I’m still trying to get used to this new infrastructure, and my actual writing is sapping away any momentum I might have to do this, but I keep thinking of neato ideas I might eventually do on here.

Case in point: I am attempting to write this entire post on the iPhone. Wordpress has an app for that; it lets me enter text, take pictures, and do minor administrative tasks like approve comments, all from my little touchsceen. Yes, I have to type from a glass keyboard, but once you get going, it is not too bad.

It’s weird to think that when I started this journal in early 1997, my cell phone was this analog Sony model with a pull-out antenna that incurred massive roaming charges when I was not in western Washington and could barely store my favorite five speed dial numbers, let alone text message or run apps or browse the web. The most portable computer I had was a Mac Classic, which was luggable, but still required AC power.

The idea of typing away on a machine like this phone and then jetting it across the ether to my web page was completely unfathomable. Cell phones were not even that old then; I think nobody had one five years before. Now in some countries in Europe, there are more cell phones than people.  And I can carry a little Mac in my pocket that’s probably ten times faster than that old luggable mac.

I saved this as a draft, came home, and now it’s the next day and I’m editing it at home in a web browser.  But it’s still exciting that I’ll be able to use this to jot down the occasional note or two, all from a thing smaller than a deck of cards.

I spent two hours the other night trying to hack out a shell script to import the archives into this thing. Wordpress doesn’t have a simple way to just suck in a bunch of text files; you need to assemble them into something that resembles an RSS feed, and then import that. This brought up two problems:

1. All of the posts had to be on a single line in the element. This involved a bit of dicking around with awk and then sed before I finally gave up and realized I could do it faster with tr.

2. The pubdate element had to be in RFC-822 time format, and the only thing I had to work with was the filename, which was in YYYYMMDD format. It took most of the two hours to figure out the god damned /bin/date program that ships with OS X is fundamentally broken, and ALL date commands in unixes are broken, because instead of curing cancer or stopping wars, about 80% of our world’s brainpower goes to stupid pursuits like “oh, I have philosophical issues with the 87 flags offered in BSD’s date program, so I’m going to write a completely incompatible one with 73 flags of its own, but still fail to address the two or three things people need to do with a time program.”

Case in point, this DOES NOT work in OS X:

date -j -f "%Y%m%d" "20090930" +"%+"

This DOES work:

date -j -f "%Y %m%d" "2009 0930" +"%+"

But my filenames are 20090930.html and not 2009 0930.html. That extra fucking space killed me.

AND YES, I am sure I am just an idiot, and if I sat around all day writing shell scripts, I would KNOW that blah blah blah hidden flag blah blah blah run it through a perl script blah blah blah. But truth of the matter is, I write maybe a half-dozen lines of shell script every three months, and then promptly forget everything. I’m sure if I sat around all day slicing onions into cubes, I would be a god damned onion slicing master, but the truth of it is, I only need to cut up maybe one onion a week tops, and I’m not about to quit my day job just to sit around slicing up onions.

Here’s the script:

for f in ~/website-mirror/oldjournal/html/1997*.html; do
    echo "<item>"
    OLDDATE=`basename -s .html $f`
    THEYEAR=`echo $OLDDATE | cut -c1-4`
    THEREST=`echo $OLDDATE | cut -c5-8`
    SHIT=`echo $THEYEAR $THEREST`
    pubdate=$(    date -j -f "%Y %m%d" "`echo $SHIT`" +"%+")
    echo -n "<pubDate>"
    echo -n $pubdate
    echo "</pubDate>"
    echo "<category></category>"
    echo "<title></title>"
    echo "<content:encoded>`tr '\n' ' ' < $f`</content:encoded>"
    echo "</item>"
done