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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

* 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.

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