ importer, and all my posts were in.

But my tags, unfortunately, were not. ljdump happily pulls the tags from LiveJournal, but the importer just ignores them. I found a sort-of patch to fix this, but it seems to be quite antiquated. Based on this and the WordPress importer (that’s the importer that allows WordPress to import from another WordPress blog’s exported output), I wrote my own patch to import LJ tags (against WordPress 2.7.1). Just cd into your blog directory and do a patch -p0 < wp-livejournal-import-tags.patch to use it.

That’s it — I dropped all the old posts (requires a plugin to do it all at one shot), and then imported the big XML file again, and voila!

Trivial as it was, it was great to see how easy hacking the WordPress code was. There’s more to come in days ahead. I hope it remains this easy. :D

Update: Just noticed that the imported comments are not threaded. This kind of blows, because there have been some really long threads on some posts. I guess I’ll wait till the new WordPress goes stable and do a re-import. (file under #suckage)

April 23, 2009

It starts … again :-)

So this is my first actual post on this blog. I’ve imported the history from my LiveJournal blog — starting on a blank slate was just too strange. I’ll post about how the import was done tomorrow, but it was only slightly painful, and should be less so for others.

Cheerio!