Omar came to Tokyo before he actually starts working with us in August
Omar is going to replace Bruno who is going back to Paris (sniff ...) and he
had the traditional welcome party.
I've actually changed my weblog from movabletype to blosxom after Bruno brought me back to reality, while I was so proud to have set up my weblog a few days ago !
Basically, Movabletype is quite a nice weblog, but on the contrary of
blosxom, it's a propriatary product, under a certain license and any change in
the source code is a violation of this license ...
Also, if you run a commercial site, you are to pay a certain amount since the
type of your license changed ...
Although it was quite unlikely that I had to change anything in the source
code (since the default weblog is quite nice ance that there are tons of
plugins available on the Internet), and even more unlikely that a I would get
sued for doing something like this, I didn't like the fact that this thing was
not in the trendy way of GPL.
I was kind of
challenged to rebuild everything by myself with blosxom, in perl (finally
something I can understand !), to have something I could really be proud of
(yeah, I know, it's not that hard, but still ... ;-) )
Also, I was thinking that if I ever had to advertise my site to sell some of my pictures (still praying here !), then I'd be in a position to have to pay this license, unless I migrated the weblog to something else, so I figured I could just do it right now, while there are not too many entries ...
The cool thing about blosxom is that the system is very simple, using a cgi
script and the Unix file system. Therefore, you just need to create text files
and blosxom will create the entries directly for you, with the tree refering
to your own file structure and marking the date from the date of the file !
This also made the migration much easier since I was able to parse my old
diary and create a new file for each entry on the fly with a quick and dirty
perl script, do a "touch" (to change the date of the file) to make it look
like it was created in the past ! Cool, isn't it ?
Again, I don't know how long it would have taken if I hadn't used a Unix and
if I had tried to do it on Windows ... That'll probably make Bruno smile and
laugh at me again, since he's been very pushy for the last few months for me
to use Linux instead of Windows ...
The only reason I'm still sticking to Windows, although I reckon I really miss
Unix' features, is because I need some programs to convert the pictures from
my camera to JPG ... until Bruno finds something for me, just like that, out
of the blue with a GPL license !
This also means that the search feature (provided by a blosxom's fan, see
the credits) is finally meaningful.
There are also other nice plugins available but I'll have a look at them
little by little
Finally, I'd like to congratulate Fred for his perseverance (I'm not quite sure until when this is going to last, that's why I'm congratulating him now !) in updating his weblog ! You can tell he's been thinking the whole day about what to write in the weblog for each day though :D !
Please, also have a look at George's homepage and leave a message in the guestbook, I personally think his homepage looks pretty cool!
Today at 6:24pm, there was quite an impressive earthquake ...
I was at home on the 1st floor (got back home early because I didn't feel
well) and it was already quite scary ... I guess it must have felt like hell
in the office, a 35 story building (our office is on the 15th floor).
It's all the more scary that there have been a few earthquakes for the last 2 weeks and when you know that a major earthquake happens every 70 years in Japan !
Even worse: the last one was in 1923 ... You do the maths: the next one is 10 years late as of today ...
Have a look at statistics on earthquakes in Japan
I went to Seb and Candice's place to see the latest little one:
Gaelle.
Sawato-san and Kamo-san were also there and Kawai-san had brought his family
and his little son Ryohei, only 1 year and 8 months old, but already so
big!
Have a look at the pictures and use about a dozen of kawaiiiiiii (cute !) !
Big change in the design of this diary, which is more like a weblog now.
So far, I didn't really see the benefit of using a weblog, instead of copying
and pasting the last entry to recreate the style. That was until I saw Fred's weblog and found out more about
Movabletype.
Not only this tool will create the page automatically, it also uses a database to show the individual entries, allow any visitor to leave a comment, to run a search...
It looks pretty good too in my opinion, close to the simplified design I was trying to implementing a few months ago.
Unfortunately, converting my old diary into this weblog was not something
easy since I had to change the links on all the pages.
I finally ended up using a 4 line-csh script:
foreach file (`find . -name "*htm*"`)
cat $file | sed 's/diary\.html/weblog\.index\.html/' > tmp
mv tmp $file
end
Done ! How would you do it with Windows ? ;-)
Also, I had to input the contents of the previous diary into one new single
entry of this weblog (well I could have inputted them one by one but I figured
it was not worth it at 2:30am !). Therefore, the design is still in a
transition phase and the search feature may not be very useful as of now,
since you might as well use the search function of your browser !
