I finally migrated to Drupal 4 Blogger today. It is about time that I do this myself and eat my own dog food. Hopefully this would help to dig out the bugs but so far, so good! But I dont promise this to be perfect so please report any problem and bear with it for a while.

I look forward doing blogging without having to wait for rebuilding and without MT hogging 99% of the CPU when rebuilding. :-)

ps: Oh yea, migration is done using mt-to-drupal.

Just arrived in SFO after nearly 20hours of flight *phew* It been over a year since I come to US and I really missed here, especially the Bay Area.

For one, US is the one of the few countries I can pick up a rental car and drive around. I don’t do that in Europe and certainly not most part of Asia (Are you nuts!? Have you seen how they drive in Taiwan or Thailand?)

Second, the roads are wide and easy to drive. I really missed driving on 101 (Okay, not during the peak hours). In Singapore, we dont have such nice long stretch of road where you can speed down at 80mph.

Third, I always get a car with GPS. It is a god-sent! While it is not as impressive as some of the GPS I seen in Japan, the ones provided by Hertz are really cool! You know, it will give voice instructions like “Right turn in 0.5 miles” or “Keep to the left for 3miles”. (See, I even remembers the exact words :-)

And this time, it is especially nice! Because they ran out of a GPS car that I reserved, I flip out my Hertz Gold Card and the nice lady said ‘Okay sire, the only GPS car we have left is the Jaguar.” :-)

Uncommon Sense by Peter Cochrane (former CTO of BT)

Pick this up in the Singapore Airport on my way to SFO. I flip through it briefly and really like what I saw!

I am packing my stuff and flying to Bay Area in a few hours time. I will be attending Supernova 2004 and also Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2004 and meeting some pretty cool people! Oh, please sign up for pre-conference dinner which is open to anyone whether you’re going to attend Supernova or not.

Also going to catch up with a few friends this time so looking forward to see all there!

CommunicAsia Exhibition is huge this year! Between CommunicAsia and BroadcastAsia, they took up the whole Singapore Expo! (Singapore Expo can normally house 2-8 concurrent large-scale exhibitions)

I spend an afternoon just walking through the booths briefly, stopping only to talk to IP Telephony Service Providers (ITSP) and IP Phone manufacturers. The usual suspect are there of course, like Lucents, Cisco, Zylex, AudioCodes but what interests me are those new and start-up companies, like NTEL in Korea and Howdy in Singapore. And there are also a lot of US and Taiwan manufacturers of SIP Phones like Zultys and DBTEL. And lots of new wireless SIP Phones, some of them so new that you can’t even find it on their website yet (e.g. DB-168)! This means these phones probably won’t reach consumer until 2005 or 2006! Hey, it is going to be fun watching this industry grows.

ps: Oh yea, I just release Drupal for Bloggers v0.8.

Another project, codename ‘InfoPort’, I did in IDA just went public today, announced by our minister Dr. Lee Boon Yang.

An integrated IT platform that manages the flow of trade-related information is set to make Singapore more competitive as a world class port and logistics hub. This platform will enable exchange of information between shippers, freight forwarders, carriers and financial institutions to facilitate the flow of goods within, through and out of Singapore. Revealing this today at the opening of the Infocomm Media Business Exchange 2004 was Dr Lee Boon Yang, Singapore’s Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts.

It is the first project I did when I join IDA early last year and I play a small role in the technical team in architecting the platform in Phase I (feasibility study). I have a lot of fun (aka “big fight”) arguing for a de-centralized architecture.

I believe we should keep as little as possible centralized and allowing the industries and third party to provide interesting and innovative services rather then pretending to know all the possible services people would do with the system from the beginning.

I am no longer involved in the project after Phase I but I am still proud how far this has come along and the little contributions I made to the project…

Okay, it is confirmed: Dave Farber is unable to make it to Singapore :-( I spend the whole morning cancelling the meetings for Dave and looking for a replacement speaker for CommunicAsia 2004. Luckily, Dr. Lawrence Wong agreed to do so on short notice. (Thanks Lawrence! I owe you one! :-)

So I missed the whole morning section of IX 2004 – including a talk by Nicholas Carr (of “IT does not matter” fame). He has since back panel to a less controvsial title “Does IT matter?”. *yawn* I dont think I missed much, what he has been saying is true but pretty moot¹.

Anyway, I arrived in time to attend the Open Source session. In short, it is a disaster! The session has a balance mixed of proponents and opponents of Open Source which is a good thing.

The bad news is the OSS proponent comes badly prepared – with Scott McNeil’s slides (presented by Michael) rattling on Linux Standard Base which most of the business audience dont understand dont frankly dont care, and Harish Pillay (from Red Hat Asia) who did a negative demostration of the failure of RedHat desktop to play the video clips he wanted to show. Tan Min Liang did a slighly better job but unfortunately, he is there as a lawyer, not as a proponent of Open Source.

The OSS opponents comes strong and powerful, lead by Chris Sharp from Microsoft who did the standard Microsoft Get The Facts on their bias survey showing MS is more security (haha), more reliable, cheaper etc. And Goh Siew Hiong from BSA repeated BSA standard corporate position that Open Source are not neccessary better then properiatary software.

And people wonder why Singaporean is slow to take up Open Source *sigh* I think the advocate needs to look at themselves/ourselves first.

¹ For those who wonders why I say it is moot, read Geoffrey Moore’s Living on the Fault Line and its concepts of core vs context.

I just hack up an alternate method to migrate from MT to drupal. Download mt2drupal.tar.gz.

This is a perl script written as an MT-plugin, utilizing on MT libraries to export the data directly into Drupal database (limitation: only for MySQL for now). So unlike http://drupal.org/node/view/6141, you do not need to generate large intermediate php files and the migrated entries will not be stored as HTML.

The script can migrate from MT to Drupal 4.4.1, Drupal CVS and also Drupal 4 Bloggers. It will migrate:

a) all your bloggers
b) all your defined categories
c) all your entries including body, excerpt, extended (in 4.4.1 & CVS, it is stored as bodyextended and in D4B formatting rules are also preserved)
d) all your comments (with anonymous support, in CVS and D4B)
e) all incoming trackbacks (stored as comments)
f) all your outgoing trackbacks (D4B only)
g) all your trackbacks trackers (D4B only)

It will also keep your permalink by using URL aliases in Drupal. (enable path.module). You can also migrate MT into an existing Drupal installation. You can see the migrated site of this blog at http://james.seng.sg/dblog/ (Running D4B of cos :-)

Disclaimer: While I tried to test it as much as I can and that it works for me, I give no assurance it will work for you. So backup all your database before you attempt this.

The next few weeks would be pretty hectic and exciting for me. We invited Dave Farber¹ to Singapore for CommunicAsia 2004. Yeah!

The week after, I will be flying to the Bay Area on 21st to attend Supernova 2004. I have been looking forward to Supernova and meeting all the cool people. I will be speaking at the “Telecom Transformation: Voice as a Data Application” session, together with Jeff Ganek (CEO of Neustar) and Niklas Zennstrom (CEO of Skype). It is going to be exciting. Joi is also planning a Supernova dinner although he won’t be able to make it this year.

Then I will stay over the weekend in San Francisco to attend the Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2004 (I am invited as an VIP) to hear Steve Job’s keynote before heading back to Singapore on the 29th.

My only regret is not being able to attend Supercomm 2004 in Chicago as I am already engaged on 22nd and 23rd. Nevertheless, the next few weeks is going to be fun!

¹ Just got news Dave may have some trouble getting here. I hope everything is okay with him.

A couple of days ago, an old friend William sent me an IM saying he is “surprised to see me coding again” (refering to Drupal for Bloggers). I suppose the real question in his (and many others) mind is “Why are you still coding!?”. I suppose “programmer” is no longer as prestigious a title as it used to be, since it can be cheaply outsourced. I shouldn’t be surprised since I blogged about the how programmers are just factory workers last year.

Well, the answer is simple: Hacking code is my hobby. While other play tennis, do calligraphy and paintings, I play golf and hack codes. To me, hacking codes isn’t just instructions to do tell the computer what to do (thats just programming); Hacking codes is an Art. There are beauty that lies in the codes and elegant in the design. I could admire a well-written code like a Van Gogh’s painting¹.

Just compare Drupal codes to the more popular phpNuke. Both are written in PHP but Drupal is a beautiful masterpiece, neat and elegant whereas phpNuke looks as if it get pasted together by some kids who don’t know how to indent.
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