October 31, 2002

First of all, I apologize for the new Blog 7.0 build that I uploaded a couple of days ago. It has an irritating bug – you can’t use the space bar at the end of your text … I know that sounds confusing but those who tried that build would know what I mean. Rob pointed this out to me yesterday and I was able to fix the problem and upload a new build yesterday. So those of you who have this problem just need to re-download Blog 7.0 and re-install it. So what caused the problem? It was me mistakenly trying to fix a problem that wasn’t there :p Somebody wrote to me and said that they got extra lines at the end of their comments and I knew I had to strip out blank spaces at the end of comments and entries e-mailed in, in Blog Server mode. I was looking at the PlusMemo component when I was going to release the Blog 7.0 nag-removed-edition and I realized that it had an option to “remove trailing blanks” and I somehow confused that with removing trailing spaces from the comments and implemented that option. Now that option seems to ensure that no trailing spaces are entered in a PlusMemo component by not letting you enter space at the end of a line – so that’s how that came to be :p

Secondly, there is some racial unrest here in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese and the Muslims at the moment. I pray to God that this does not escalate beyond what has taken place already since we are just trying to sort out the issues of racial unrest between the Sinhalese and the Tamils at the moment and we really do not need another conflict. Incidentally, for those who didn’t know/realize, I’m a Muslim. I have been expecting some problems like this for a while now just because some Muslim politician’s are opportunistically grab some glory by asking for an autonomous area for themselves if the Tamils get one as part of the peace process which is going on right now. I have always believed that we should all consider ourselves Sri Lankans instead of Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims but that doesn’t seem to be a popular opinion. Since I edit a page on peace in three languages for three local dailies, I have even written anti-Muslim articles where I have denounced the politicians for playing their games at this juncture of the peace process but of course nobody gives a damn. However, all this grand-standing and demanding was bound to create some resentment in the minds of at least some Sinhalese and yesterday’s incident seems to indicate that this is so. There had been some protest about a Muslim school or mosque (a mosque is a place of prayer – like a church or temple) being built in front of a Buddhist temple and that had escalated into rioting and fighting which ended with part of Colombo (the capital of Sri Lanka – I live in the suburbs of Colombo) being placed under curfew. We should know today where the incident leads but I do hope that it ends there …

Thirdly, (I’m inserting this bit after publishing once because I forgot all about this :p) I see that the number of sites using Blog has been steadily growing. I added six or seven sites just a couple of days ago to the list and I already have seven or eight more to be added to the list. I haven’t been highlighting any of the sites using Blog here except occasionally but I’m beginning to think that maybe I should have something like a site of the week or something and highlight each site that uses Blog and is frequently updated. Not sure how often I’d get around to updating that though :p Anyway, the reason for this part of the entry was to mention two sites that caught my attention yesterday. The first one is called Mr. McGaughey’s Grade 2 Class and is basically a blog for the whole class (or perhaps their parents as well) which details classroom activities and stuff. I was really excited by Blog being used for this – can’t explain why. Maybe it was because that was a unique way to use it or maybe it’s just because I love kids but it did give me a warm feeling to see this particular blog and to know that I’d contributed in some way to making it happen. The other one is called All Around Me : Photo blog and has some really beautiful photographs in it. I had always admired Noah Grey’s beautiful photographs on the GreyMatter site and am now thrilled to have somebody do a a complete blog with photograph’s using Blog 🙂

Fourthly, I’ve written at too great a length again and so it looks as if I shouldn’t venture into writing about the future of Blog or PostMan just yet since that’s probably going to be another long entry. So I’ll have to stop at this for the moment and promise that Blog and PostMan will be discussed tomorrow – just as I’ve been saying for the last couple of days :p

Tags:
Posted by Fahim at 4:56 am  |  1 Comment