blogporter v1.0.0 released

The first version of blogporter is released. It's a utility for synchronizing posts between different blog service provider.
I wrote this tool because I need to maintain two blogs. It's annoying to have to copy and paste my posts to another blog. And the main reason I have two blogs is that blogger's service is not available in china mainland, due to a well-known reason. But I don't want to give up blogger's tight integration with my gmail account. So, I mainly write blogs here, and then use blog-porter to synchronize the other blog with this one.

Refer to http://code.google.com/p/blog-porter/ for more information about this utility.

The immediate usage of this tool is to sync posts from LiveSpace blog to other blog sites, because LiveSpace blog is soon to be closed. To do this, you can:

1. download LiveSpace blog data through http://{your_name}.spaces.live.com/Migration/Default.aspx
2. extract the downloaded zip file
3. install python, and BeatuifulSoup module
4. run "python blogporter.py --list-blogs" to find out supported blog provider
5. run "python blogporter.py --src-type=4 -p{path_to_unzipped_folder} --dst-type={number_stand_for_dst_blog_type} --dst-account={dst_blog_account} --dst-password={dst_blog_password} --startdate=2000-01-01 --enddate=2010-12-31 -v"

This tool still has limitations, mainly includes:

1. it doesn't sync comments
2. it doesn't sync category information from LiveSpace

I've tried below ways to work with LiveSpace, but failed to find a perfect solution.

1. metaweblog api, it's limited to retrieve 20 posts at most. 
2. rss, it returns even less posts than metaweblog api. May be Google Reader API can helps us get more data through rss, since google cached a lot of historical rss data on their own server. 
3. livespace backup file, it doesn't contain category information. 

I finally choose livespace backup file to implement LiveSpaceProvider, hope this doesn't bother too much.

nook vs kindle 3

I finally had a chance to play with kindle 3, and compared it with my nook.

Pros:

• The greatest advantage I felt that kindle 3 is over nook is its speed. It's extremely fast to turn pages, at least twice faster than nook.
• The second point that kindle 3 is totally over nook is its power sustainability, on which nook performs very poor. Kindle is said to be able to work for at least half a month in one charge, but my nook only can work slightly longer than half a week.
• Kindle wins nook on size and weight as well. Though the screen size of them are the same, kindle is thinner and lighter than nook. Based on my feeling, kindle only weighs half nook's weight.
• The display of kindle 3 is a little bit better. It's whiter. And its contrast is higher, so that the text is clearer and easier to read. But the difference is slight, you might not notice it if you don't have them on hand at the same time to compare.

Cons:

• Kindle doesn't support epub format, which is a popular format with a lot of resources on the web.
• Kindle doesn't handle pdf format as well as nook does. I opened the same pdf book on both devices, nook can wisely cut white margins of the pdf to make full use of its screen. Nook can also layout the content correctly when I chose to use a larger font. Kindle doesn't change the layout, it can only zoom into the page, which means I have to scroll the page rather than turning page to see more. But kindle support two viewport, landscape and portrait, this feature gains some point for it.
• Nook is based on android, and you may extend its capability by installing new software. Thanks to nookdevs.

android touch event summary

In "implement drag and drop on android", I wrote the rules how touch event can be passed to the touched view's parent, and how a parent can intercept the touched view's event. On a device without mouse, Click and LongClicked events are also strongly related to touch event. So, I'll summarize how they are related.

1. Button widget doesn't bubble event. If a button is touched, it doesn't pass the event to its parent in any case. (There should be more widgets exhibit this character.)
2. Touch event doesn't bubble up to parent if the widget also registers Click or LongClick event handler.
3. If a widget registers both Touch and Click event handler, Click event fires only when Touch event handler returns false. In other words, Click event gets fired only when touch event handler declares it's not interested in the touch event.
4. If a widget registers both Click and LongClick event handler, and LongClick event get fired. Click event will be fired only if LongClick event handler returns false.

Testing Code:
http://code.google.com/p/rxwen-blog-stuff/source/browse/trunk/android/touch_events/

repair mac login failure due to invalid home directory

My macbook failed to start and gave me "the password you entered is invalid" on login. It happened after my user directory is changed.
By default, mac system saves a user's personal data in /Users/user_name directory. In order to make the system easier to maintain and keep my personal data separated from system data. I created two partitions during installation. One partition is used for system installation, and the second partition is used as my home directory.
To do this, after the mac has been successfully, I copied all data from original /Users/user_name directory to /Volumes/user/user_name directory. Then I remove /Users/user_name directory, and created a soft symbol link /Users/user_name pointing to /Volumes/user/user_name. Everything work perfectly.
The problem occurred after I considered the /Volumes/user directory a poor name and changed it to a better one, /Volumes/idiot. After I restarted the machine and found I can't log into the system. Mac simply complained about my password wasn't correct, though I'm pretty sure it's correct.
The reason is I forgot to change /Users/user_name symbol link to correct place. I guess mac stores my credential in my home directory. So if this directory isn't accessible, all my login attempts failed.
To repair this, I tried mounting the mac hard disk on a ubuntu box and changing the symbol link. But due to the file system (HFS, Hierarchical File System) is journaled, it's read-only on ubuntu.
I finally found another mac machine and changed the symbol link correctly. In case I may encounter this problem again, I used "sudo diskutil disableJournal /Volumes/user" command to turn off jorunaling on the file system so that it'll be writable under ubuntu. The cost is the mac may take much longer time to scan file system if not shutting down properly. It deserves, at least I can log into the system.

References:
Repair / Fix Mac HFS+ partition using Ubuntu CD
How to Move the Home Folder in OS X – and Why