September 2007 Archives

I came across the Heinlein archives the other day and was quite astounded. Basically it looks like pretty much everything Robert A Heinlein ever wrote has been scanned, PFD'ed and uploaded. If you want to look at any of it you can. There's a price of course but at $3 for around 200 pages it's pretty reasonable. It would cost a lot to get everything but if, say, you really wanted to read everything he wrote for the movie Destination Moon then for $20 you get:

• Part 1 includes "10 pages of diagrams and calculations about moon flight", "Heinlein’s report on faults and flaws in the script of Destination Moon addressed to George Pal, lengthy with extensive hand-edits", "17 pages, single-spaced by RAH “The Care and Feeding of Spaceships” discussing technical elements for film"
• Part 2 includes "Article in Aviation Week about movie", "1957 letter from an attorney to RAH about possible money from the movie (talks about law suits)", "Notes, calculations and diagrams working out the moon flight and landing. Studio call sheets and shooting schedules for the production"
• Parts 3 to 6 are 5 versions of the script
• Part 7 includes articles about the movie

Alternatively if the history of Stranger in a Strange Land is more your thing then you can get 3865 pages for $38 that include 3 different edits of the book plus supporting articles.

Personally I just always thought that Pixel (a.k.a. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls) was a great name for a cat.

I've upgraded the blog to Movable Type 4. It didn't go entirely without problems - which is pretty much par for the course. Here's a brief run-down of what I did for reference.

Installation

• Save off a copy of the database using phpMyAdmin to an SQL dump
• Upload MT 4.1 to server and unpack to /cgi-bin/mt4 and /mt-static4 (to avoid overwriting the 3.3 installation)
• Set the cgi files to be executable
• Load mt.cgi which started upgrading the database
• Puzzle greatly over the Error 403: Forbidden which I got in the middle of the database upgrade. This happened if I repeated the operation.
• Load mt.cgi in IE7 - it worked perfectly!

Configuration

• Refresh all the templates from the main blog menu
• Go to the Archive Templates and set up archive mappings
• Choose a TWT (thin-wide-thin) layout style

Plugins

• Install MediaManager 2.0b1


• Copy the Amazon details from the system overview preferences into the individual blog preferences