Small progress

Looking again at the Manila RPC spec, I see I’ve missed something that might enable populating a drop down list of news item categories. Comforting after I’ve hit so many walls with other feature implementations over the last few weeks. I’m now looking at “manila.sitePref.get” which allows retrieving named portions of site preferences. I can grab the department list using “newsitems.departments” as the preference name, but now I have to see how to parse the reply using AppleScript. Dig we must…

Confession

Ten days ago I said I’d stop looking at referral logs until I was happy with my writing again. Looking back over the last ten days, I note two things:

  1. I’ve successfully kept away from looking at my referral logs.
  2. I’ve written a lot less.

The second, I think, was to be expected. I’m trying on some new styles of thinking (more about that shortly). It’s only natural that output falls as my brain changes its way of thinking and expressing itself.

The first requires one confession–I did go back to the discussion group, which shows the number of times a news item is read, one time last week and saw that my “Confessions of a Referral Junkie” had gotten something like 250 reads (normal levels somewhere between 0 and 30). Irony?

The irony

There’s a nice article in the current edition of The Tech about ego surfing, although the writer didn’t do enough research about it to mention that term.

Where’s the irony? Why, the fact that the article isn’t on the Web edition of The Tech yet! No wonder it took years for the author to get his name to # 1 on his search engine of choice (which I assume is Google, though he doesn’t specify).

Here’s my obligatory ego surfing link. Note that all of the pages except one are by or about me.

Update 22 Feb: Now the article is available on line. Interestingly the site says “last updated Feb 19” on the main page, though the content wasn’t there until today…
more…

Regressing

I’d love to know what happened to the 2-4 inches of snow we were promised for today. I have the day off for Presidents Day, and was looking forward to having the snow to wake up to.

I also note that the longer I stay in school, the more my personality regresses to something like middle school. Definitely time to get back out there into the workforce…

Old friends

Today at school I ran into Steven, an old friend from AMS, my pre-business school employer. He’s in his first year at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, and through sheer coincidence was cross-registered in the same systems dynamics class that I’m taking. A strange feeling to see such a familiar face as we’re handing in homework assignments.

You know it’s bad…

…when your own mother says she’s stopped reading your blog because programming news is boring. 🙂 Ok, got the message. I’m finding more things to think and write about starting right now!

…

Hmm. This could be harder than I thought.

RadioService.app

I’m looking at the source code for RadioService now. The author took an opposite approach to mine–most of the code is Objective C with just one AppleScript. But he did answer some of my questions about how to address the keychain and other tricks with Objective C. The answer is it looks really hairy and I’ll be figuring it out for a few days.

Now playing

Currently playing song: “Cold Turkey” by John Lennon on Lennon Legend.

I just went looking for the original album for this song and found to my surprise that it was from a single by the Plastic Ono Band, on which it was paired with the equally memorable “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mommy’s Just Looking For A Hand In the Snow”). The latter, needless to say, was a Yoko song.