A glint of grim humor in the sniper story

I’ve been too blown away by the horror of the sniper story to post a lot about it (I lived for six years in Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the last killing in Seven Corners). But the Slacktivist has provided some grim perspective on the identity of the killer:

“…one thing we can be pretty sure of: the sniper isn’t a black man.

…. How can we be sure of that?

The killer’s vehicle is described as ‘a white, Chevy Astro van with a burned-out or broken left tail light.’

No black man could drive around for two weeks with a busted tail light without getting pulled over by police.”

Thanks to Evan, whose blog I’ve inexplicably not been reading, for the pointer.
more…

More bugfixes coming

After the big release of 1.0.3a on Tuesday, a reader in England found some bugs I had missed in the first go-round with Manila Envelope on Jaguar. Specifically, people using the software for the first time can’t post!

The problem was a result of two things. First, the problem with Jaguar requiring plain text for XML-RPC extended into an additional function call that I hadn’t investigated, one that passed a URL as one of its parameters. This particular call only happens if no successful calls to the server have been made before, so I didn’t catch it in my haste to release 1.0.3a. Once again the importance of thorough testing…

Second, I made a big fuss about the importance of separating user interaction from business logic back in February, but didn’t catch all the problem areas. This particular problem was caused by a function that returned a string value. In the first implementation, I had the calling functions make the assumption that an empty string meant an error had occurred. Only problem: if the calling function in the UI is handling error notification and I’m returning a single empty string parameter, there’s no way to provide detailed error information.

This is where I miss “pass by reference” in other programming languages. It then becomes simple: you pass in a variable to be transformed by the method, and you check a return value for success or failure. Instead, I am using multiple return values:
return [Macro error: Can't compile this script because of a syntax error.]

which means I have to use AppleScript’s copy syntax instead of a simple set. Ah, growing pains.