I heard back from Fabian, the developer of HTMLEdit, and he was kind enough to promise a fix for the problems that I’ve been facing with the component and since he’s been talking of a new build soon, I have decided to wait for his build before releasing the next beta of Blog 8.0 🙂 In the meantime, I’ve been using the last build I created for several days now and I find it to be fairly stable since I was able to fix one of the last problems which had been nagging me, yesterday. The problem? There would be extreme slow-downs when switching from the WYSIWG view to the HTML view and I would have to wait over 20 seconds before the right-click menu for a misspelt word came up. Both these problems seem to have disappeared since I replaced the spellchecking component used in the application with a fresh copy. Yes, that’s exactly what I said – I didn’t replace the component with a different component, but I replaced the copy of the component in the application with a fresh copy of the exact same component and it seems to work fine now – go figure :p I did read something on the forums about the HTMLEdit component not liking to work with a shared copy of the Addict spellcheck component but so far, after putting in the new copy of the component, I don’t seem to have problems with sharing. Guess I’ll wait and see.

In other news not related to Blog or Delphi coding, I seem to be getting heavily hit by comment spam over on SM. So far, I’ve been talking about comment spam related development over on SM since that’s the WordPress blog and so I thought I might as well talk about WordPress related development over there. But then, that breaks the whole "development here", "meandering thoughts there" rule :p But I’ve done it that way anyway since I like to try and post in both places several times a week and sometimes I’m too busy to post in both places on the same day 🙂 However, today I had something I really wanted to say over there on SM and then I came into work and discovered that I’d been hit by comment spam again and this time my WPBlacklist plugin had actually not caught the spam – darn it! Of course, a blacklist is only as good as the entries in it and in this instance, the spammer was not in my blacklist. So I immediately rectified the situation, deleted all the comment spam and then decided that I was going to spend some time working on adding all the extra bells and whistles that I’d been meaning to add to the WPBlacklist plugin. So, that’s what I’ll be working on for the next few days :p

The Miracles around us

Have you recently sat in the rain and looked up at the lightning playing across the sky? Or, sat on the grass on an early morning, feeling the freshness and the coolness of the grass under you and the warmth of the sun on your face while the birds sang and the fragrance of flowers wafted all around you? I don’t know about you, but I seem to be doing less and less of this kind of thing which actually makes us realize how good life is and all the little miracles that surround us … and this is not a good thing.

It started raining heavily in the morning today just as I got up. I washed, prayed and then sat on my couch for a little while, staring out the window at the rain falling down and the lightning streaking across the sky. I really wanted to go out and just sit in the rain and let it splash all over me like I used to do when I was a child. Why is it that as we get older, we get more and more conservative and so …. dull? :p Why is it that we start thinking about what other people will think/say, whether we’d get sick and so on, instead of just going out and doing something which is fun? I don’t know. But I do know that I didn’t go out and just romp around in the rain. But I did sit there and look at the rain and think about all these things 🙂

It was then that I had the thought that the rain falling outside, the sunshine on our face, all these things are little miracles of God. When something big happens, like a huge storm coming up (I was thinking of "The Day After Tomorrow" at this point but that’s a different discussion :p), we start thinking of God and sometimes even say that it’s an "act of God". But we always disregard the little miracles which are all around us, I guess because we’ve gotten so used to them and they have lost their miraculousness. This is probably why I love a child’s viewpoint of the world much better than I love an adult’s – because children have still not become so blasé about all the little wonders that are all around us and they still look out at the world with innocent eyes. But the truth of the matter is that there is beauty and wonder to be seen, enjoyed and marvelled at, all around us … if we’d just take the time from our daily grind to notice these things. So just take a minute off your day to smell the roses, to stare out your window at the greenery of the trees or how blue the sky is and realize that the world might not be as dreary as it sometimes might seem 🙂