Mikko Saari in English

MT4 and preview problems

I had this problem with Movable Type 4 and an older blog created on MT3. It wouldn't allow entry previews, but gave an error about missing context handlers for entry_based archives. It bothered me a long time, but yesterday I decided to fix it and fortunately I was able to find the solution at the Movable Type support forums.

I'm posting it here now to make it easier to find in case someone else is having the same problem, as it's really quite simple fix. The problem is caused by MTArchive tags: your entry-based archive template shouldn't have any. Most likely culprit is MTArchiveTitle - just replace that by MTEntryTitle and everything works. Watch out - the bad tag may be hiding in a Header module.

Facebook

My wife got invited to Facebook by her friends, I checked the place out (hadn't taken a single look at it before that) and found out I have quite a few friends listed there. Thus, I got myself a Facebook profile, too.

Book reviews

One has never enough blogs, right? Even if old ones are pushing weeds and looking quite abandoned and derelict? Well, if you start enough blogs, the weak ones will eventually die (like this old geezer here) and the strong ones, those you are really interested in (say, Gameblog) will survive. We'll see what happens to my latest attempt.

It's called Mikko reads and it features small book reviews. If time permits, I'll go through my Finnish review archives (some 200 book reviews) and post translations, but at least I try to review all the books I read from now on. We'll see...

BookMooch recommendations

I've been happily mooching books lately. BookMooch has actually beaten both Bloglines and BoardGameGeek in my browser: if I type 'b' in the URL bar, Firefox suggests BookMooch.

It's been fun, and quite useful too: I've mooched over 70 books with a very reasonable cost, just about three euros per book. While three euros is more than enough for some of them (old, worn paperbacks), I've also received brand new trade paperbacks and hardcovers in pristine condition, books I couldn't get in library and I'd have to pay at least 15 euros or so to buy.

In an effort to give something back to the community (and to get something for myself), I created BookMooch Recommendations. It's a simple recommendations engine: type in your BookMooch id to get some recommendations based on your mooching history. It was a fun project, and depending on your history, it can produce pretty good results, too.

If you're a BookMooch user, try it out. If you're not - well, if you like cheap books, you probably should be!

SpamLookup keyword blacklist

Comment spam is a constant nuisance to every blog owner. Movable Type is an excellent tool for having a blog, but it's also very popular - which makes it a prime target for spammers. Fortunately the newer versions have SpamLookup, a good tool to fight spam.

I haven't seen many comment spam blacklists around, so I thought I'd publish mine. My keyword list has a bunch of regular expressions that block lots of spam. Not everything, definitely, but most of the common stuff: porn, debt consolidation, pharmacy and so on. This is for SpamLookup, but works with any keyword filter that understands regular expressions.

Installing the list is simple: just copy-paste it to the SpamLookup keyword filter. These are pretty safe for junking comments, but if your blog discusses finance, pharmacy or sex, you'll need to remove some stuff, otherwise conversation will be severely stiffled. Non-English blogs have it easier here.

These are all regular expressions, as this gives so much more power to the keywords. For example, /free(\s*|-)porn/i is much better than free porn, as it will catch several forms more: freeporn, free-porn and free porn.

Any good suggestions? It's best to send those by email to msaari@iki.fi, because SpamLookup might just want to eat them... I'll try and update the list every now and then as spam trends shift.

Lunch with John Buckman

Neat: I met John Buckman and his wife Jan, both very nice people. John is, of course, the mastermind behind Magnatune and, most importantly, BookMooch. It's pretty strange to meet people like that in your home town - this time the key was the Openmind conference.

And the world is a step smaller, again: it turns out that now I'm just one step away from Doris Lessing, as I have met Jan who knows her.

Free books

Do you want free books? Iain M. Banks' excellent scifi novels? Or the hard-boiled noir scifi of Richard Morgan? Or something else? I've got a bunch of books I'd like to give away, and they're completely free. I'll even pay the shipping costs to anywhere in the world.

What's the catch? Well, to get the books, you'll need to sign up with BookMooch and ask the books from me that way. If you do that, then I'll get paid few points for each book. I can then use the points to get new books. Everybody wins.

I've been using BookMooch for a while now and I'm very happy with it. I've sent out six books and received eight. I read a lot of English books, mostly science fiction, and the Finnish libraries aren't the best possible source for that kind of literature. BookMooch isn't free, but a lot cheaper than buying the books new. The selection is perhaps a bit erratic, but at least so far I've found a lot of interesting books, more than I can get right now. And of course, the selection grows larger all the time when new users join.

TagSupplementals

If you're running Movable Type 3.31 with the new tag functionality, getting TagSupplementals should be pretty high on your list. The plugin adds several very useful tags; the MTRelatedEntries tag which displays related entries based on similar tags is particularly nice.

Lingerie flood

You go to bed in good faith. Oh, sure, there was a spam comment on your blog, but hey, you can deal with it later. Wake up next morning and what do you see: over 300 bloody spam comments advertising lingerie...

Fortunately Movable Type had the good sense to moderate all those, so removing them took just minutes, not hours...

Baby life

The boy is two months tomorrow. It's been a wild ride so far... Though to be honest, I think life's been easier than I expected. The nights haven't been bad - I have to wake up few times, but that's pretty small. So I sleep from nine to five instead of eleven to seven, that's minor.

It's been fun, that's for sure! The baby is a constant source of funny stuff. He's cute as a button and almost endlessly capable on strange noises and funny faces. That's very nice, except at three am when you'd rather be sleeping than listening to a grunting baby, but hey, it's all or nothing...

So yeah, I'd recommend this to others, as well - having a baby can be good fun. Particularly if you enjoy poop jokes and find farts and burping entertaining...

It's a boy!

My son was born today, just seven minutes past midnight. He's small, cute and seems to enjoy sleeping quite a lot. I don't know what to say, it was simply an amazing experience seeing the birth and the first few moments, my son and his mother together. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

The first day has been taxing (little sleep) but rewarding (lots of contact with the new kid in the block). Can't wait to see him again tomorrow...

Math trades

Math trades are a fairly popular thing on BoardGameGeek, where people keep trading games using them. The idea is simple: instead of traditional one-on-one trades where two people exchange games, people list what they have for trade, then form want lists of the stuff other people have listed and then computer takes the lists and checks who gets what. The goal is to maximize the trades so that as many items trade as possible.

TradeGenie is the de facto standard for running the math trades. However, while the program is fast and works well, it's not ideal. The biggest problem for me is the fact it only runs on Windows. I need something that runs on Mac as well. TradeGenie has some other limiting factors as well.

Since I enjoy programming, the obvious solution is to create my own software to calculate the trades. I was curious: am I able to do this? It turned out to be fairly easy. Currently my program, TradeResolver, written in Java for platform independence, can actually beat TradeGenie on some lists, finding more results faster. Of course, if faced head-to-head, competing for speed, TradeResolver loses hands down. That doesn't really matter, because even TradeGenie is too slow to completely go through bigger lists.

You can find TradeResolver at SourceForge. It's open source, so the source code is included in the release package (found on the SourceForge download page).

Lordi wins!

Perhaps you have to Finnish to understand how strange this all is, but I guess Hell just froze as Finland won the Eurovision Song Contest! Not only that, but with a monster rock band and the highest score ever! After 39 years of being a loser Finland doesn't give a rat's ass of what Europe might like, but instead sends something unique, something personal and something Finland can really do well, and that's metal! Metal and monsters and the best Eurovision song ever! Woohoo! We rule!

My Master's thesis

I got the grade for my Master's thesis today. I scored an eximia cum laude approbatur, that is accepted with particular gratitude. It is the second best grade one can get. The best grade, laudatur, is super-rare and really hard to get.

Getting an eximia requires a well-written work with something new in it; you can't get an eximia by going over someone else's work, no matter how well you do it. I suppose my contribution to the body of research on XML information retrieval was notable, in some way. I should get the actual evaluation tomorrow, then I'll know what they really thought of it.

I'm quite glad. I never expected to get a grade this good, it was too good to expect. Now they'll probably want to me to continue postgraduate studies, particularly as I'll be working on the department this Fall doing some kind of small research project.

Which is nice, but I'm not that keen on getting a Doctorate; it isn't too hot on the job market, really - getting a decent job with the Master's degree is hard enough, as I'm over-educated for most of the library jobs that are available. A Doctor is good for running a university library, which takes years of work experience, which might be hard to come by...

I'm also less keen on embarking on an academic career. While it might be kind of fun, I'm not so sure I'll enjoy the battle for the extremely limited research funding... Well, I'll just have to see what the future brings. Que sera, sera, right?

I've found football

Traded myself a copy of Pro Evolution Soccer 2 for PS2. I've been playing as England; Emile Heskey is my new hero, with Michael Owen. The duo has been scoring goals like there's no tomorrow.

I like the game. I've never been a big fan of sports, particularly on tv, but I do like my sports games. I used to be a huge fan of NHL Hockey (around 1995, though), and there's two football games I've played a lot: Sensible Soccer and Kick Off. I must say, despite all nostalgia, PES2 beats both of them hands down...