Work continues at an unabated pace … I forgot to mention yesterday that I worked part of Sunday as well … Well, I did and that actually helped me to get the Tamil newspaper page in shape though I still needed the help of the Tamil team yesterday to proofread it and make the final corrections. We were told that we had to get it on the table of the editor of the paper by noon if we wanted the page to be published and we sent it off at 11:35! I’m not even sure that the page will be published this time but I did learn a lot about Adobe Illustrator in the space of three day’s time – so not everything is lost :p

Of course, as soon as I got the Tamil page out, I had to start working on the Sinhala page since that has to go out today. At least, that was being done by the graphics guys and all I had to do was proofread, make editorial changes and make judgment calls on various layout decisions :p I’m beginning to think that being democratic is not the way to go when working in a team environment. Even people who contribute nothing towards the newspaper page feel that it is their duty to contribute inane (and conflicting) suggestions about layout changes and they all feel that their’s is the only good suggestion. I’ve finally become so fed up with it that I’ve said that *I* will make the decisions and that they will be final – guess the stress is getting to me :p

Had an interesting weekend – or at least Saturday :p Went to work again on Saturday since one of the newspaper column teams had decided to do their layout in PageMaker instead of Adobe Illustrator like everybody else and didn’t know till the end that PageMaker couldn’t output to TIFF format like Illustrator could. Of course, the boys in the graphics department didn’t inform anybody of this fact either since they just wanted to sit back and watch the fun when they tried to finally output their layout. The upshot of it was that the graphics guys went home on Friday, the newspaper team went home on Friday and I had to come in and try to sort out their mess on Saturday! I didn’t think being head honcho meant that you had to do so much work – my boss has it easier, he just tells them that they’ll fire them if they don’t get it right :p

Anyway, I did some research and found out that you can install a postscript printer driver and have PageMaker print the page into an EPS file, which Illustrator can read. Of course, this is something that the boys in graphics said could not be done in any form whatever – so much for what they know :p The problem started with fonts – they had used a lot of Tamil fonts that weren’t installed on my system and even after installing them, Illustrator would say that the font wasn’t there when the EPS file was opened. It would however substitute the exact fonts it said that weren’t there – crazy! There were other problems with layout and placement however and I had to spend the whole day before I came up with something which *almost* worked. My Tamil wasn’t up to the task of proofreading the text however and so I decided to wait till Monday …

There was a party to be held by a bunch of people who’d come to work with our company on a sort of mutual exchange program. It was in the evening and I was simply going to give it a miss and go home but since work kept me at work till evening, I decided to go with a couple of other guys from work. It turned out that it was a good idea that I decided to go since I had a very good time there. I got to know a lot of people that I hadn’t talked to much except perhaps to smile and say “Hi” to and found them to be great people. I hadn’t danced in a while and the music was pretty good too 🙂 Of course, one of the guys we went with had to go get so drunk that he went over the top – I think that’s a peculiarly Sri Lankan thing … Or does anybody else have friends like that? He was so drunk that he started puking and then we had to take him downstairs and let him lie down … When I finally left, he was still sleeping and two of the guys stayed back to take him home in the morning – what a way to end a party :p

Do we change so much in the space of a few years that things that seemed hilarious to us at one time are no longer even mildly amusing? OK, maybe a teensy weensy bit amusing but not very much :p I’m reading a few books from Keith Laumer’s Retief series at the moment. The first Retief book I read was “Retief’s War” and that must have been all of ten years ago or more. I found the book to be extremely funny and can remember many scenes where I laughed out loud or had a good chuckle. I started searching for more Retief books from then onwards but didn’t find any at all till I went to the US. There, I got a whole bunch of Retief books but didn’t get the time to read any of them and that brings us to the present where I’ve actually started reading them :p However, I haven’t found so much as one laugh-out-loud bit in the two books that I’ve read so far! There were a few scenes that I found mildly amusing but it wasn’t as half as funny as I remember the first book to be.

The same thing is happening to me with Terry Pratchett. The first books of his that I read made me chuckle and laugh with almost every page turn but not so any more. I still get a smile on reading some of the stuff but mostly, while interesting reading, it doesn’t make me laugh as much as it used to. Am I losing my sense of humour or is it just that with age humour loses its surprise because you’ve heard all the jokes before? I really don’t know but I can do with a good laugh right now and none of my books seem to be able to provide it .. Ah well, maybe I should go back to reading Asterix and see if that is still funny :p

I must thank Aaron Freeman for sending me “The Replacements” DVD off my movies wish list – thanks Aaaron 🙂 He also mentioned the fact that he’d actually wanted to get me “Morrowind” for the XBox but that Amazon didn’t have a “buy” button for it – I checked and turns out that Amazon is not shipping the game outside the US for the moment! What’s up with that, I wonder? Is it for just this particular game or is this the case for any XBox game? I haven’t bothered to find out yet but might have to if Sierra ever releases “Malice” – now renamed to something like “Kat’s Tale” or something I think …

Haven’t heard anything at all about Snipper – good or bad :p It’s as if nobody really wants to work with the app or need the functionality it provides <g> Or then again, it might be like BOB in that it provides the kind of niche functionality that not many really want but the few who do, can’t live without :p As far as I know, there’s only a handful of people who use BOB and I’m probably the only one who currently uses Snipper … Ah well, it was a challenge to develop the HTML parsing and the exact logic to create a snippet but now that it’s done, I guess I probably will not work on it much further unless somebody else shows some interest in it …

First of all, I put the latest build of Snipper online as Snipper 1.0. You can get it here or from the link on the sidebar. The feature set is not complete since I don’t have snippet definition importing and I’d also liked to have had some sort of documentation to go along with it but things are becoming a bit hectic at work (I’ll get to that rant/whine in a bit :p) that I don’t even have time in the evening to complete any of that work and might not for a while since I have to work Saturdays till the end of July or so … Anyway, hopefully the method of defining a snippet should be self explanatory since it a new snippet definition leads you through a sort of a wizard-like interface and since there is already a snippet Collection in there for some of my favorite comics, anybody who is interested should be able to figure out how the definitions are done by looking at the existing definitions. At least I hope so – and of course, if anybody finds it interesting and wants to suggest features or simply wants help with it, let me know … but be warned, creating snippet definitions does require a bit of HTML knowledge …

Now to the whine :p My latest responsibility at work has turned out to be something which keeps me constantly on the go – as well as at work late 🙁 So far we’ve always found ourselves right-smack on top of deadlines since it all started around last Wednesday and since then I’ve gone through setting up and getting out three different newspaper pages in three different languages. Yesterday was the Sinhala page’s turn and while yesterday we should have sent the final copy to the paper for printing, we weren’t able to do so since some of the articles were being typed out only yesterday. I stayed late with another guy and the assigned graphics guy and we worked on the layout till we got it right but we found out that the first proof-reading session didn’t catch all the errors and by that time, the graphics guy was eager to go home. So I’m planning to get to work, correct the mistakes caught in the second proof-reading and then rush out the copy. Of course, in the mean time, the next English and Tamil pages are ready to for layout and that begins today *and* we have to get started on the articles for the next Sinhala page which has an internal deadline of Friday! So it looks to me as if I’m going to be constantly in this cyclical struggle to get the pages out weekly and since my other project is already behind schedule and we are working Saturdays to try and finish it by the end of July (which I don’t think we’ll be able to do – my estimate is the second week of August … purely because we don’t have all the footage in-house and are still shooting stuff or expecting stuff from stringers), I don’t think I’m going to find much time for coding in the next few weeks … Of course, I could be wrong :p

First of all, a big thank you goes out to whoever who sent me “Daughter of the Empire” off my wish list! Either Amazon UK does not allow people to include a message or the person didn’t feel it was necessary but I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know who you are so that I can add you to my Hall of Fame 🙂

I’ve received reports from a couple of people who tried to upgrade to Blog 6.0 and discovered that the upgrade wouldn’t go smoothly and it turns out that this was because they were running a beta of Blog 5.0 instead of the final version and so didn’t have the database tables updated to the latest version. I’m just puzzled as to how this could have happened since I thought I had the version numbering in the About dialog set correctly for each version and you could tell the difference between the Blog 5.0 final and the betas but then again I might be wrong since it was quite a while back … But if any of you are having problems, this might be the cause. If you are one of the people with this particular problem, contact me and I’ll tell you what you need to do – oh yeah, also let me know where you downloaded Blog from since I’m beginning to believe that there is a rogue mirror site/download site which lists an invalid download file as Blog 5.0 …

I’ve been extremely busy at work since they’ve just given me the task of coordinating the publication of a newspaper page devoted to the issues discussed by two of our programs, in the three major languages of Sri Lanka – Sinhala, Tamil and English. Since all three have their own alphabets and are fairly different from each other, it’s a bit of a task to keep track of all three in written form – while I can read both Sinhala and English pretty fast, my Tamil reading skills are pretty atrocious and it takes me about an hour to read the page :p However, I think I am one of the few people at the company who can read all three languages and so I got “volunteered” <vbg>

In the midst of all the work, I’ve been beavering away steadily at Snipper and finally have a working version. I’ve currently tested only image extraction but do have three online comics displaying in one window with none of the banner ads or any of the other junk! I don’t know if it will always work or even if it will work for HTML extraction (while Snipper has the capability, I haven’t tested it yet :p) But hopefully, it should work fine in most cases. However, it is not as simple as selecting a bit of a page and expecting Snipper to show you that bit – you have to do some boundary definitions and to do that, you should at least have a basic knowledge of HTML. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Snipper is not a novice-user tool but the good news is that it’s possible to export definitions created by you to an external file and once I add the import feature, even a novice user can use Snipper as long as they have access to a large enough definition library :p Of course, before doing all this I should probably release Snipper and see if anybody really wants it but I’ve been reluctant to do so since I don’t have any documentation done but I think I will do a release sometime today anyway to see what the user reaction is ….

I’ve been feeling very anti-social the last few days :p I don’t know whether it was the short weekend (which always has the effect of making me grumpy …) or the fact that I am not getting enough sleep (which too can make me grouchy) at nights. Why am I not getting enough sleep at night? It’s because I’ve started dreaming like Morpheus Mentor (see story on sidebar) <g> Well, not exactly like him but the story originally started because I have these vivid dreams set in strange places. But I haven’t been dreaming too much for a while and suddenly the dreams started again. I’m not sure whether it was due to my current choice in reading – Heinlein’s “Glory Road” – or something else. Ah well …

I did start work on another project yesterday – yeah, yet another one :p I call this one Snipper and it is supposed to let me snip out pieces from different web pages and view all the pieces as one web page. I’ve seen two apps like that before – one was coded in Java and I can’t even recall what it was named since I saw it years ago. That one did work but was a bit clunky because of the Java interface. The other one is called InfoSnorkel and I believe was mentioned in yesterday’s (or last week’s) LockerGnome. I tried InfoSnorkel and found that it really didn’t work too well when it came to snipping out bits from a web page and so decided to see if I couldn’t do it better – plus, it’s got a really irritating nag at startup and shutdown even during the trial period :p

I did the preliminary testing stuff for Snipper and found that it was possible to do what I wanted to do – at least theoretically … So I began working on a full-blown interface for the app and that’s taking a little time since I’m taking a wizard-based route for adding new snippets. Since I’ve never done a wizard-based app before, it is taking me a while to come up with the whole wizard structure and even then it will probably be a pretty poor excuse for a wizard <g> But we’ll see how it goes – I will need to get the wizard stuff done before I can do a full-blown test of the concept and see if it works for all cases – not just this one site that I tried out … so who knows, it still might not come to anything …

In the mean time, Nigel has been selling me a new feature for Blog :p The feature is to have the ability to send out a digest version of a given blog to anybody who subscribes! I like the idea and have been coming up with additions to the basic idea myself and think it could turn out to be a pretty interesting exercise. Nigel’s been giving me further refinements to his original idea as well and if I get fired up on that, I might actually drop everything and start coding Blog 7.0 – though I hope not since I want to get these other apps coded too 🙂 Incidentally, I was hoping to release a Blog 6.01 release since both Brant and Phil have pointed out various minor bugs but I’m running into some problems fixing the bug that Phil pointed out – that the displaying of dates in bold on the calendar for days with entries doesn’t work when you switch journals. I know the cause but can’t seem to find a solution that works …

Nothing much accomplished this weekend – probably because my parents were at home but also because it was a fairly busy weekend doing a lot of stuff outside the house. Oh yeah, I had to work Saturday as we have suddenly been given a very tight deadline to finish the project I supervise by the end of July. That is a story in and of itself. They’d started the project late for some reason or other and had then told the funder that it was completed in time when it wasn’t. Since then, they’ve been struggling to finish it but nobody seemed to have the urge to actually get it done fast. One of the main reasons for the delay is actually my boss (or rather one of my bosses …) who nitpicks all the work and asks for a redo however long it may take. So progress has been at a snail’s pace and suddenly everybody has been asked to pick up their pace and I can tell you that nobody is happy :p