October 3, 2002

I probably shouldn’t have posted the e-mail from yesterday since it’s turning into another “OS religious war” :p I really don’t want the “my OS is superior to yours” comments since I don’t believe any OS is superior – the choice is a personal one just as almost anything else in life is. The reason you find a particular OS to your liking depends on your requirements or even your current situation. So, as I told somebody privately in response to their comment, “The point is not whether Mac OS is superior to Windows or not – I’ve used Windows, Mac, IRIX, UNIX and various distros of Linux as well as OS/2. Each one is good for in its own way. But there is a way to ask a developer for software to be ported to your platform of choice. I’ve had plenty of people ask me politely if I’d consider porting Blog to Linux and I’ve always told them why I can’t do it. But to have somebody who seems to know nothing about the OS he’s championing, talk down to me and tell me why I should develop for his platform is a bit too much …” I loved the comments this particular entry generated since that’s probably the highest number of comments any entry of mine has generated <g> but let’s drop the “holy war” shall we? :p

In more cheerful news, Blog 7.0 Beta 6 is out (and the download link is on the side bar and the downloads page …) 🙂 Turns out the problems I was having were stupid ones created by myself rather than any problem with PlusMemo or the spell-checking :p The problem with PlusMemo had been due to the fact that I had downloaded the latest PlusMemo to the same directory where I had had an earlier build of PlusMemo and both the distro packages were named the same – I had a download manager doing the work and it automatically renamed the new distro and I simply uninstalled and reinstalled the old distro :p The old build wouldn’t work with the new spell checking component (since it required the latest PlusMemo) and that’s where my problems started. Once I figured that out and got that sorted out, I still got all words underlined as incorrect and it took me a while longer to figure that one out – guess what the problem was? There were no dictionary files <vbg> I’d had all my Blog files get deleted the last time I tried to fix the dual-instances of Blog deleting files problem and I’d thought I’d restored everything but obviously, I’d left out the dictionary file – and that caused such a big problem and a delay in Blog development :p

Anyway, once I got all that sorted out, I was able to test the latest functionality that I had put in. Incidentally, I added a slight twist to the HTML stripping code for the digest – now, it replaces line break tags with a single carriage return and line feed (CR/LF) combination and paragraph tags with a double CR/LF combination. It seems to work fine in testing but I’d still like to find out how useful you find it. Incidentally, I just had another idea for Blog itself – should I change the current behaviour where all CR/LF combinations generate a new paragraph to a single CR/LF generating a line break and doulbe CR/LF generating a new paragraph? That would actually make the text typed in Blog look a lot more legible and also remove the need for explicit tags quite a bit … Again let me know what you think …

Now on to the last (but not least <g>) bit of news. Remember the “secret” project that I was talking about a while back? Well, it’s not so much a project as a journey – I am returning to the US in a couple of weeks or so 🙂 I don’t know for how long since there are several factors involved in determining the duration of my stay but I will be traveling there and hope to be in Ohio if I even gain admission to the country (yes, there is some doubt about that :p). Anybody know of any good jobs available for a developer who knows several languages, in Ohio? 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 5:32 am  |  5 Comments