When it rains …

(I wrote this entry yesterday – and to confuse things more, it will appear under the right date too – but couldn’t post it due to problems with BlogMan testing)
Jen’s having a real tough time at the moment, first she and Hunter were sick, then her tire had to be replaced, then Hunter got the croup and now her car has been vandalized and her CD player stolen. You sometimes begin to wonder why so many bad things should happen to the same person. It would make sense if it was a bad person but when it happens to somebody who believes in helping others and goes out of their way to do so, you really begin to wonder whether there is any justice in the world.

I will not even get into the whole justice thing because that’s another rant altogether :p But what do you do when you somebody you love for and care for has problems and you are too far away to do anything except pray for them and hope that things turn out right? I am the kind of person who wants to be on hand to help when somebody has problems – especially someone I love – and I feel so helpless when I can’t do anything at all! This is one of the reasons I returned to Sri Lanka – because my parents were over here and I knew I could never be on hand to help them or support them if they had a problem. (Of course, I feel completely useless now that I am here but that’s a different story :p) And now, I feel the same way as regards Jen – I want to be there at least to hug her and to tell her that it’ll be OK but I can’t because I am here. It’s frustrating … Of course, in the meantime, none of this is going to help Jen any …

It must have been the alignment of the planets, the position of the moon in the sky, the conjugation of the stars or something like that but yesterday was a really bad day for Blog :p People were having trouble all over the place and I had no idea what was causing these problems – OK, maybe I exaggerate … a bit :p There were only three people (that I know of) who had problems but each of their problems is weird and (so far) unexplainable. There was Jen who tried to publish and had Blog stop halfway and just stop responding each time she tried, there was Duane who had the built-in Blog comments link mysteriously drop a character on the subject filter but only when he published to an FTP site – local publishes were fine. And then there is Edward’s wife Trish (the newest member of the Blog family – welcome Trish!) who had unexplainable crashes with Blog under Windows XP whereas Blog has been rock solid for me under XP – and I’m still using 7.0 Beta 5 … hmm.. maybe that’s the problem? :p

In Jen’s case, deleting a couple of files off her FTP site seemed to fix the problems but I still have to find a solution for Duane’s problem – I even got him to send me his blog template and published from here but it works fine at this end. I am stumped. And in Trish’s case, unexplainable crashes are the worst since you really have no idea where to being to look for a cause. Edward and Trish are working on that though and have told me that they’ll get screenshots and detailed error messages the next time it happens. Maybe this is a sign that Blog has reached a certain stage in development and should not be bloated any further? :p I don’t know … but I am going to look into stability very hard now since I’d hate Blog to suddenly degrade into a feature-rich yet unstable product. I’d rather go back to Blog 6.0 if that were the case. However, I still suspect the snippets to be the cause because that code is rather unwieldy and probably buggy due to the convoluted way in which Borland has implemented action bars. I might have to go back and redo that bit and then find that everything works fine. We’ll see …

Speaking of new members to the Blog family, there is another new member that I actually wanted to highlight today since I enjoyed his site very much – but unfortunately, I didn’t e-mail myself his site link from work and so am left without a link. However, do not despair :p He has given the link to his site on the new RookSoft forums under the Blog section – so if you are interested, go there and take a look. He’s a cartoonist and his site is full of the funniest/cutest cartoons – I assume done by him. Plus, there is a hilarious (and yet true) cartoon about the ten best reasons that the US should attack Iraq – OK, let me not get into the politics of it here :p But go take a look … it’s an interesting site.