Finally spent an hour doing diffs on the various entry-export data piles, and very happily, the WXR-format export routine seen here involving setting up a new index template is now proven to work. The missing entries in the export are simply the entries set to draft status.

So the next procedure is to work on correcting the stored copy for the Twitter archive entries and reimport them into the MT DB. Once I get them into human-readable format I’ll be good to migrate in earnest.

In other computey news I have been taking a javascript course from UW online. The class meets in a classroom downtown on Mondays at 6 and the lectures are presented in a distance learning format as well. It’s the first computer-programming class I have taken since PHP in 2001 and the first distance learning class I have ever taken.

I was able to take good handwritten notes in the PHP class. Handwritten notes are the gold standard for effective speech-based learning presentation, but the classroom standards and needs have changed sufficiently that I have found it to be completely impossible to take notes with a pen and paper, copy and paste code samples into an open note document on the laptop, follow along in the online presentation, ask questions via chat window, and develop and debug example code in the browser as the classes are being taught.

So I’ve moved on to all-typing note taking and consolidated the cut-and-paste doc with actual interactive note taking. However, and this is really kind of an issuer I think, the predominance of detailed presentation slides made available as PDFs largely obviates the need to recopy the data as it is presented. This is inherently unfortunate, because it means that rather than reiterating the data presented in my mind prior to consigning it to a record-keeping medium, I am largely preoccupied with making sure my interaction with the available text preserves it accurately in a mechanical sense.It certainly speeds up the presentation of the material but it must necessarily degrade the quality of apprehension needed in order to effectively capture it.

I suppose this reflects the way we use and have integrated computers into our day to day lives as information retrieval and sharing devices – I would imagine that hardcore date-based memorization in disciplines such as art history is essentially de-emphasized outside the area on an individual’s academic concentration, where the dates will be memorized anyway by necessity and exposure. For everything else, there’s wikipedia and more-vetted sources.

New cousins had to put down a big dog this morning. Been working on little something for them. It’s coming along nicely.

Yesterday I went to work on a long-term sprucing-up project for the Tussin Up site and was frustrated to learn that some sort of bug was preventing the composition box within the MT UI at my hosting from completely rendering.

As a subunit of the composition UI which normally does not even appear was also appearing with an error message, I think that in all likelihood, there was a remote hosting issue somewhere between my install of the blog software and components that were initially designed to provide additional remotely-hosted functionality by SixApart over a decade ago – so a module was not returning an acknowledgement or some such and instead of being properly error-handled within MT’s perl at my host the software was hanging in a way that prevented the complete exposure of the composition box to my cursor.

Anyway, it was a pain, and reminded me that I need to finish my platform migration.

Working on getting a test implementation of PageFlip 5 up in service of a site refresh for the venerable Tussin Up archive.

Docs here.

The developers offer a 14-day test license and thereafter a freebie for blog publicity along the lines of this entry.

An initial bump in the road: this here install of MT4 has developed a leak in the form of a text-entry field that does not render fully in certain circumstances, preventing access to extant entries and the creation of new ones in some use cases. So I may have to get under the hood here a bit just to get things rolling.

Whatever, it’s something I should be doing every day anyway – I still need to go back and isolate the non-rendering entries as a part of the migration project anyway.

UPDATE: The work around for this text-entry problem is to create the entry using QuickPost and then to access the entry via Manage Entries. The post will load but not display the body copy.

Clicking “Preview” will cause the UI to successfully load the body and make it available for editing and entry. Not a good long term solution.

It does imply that there’s a database query that’s failing on the initial pageload, which might point to a change in MySQL versions.

On Facebook tonight an artist that I greatly admire posted the first of a promised series of strips which opens with the recounting of a car accident in which the narrator, as a child, accidentally, in the most literal possible sense of the word, kills another child.

In jest but with serious intent I posted a comment suggesting that the story was the origin tale of one of the artist’s characters. The artist has subsequently deleted my comment and in interactions with other folks on FB confirmed that the story is in most respects true.

I trust this artist’s judgement and think he must have had a good reason for the deletion. I am at the moment so very sad for him; he has had a weight to carry since childhood and his art is in part an expression of it.

Hm. For some reason the prior entry republishes to aggregate archive pages but not to individual entry archive pages.

I wonder if it’s the image embed. Man, that would be a pain.

I’ll try rebuilding it here block by block.

Initially, I pasted the image into this entry, and both the aggregate and individual page entries published. Then I pasted the first paragraph above both the image and the behavior of no individual archive rebuild appeared.

So it may be a bad character in the first graf or it may be a limit on the number of times an edit can be generated.

This would appear to be a clue to the export-resistant entries as well.

I’ll continue trying various tricks.

UPDATE: The entry rebuilt, finally, apparently after a full site rebuild. Still, an edit to an individual entry shouldn’t delete the initial post without writing the update. It seems likeliest that it has something to do with the size of the blog’s entry set, which is approaching 7000.

A friend of my adolescence died this week, of lung cancer, back home.

When he was a little kid, say, eleven, he (as with many of my cohort) appeared as an extra in Breaking Away. His appearance, though, was distinctive in more ways than one. He had a unique face with an uncommon shape, and additionally in the scene he most notably appears in, he is literally in the front and center of the shot.

He had a cynical sense of humor and had experienced losses and challenges early – one of his closest friends in high school died very young from some sort of renal failure that left him on dialysis from a young age.

That loss, and of course this week’s end of things, are all in the future at the moment the camera on the Breaking Away shoot committed my friend’s eleven-year-old gaze to film and thence to pixels in the fullness of time.

His expression is haunting me this week. He can’t quite believe it. All of it. The child is looking into the future and seeing something that surprises and does not delight, something that has taken him aback. That’s a fine epitaph, one that’s culturally sound and expressive on behalf of my cohort. Weirdly, it makes me happy and I start to chuckle every time I see it. It’s as if at age eleven he planted a practical joke for us to notice and appreciate today, in his wake.

Rest in peace.

NOTED. Moreover.

Maybe (how). Also.

Related.