Author: Tim Jarrett

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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My Dad, local TV celebrity

One of the family’s newer traditions, now that everyone is back on the farm in Buncombe County, is to spend a day after the apple harvest making apple butter by hand the old fashioned way — in a cast iron pot over an open fire outdoors with lots of people on hand to stir. My uncle Forrest has a trout pond down the hill from his house, in a little dammed-up river valley he calls “Quail Hollow” (random aside: the second word is generally pronounced holler), and they meet up to do the work there.

This year local TV got wind of the event and did a spot on it in last night’s news. The transcript will linkrot tonight, but I’ve transcribed the text in its entirety (lowercased for everyone’s sanity).

Dad (Olin), as always, hits the tone just right:

I’m a retired aerospace engineer.
Is this rocket science?
I think it’s harder.

Also, trust my uncle to claim that he had to go back to the family farm to be important–this is a guy, after all, who’s had pictures taken with presidents over legislation that he got lobbied through Congress.

One note: my mom was a little miffed they didn’t interview her–she was the only woman participating. Mom, if you have anything you want to add to the story, shoot it over and I’ll publish it…

Printing without wires, part II

Over a year ago I figured out how to connect our Laserjet to our wireless network. A few minutes ago I installed our new SMC base station, which comes with a built in print server—with a parallel port (what is it with all the obsolete hardware interfaces that won’t die?).

I took the opportunity to try hooking up our color HP DeskJet 842c to the print server, which can provide an LPR-style IP interface to the connected printer. I installed the printer as an LPR printer using Print Center and printed a test document from TextEdit. The first page had a PostScript job header, and it went on from there. Apparently the Print Center printer only could do PostScript—and the DeskJet doesn’t speak PostScript.

I was about to give up when I decided to try CUPS. As I wrote in August, Apple includes CUPS but doesn’t configure it by default—but you can enable it. You can also use it to provide more options than Print Center gives you for configuring the printer. Specifically, you can tell Print Center that an LPR queue is a DeskJet:

  1. After configuring CUPS and adding your DeskJet as an LPR printer through Print Center, point your web browser to http://127.0.0.1:631/.
  2. Click on Manage Printers.
  3. Under the LPR printer, click on Modify Printer, then continue through the next few screens accepting the defaults until you get to the option to choose the Make of your printer.
  4. Choose the correct make of printer and click Continue.
  5. Choose one of the two DeskJet models—I’m using HP New DeskJet Series CUPS v.1.1 (en)—and click Continue.

You should now be able to print through your SMC wireless router to a DeskJet. So much for SMC’s claim that “the printer server is only compatible with x86 based Computers”.

Now if I could just get the LaserJet back online. It isn’t working and I can’t telnet to it again…
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