Monthly Archive for February, 2006

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Migrating from Blogger to WordPress 2.0

Published on February 26, 2006 in Wordpress. 4 Comments Tags: bluehost, dns, RSS, Wordpress.

Ever since I saw the new ‘import from Blogger’ functionality in WordPress 2.0, I’ve known I would eventually migrate my main blog. Blogger is a great way to start blogging , but I want categories, easy template updating (without republish) and all the WordPress plug-in sweetness. As a dress rehearsal, I migrated my Dutch poetry blog first: Zo helpt Poezie ….

START SITUATION

The site was managed with Blogger but published via FTP on one of my own domains. Because my old hosting system did not support domain mapping while serving multiple domains, I had to publish each domain in a subfolder. All blog’s files were stored under www.samoera.com/poezie/.
The individual posts (one poem per post) were saved as /poezie/[YEAR]/[MONTH]/[TITLE].html (e.g. /poezie/2004/04/02/kwijt-bart-moeyaert.html). I always used “[POEM TITLE] ([POEM AUTHOR])” as title for a post. Since Blogger removes special characters, this means that the file name typically ends with the author’s last name (something I will try to use later).
The monthly archives were saved as /poezie/[YEAR]_[MONTH]_01_gedichten.html (e.g. /poezie/2006_02_01_gedichten.html).

STEP 1: NEW HOSTING

I have taken an account with Bluehost.com. For $6.95 they offer 10GB storage, 250GB bandwidth and the excellent CPanel/Fantastico combo to easily configure sites, install software and manage your DNS.
My Bluehost hosting is on www.smoothouse.com. I use it already for stuff like the podcast feed validator and other small Smoothouse development projects.
Another option is Dreamhost.com: $7,99 per month, 20GB storage, 1TB bandwidth(!) but a less handy management panel. Don’t pay more than this.

STEP 2: SET UP WORDPRESS

Setting up WordPress with Bluehost is quite easy: you go to the Fantastico page, select WordPress, decide on a subfolder name (in my case: “poezie”), click “Install” and all the rest is automatic. After this, the blog is installed on -in my case- www.smoothouse.com/poezie. Later I will have to map the poetry site to this folder (without the /poezie folder showing)
Even if you don’t have the Fantastico wizard, WordPress is one of the easiest programs to install. Then take one of the standard templates

STEP 3: IMPORT FROM BLOGGER

On the new blog, go to the /wp-admin/import.php page, and give you Blogger username/password. Then select the Blogger Blog you want to import and then let the import wizard run. It will import ALL POSTS and ALL COMMENTS! This is friggin’ awesome! It might take 5-10 minutes if you have a large blog.

STEP 4: MOVE ARCHIVE

Now download your full archive (via FTP with e.g. FileZilla) to your local drive and upload them to where they should be after you moved the domain. In my case: I uploaded them to www.smoothouse.com/poezie/poezie which will be mapped to www.samoera.com/poezie/ once the DNS transfer is done.
The reason for this: all your posts will have new URLs and you don’t want people who find your old URLs in Google and click on them to get a “Error 404 not found” page. So you start by copying them to the new hosting server. We will do some more fancy redirect stuff later.

STEP 5: DNS UPDATE

Now comes the tricky stuff: you want your domain name to point to the new host. So you edit the A or CNAME record for the domain name. This will take somewhere between 1 and 24 hours to propagate.
In my case (Bluehost) this also meant I had to transfer DNS management for all subdomains to Bluehost (i.e. change the SOA records). Bluehost requires you to this because the whole DNS management is linked to the Fantastico wizards. In this case it just meant that it took a while longer. I then mapped the www.samoera.com domain to map to the same /poezie folder I just created.
Once that the transfer is done, all your URLs should continue to work (since you took care of that in step 4)!

STEP 6: CHANGE CONFIGURATION

Change WordPress root path to www.samoera.com instead of www.smoothouse.com/poezie/ (WordPress will adapt all links on the blog pages). I removed the index.html from archive root (www.samoera.com/poezie) because a lot of sites link to it and replaced it by a index.php that redirects to www.samoera.com.
OPTIONAL: you can play with Apache Redirect/Rewrite rules to take every visitor to one of the old URLs automatically to the new URL. What I tried was:
### for the archives: easy to do! RedirectMatch permanent /poezie/([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])_([0-9][0-9])_01_.*html$ http://www.samoera.com/$1/$2/ ### for the post pages: this would have worked if Apache didn't have a bug #RedirectMatch permanent /poezie/([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])/([0-9][0-9])/.*-([a-z]*)\.html$ http://www.samoera.com/$1/$2/?s=$3
I tried to use the fact that the author’s last name (a quite ‘unique’ word) was the last word before the .html to construct queries like: www.samoera.com/2006/01/?s=tellegen (which shows all posts from Feb 2006 with the string ‘tellegen’ in the text – which almost always translates into 1 post). However, due to a bug in Apache (the ‘?’ before the querystring is always translated into %3f and this results in invalid URLs) I haven’t found the right way to do it yet. I could have used
RedirectMatch permanent /poezie/([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])/([0-9][0-9])/.*html$ http://www.samoera.com/$1/$2/ but this maps onto a whole month – or up to 10 poems. Maybe I’ll find some other trick.

STEP 7: EXTERNAL STUFF

Change your Feedburner source to the new URL. Everyone that’s subscribed stays subscribed. Ain’t that neat? You don’t have a Feedburner feed? What, you only had Blogger Atom feed? Shame on you. Go get one!

The Next German Top Model will be thin

Published on February 21, 2006 in media. 2 Comments

The ‘top model’ Heidi Klum presents a TV show: Germany’s Next Top Model, basically a contest for a bunch of girls who want to become a top model (date actors, eat carrots, spend hours getting your hair done, dress lightly and get paid a whole lot of money while doing that). Recently one of the candidates was dismissed and the reasons were somewhat controversial:

Irina’s misfortune was her height-weight ratio — she weighed 52 kilograms (114.5 pounds) and was 1.76 meters (5 feet 9 inches) tall. With that kind of body, Irina, 19, was used to being adoringly ogled, but on supermodel Heidi Klum’s television show “Germany’s Next Top-Model” her body became her downfall. “Too fat,” was the verdict handed down by the show’s jury. The svelte Irina was sent home.
Der Spiegel

The poor thing has a BMI (Body Mass Index) of 16.8, which places her under the 5th percentile for her age. In theory, she could very well be an anorexic.

One wonders: do only extremely thin/skinny girls get a chance at becoming a top model? “Germany’s Next Top Model” (Prosieben) actually publishes dimensions and measurements for all girls. Which means that, if one were to throw those into a spreadsheet, one could make some graphs of that, couldn’t one? And so it happened that that was exactly what I did. Here are some results:

BMI (BODY MASS INDEX)

The average BMI is 17,6. Granted, there are some 16-years olds amongst them (younger girls typically have smaller BMIs – cf BMI percentile for girls (PDF)) but more than half would be considered a candidate for anorexia by a US nutrition specialist (see remark). The lowest BMI was Katrin (23y, 171cm, 46kg) with 15,7 and the highest Ramona (17y, 173cm, 61kg) with 20,4. Both didn’t make it to the final selection. Heidi Klum herself is also a small eater: 17,2.
REMARK: the indicator used is: below the 5th percentile in that age group. It indicates a risk for anorexia. Keep in mind that “anorexia nervosa => exceptionally thin” does not mean “exceptionally thin => anorexia nervosa” (classical ‘non-sequitur‘)). The only percentile numbers I found are for the US population, but remember that the average weight in the States (27% overweight) is significantly higher than Germany (19%) or Belgium (12% overweight). So a woman with a BMI of 18 in the US can be considered ‘exceptionally thin’, while the same weight/height ratio in Belgium is not that exceptional. I have several female friends with a BMI of 18 or lower, and I can assure you they do not have any eating disorder.

CURVES

OK, bear with me for a moment. I also had the bust/waist/hips measurements. But I wanted a single number instead of 3. So I did the following: there is this 90-60-90 ideal that men seem to prefer (the ‘average man’ presumably, my hands are too small). Think “Monica Belluci” (perfect 100%)! Now calm your breathing and read on. So I came up with a CURVE (or ‘wasp‘) coefficient that scores 100% for that mythical 90-60-90 and that grows the more wasp-like the figure is (waist/[[hip+bust]/2] is smaller) and the more symmetric it is (hip/bust is 1). To get a feeling for it: the minimal score is 76% for Jennifer (80-66-91) and the maximum score is 97% for Missy (90-62-90). Heidi Klum scores an average 93% (88-61-86). There is of course a correlation between BMI and CURVE. It’s kinda hard to be a 90-60-90 and be exceptionally thin. Something’s gotta give.

CONCLUSIONS

BMI: is not the defining factor for making it in a “Top Model” kind of show (in the sense of: the lower the better). What a relief! Although, a look at the chart shows that having an ‘unusual’ BMI does not help: all candidates with a BMI below 17 or above 18 are no longer in the running.
CURVE: Monica Belluci would have a hard time here. The least curvy girl (76% Jennifer, mainly because of her err… less significant chest area) is still in there. All candidates with a CURVES coefficient above 93% are out.
QUALITY/QUANTITY: I am confident that, in order to win a contest like that, a lot of other qualities are more important than measurements (say: IQ, character, confidence, prettiness) but I limited myself here to an exercise in Excel statistics.
TOPIC: statistics and pretty women: I love it. Any related stuff I should dive in to? Actresses? European models compared to US models? Spanish vs German?

Technorati Tags: germany, heidiklum, model, bmi, weight, curves

Broadband in Brussels

Published on February 17, 2006 in bandwidth, Belgium, Brussel and internet. 2 Comments

(post seems to have disappeared when I migrated to WordPress
I have what is proving to be an expensive habit: I’m subscribed to over 30 podcasts (including e.g. Diggnation at 300MB/week), I regularly download software to try out, I use BitTorrent on a regular basis, I buy stuff on iTunes. All that adds up to more than my allowance my ISP subscription gives me (20GB per month). Most of the months I pay an extra €8 per 10GB.

I’m a Coditel customer (cable provider in the part of Brussels where I live). I started out on ADSL until I got loads of technical problems and Belgacom/Skynet could not solve them. My current bandwidth is not bad (although not as fast as Telenet):

http://www.adslbox.be speed test results:
- Download speed : 4415 kbit/s or 552 kbyte/s
(in theory it should be 10.000 kbit/s)
- Upload speed : 233 kbit/s or 29 kbyte/s
Wed Feb 15 2006 at 20:59:42 UTC+0100

But now I want to know: do I have the best formula? So I collected some data. On vergelijking.be all the provider formulas are listed, but the list is not up-to-date. I collected all the latest numbers from the ISPs’ homepages. I got some real throughput statistics from adslbox.be and ispmonitor.be.

BROADBAND PRICES

The cheapest broadband one can get is Coditel LightClick: 22,90 € for 1 Mbps. The best price/speed you can get is Telenet ExpressnetTurbo (60€ for a theorethical 20Mbps and an actual throughput of about 11 Mbps). The one to avoid is Belgacom ADSL Light: 30 € for a meager 0,5 Mbps.

COST OF 50GB/MON

Now let’s see what happens if I would go to 50GB data transfer per month. Only 6 providers allow for this, either because their GB/mon allowance is big enough or because the price per extra GB is acceptable:

Where I live, I cannot get BruTele or Chello, so the only options are Coditel (cable) and Dommel, RealDSL or Mobistar (ADSL).

GB/MON ALLOWANCE

There are a 6 broadband subscriptions that allow unlimited download allowances: Dommel Netconnect Pro, BruTele @Home and @Turbo, RealDSL Basic and GeekDSL and Chello Extreme. The only options for me in Brussels are the 2 ADSL ones, of which the Dommel one is excessively expensive (€150/month).

CONCLUSION

For Brussels, Coditel is still a very good option (now if they could update that empty FAQ page that doesn’t seem to have been updated since the nineties). There is no point in switching from SpeedClick to MegaClick for the GB/mon only, but if the speed is really the double (in theory 20Mbps instead of 10Mbps) it might be a nice upgrade. I don’t need something like 200GB/month yet, but if I would, then RealDSL would be the best option.

If you live in Flanders and your main concern is speed, go Telenet ExpressNet Turbo. If you need loads of GB/month, go Chello Extreme (where possible) or RealDSL.

UPDATE
RealDSL does NOT accept any new subscriptions since October 2005, since there seem to be a capacity problem with its bandwidth provider Telenet. Luc and Cindy blogged about this earlier, so I have no excuse for my sloppy research. The only DSL provider with a unlimited bandwidth offer seems to be Dommel, but at an extreme high price. Their €33/50GB is however a good offer. Thanks for the update, Smetty!

The RIAA shoots itself in the foot again

Image by FactoryJoe

Someone at the RIAA decided they hadn’t enough enemies yet. Why not start screwing with the iPod owners?

As part of the on-going DMCA rule-making proceedings, the RIAA and other copyright industry associations submitted a filing that included this gem as part of their argument that space-shifting and format-shifting do not count as noninfringing uses, even when you are talking about making copies of your own CDs
(…)
For those who may not remember, here’s what Don Verrilli said to the Supreme Court last year:
“The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it’s been on their website for some time now, that it’s perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod.”
from EFF via BoingBoing

It’s a struggle for survival: the RIAA sees their old business model disappear, has no clue how to adapt to that and reacts by throwing money at lawyers and lobbyists. The RIAA is like the USS Nimitz in a pond that is drying up and the only reaction they can think of is: “sue the sun”.

What is so special about this is that the music industry has something that most industries would die for: passionate consumers. It’s not as if we buy music because we ran out of them (like toilet paper) or because the old ones aren’t any good anymore (like newspapers). We have developed a taste, we have artists we love and others we hate, we know the names of people behind them, we’re interested in how they live their life. There are groupies, musical subcultures, music magazines, music sites and TV stations with nothing but music. It’s a product any CEO would sell his mother-in-law for. Yet, the only thing the ‘old’ record companies seem to do with that is make their customers passionately hostile.

Look, I dunno what planet you guys think you�re on and what legal system is going to end up supporting your stilted worldview, but it doesn�t even matter. Because you�re irrelevant. You�re meaningless. What you�re doing is like a slow train wreck euthanasia; we�re all watching you pen your own demise, over months and months of screwing your best customers. I mean�it�s so painfully clear to us! Why is this not obvious to you?
FactoryJoe

Let’s take another example of a company that has passionate customers: Apple. Would it have been wise of Apple to sell a computer and forbid people to install software on it that was not developed by Apple? What if Apple had built a music player that only played music in its proprietary AAC format? “Yes, we know this MP3 thing is kinda big and stuff, but we feel we have to protect you from yourself. Oh, you want to print stuff? That’s an extra 50 cents per page!”
On the contrary, Steve Jobs is the (only) one who is driving the entertainment industry forward. While record companies were still arguing about “how much can we charge them for each time they listen to a song and how can we control that”, iTunes set the standard: 1$ per song, $10 per album, no limits on listening. While the MPA was busy suing toddlers and grannies with BitTorrent, iTunes came up with a model for TV show distribution: 2$/episode – no bullshit. We can only hope health problems do not keep Steve from setting standards in movie distribution either (like: get rid of the DVD regions or use BitTorrent as distribution mechanism). The content is ready, the bandwidth is ready, the customer is ready, all we need now is someone who wants serve his customers the 21st century way.

Technorati: riaa – eff – efftheriaa – apple – ipod – stevejobs