Author: Tim Jarrett

Where have I been?

I’ve been quiet the last few days. Partly it was company (my inlaws came into town Friday and left yesterday); partly a class I took last week. Partly it’s gearing up for my last semester. And partly it’s making sure I’m focusing on the right things.

I’ve spent most of the last month visiting friends and getting my first solo application out to the public. I was getting ready to jump in and add a bunch of new features but I hit some roadblocks. There’s a lot of other things I need to do as well–for instance, the Sloan E-52s need some new arrangements and some new members… I will get work done on Manila Envelope when I can. One thing I’ve found for sure, putting a new API in behind the scenes as a choice is not a transparent thing. There are some serious UI decisions to make.

But at the same time, I have a wife who I’m getting ready to uproot and move across the country for my new job; a father who’s been very ill in the hospital (he’s getting better); a grandfather who just got out of the hospital himself, now on a new regimen of medicine to help him overcome the effects of an undetected stroke; and a bunch of other family who I just made contact with again. There are certain things that take priority hour to hour.

Just an apostate enjoying the choir

I just saw my in-laws off after a nice weekend in which we took in the North End and the Symphony. I was watching the playoff game with my father in law before I went to get their car at halftime. Walking down Salem Street, I saw a guy stick his head out a third story window and yell “PATRIOTS!!!” at the top of his lungs. Up and down the street there were roars of approval.

I don’t watch football under normal circumstances, but there’s something great about being in the city when the Patriots are playing and playing well. Must be like what atheists feel like going to a really rousing church service.

Heads down til Friday

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? 🙂

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.

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…