How to edit Chrome thumbnails

I just wanted to shared this tip, if anyone else wants a bit of control over the thumbnails that show up in the "New tab" page of Chrome.

For me, it was annoying that it had saved the http://twitter.com/ url, because the front page has the stupid login box where you have to get your mouse going. Instead, I want it to go to http://twitter.com/home which has a much better login box.

This is not supported by chrome, as far as I can tell, so I went digging. And I found a small file that contains the tabs. In my case (On XP in danish) it is here:

C:\Documents and Settings\Morten Bock Sørensen\Lokale indstillinger\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

Open it with your favorite text editor, and look near the bottom. There is a list of "pinned_urls" in what looks like Json to me. I just changed the link I needed from:

"1cc089548931c4fe0463e7a98ec6078e": {
"direction": "ltr",
"index": 2,
"title": "Twitter / Home",
"url": "http://twitter.com/"
},

to

"1cc089548931c4fe0463e7a98ec6078e": {
"direction": "ltr",
"index": 2,
"title": "Twitter / Home",
"url": "http://twitter.com/home"
},

And off we go :-)

Just remember to do this while Chrome is closed, otherwise it will overwrite your changes.

Importing Wordpress posts to Umbraco

As you may have noticed, my blog has changed a bit this week. I finally got around to porting it to Umbraco. I did this for several reasons, but mainly because I feel at home with Umbraco, and I can tweak it to do just about anything I want. Wordpress on the other hand is PHP, and I just suck at that. So there you go...

Anyhow, after setting up my document types in Umbraco I needed to figure out how to get all my old content into the new site. Wordpress offers to export the entire content as xml, so that part was easy. The exported file was 3Mb, mainly because of some sort of screwed up tags back from when I was using the Ultimate Tag Warrior (I will miss the cool plugin names from Wordpress), which spit out a whole lot of empty tags.

The exported format is basically an RSS feed, but with some extra elements added by wordpress. One of those is an <excerpts:encoded> element, which does not have a namespace declaration at the top, thus making it invalid xml. So I needed to fix this before handling the file in my import routine. I just added it to the rss element:

<rss version="2.0"
    xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
    xmlns:excerpt="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/excerpt/"
    xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
    xmlns:wp="http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/">
   

Sweet, now the xml is all nice and tidy and ready to be imported. So, how to do the import? Well, I decided to do it through the Umbraco API using a dashboard usercontrol. To get the content from the XML file, I chose to go with Linq2Xml which is pretty neat for navigating through the XML file.

First thing I did was to disable some Lucene lock, because it made my import fail due to the number of operations done. I also set the script timeout value a bit high just to be sure:

Server.ScriptTimeout = 300;
Lucene.Net.Store.FSDirectory.SetDisableLocks(true);
   

Now, to load the Xml file. Pretty easy. I later added the possibility to enter the XML in a textarea instead, thus the commented out line:

XDocument loaded = XDocument.Load(Server.MapPath("~/usercontrols/wordpress.2009-08-01.xml"));
//XDocument loaded = XDocument.Parse(wpxmltextbox.Text);

XNamespace wpns = XNamespace.Get("http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/");
XNamespace contentns = XNamespace.Get("http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/");
var q = from c in loaded.Descendants("item")
        where (string)c.Element(wpns + "post_type") == "post"
        select c;

So now I got all my blogposts in the variable "q". time to feed them into Umbraco. It's not too nicely structured, but it does the job, and it's a one time deal, so no need to go crazy here.

DocumentType dt = DocumentType.GetByAlias("BlogPost");
User author = User.GetUser(0);

foreach (XElement item in q)
{
    string posttitle = (string)item.Element("title");
    string legacyurl = ((string)item.Element("link")).Replace("", string.Empty);
    string legacyid = (string)item.Element(wpns + "post_id");
    string posturlnodename = Server.UrlDecode((string)item.Element(wpns + "post_name"));
    string postbody = (string)item.Element(contentns + "encoded");
    string posttags = string.Empty;
    DateTime createdate = DateTime.Parse((string)item.Element(wpns + "post_date"));

    int i = 0;
    foreach (XElement tag in item.Elements("category"))
    {
        if ((string)tag.Attribute("domain") == "tag" && !string.IsNullOrEmpty((string)tag.Attribute("nicename")))
        {
            if (i > 0)
            {
                posttags += ",";
            }
            posttags += (string)tag.Attribute("nicename");
            i++;
        }
    }

    Document doc = Document.MakeNew(posturlnodename, dt, author, 1049);
    doc.getProperty("blogPostTitle").Value = posttitle;
    doc.getProperty("blogPostBody").Value = WordpressPostParser.ParseCodeBlocks(WordpressPostParser.ChangeImageUrls(WordpressPostParser.CreateParagraphTags(postbody)));
    doc.getProperty("blogPostLegacyUrl").Value = legacyurl;
    doc.getProperty("blogPostLegacyID").Value = legacyid;
    doc.CreateDateTime = createdate;

    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(posttags))
    {
        umbraco.editorControls.tags.library.addTagsToNode(doc.Id, posttags, "default");
        doc.getProperty("blogPostTags").Value = posttags;
    }

    doc.Publish(author);
    umbraco.library.UpdateDocumentCache(doc.Id);


    //comments here...
    foreach (XElement comment in item.Elements(wpns + "comment"))
    {
        if ((string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_approved") == "1")
        {

            string commentAuthor = (string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_author");
            string commentEmail = (string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_author_email");
            string commentUrl = (string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_author_url");
            string commentIP = (string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_author_IP");
            string commentBody = (string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_content");
            DateTime commentDate = DateTime.Parse((string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_date"));
            
            Document commentdoc = Document.MakeNew(commentAuthor, DocumentType.GetByAlias("BlogComment"), author, doc.Id);
            commentdoc.getProperty("blogCommentAuthor").Value = commentAuthor;
            commentdoc.getProperty("blogCommentAuthorEmail").Value = commentEmail;
            commentdoc.getProperty("blogCommentAuthorURL").Value = commentUrl;
            commentdoc.getProperty("blogCommentAuthorIP").Value = commentIP;
            commentdoc.getProperty("blogCommentBody").Value = commentBody;
            commentdoc.CreateDateTime = commentDate;

            commentdoc.Publish(author);
            umbraco.library.UpdateDocumentCache(commentdoc.Id);
        }

    }

}
   

I am using some external methods to parse the body text of the posts. This is because Wordpress doesn't save html, but puts in linebreaks and renders paragraph tags at render time... brrrr... There are also some [source] tags leftover from the syntax highlighter plugin that I need to change:

These are the three methods I am using to parse the text:

public static string CreateParagraphTags(string postbody)
{
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    sb.Append("<p>");
    sb.Append(postbody.Replace("\n\n", "</p><p>"));
    sb.Append("</p>");
    return sb.ToString();
}

public static string ChangeImageUrls(string postbody)
{
    string parsedstring = Regex.Replace(postbody, "src=\"/wp-content", "src=\"/media/images", RegexOptions.Singleline);
    return Regex.Replace(parsedstring, "href=\"/wp-content", "href=\"/media/images", RegexOptions.Singleline);
}

public static string ParseCodeBlocks(string postbody)
{
    Regex regPattern = new Regex(@"(\[source(.*?)\])(.*?)(\[/source\])", RegexOptions.Singleline);
    Dictionary<string, string> replaceValues = new Dictionary<string, string>();

    int i = 0;
    foreach (Match match in regPattern.Matches(postbody))
    {
        string code = match.Groups[3].Value;
        if (code.Contains("<"))
        {
            code = code.Replace("<", "&lt;").Replace(">", "&gt;");
        }
        postbody = postbody.Replace(match.Value, string.Format("[[[replacecode{0}]]]", i));
        replaceValues.Add(string.Format("[[[replacecode{0}]]]", i), "<pre>" + code + "</pre>");
        i++;
    }

    foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> replaceValue in replaceValues)
    {
        postbody = postbody.Replace(replaceValue.Key, replaceValue.Value);
    }

    return postbody;
}
   

It's not perfect. For example it added some strange <p> tags inside my code blocks, but no more than I could handle by doing manual updates. For these methods I added some unit tests. It is just so much nicer to work with RegEx when you have tests to see if you are breaking existing matches while changing this stuff.

So there you have it. Posts imported and ready to go. It's so easy I don't know why I didn't get around to it before :-)

Natur-Energi bruger ufine metoder

Jeg vil gerne lige gøre mit til at advare mod selskabet Natur-Energi der tilsyneladende ikke har meget respekt for forbrugernes rettigheder. Flere andre har også have uheldige oplevelser med dem, som f.eks. Tonni, der blev svindlet med nog bil streamer værk: http://ekstrabladet.dk/kup/vagthundene/article1195722.ece og John der åbenbart skulle skifte selskab fordi han var med i en spørgeskemaundersøgelse: http://24.dk/user/johnsmedehus/perma/2009/07/19/det_er_da_halvfarligt_at_deltage_i_sprgeskemaer_p_netet

Og Mogens har her på facebook beskrevet noget der meget godt ligner den situation vi også er i: http://www.facebook.com/wall.php?id=59887513919

Humlen i det hele er at Natur-Energi synes det er helt OK at de hijacker dit el-abonnement uden at fortælle det til dig. Det eneste du skal gøre er bare lige at gøre dit og dat for at vise at du "støtter grøn energi", og hvem gør ikke det? Det glemmer bare helt at fortælle at de selv er et el-selskab der har tænkt sig at overtage leverancen af strøm til dig. Og vupti, så får du en faktura. Hvis du prøver at ringe til dem, ja så får du lov at vente i 10 minutter til noget musik før linjen bare bliver tavs. Fedt...

Så hvis du støder ind i en Natur-Energi mand på gaden eller i dit storcenter, så stik ham lige en på kassen fra mig, og så skynd dig videre inden de får fat i din adresse!

Jeg har i hvert fald tænkt mig at sende et anbefalet brev med en opsigelse, og så kan de ellers stikke deres faktura et sted hen hvor solen aldrig skinner. Lorteselskab!

Update: Fandt lige et link der beskriver at det alligevel ikke nytter at købe skidtet: http://www.elsparefonden.dk/presse/arkiv/presseklip_archive/ni.2008-11-07.4088459089

Zyxel P-660R-D1 client list duplicate entries

This is mainly just a "note to self" about how to solve this problem if I come across it again.

Problem is that somehow the web interface for the router allowed me to enter the same ip/mac address to the "client list" table. This of course is not great, and for some reason there is no "delete" button on there. It just gave me an "ERROR: Duplicate MAC Address!" message. So I had to do a lot of digging to find a way to delete it.

In short:

1. Telnet to the router
2. Go to the Command Line if you are not already there
3. Type this command: "ip dhcp enif0 static delete all"

I found this in a CLI reference for another zyxel router (PDF).

I hope this might help out others in the same situation :-)