this blog is girtby.net

Last Post!

On the 18th of September 2004, I unveiled the first post on girtby.net.

And today, exactly 5 years later, I’m posting the last.

Archiving Tweets

If you’ve run Damon Cortesi’s handy curl command to download all (or the last 3200) tweets from your twitter account, you’ll have a directory full of files with names like user_timeline.xml?count=100&page=1. Not only that but they include a large amount of redundant profile stuff in the <user> element. And not only that, but twitter sometimes returns a “Twitter is over capacity” page instead of your tweets.

What we want to do is a) detect any files which don’t contain tweets, b) remove the redundant user profile, and c) combine the results into a single file.

Well, friends, here is a shell script to do exactly that. You’ll need zsh and xsltproc, both of which are standard on MacOS X and most sane Linuxen.

Output is on stdout, so just redirect to your filename of choice:

$ tweetcombine user_timeline.xml\?count=100\&page=* \
    > tweet_archive.xml

Sleeping Bloggy

It should be apparent to prettymuch anyone who reads this blog that I have lost the impetus to publish regularly. Although I still have many things to say to the internet, it seems to be getting harder and harder to find the time to put these things in a blog form that I’m happy with.

But I’m also not happy with the concept of just abandoning the blog, as so many others seem to do. I like the idea of putting it into hibernation, where it still can be linked to and indexed in search engines, but just not active.

So I’ve been working out how to do that. It’s not as easy as I expected. And, yes, worth blogging about…

Bye Bye eMusic

Well, it was good while it lasted, but I’ve just downloaded my last album from eMusic.

At The End Of One's Tether

Many carriers, most notably AT&T, but also others such as Optus, are getting a lot of bad press for charging their subscribers extra for “tethering” their iPhones to their laptops.

Easiest $100 I'll Ever Make

Recently, before boarding a flight up to Hamilton Island for a $WORK junket conference, I purchased a puzzle book. On the flight, I shared the puzzles amongst colleagues, and fun was had. One particularly tricky puzzle confounded us all, although I recognised it as a variant of the Monty Hall problem. Alarm bells should be going off at this point for those who have debated the subject in the past…

Anyway, one colleague didn’t believe that the answer in the back of the book was correct, and he offered to bet that by running a computer simulation he could prove the book (and me) wrong. I’m not a betting person, but for some reason, possibly euphoria at the prospect of the upcoming partying seminars, I immediately accepted his bet, wagering $100.

What follows is my attempt to win that bet.

I Fought The Gorm

There’s a kind of internally-generated tension that builds up when you haven’t blogged for a while. It’s not as bad as that other kind of tension which builds up over time, but it’s still there in the back of your mind. And after a while you need to do something, anything, to release the tension.

Headphone Update

So you might remember reading the previous article about headphones. At the time you might have wondered to yourself whether I could get any more crazy-ass obsessed and drop even more ridiculous quantities of cash on these things.

If you have, I’m happy to say yes. Yes, I can.

The two headphones described below are about as much as I can imagine spending on what are basically little speakers that you strap to your head. So this article isn’t so much a review as a freakshow; check out the guy with the weird obsession and the lack of self-restraint!

Precisely Wrong

Dan reminds me of a story I heard on an ancient Media Watch episode. It’s Stuart Littlemore-era Media Watch, and is sadly not in the otherwise extensive ABC online archives. hence you’ll have to rely on my somewhat hazy recollection. Don’t worry though, I may have forgotten some of the details, but I remember the punchline.

Staging Wordpress With Bazaar

Version Control Systems, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.

Keen observers will have noted that I have tended to blog each time I try out a new version control system, and this really isn’t an exception. Except that, well I’m not just trying it out, I actually use Bazaar daily at $WORK, so and this is like after-hours practice.

Anyway, I wanted to share this because I’ve found that maintaining a staging and production installation of wordpress, complete with custom modifications and a collection of plugins, is a problem ideally solved by a distributed source control. Plus I really like Bazaar, and wanted to show how easy it can be.