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Re: Blub by Convention (In Defense of Arc)

jonnytran — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:31:06 -0000

My pleasure! If it was thought-provoking, then I have succeeded.

Re: Blub by Convention (In Defense of Arc)

jonnytran — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:16:58 -0000

Thanks for the thoughts. All the comments for this have shown me that what I meant to say wasn't communicated very well. (The post you are referring to, I had written months ago, decided to post it, and then unposted it b/c I thought it was unworthy. Guess it already spread through the tubes, though.)

If I could redo this post, I would try to make it clear that what I meant was: (1) Many languages could be better than they are if they used different conventions; (2) it's damn-near impossible to go against the conventions; (3) conventions are difficult to change, more of a way of thinking of the community; (4) it's worthwhile to push good conventions into the core language/libraries, and if you do that, you're essentially making something new.

This really has little to do with Arc. Silly me for associating Arc with language design.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:30:31 -0000

One thing you can try is typing your feed url into the location bar of a browser window, and see if you can view all your blog posts. (I think the first 25 or so should show up.) Also, make sure they are the full entries, not just summaries for example. If it doesn't show up or the full entries aren't displayed, you'll need to tweak your Blogger Settings until they do.

Let me know if this helps or not.

Re: Setting Up Clojure

jonnytran — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:07:59 -0000

Tried helping gv0tch0 set this up on his machine... I'm using this commit of mdelaurentis/env.git 8d627334ee2bff9695c0f3791444575679e4759b

I have also deleted the setq line in emacs/clojure-stuff.el that references "/src/hmscommon-similarity/target/installed/bin/repl".

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:18:29 -0000

Tumblr doesn't support this... Everyone, bug them about it until they do!

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:05:36 -0000

That's a very good idea. I'm not sure Tumblr supports this through their API. I'll ask them.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:57:29 -0000

The full post bodies are not showing up in your feed URL. In other words, if you open that url (the one you linked to) in your browser, it only shows the summaries of your posts (like the first paragraph or so), not the entire entries. This is causing the import to miss your post bodies completely.

To fix this, from you Blogger dashboard, click Settings for your blog. Then go to the Site Feed page. Depending on whether you have Basic Mode or Advanced Mode selected you will see one of two things. Either an "Allow Blog Feeds" or "Blog Posts Feed" setting. You probably have this set to "Short". Change it to "Full". Then click "Save Settings".

To verify that you've done it correct, open/refresh your feed in your browser again (yeah, that url you posted) and the full text of your posts should show up now.

Now you should be able to import w/o a hitch.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 15:17:52 -0000

Fixed! Now if you use "feed://www..." for your feed url, it works as expected.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 12:56:32 -0000

Don't worry about it only showing 25 at a time; Blogger is just paging.

I wasn't able to find anything obvious. But I did try to test importing some of your entries, and it worked fine. So here is my suggestion... Import your entries in blocks. Try 25 at a time. (Note: this is unrelated to the 25 above; it's just a good round number.)

You can do this by importing starting at the end of your posts, and working backwards, specifying which entries to fetch in the feed url parameters. Like this...

First import this: http://jacobswellmusic2.blogspot.com/feeds/post...

Then this: http://jacobswellmusic2.blogspot.com/feeds/post...

Then this: http://jacobswellmusic2.blogspot.com/feeds/post...

... and keep doing that, changing start-index (the number at the end of the feed url) decreasing by 25 until it gets to 1. The reason I'm saying do it in reverse order, instead of starting from 1, is that this way, your latest entry will show up at the top of your Tumblr Dashboard when this is all done. And since you have 132 posts, a start-index of 126 getting 25 at a time will get the last entries.

If this still fails, we will have narrowed it down to a range of 25 posts. But this might solve the problem all together.

I know this is a little complicated; it would be much better if the app I made could do all this for us. But it would be a decent amount of work, and the time would be better spent working on another idea I have which will allow people to do things other than just import.

Let me know if you still have trouble or if that solves it.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:42:56 -0000

Thanks. I appreciate comments like this. I would never have dreamed of typing in "feed://", so this really helps.

If anyone has other ideas for improvements, please comment! If people make enough noise, I may even make them...

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:36:48 -0000

Anything unusual about your blog? Non-English characters? Obscure Blogger options tweaked? I seriously whipped this app up in just a couple days, so there may be cases it simply doesn't handle.

Again, if you email me or somehow get me your feed url, I can try to look at it for you. I'd like to try to keep as much discussion in these comments, though, to hopefully help others with the same problem.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:22:41 -0000

About how many posts do you have? I heard someone use it on about 400 posts w/o a hitch, but it could be hitting some kind of memory or timeout limit. If you give me your feed url, I can try to look into it for you.

If you'd rather do it yourself, there may be a way to use Blogger's API to import the first chunk of your posts, then the next chunk, and so on.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:22:14 -0000

Have you checked the Feed URL you are using by typing it into your browser location bar and making sure that you can see your posts (possibly in an ugly XML format)?

Re: An Arc News Forum

jonnytran — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:41:58 -0000

Link updated. Try this. Google also has a lot on the topic.

Re: An Arc News Forum

jonnytran — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:13:31 -0000

If you follow my instructions above to run the server in a thread, you can redefine things on the fly. The first time you do this, it might be a little confusing b/c of the way the lines get printed. It will look something like this:

$ mzscheme -m -f as.scm 
Use (quit) to quit, (tl) to return here after an interrupt.
arc> (= app (thread (nsv)))
#<thread>
arc> load items: 
ranking stories.
load users: 
ready to serve port 8080

But rest assured, when you see this, you are now at the Arc prompt again. So if you simply redefine news.css by typing...

(defop news.css req
  (pr "
body  { background-color: green; }"))

... and hitting enter, when you refresh in the browser, all your new bindings will be used, and you'll see an ugly green everywhere. You have to redefine the whole thing each time, so if you're going to be doing this often, you might want to look into changing the function to read from a separate file. And then you can put all your CSS in a file by itself.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:36:54 -0000

Since Blogger's integration with FeedBurner, others might have this problem. I haven't used Blogger since I made the switch way back in June so I haven't kept up with the changes. But I'd like to continue helping people switch to Tumblr.

Any idea how I can change the program to ease the process for others? Did your FeedBurner URL default to RSS? b/c the code expects an Atom feed. It would be nice if it just worked on the FeedBurner feed.

btw, nice blog. Both layouts are nice, but the new one looks even cleaner and more organized.

Re: think4yourself - Joe Loves Crappy Movies

jonnytran — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:17:50 -0000

Yeah, i see it now. Cool!

Re: What Web Frameworks Are Missing

jonnytran — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:59:08 -0000

Will do. ... Do you guys have a website yet? When you do, post it here.

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

jonnytran — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:29:45 -0000

I'm glad you like it! No, I don't know of anything to move back. But I've heard someone mention he moved to WordPress, and then from there, to Blogger.

Re: We’ve had a few weeks to observe “Likes” effects... | Tumblr Staff

jonnytran — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:54:16 -0000

I've always wondered if likes affect what shows up on http://www.tumblr.com/explore

Re: The Abstraction Machine

jonnytran — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:14:00 -0000

I am far from being an expert at neuroscience

I've drawn terminology from Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence. But what makes a neuroscientist qualified besides his understanding of how the mind works? Everyone, including you, has intimate access to a mind if they train themselves to be aware of it.

They were both guilty of learning from experience.

But how did they learn? What does it mean to learn? This is exactly my point.

They each remembered their past observations/experiences, abstracted away the insignificant details (like the time of day, the weather at the time, which direction the animal was coming from), and hypothesized (or predicted) a way of escaping.

The first man abstracted away the type of animal and predicted that climbing a tree would save him. Since some animals can climb trees and others can't (an important point in this case), his prediction failed.

The second man, after seeing this, abstracted away many of the same unimportant things (like the time of day and the weather at the time) and which man was being chased, and hypothesized (or predicted) that a leopard would kill him if he ran up a tree also. At this point, he probably drew on other experiences in which running away allowed a person to escape, an even more abstract pattern not necessarily having to do with animals, but chasers and chasees.

Ahh but that might be a consequence of not having experienced otherwise

Very true. Any ideas on making the quantum leap of "mutation" that you describe?

Re: Techies Vs. The Business

jonnytran — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:19:45 -0000

Your overall argument seems to be that managers get paid more because it's harder to get people to follow a process than it is to get computers to follow a process.

You said yourself, though, that with computers, you have to specify all the details that for a human would be obvious, increasing complexity. So both have their pros and cons.

This supports the idea that neither people nor computers should be chosen blindly -- another example of "the right tool for the right job".

Re: Comment formatting?

jonnytran — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:05:40 -0000

Having strikeout would be very useful for when you need to edit comments. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's run into this problem.

Re: Techies Vs. The Business

jonnytran — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:35:38 -0000

Short answer: Yes, I have a conscience.

Long answer: Having a conscience is bad for <strike>business</strike> making money. Like cheating or stealing (and getting away with it), it's easier to be bad. But I think if you find the right people, it's in your best interest in the long-run to compensate them for whatever value they're contributing. Why breed bitterness when you can make workers feel appreciated? Workers are, after all, customers of an organization. Make them feel good, and they will pass that on to the end-users. In other words, I don't think it's necessary to be a slave-driver, in the same way that it's not necessary to cheat or steal to be successful.

No rules are absolute, though. I think seeing 2 opposing perspectives and looking at them from the outside is proof of that.

Re: Programming Concepts People Just "Don't Get"

jonnytran — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:16:34 -0000

Yes, I can see how it can be confusing. Web 2.0 vs. semantic web vs. Semantic Web (capitalized) vs. Web 3.0.

I haven't heard anyone else mention this. I may have unintentionally excluded some topics though by saying "programming concepts". ... I'll see what I can do, but I think I've accumulated enough topics for one presentation.