Some of you might have noticed that I released BOB 1.2 yesterday (it’s linked to from the sidebar and is also listed on the Download page). I didn’t however release Blog 5.0 🙁 There were two main reasons for not doing so: a) I remembered a few features I hadn’t added and came up with a new feature that would be useful b) I got side-tracked by some C code out of a sense of nostalgia :p Yeah, I don’t know why but C code always entices me and I am drawn to it but I then discover that I have to work hard to code in C (or even C++) and then I come back to Delphi <vbg> The features I missed? Some of the Blog users wanted more options in the Hyperlink entry dialog such as the ability to specify whether to add http:// to the entry or not and whether to open the link in a new page or not … The new feature? I had already added full-text searching for Blog but I realized that text searching by itself does nothing much. Why would you normally search for something in Blog? Probably because you want to link to that entry. As things stand currently, you’ll have to search, memorize the date and then invoke the Entry Linking dialog. Instead, what if I provided a button which said “Link” on the dialog which lists the search results? That seems much more user-friendly to me. So I’m gonna get cracking on all that and hopefully, I’ll keep away from “Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance” on the PS2 to complete the code and get a release out today :p

Yeah, I know … I was supposed to do some software releases … What can I say? I got busy with various things over the weekend – movies, TV, games … that sorta thing :p – and really didn’t have any time for coding or for doing the docs. Actually, documentation and packaging is all that remains and I will hopefully get at least one app out today, though it might not be Blog since I’ve decided to release BOB 1.2 as well and since it was done first, I probably should release it first – plus, there’s less work involved in the BOB release since there isn’t any data conversion to worry about (it is built-in whereas there is a slight problem with Blog’s built-in data conversion …) or having to do two distros (full and upgrade). Anyway, I hope to get to all of that sometime today …

I’m in a really lazy mood today plus I’m in another one of my moods at the sheer stupidity and orneriness of people :p There is another brouhaha going on in a project I used to be involved with where a guy wants to take (or is it borrow? <vbg>) some of the code from the project (with the consent of those involved of course …) and then release his work under a different open license than the GPL, under which the original code was released. This has brought forward so many arm-chair lawyers and nay sayers who seem to think this is a sacrilege! The guy is breaking the GPL!! Oh come on people, grow up! There are so many people out there who take GPL’ed code, use it in their apps and release it as closed source. Some even make money out of it! Does anybody care? Of course not because nobody knows about these instances! But let a guy come forward honestly, say that he’s using some code and will release that same code under a different open license due to certain limitations in the GPL and everybody jumps on his back! Where the heck is the logic in that? Of course, I know I’ll get the people saying that laws are meant to be followed and that if everybody took my stance there would be no open source movement. But remember also that laws are made by humans and as humans we can also decide (in concensus of course – not individually …) when it might be sensible to make exceptions instead of being tight-assed and saying “It’s the law!” If somebody wants to take open sourced code and release it again as open source, why cry about it? Do we have to be such a nitpicking, small-minded bunch of idiots? Guess we do … ah, when will humanity change?

I watched “Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers” last night on the Sci Fi Channel. I have never been an avid fan of Babylon 5 before – I’ve watched some of the episodes on and on but had never been engrossed enough (or cared enough about the characters) to want to watch it on a regular basis. In fact, my brother back home in Sri Lanka probably knows more about the series than I do because he used to watch it regularly 🙂 That all changed last night because I simply loved “The Legend of the Rangers” (which coincidentally has the acronym LOTR – for those of you living under a rock, that’s the acronym for “Lord of the Rings” as well :p). The show was funny, had characters that I liked and had a feel of history to it with references to Sheridan being President and G’Kar that it somehow had an aura of credibility in my eyes :p It may sound paradoxical but while I don’t have much faith in humanity, I believe in the human race and “The Legend of the Rangers” presented the kind of humans that I hope for – people who will stand by their convictions and because who they are, inspire such devotion in their comrades that they’ll stand together come what may. It was great!!

I was also amused by G’Kar. I had always perceived him in a villainous (or at least, negative) role in the original Babylon 5 – though he may have changed towards the end but I didn’t watch much of the later episodes. Here he was actually one of the good guys and I really liked his character. One of the scenes that really tickled me was G’Kar saying “Love to stay but can’t! Kiss, kiss, love, love” <g> to an assembly of ambassadors. That was really funny :p

I actually got into the thick of Blog coding yesterday evening and added the final bit of major functionality that I wanted to see in the 5.0 release – a Find tool that lets you find any entries in the current journal (or across all the journals in Blog) that have a specific word or phrase in them. I really like how the final product turned out because I hadn’t really envisioned it that way when I started coding :p I need to do a few more bits of tweaking and testing and then I should be ready to release Blog 5.0 (finally …) sometime today or tomorrow – latest, Monday. I am toying with the idea of making the full install be done via a setup program to make it easier on new users and make the upgrade distro (which I’ve been promising as a separate download for a while now <g>) be a ZIP file. Of course, if you want to download the full distro but do only an upgrade, the setup program would allow you to change the install options to remove the database files from the install …

I’m also debating about releasing BOB and Scope at the same time – the reasons I’m in two minds about that? Well, Scope is still kinda half-baked and I don’t know if Mozilla works or not with the latest build – on my system it crashes every time and I have no idea whether it is Mozilla or Scope. Plus, they’ve upgraded Mozilla again and I probably should test out Scope with the latest build again … On the BOB side, I still haven’t heard from Daniel and am wondering whether he’s even using BOB or if it was another one of those e-mails where somebody gets really enthusiastic about an app for a few days but forgets all about it after that. If that is the case, since only two people have expressed any interest in it and the one who requested all the features has gone silent, I will simply leave BOB as it is since it has all the stuff that *I* need from it …

I’m watching “Swordfish” at the moment. There are little niggling things like the appearing and disappearing for John Travolta’s goatee (not really a goatee but that strip of facial hair under his lowe lip :p) during the opening sequences but the opening sequences themselves made me sit up and say “Wow! I like it!!” The opening monologue was kinda boring due to the lack of any action but then the camera draws back and you see that he’s surrounded by gun toting cops and I was totally blown away 🙂 And then the whole scene with the exploding hostage, what can I say? This one looks good and I don’t care how badly it got panned by reviewers – of course, I reserve the option to reverse my judgment once I’ve seen the full movie :p

An interestingly coincidental thing happened yesterday :p I mentioned The Red Ferret Journal on here since I’d discovered the site on my reference logs and thought it was interesting. Then in the evening, I received a package from Amazon.com which contained the “Groundhog Day” DVD with a note from a UK Blog user named Nigel Powell. I had not heard from Nigel before and was wondering whom I should thank since there was no e-mail address or even a URL. I opened up my e-mail a bit later and there was an e-mail from Nigel Powell asking me what could be done since I’d mentioned in my journal entry that day that I should change my Wish List address as I’m moving to Sri Lanka :p What’s more, it turned out that he was the guy who wrote The Red Ferret Journal! Sometimes I think there are way too many coincidences in life for them to be coincidences at all – or rather that coincidences aren’t so coincidental after all :p

Nigel’s gift did start me thinking about the fact that two thirds of the gifts/donations that I’ve received (not counting the time, effort and talents put in by folks – which I’m not demeaning by any means here but I’m trying to make a point <vbg>) so far have been from people in the UK. I thought that was kind of interesting and mentioned it to Nigel and he said that it might be due to the innate sense of fair play that the Brits have and you know, he may be right because Theo Richardson, who sent me a gift certificate a few days back, said that he’d been feeling guilty about using Blog without paying for it. Now all this talk about donations and paying does not mean I’m hinting at anything <vbg> It’s just that I’m really excited any time I receive a gift and so will talk about it for a while but as long as somebody finds Blog useful, I’m happy too 🙂

Incidentally, just checked the Amazon.com site for “Groundhog Day” and I see that they have a special edition of the movie coming out the end of the month. Argh! I hate that!! Why can’t they make one edition of the DVD release with all the extras instead of making us buy new stuff over and over again? I guess you could just stick with the first one you bought but the main reason I buy DVD’s is for the extras and so I hate it when they come up with a better release than the one I’ve got! It’s happened to me several times already – most notably with “Seven”, “Total Recall”, the “Die Hard” boxed set and “Bad Boys”. I bought all of them even though I had the older copy. When will it all end? When? (Probably not till idiots like me stop buying every new release of the same DVD but that’s another story … :p)

It almost always pays to check out the referrers to my site(s) since that is how I find people using Blog on their sites – rather than the person e-mailing me and telling me that they are using Blog :p Found a site today named The Red Ferret Journal that is pretty interesting … Interesting in that the guy has links to a lot of things (and talks about a lot of things) that I find interesting too … Why am I writing this here? Probably because I’m at home and I’m bored <vbg> I am actually thinking of going back to work on Cee – the much neglected, extremely primitive (at the moment) cookie/quote program that I wrote to complement Blog – and adding some skinning capability or some such to make it look a bit better … Will I do it? I don’t know … Guess laziness has got its coils around me really tight … but fear not dear reader, I will break through and prevail – but not today <vbg>

When I mentioned yesterday that I was thinking of putting up a PayPal donations link on the site, I wasn’t really expecting anybody to take me up on the offer immediately :p But Theo Richardson – who is a Blog user who has his site here – immediately sent me an Amazon.Com gift certificate for $30! Thanks a lot, Theo – it really makes a difference to me as a coder to see such generous gestures of appreciation from my users. I immediately put it to use and got “Almost Famous untitled – The Bootleg Cut” since I’ve been meaning to get that for a long time – I’ll really enjoy that movie thanks to Theo 🙂 I hope it gets here before I leave though since I will be left wondering whether I’ll get the stuff forwarded at all if it doesn’t get here before I leave :p That reminds me, guess I should change the mailing address on my Amazon.Com wish list as well – not that anybody I know of has used it yet but still …

It was sort of a bitter sweet parting yesterday when I left work – it felt good to know that I won’t have to work for the next few weeks but I was sad to say good bye to some of the people that I’d worked with. Ah well, guess life is full of meetings and partings … I got to stay up later than normal yesterday since I didn’t have to get up early for work :p I still haven’t heard from Daniel about BOB and so I’m kinda debating as to what I should do next – whether I should release BOB 1.2 or continue working on it so that I can release a different version or not work on it at all and go back to Blog … Decisions, decisions :p

Well … did some emergency surgery on BOB yesterday :p I got the Favorite site selection grid changed and did some UI changes while I was at it as well. It looks better now (hopefully ….) and will not be as confusing to somebody who’s trying to use it – again hopefully <g> So how come I haven’t put up a new build? Well, the new build is up there – invisibly – but I’m waiting to see if Daniel has any problems with it before I make a general announcement. Anyway, since not many people seem to use BOB, I don’t think it matters that much 🙂 But if you can’t live without the latest version of BOB, let me know and I’ll send you the download link … It should actually work pretty fine since I used the latest version to upload the new build of BOB to all my servers and it went off without a hitch but you never know …

On other news, today is my last day at work. I came in loaded for bear since my exit interview had not been scheduled even after repeated queries to HR. I was going to wait till noon and then e-mail the guy responsible for setting up the exit interview a scathing e-mail with CC’s to everybody from the VP in charge of the IT department down to my boss and his boss <vbg> but the guy finally responded yesterday after I left work – darn! :p I’m kinda looking forward to spending two weeks at home without having to get up early in the morning, drive for an hour or more dealing with early morning traffic and of course, the snow … Maybe I’ll get some coding done as well but I mostly want to catch up on my movies, games, books etc. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a vacation where I could just kick back and relax – even the trip home to Sri Lanka in October was kinda hectic since I had to do a lot of travelling, visiting relatives etc. So I’m looking forward to this …

I’ve been thinking lately of putting up a PayPal donations link on this site … Not that that many of my users have volunteered to donate anything <g> except of course for those generous souls who are listed on my Hall of Fame but what with the move to Sri Lanka and the resultant decrease in funds due to the drastic difference in exchange rates, I might be in a position where I’d welcome anything I can get :p I’ve always been reluctant to even ask for donations and stuff because to me it seems to be just a step below asking for payment up front but I guess beggars can’t be choosers :p Guess I’ll have to just wait and see which direction I go with that one …

You know, I’m really shortsighted when it comes to designing applications and especially the UI for an application :p As I think I’ve mentioned before, I usually write an app for myself (and usually because there is a specific circumstance that demands that particular app …) and then put it up on the web site if I think somebody else might have a use for it. Unfortunately, this approach leads to a UI which can be clunky or even not very user-friendly. This was demonstrated again with BOB because when I did the UI for selecting Favorite sites, I didn’t think much about not including a Select All button or even of finding a grid control where you can SHIFT+Click and select a range of items because I knew *I* wouldn’t have more than three or four favorites to select at a time … Poor Daniel wrote to me yesterday and said that he had to click 120 times since he was updating 120 sites in one go 🙁 Ugh! Not good at all! I intend to try and fix at least that bit in BOB today so that Daniel can use BOB more easily. Of course this means I’ll probably continue to work on BOB for a while and neglect Blog … Ah well …