I’m in a workshop on distributed leadership for the next three days, so there won’t be a lot of blogging. (Famous last words.) I already have some things I want to try to write about. For instance, is creation a fundamentally selfish act? Or is it only selfish the way I do it? 🙂
Author: Tim Jarrett
The truth
I keep forgetting to post the results of last week’s IAP College Bowl. I’m sorry to say that the omission is probably Freudian. Yes, we lost, but we were the winners of the “losers’ bracket,” and I got invited to join the team. Maybe, in my copious spare time…
Manila Envelope and Radio Userland
I’ve had feedback from a few people who have tried to use Manila Envelope with Radio, either against their desktop website or on radio.weblogs.com. The short version is that Manila Envelope doesn’t work very well with Radio right now.
The long version is that Radio 8.0.1 doesn’t support the Manila API for SOAP calls, just the Blogger API. I didn’t start testing Radio until after its release, and just started to figure out some of the issues around the time that I did my 1.0 release.
The good news is that people had already requested the Blogger API as an option, and I’m looking at it for a future release. So this isn’t a permanent incompatibility, just a short term issue. I’m somewhat intrigued that people want to run Manila Envelope against their local Radio site; I didn’t think the Radio user interface through the browser was that bad, but I understand the desire for a consistent user interface.
Manila Envelope 1.0.1 Released
Manila Envelope 1.0.1 has been released. Bugfixes, mostly, and a few new features, including importing text files and automatic translation of special characters (e.g. å, é, î, ò, ü, ç, ñ, etc.) to their HTML entity equivalents. Check out the full release notes for more details.
Now playing
Currently playing song: “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” by U2 on The Unforgettable Fire.
Happy MLK Day. Enjoy the progress.
Editorial in today’s Washington Post: “Gaps measured by race loom large in school performance, health status, incarceration rates and, of course, the death penalty. Skin color, it is widely feared in 2002, increases the likelihood of being stopped, searched and arrested.” Plus ça change…
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Proud Sloanie
Interesting article in the New York Times on Amazon today, regarding the importance of their operations management capability in making profit. I’d like to point out for the record that Jeff Wilke isn’t just an MIT alum, he’s an MIT Sloan alum. You don’t read stories like that about Harvard Business School grads, do you? 🙂
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Getting serious
In doing this project, I’m continually reminded of things that I knew once and have subsequently lost. For instance, making sure that I follow a consistent process for building and publishing. I just realized that the build I made yesterday still showed 1.0A1 as the version number in the About box. As a result, I started a checklist for my build and deployment process. Our old configuration manager at AMS would be so proud…
A slightly lazy day…
I’ve finished all the bug fixes (that I know of) and a few surprise new features for Manila Envelope. I’ll release v. 1.0.1 tomorrow (I can’t get to my iDisk tonight).
For now, I wanted to publicly thank the folks who emailed me to report bugs and make suggestions: Nicholas Riley, Jeremy Wilker, Martin Fenner, Oliver Wrede, Clark Venable, Walter, and Peter Gallagher.
Because he sold all the old songs
So finally Moby is ready to release new material at the Olympics. I still find Play a really good album, even if I’ve heard all the songs other places (like “Body Rock” being sold first to “Veronica’s Closet” and “Ali”… or was it “Black Hawk Down”?).
A slow day
Snow falling in Boston tonight. A slow day waiting for the snow to start.
I fixed some bugs in Manila Envelope the last few days, including a dumb error with the icon this morning. I’m a very junior developer, but I’m finding that it’s difficult to get a good icon creation program. Apple ships IconComposer, which allows editing four sizes of icons. Then there’s Iconographer, which would be perfect if it would automatically scale images that were pasted into its icon windows. I had to use both to fix the icon problems I had today–the masks weren’t working very well and the icon was surrounded by a black outline at certain sizes. I will be releasing the bugfix Monday or Tuesday.
I’d like to see “The Betrayal of Sonic Hedgehog”
Today’s silly link from the Museum of Depressionist Art: David with the Head of Godzilla. Since Seanbaby doesn’t update regularly any more, these guys are the funniest stuff I see regularly on the web.
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Crossing the Ocean
This is pretty cool: Manila Envelope got picked up by FrTracker at Bluedays Software, a software tracker in French. And the app isn’t even localized… If anyone out there wants to help me translate Manila Envelope into your language of choice, please let me know. (Hint: the biggest issue will probably be the Help file.)
Now playing
Currently playing song: “Spartacus” by Branford Marsalis Quartet on Crazy People Music.
Thanks, and bugs
I love the Mac community. The people who blog from the Mac are willing to try new things (about 171 people have downloaded my app from VersionTracker, not counting the ones who went to my site) and ready to tell you when they find bugs. I am really glad that you guys are out there–I was panicked that I had no testers, but I do now and they’re piling up the bug reports! Look for a new version soon to fix the initial bugs.