Hari's Corner

Has anybody noticed now that this blog is powered by b2evolution?

That's right, this is the result of my very own importer and I'm quite proud of the fact that I accomplished this in a couple of days (including changing my theme manually to match the earlier WordPress blog). I am going to share the converter with the community and I would appreciate it if people test it and give me feedback.

As far as this blog content goes, there are a few minor import problem related to posts and attachments which I'll fix manually. But for one really annoying MySQL bug, this changeover went pretty smoothly.

If you notice any problems please do bring them to my attention and I'll fix them as soon as possible. And please don't forget to update your feed reader

I've now working on a WP to b2evolution importer feverishly as I haven't been able to find one anywhere on the internet. They say, if you cannot find somebody to do the job, do it yourself Once that is done, I'll probably switch over to b2evolution and share the code with the community. I'm working with Francois Planque, the b2evolution developer to ensure that everybody benefits from this piece of code.

I've done the categories and posts tables but I have yet to finish the comments and the users table. At this point things look really good. This importer works with WP 2.3 (only) and converts to b2evolution 2.0.1 (alpha).

Should be done in a day or so. In the meantime if anybody is interested in testing it, please drop a comment here and I'll let you have the code when I finish it. Developed in an environment of PHP 5 and Apache 2+ but it should work with PHP 4 as well as I've not used an PHP 5 specific functionality as far as I can see.

Ever since we moved into the new place, I've realized the importance of one thing I've been taking for granted for a long time: proper ventilation. Circulation of fresh air is a critical component of home architecture and unfortunately the house we've moved into is a fairly old house with few windows. Actually the location and the plan of this house makes it nearly impossible to have any windows except a couple in the front of the house facing the street. Being on the ground floor is a further disadvantage and there is no compound wall to speak of which makes the street-facing windows exposed to the dust and pollution of vehicular traffic.

In many ways, the house is extremely comfortable, but the lack of fresh air and sunlight makes electric lighting a necessity even in daytime. In the older house (which was on the second floor, had plenty of windows and was away from the main road) the bedroom was a cosy little room tucked away in one corner which we used just for sleeping at night. We had kept the computer and our second television in another room. The large spacious hall made it easy for us to avoid the bedroom during the daytime. In this house, the master bedroom dominates the floor space. It is virtually a second living room. As a result we spend a lot of time during the day in this room. This, coupled with the lack of ventilation and natural lighting, makes the air of this room stale very quickly. One thing I've realized quickly is that you need your bedrooms to be naturally well lit and aired out during the daytime. After a night's sleep, a lot of carbon dioxide accumulates and you need the morning breeze to blow in and remove the mustiness in the air. But unfortunately, getting any breeze in this particular house is very difficult. Keeping the few windows open brings in a swarm of mosquitoes at night. So we are forced to shut out all windows and resort to air-conditioning. Naturally it's not the ideal solution, but at least breathing becomes easier with this circulating air. Even so, I've not had a proper night's sleep ever since we shifted. I believe this is partly due to the accumulation of stale air during the daytime and partly due to the menace of mosquitoes which find the spacious dark corners of these rooms extremely inviting.

From all this, I've concluded that the most important component of any house is ventilation and natural lighting. Modern design does not pay much importance to the flow of fresh air as air-conditioning has taken over that role, but I think it's a key aspect of making any house comfortable for its residents and reduce energy costs at the same time. It's all very well living in the lap of luxury, but that cannot replace fresh air and sunlight to liven up a home and keep it fresh and free of mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects. So if you're planning to buy or build a house, keep these aspects in mind. It's far more important than any other comforts or luxuries you might have in mind.

From a personal point of view, hopefully this house is only a temporary solution for us.

Notice anything different about WordPress now that 2.3 has come out?

I didn't either. I'm not really complaining though. WordPress has never really had any "spectacular effects" upgrade since 1.5 to 2.0 and I didn't expect anything big in 2.3 either. There is now native tagging support and there are some minor changes to the way the WYSIWYG editor is displayed but in reality there is nothing new to see here. There are probably a bunch of invisible security updates though.

TinyMCE hasn't really been XHTML 1.0 compliant and I'm surprised that the WordPress developers continue to use that as the editor of choice. To be frank, most people probably don't care, but WP has always advertised itself as a standards compliant blogging engine. To see the old <font color=> tag being used for text colouring is really suprising. Well, I don't use the WYSIWYG mode anyway.

Why do I continue using WordPress? Unlike a desktop editor, changing an entire website's back-end is not easy and needs a lot of work. Besides, conversion of posts and comments to other blogging tools is really iffy and tends to break a lot of things in the process including permalinks. As long as WordPress doesn't break, I probably don't care much. If you notice any problems on this blog, do let me know.

This is the third set of links I'm sharing with you. Hopefully these articles make for interesting reading. I always try to pick relatively recent articles from other blogs, but I'm always open to highlighting interesting content regardless of age. So if you've written something which you want me to share with other readers and blog authors, please post a comment here and you'll feature in the next edition of Blog Perambulations.

Creative Hedgehog has written an article titled how I use facebook. Social networking sites have mushroomed in the last few months, and I have no doubt that they will continue evolving as the days go by, but to me they're nothing more than glorified contact lists as I've mentioned before. This article is a good review of facebook's unique features and the overall tone is quite positive. Ultimately every social network is the sum total of its userbase. Everything else is fluff.

Cop Killer....So what?! is an article that has spawned some discussion at GEM's blog Human Psyche. He wonders why people get so heated up over the death of a cop on duty. His point is well made though the language is a bit crude. I also wonder whether this is a cultural phenomenon specific to the US. My feeling is that low-ranking policemen in most parts of the world are generally rough, uneducated men who tend to instill more fear than respect in law-abiding society. Can education make a difference?

Drew has written about Mandatory Christianity in the US. For a country that prides itself on being the biggest democracy in the world, religious freedom is still a big issue. The hypocrisy of the people who actively propagate one religion in the name of religious freedom while trying to destroy other religions really sticks out.

On a similar note, Sandeep writes about how Big Brother Sermonizes. Seriously Sandeep is essentially a political blog and his views are quite refreshing and different for people who've been fed on a diet of pseudo-secular crap found in the Indian English language media and Press. Once again, he highlights the hypocrisy of "religious freedom". The real problem in the world is not a lack of freedom but selective freedom of religion which creates so much tension in society.

Dominic at OneAndOneIs2 has found out How to scare people on campus. It's quite amazing how much of an effort it is to remember names, but the real challenge is to remember faces and then associate them with the correct names. Face recognition is one of the most complex functions carried out by the human brain and it's quite a feat to remember the names of an entire group of people and correctly identify them. Teachers do have a tough job and Dominic as one in training, seems to have all the right instincts for it!

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention Desh's blog Drishtikone. He has some interesting pictures of Landing a plane with Parking brakes on. That looks like something to try out on a boring Sunday afternoon

That's all for today and once again, if you have any interesting articles to share, please do so here and I'll feature them next time.

Papa Hari Says, in His Infinite Wisdom:

Many times, when we think about something, that thought leads to another thought and we think that that thought had actually led to the other thought naturally, but when we think about it, we actually begin to think that we had actually thought ourselves into the second thought through the first thought without the second occuring naturally. At that moment, we start thinking about thinking itself and not about that thought any more, so the thought that first occurs to us is that the second thought didn't occur naturally but was forced on by thinking about the first thought.

-- Papa Hari, circa AD 2007

(Papa Hari prudently withdraws behind the curtains to avoid the first wave of rotten tomato missile attacks)