Carthik Sharma

This article seeks to explain the painful process of migrating from LiveJournal to MovableType.

The first thing I needed to do for this was to import all the entries from my LiveJournal (LJ) to my MovableType (MT) blog.

Amanita.net has an excellent guide on how to do this. I just followed it step by step. The only thing I did, that she did not tell me to do was to set the category for all imported post to “Livejournal” at the Import Entries page, by choosing the option from the drop down menu for the same.

Update : There is another alternative that I found over at ScriptyGoddess which allows one to drag and drop the exported LJ entries XML file, and get the MovableType importable files in a jiffy. It is javasript powered. The script and the instructions are available here. Pretty neat.

Now once I was done with importing all the entries, I needed to figure a way to reflect, or mirror the two blogs (LJ and MT).

There are several options, depending on your needs. You could :

1) Continue posting on LiveJournal (LJ) and have those posts updated on your MovableType (MT) blog via the MTRSSFeed plugin.
The problem with this is that it is static content on your MT page. It does not create a new MT entry. This cannot be archived. Also, if you are using this to have your entire LJ post show up on your MT blog, you might want to change the synopsis as follows :

find the required lines and change as shown in bold

I tried to include the whole code here, but when I post to the blog, MT thinks its valid code and so I cant see it there!! So I had to make it this way.

Once you have made these changes, You can include the code in your MT blog where you want to see the LJ post “imported”. If you want to import more than just the latest LJ post, you can do that by changing the lastn=”1″
to lastn=”x”, where x is the number of latest entries you want to display.

2) Start a syndicated feed of your blog at your livejournal synidcated feeds page, which ends up looking like my LJ syndication page (which I setup in the course of writing this article, and which might not have any articles, since it takes time to get going), or in general, like the Kuro5hin.org syndicated feed.

As you can see the problem is that it has to have a new LJ username, “carthik” in my case, and your friends will all have to add this feed as a friend, and you can not receive the comments in the mail, and it doesn’t look good.

3) You can post on MT and have that show up on LJ.

I found that this would be the best option, since
a) When I post on MT, I can decide the category and also archive it for later
b) I can continue to receive comments at the LJ, since updates show up as new posts, which can be commented upon.

To post on my MT blog and have it show as a new entry on LJ, I used the mtsyn perl script available at the GDS mirror. Mysteriously Sungo’s Sourceforge page does not have this script anymore. I don’t know why the author discontinued the script.

This script works fine the way it is. What you have to do is to login to an ssh account (or if you have a Linux terminal, you could execute the mt2LJ.pl script locally) and execute the script after installing all the modules it requires.

I made some changes to suit my needs.
a) As it is now, the program only checks for new posts to update to LJ in a specific category. I made changes to the script so that it updates the LJ with the new post, irrespective of the category.

b) I modified the program to run in the background, and added some code so that it checks for new updates every x minutes, where the value of x is decided by me.

UPDATE:
c) I modified the localtime(time) code in the posting to LJ section to
localtime((time() - (3600 * 6)))
to account for the fact that the localtime in the server that I use to execute this script is ahead of EST by 6 hours.

You could schedule a cron job to run the mt2LJ.pl script at a particular interval. I wrote the code I did because I found no way to have a cronjob run every 6 hours.

This is my first shot at perl programming, and I don’t know too much php either. So I could not make too much sense of an alternate method suggested by RevJim.Net. This is the php code he has made available.

I found this process very interesting, and I was overjoyed to see it all work, in the end. Programming is just another word for good magic

If you have any problems in doing any of the above, please let me know, and I will do what I can to help you out. I might revise this article in the future, based on feedback, if any.

Filed by Carthik at 2:36 pm under Blogging, Livejournal 3 Comments

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Finally, everything works like a dream.

I am going to stop using Livejournal actively. But I will still be using it passively, without probably ever visiting my LiveJournal again.

I once wanted to link to a previous article I had written on my LiveJournal, and without a way to search the previous entries, I was lost. I also miss being able to edit my layout and style in a simple way, as also the ability to organize my categories in a meaningful manner. The basic problem is that a LiveJournal is never like a website that is your own, under your control.

With MovableType you can do whatever you want to, with your website. Its free too.

I figured a way to update my LiveJournal with the posts I make on my MT blog. So from now on whenever I post to Carthik.Net, the post will automatically show up as a new entry in my LiveJournal. The easier, but less effective way of doing this would be to create a new syndicated feed on LJ. But I wanted to remain 2fargon and I wanted to continue to keep in touch with my friends on LJ. So I had to have a program which automatically updates the LJ using the latest MT entries, and I have it now. This post was not posted by me at LJ. It has been imported using a program from carthik.net. My paid LJ account expires in a couple of days. I could not have done all this at a better time.

All my previous LiveJournal Entries have been imported into Carthik.Net and are now searchable. I love it.

That said, I also setup MT to power my static pages on my site. Carthik.Net is now powered entirely by MovableType, which is just an added level of abstraction in the process of web design. Pretty neat tool, though. Once it is setup, it is remarkably easy to manage. I will have to write how I did it, lest I forget.

I have updated my site, and now all the links work, which means I had to write a few things that I had been intending to write since last May.

I installed Red Hat 9.0 on my laptop, and it is the best thing that happened to this laptop — and me. Better fonts, better performance, better sound than ever before. Its amazing how I was able to install it using the defaults and boot up without any problems. I have since changed the XFree86 configuration and tweaked a few things, but most of the devices worked without a hitch from since when I installed RH 9.0.

I have to write about how I did the MovableType setup and about the Linux installation. Boy, I had a tough time finding out stuff online for doing both, which is why it took so long - almost 4 days.

Dear LJ friends, on the surface, nothing has changed, my posts will still appear, you can still leave comments, and I will still read and reply to them. Life without you is like research without the internet.

Filed by Carthik at 9:04 pm under Blogging, Livejournal 2 Comments

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My last post was weeks ago. Lots has been happening, but just got into the carthik -nolog mode.

Among other things, I bought a new Acer Travelmate 290 LMi laptop from Bestbuy.com. I bought it on the 27th, picked it up from Bestbuy, that is. Here we go…(dont even ask about the price right now )

Acer Travelmate 290LMi

Click on the pictures for more pics at my Gallery
   
CPU: 1.3-GHz Pentium M

Screen size: 15 inches

System memory: 512MB of DDR266 SDRAM

Hard drive: 40GB

Graphics: Intel 855GM using main memory

Pointing device: Touchpad

Expandability: One multipurpose bay, one PC Card slot

Extra features

Bundled removable-media drives: DVD-R/RW drive

Communications: Built-in V.92, NIC, and 802.11b Wi-Fi

Extra ports: Headphone jack, S-Video and FireWire ports

Battery life (hours:minutes): Outstanding: 4:50

Weight (typ/min in lbs): Average: 7.2/6.3

Pros :

I love the design, it has
a)a smooth lid
b)a very responsive and lovable key board
c)no awkward projections on the sides
d)a hardware switch to enable/diable the in-built Wireless Device

It has enough and more ports, what matters to me is it has,
a)3 USB ports (could use 1 each for mouse and keyboard, and then one for CompactFlash/Camera)
b)a Firewire Port.(useful to trasfer from a digital camcorder, only I dont have one, but one of my friends might buy one soon)
c)S-Video Out. (Can watch cricket matches/online movies/just-about-anything) on a TV.

Of course what made me buy it was the fact that it had
a) a DVD-R/RW writer (Samsung - Japanese)
b) 512 MB RAM
c) Centrino Chipset and Processor that runs faster than a P4 2.5 GHz
d) 1 GB(!!) on-chip Cache
e) 5.2 hours of battery life

While I am at it, what I dont like about it is that
a) It has no hardware volume control.
b) The speakers are said to be not-so-loud but I find it okay for now.
c) with Shared Memory Video RAM, high end gaming is ruled out (almost).
d) The DEL key is to the right of the space button, and at the top right corner.

OF course, I can deal with all that, and I love this Laptop, especially since I got it for $1099, after a $200 mail in rebate

This Machine is featured in PcWorld’s Top 3 Value Notebooks, and so I presume that its a good deal.

Filed by Carthik at 4:44 pm under Livejournal Comments Off

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Before I forget, let me write this down.

My Yahoo! mailbox was full to the brim, and threatening to overflow. I got lucky and found YahooPops a program that lets me check my yahoo mail using a mail client like Thunderbird, or Outlook Express.

Alright, so I download the mails, but how do I save them individually, in human-readable format? Outlook Express stores them in single file, which, if you store for later, gets corrupted, as happened to Mei-Ling once not so long ago.

The solution is DBXtract, a small windows application that extracts mails from the Outlook Express binary format and stores them as individual, wordpad/notepad readable emails. It even saves all the attachment, WOOF!

I should also mention that yesterday I had the longest meeting in my life. It started at 11 AM and went all the way upto 8 PM. THe adviser was very enthusiastic and I sat with him as we wrote up some sections of a document, brainstormed and made some tables. I admire his tenacity and diligence. I could not work 9 hours at a stretch for the life of me, or so I thought, until yesterday. After that, it was so much fun to go home walking that I want to do it again.

Just took a break to share the good news regarding the emails. It was a perpetual problem, or Gordian-knot proportions. The closer I had come to solving it earlier was using Thunderbird’s “save as text” option, but then that doesnt save attachements, nor does it do it all at one go, its a one mail at a time process.

Later.

Filed by Carthik at 4:54 pm under Livejournal No Comments

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A look at ’s journal convinced me I should change my layout to and S2 style here on LJ. Then I went to citrus moon and with the help of firebird’s Spiderzilla extension, downloaded all of the tiles there, thats a total of 1863 background images! They are all stashed away now. The backgrounds are so good I want to hug the girl who made it tight, and pat her back (I know its a woman, it would be difficult for a man to make something so beautiful ), and tell her that she made me happy. I spent well over an hour looking at the backgrounds after downloading them.
Designs which evoke feelings, designs like songs.
Oh and she makes one background tile everyday and makes them available for free!! Visit Tile-A-Day

Filed by Carthik at 2:07 am under Livejournal No Comments

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Who wouldn’t like to have a dot com or dot net of their own? (Rhetorical question - do not answer)

3 YEAR FREE webhosting - 500 MB space, 5GB/month transfer

Thats right, 1 and 1.com, now offers 3 year free webhosting for free. the company in question seems to have a good reputation, I found articles about it in microsoft’s website and in a newspaper. I have been closely following the discussions at fatwallet and AnandTech forums and did some research otherwise, looking for user opinions and all that jazz, and this one’s a winner.

What’s the catch? Yeah, clue in on this - they will not let you transfer the domain name if you registered it through them. Workaround - get your domain name from some other registrar, I would suggest the cheapest out there..RackShack and then have the domain point to 1and1’s nameserver. Rackshack charges $5.41, tax included for a year, for the domain name. Dont even try to register your name using 1and1.com

I tried it out to the end, and got my webspace, without getting a new domain name, ’cause I dont want to spend $5.41.
The space I got is at s86941641.onlinehome.us, but that cryptic address is there just because I haven’t paid for a domain name, not that $5.41 is too much - Hell! Thats what I pay for one lunch!!

This one’s for real, and its good. Get it before its gone, all ye faithful.

So, friends, who wants a website?

Addendum..

what kind of junkie are you?

As if I didn’t know…

Filed by Carthik at 8:09 pm under Livejournal No Comments

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So what have I been doing lately?

* I have started playing soccer(football) everyday. I even went and bought Soccer cleats (football boots). I wont play today, sicne my legs are complaining.

* We are working on the second stage proposal, since the first stage proposal submitted to NASA went through and we managed to get a “high-priority” rating. So now we have to come up with a detailed, long proposal with some initial results. Now, for initial results, we need to work towards some experiments. I am in charge of formalizing the mathematics and writing up the literature survey. The proposal is due on the 17th of October.

* My Ph.D. qualifiers are on the 7th of November. I need to study 4 subject. If I start now I will have a week for a subject. High time I started studying in earnest.

* Me and sumant () have been working on the side as amateur web developers, helping small companies have a “presence on the web”. Work on the second job is on now. He does all of the work, i just help with the CSS and some arbit work, like adding page borders and formatting stuff.

* my desktop is now with , since I dont get free ethernet at home and she does at her dorm room. She could use a computer, I could use the one I have in my office. Since I dont have the computer at home now, I am leading a good, computer-less life. The initial tedium of the days have given way to a good life, with Soccer, cooking and cleaning (self and the room).

Thats it for now.
Thats it for now.

Filed by Carthik at 9:19 am under Livejournal No Comments

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How would you like to have a Internet browser that can…

1) Let you move around from this page to the previous page, or the next page, by just clicking your right mouse button and moving the button left or right?

2) Clear all cookies, and other such privacy related files with just one click, so no one can filch your passwords or other critical info?

3) Download an entire website, with just one click?

4) Download all the images on a page with just one click?

5) Allow you to use different skins, winamp style?

6) search on google, just by typing “gg

Have I told you about my failure to get into an IIT, and how, at times, I really feel bad for not having worked hard enough to have made it? Every engineering graduate in India must have, at one point of time or the other, envied the IITians…

With any luck, I should be able to say in a couple of years that I graduated from an Institution that is now an IIT!!

R.E.C. (Regional Engineering College), Warangal, which was renamed as NIT (National Institute of Technology), Warangal last year, is among the front runners for promotion to an IIT!!
My heart filled with joy as I read this article in Deccan Herald …

Article from Deccan Herald:: www.deccan.com
Warangal NIT inches towards IIT status

Warangal, Sept. 10: It is now official that the National Institute of
Technology here is among the five NITs in the country to be upgraded
as an Indian Institute of Technology under a two-year time-bound
plan.

The Board of Governors’ meet of the NIT held here on Tuesday for the
first time on the campus has discussed the strategy to ensure that
the premier institute gets IIT status in the first phase.

Addressing a press conference on Wednesday, NIT Director D K Tripathy
said that the governing body members were highly optimistic about the
institute’s upgradation to IIT. According to him, the Ministry of
Human Resource Development had decided to upgrade five of the 17 NITs
in the country as IITs and the Warangal NIT stands a good chance to
be the first NIT to be upgraded as an IIT.

In order to be first in the race, the Board of Governors’ meet had
endorsed sweeping changes in academic schedules and curricula in tune
with the IIT module, initiated by Tripathy, the newly appointed
Director.

Among the major changes initiated at the institute are a change to
the grading system from the present marks system, introduction of the
semester system in place of the annual exam system and introduction
of new courses like Rural Development, Biochemistry and Biotechnology.

The Director stated that the institute had attracted top rankers of
the All India Engineering Entrance Examination. He said the
preference of the top rankers indicated the academic standards of the
institute. Chairman, Board of Governors, Dr Hari Narain said that top
companies like Infosys, Oracle, Wipro and Satyam Computers recruited
around 200 NIT students as part of campus recruitment during the last
30 days.

He said that support from institute alumni would be explored in
developing the campus. “The sponsored Research and Industry
Consultancy cell would be strengthened to make its services available
on a larger scale,” Hari Narain said.

I google-news-ed and got a confirmation.

Me, an IITian? In my dreams. You can change all the names you want to, but I dare not claim I am in any way related to an IIT. After all, that is one thing that has been right, so far, with India. I am afraid that this latest move to promote other institutions to IITs will dilute the reputation of the IIT brand. I know what goes on in REC Warangal. After all, besides studying there, I was also a Lecturer there, albeit for a short period of time.

Filed by Carthik at 12:10 am under Livejournal 12 Comments

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I thought it must be pretty obvious to have a website/page that lists
1. All the conferences that are to take place in Electrical/ Computer Engineering in the near future.
2. All the “call for papers” in the different fields of Engineering
3. All the “solicitations” for proposals in the different fields of Engineering.

You can extend that you other fields of research, such as the humanities.

After a relatively extensive search, I find that there is no such page, at least for electrical/computer engineering.

Say I have an interesting idea I want to write a paper about. How do I find the conference to publish it in? And also, if the paper is not that great, you know, to merit being published in a leading conference paper (IEEE/ACM in my case), how do I find the other conferences/journals I can send it to.

Basically, if I want to use conferences/seminars as an excuse to visit some city/country, and get reimbursed by my university, how do I go about it?

Need to ask the advisor, but he might just laugh at me, ’cause I dont have any papers worth publishing right now, but hell, this is a good source of motivation. If there was a conference in Crete I could attend if I had a paper, then the paper shall be written, for sure

Filed by Carthik at 5:40 pm under Research, Livejournal 2 Comments

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I feel this buzz in my head which says I must take a nap, but I love this quasi-drunk feeling (unmathavastha).

I hope my friends are all doing fine today.

Nonsense. Waste of Bandwidth. Clutter.

Its no wonder I am not listed as one of my friends.

Filed by Carthik at 2:10 pm under Livejournal No Comments

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The last week was bad. There was the tummy upset, which meant I missed my favourite class. I also haven’t been efficient at my research work, due to unexpected diversions. Dad’s friend’s son and his friend dropped in for a couple of days, and that meant taking them around a bit - not that I mind, but I wanted to work on those days. Then there was the Indian student association “back to school” celebration on saturday, for which I sang(last minute preparation), acted in drag, and on the whole, was busy. Now its early morning on Monday, and I still am grappling with 4 papers in my mind, trying to compare them, and get some tables out of them. I have read each of those papers at least thrice, but I haven’t yet been able to “see” them, in the same frame, in my mind, so I can’t yet compare them. When there is the will and yet there in no output, you begin to doubt your mind. Such doubts notwithstanding, its time for some serious thinking, and writing. My biggest motivation is the fact that I have a good man to advise me, to guide me, and I want to meet his expectations, nay, exceed them.

Perhaps this is what people meant when they said a Ph.D. can be “painful”. Mental constipation - bad comparison, since the output of research is good, and useful too.

October 17th is the next deadline, so I will have to imagine a deadline on the 12th.

I am fresh now, and just that little bit tense, and so everything should work fine. I am a researcher, and with a little imagination, one could say I am a scientist! That certainly gets me going, that very thought.

Filed by Carthik at 2:19 am under Livejournal No Comments

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Yeah, I hate quizzes too, but this one was’nt over the top. I hope no one removes me from their friends lists for posting a quiz.

Your aura shines Red!

What Color Is Your Aura?
brought to you by Quizilla

Filed by Carthik at 10:01 am under Livejournal No Comments

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Kening takes a short nap after lunch, and today, before he did, he was asking me as to whether I will be going to India anytime soon. I said I would love to, but its so expensive. Mysteriously, the airfare to China is 50% that of the airfare to India. So he then told me that he would have gone home, if not for his visa problem. They gave him a six month visa, so that if he goes back to China, he will have to apply for the visa all over again. I, on the other hand have a 5 year multiple entry visa. I wish he had my visa, and I got his airfares!

So I was telling him that he could me some things from China.
Kening-”What exactly?”
Me- “A Chinese kitchen knife.”
Kening-”Just go to Walmart, or any store, and pick up a knife, almost all knives there are made in China.”

We had a good laugh over this.

What I was referring to, though was a Chinese Kitchen Knife. Like this one here….

My roommates have one, and man, does it look deadly??

Like Kening went on to clarify, no battles were fought with these knives, but I bet the womenfolk in China do feel secure with one of these around!!

The knife is just one of the things I want thats available in China. Should go there someday.

Filed by Carthik at 2:28 pm under Livejournal No Comments

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Do you remember the Films Division presentation that went

“Sooraj Ek, Chanda Ek…”, the cartoon in which a “didi” tells a small boy about Ekta?

This was an ad that used to come on TV, about 10 years ago. A story to illustrate the importance of unity in diversity. You can see it again!!

Moving picture with sound! Be warned that this is a huge file, and so might not be easily accessed using dial up connections.

This made me feel so good, I could’nt resist sharing it

Filed by Carthik at 10:01 pm under Livejournal 2 Comments

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