Author: Tim Jarrett

Remedying: Happy b-day, Tony

Correcting a long-standing omission, I’m adding Tony Pierce’s Busblog to my blogroll. This is not only in recognition of Tony’s coolness but also in honor of his birthday.

Tony is not only funnier than I am, he’s also more likely to be seen in the company of hot, barely legal women. So he says. Here’s hoping he gets his birthday wish:

…that’s one thing i’d like for my birthday. i’d like everyone to put aside all their bullshit fears surrounding good for just one day. real good. like everyone, if they want to eat cake that day, say the hell with the damn diet that theyve been on for half their life. eat a piece of damn cake.

right on!

and if you want to say hi to that pretty girl on the third floor, march up there and say hi. get her number even. quit listening to that same old stale voice that tells us that the things that we want somehow are either wrong, impossible, or in someway threats to our stable, miserable lives.

preach, preacha!

i have a dream, holiday gourds.

that we can all live together in peace?

no. that people can kiss each other at bars and in night clubs and their hearts flutter and their blood pressure goes up and they don’t need so much booze any more. i have a dream, my friends.

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Barista!

barista action figure with coffee cup accessories

Shel has been trying to tell me about Archie McPhee for a while now. Today Boing Boing pointed to them in reference to the Jesus Action Figure, so I followed their link. Now that I look at their website, I see why Shel was so insistent.

I especially dig the barista action figure (comes with multiple heads, a Tall and Grande coffee cup, and a barista apron!!). Fuzz, an action figure of a real 21-year-old McPhee employee whose general demeanor should be instantly recognizable to anyone from the Northwest, is also pretty cool.

More old friends on line

Esta pointed a while back to Joe Gross’s gig writing for the Austin American Statesman, but I didn’t follow the links. (Joe and I met on the Declaration, and I persuaded him to join me on Rag & Bone because I knew he had the skills and passion to take it to the next stage. Its longevity is due at least as much to his involvement as to my efforts.)

Joe’s column on music is available online, and his writing is as excellent as it ever was:

With the recent release of Nick Broomfield’s somewhat inflammatory documentary “Biggie and Tupac” (well, it hasn’t been released here yet, but I’m sure you saw something about it on MTV when it wasn’t showing soft porn on “The Real World”)…

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Esta: No red ears for our grandfather

Esta was in Lancaster County this weekend visiting our relatives and found my grandfather in great shape:

Pop Pop was more like himself than I’ve seen him since the accident. On Friday night we somehow got started talking about old farming methods, and he told stories for nearly 2 hours about planting and harvesting corn and pumpkins, and the shucking parties they’d have in the fall. If you found a red ear, you got to kiss your girlfriend! Even at 85, Pop Pop’s chagrin that he never found a red ear was quite evident…

Fifty-four year old blog

Yesterday Esta started one of the cooler genealogical blog projects I’ve seen recently: Great-Aunt Eva’s blog. She’s transcribing our maternal relative’s 1949-1951 farm journal one page at a time. It’s astonishing how much it reads like the happenings of a far distant past even though it’s only fifty-four years old. The entries aren’t floridly written; most are only a single sentence. But her voice still comes through.
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Esta Minute

There’s a blog I’ve wanted to point to for a while, but because it wasn’t yet a fully public project I’ve refrained. Today I’m proud to point to the new location of Esta’s blog, now named “Estaminet” (which is not to be pronounced Esta minute, as tempting though it is). To make up for my not linking to her before, today is officially Link to Esta Day. Mark your calendars.
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Oops

Sincere apologies for the temporary triple posts. It looks like I got false error messages from Manila Envelope making me think I had to repost. Ah well. Another day, another bug.

“A common misconception”

Doing a comic strip about blogging is like daring bloggers to write about you. I recognize that. But I can’t resist bait like today’s Doonesbury.

I’m with Zipper. It is a common misconception, for better or worse, that there are any barriers to entry for blogging. God knows I’ve read a few blogs that prove that (what, you think I was going to link to one of them?). But the more important misconception is that only a few people have something to say. My experience with blogging is that everyone–from school kids to right wing Texans to newly minted MBAs to lawyers–has something to say. And space on the Internet isn’t a scarce resource. As a blogger, you can afford to keep writing until you find the perfect audience.
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Batching again

Lisa’s off to visit her parents. I returned from dropping her off at the airport two hours ago and am skillfully procrastinating. While I batch this week, I have the joyful duty of finishing the final wallpaper cleanup myself today.

I also found another bug in iTunes2Manila, one that inexplicably failed to surface in my last round of testing. Apparently the workaround to get plaintext from a Unicode string doesn’t always work, and sometimes it gives an error instead. I hope I can get to fixing that today. Finally, though I have no feedback from my lone tester of Manila Envelope, I need to release 1.0.3b so I can get on with incorporating some new features. I’ll be spending today figuring out the revised mechanisms for drag and drop in Jaguar so that I can hopefully support Brent’s RSS clipboard format.
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Wallpaper

I hereby curse the person who invented wallpaper and wallpaper steamers. And the idiot who put wallpaper in our parlor, which is taking all day to come off.

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.
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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.

How many weblogs are there?

I’ve been digging for stats on the weblog phenomenon. It’s harder than I thought. There are no directories at Blogger.com of all the Blogger sites. Even if there were, there’s no guarantee that they update regularly, or at all, or that they haven’t moved on to greener pastures elsewhere. I think trying to count blogs is like trying to take a census, with all the potential statistical irregularity that is implied.

There is, though, one good source of data for weblog activity: Weblogs.com. I decided to look at the historical record of high water marks that Dave has kept and see what it looked like.

Here’s the graph:

weblogs.com high water mark growth is linear at abt 2.8 weblogs a day

If you peeked at the alt text on the image, you got the punch line: according to the data, overall weblog update activity has been increasing since last December at a rate of about 2.8 weblogs a day. And that’s not taking into account the blogging systems that don’t ping Weblogs.com, or that require a manual update and the blog authors don’t do it.

Next question: what’s the driver? And what does this picture look like in the long term? If there’s a network effect created by content syndication and RSS, shouldn’t the curve be exponential? Or is it too early to see that yet?

I’d love to have a better dataset to try to answer those questions. If anyone has any ideas on how to get it, let me know.

Heads down; Mario returns

It’s been a pretty busy morning today. I’m still glowing from last night’s meal: grilled salmon on a bed of pureed fava beans with a lemon and chive citron-oil sauce. From the Babbo cookbook. I have to confess that I winced a bit at the price when we bought it (the day we met Mario), but so far it’s been worth every penny. Er, dollar.
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