Tag, you’re it!

We were out the whole day yesterday and so I didn’t get to make my usual blog entry. Because of this, I now have two blog entries queued. Yes, I could make them both today but I’m OCD-ness just wouldn’t permit me to do that – so here’s yesterday’s entry and today’s entry will appear tomorrow :p

I put sprucing up Blog on hold for a bit to do some investigating day before yesterday. I wanted to see how good Yahoo Content Analysis Web Services was when it came to getting keywords for a blog entry. I didn’t want to write any code of my own and so I settled on the Terms2posts plugin from Semiologic instead. Unfortunately, the plugin wouldn’t work out of the box and I had to do some debugging to first find out what was wrong. I did find what was going on and managed to get the plugin working but was not satisfied with the keywords that Yahoo returned – it had stuff like "unfortunately" and "ugh" (I say "ugh" a lot :p) and that just didn’t look appealing to me 🙂

So I turned my attention towards Tagyu. They have an API that developers can use to get suggested tags for a given post and I wanted to see how well that works. I quickly hacked the Terms2post plugin and added a function into it that would fetch posts from Tagyu by using some code that the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin (UTW) used. This seemed to be just my day for non-working code because that bit of code wouldn’t work either :p I went through some debugging and discovered why tagyu tag fetching didn’t work, got it working and finally got some suggestions for my test post. I was actually happy with what I got this time. So I decided that Tagyu was the way to go.

Now came the difficult part. I needed a way to automatically tag posts in WordPress when they were published because I wouldn’t have categories working via XMLRPC for a while longer and I’m not known to be a patient man :p So I needed tagging working easily now, damn it! I decided to write a new WP plugin which would be an add-on to UTW and would simply get suggested tags for any new post and add the suggestions automatically to the UTW tables, giving me an automated tagger 🙂 After a couple of hours of tinkering with code, I actually had the plugin working – at least the base functionality. I’ve also added an admin menu which currently does not have any options (the options are there the admin screen just does not display or save any of it – they are hardcoded at the moment :p). The admin menu also has a button to populate all posts without tags in the blog with tags automatically but I haven’t finished this functionality either. I first want to check out the base functionality in a production environment and then I’ll get the rest working. So here goes ….

Back to Blog

Boy, this whole tag cloud thing is conjuring up a cloud of its own :p Yesterday, I got the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin but it turns out that I have to specify the tags for the plugin in WP for it to work 🙁 Sure, as Lorelle pointed out in the comments yesterday, I can always set the plugin to use categories as tags and that should solve the issue right? Except that I post to my WP installation via Blog and Blog currently has no support for categories 🙁

OK, that’s not entirely true. Blog has some great category support (though Laurie will tell you it is broken in the current betas :p) but those categories don’t transfer over when publishing to WP via XMLRPC. So, I decided to get back to Blog and fix that. Of course, me being me, I can’t work on one particular issue only – I had to go redo a whole lot of other things :p There was one outstanding issue from the early days of Blog – how I handled database tables internally. The way I was doing it was not quite efficient and rather clumsy because that’s how I had started all that time ago in the early days of Blog. Blog was my first Delphi app and it shows. However, I have not fixed this all this time since Blog has gotten increasingly more complicated over the years and fixing the way data tables were linked was a rather cumbersome task.

I began fixing that yesterday :p Yeah, I’m a glutton for punishment. I also added in support via the XMLRPC interface for working with categories. That part at least works now but I realized then that due to the way Blog works, categories were going to be a major pain! Blog can publish to multiple destinations and this means that conceivably, somebody can publish the same blog to two different WP installations. This would mean that each installation would have its own list of categories and Blog would have a third list of categories internally. How do you keep all these different categories distinct. How do you make sure that Blog marks the correct categories on each WP installation? This is going to require a whole new set of tables and logic 🙂 Ah well, the joys of coding …

Can I tag along?

Yesterday’s serendipitous discovery of TagCloud has led to a few other developments since then :p I realized after watching my tag cloud for a while yesterday that it wasn’t changing at all – it was simply displaying the tags for wordsmith.org and nothing at all from my own blog entries. So I decided to do some digging to see what was going on. I still am not sure what exactly is wrong with TagCloud because I had assumed that the Yahoo Content Analysis service basically went through your site and figured out what the relevant tags for your entries were instead of you having to set up tags for each entry. However, nothing seemed to be happening – maybe their indexing service was slow or maybe it wasn’t functional. All I know is that even after 24 hours, my site was not displaying any tags.

So, I decided to look for alternatives tailored specifically towars WordPress 🙂 Or more accurately, I wanted to find something for WP which would generate tags in case I was wrong about TagCloud and they actually needed the tags somehow explicitly specified in the RSS feed. That was when I came across this blog post – now here was a solution (and a total solution at that :p) to what I’d been looking for. So I went over to the Ultimate Tag Warrior page, downloaded the plugin and installed it. I removed my existing TagCloud entry on my blog and added my own personalized tag cloud for my site. But nothing still showed up!

Why not? Because none of my entries had existing tags :p So now I had to find a way to add the tags to get a tag cloud. I spent a little time doing the entries by hand and trying to figure out what tags to assign before giving it up as too time consuming. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin does have a button which is supposed to retrieve the suggested tags for each entry from Tagyu but for some reason, the button wouldn’t work – at least at my end. I decided to go through the source and see what was happening and if necessary, write a plugin of my own which would connect to Tagyu and pull suggested tags for each entry at the time of publishing. Perhaps I could adapt the system to also go through all my existing entries and add tags …. So I have a new project to work on … Not that I really wanted one but oh well, need something to keep life interesting, right? :p

The scavenger hunt

It’s always interesting what you find when you go hunting early in the morning :p Today, I was deleting a few spam comment entries in my blog when the Incoming Links section caught my eye. So I took a look at the sites linking to me and one of those sites, came across TagCloud. This particular site only had a tag cloud but no information as to how to get one. However, I knew they were a WordPress site based on the links on their site and so I began doing a Google search for WordPress and TagCloud. So, by way of an entry on the WordPress support forums, I arrived at the TagCloud site that I already linked to :p

This of course, started me off on a whole new tangent. I had to learn what tag clouds were, how to implement them and how I could set one of my own up on my site. I signed up for their service and created my own cloud. I added my own RSS feed and then had to pause to wonder what else I could add. I first added an RSS feed from dictionary.com but didn’t like how that looked. My favourite wordsmith site is of course, wordsmith.org – I’ve been a subscriber to Word-A-Day for longer than I can remember 🙂 So I decided to see if they had an RSS feed, and what do you know, they did! So I added that to my cloud and I was happy for the moment – but not totally happy since my site by itself was still not appearing on the tag cloud. They say that it takes a few minutes to be indexed but nothing was happening even after 10 minutes. Oh well, guess I’ll have to check on that tomorrow :p

In the meantime, going through the stuff at TagCloud, I came across a reference to GreaseMonkey. So over to that page I went and in reading up about GreaseMonkey’s capabilities, I came across a link to the Coral Content Distribution Network. Now a friend of mine, Nige, has been having a lot of trouble lately because his site keeps on getting featured on digg and going down due to heavy load. This seemed like the perfect solution for the issues that he’d been facing. So I dashed off the link to him. Another problem resolved (or at least a potential solution discovered) all within the course of half an hour of aimless web surfing. Ah, the wonders of the Internet :p

Is it the people?

I hardly ever go out anymore. Before I was married and before I got my current job, I had to meet a lot more people every day. There were people that I had to interact with at work, people I had to meet in the course of work, family get togethers and what not over the weekends and so on. Most of the work stuff dropped off once I got my current job and because of my marriage, we also moved away from the family circle – because we live on our own. Due to the nature of my work (I work remotely for a web hosting company), I don’t have the same schedule as everybody else here. I work over the weekend here and so the usual chances of mingling and meeting other people is greatly lessened. In fact, there are times that Laurie and I go a whole week without seeing anybody else :p This period probably would get extended even more if we didn’t have to go out to buy groceries.

So what has this got to do with anything else? Well, the fact is that every time we go out, I get headaches. Sometimes they are fairly mild but sometimes they can get to be rather intense. Now we’d been over to my parents’ place two days running this weekend (and then had to go out and meet other people with them) due to stuff going on at their end and now I have a doozy of a headache. It makes me wonder – is it all the people who give me a headache? Am I just allergic to people? :p Or maybe it’s just the complications involved in dealing with people that gives me a headache? At home, there are no complications – we understand each other and can (usually) tell each other what we think. But when you go out, you have to worry about how to phrase something diplomatically, how to make sure that feathers don’t get ruffled, try to figure out what people are "actually" saying as opposed to what their words mean and so on. Dealing with people is a rather complicated subject and I’m not certain that I take too well towards having to jump through all these hoops :p Is this what gives me a headache? I don’t know …

Powerless to act …

We lost power yesterday in the morning and I couldn’t work. A couple of days before that, the ADSL connection went out and when I called them up, they said that it would take about 5 hours to fix it. Today, the ADSL connection is up but it seems to be on the fritz – downloads stop after a while and I have to restart the whole thing all over again. This seems to be a general fact of life here in Sri Lanka – breakdowns happen and they happen often. And of course, you can’t do anything much about it.

Things didn’t seem to be so bad – or at least, the rosy glow of memory is misting up all the bad stuff :p But these days, everything seems to be reaching a pinnacle where breakdowns, laziness and sheer indifference is creating an untenable situation. But of course, when you live in a country and things appear to become this bad, what can you do? I don’t want to move anywhere else. I like Sri Lanka. Can you try to change the country itself? That is an interesting mental exercise but I am not sure how well it would work in practical terms :p

I don’t know about the ADSL situation but at least the power related issues are only in this particular area. My parents live about 15-20 minutes away and they don’t have as much trouble with power outages and such as we do. Maybe we should consider moving over there if this continues to happen but then there are issues with that as well … but isn’t there always some issue? Seems to be a fact of life – at least, you can’t complain that life’s boring :p

Cartoons and chaos

I have been staying away from commenting on this issue because I don’t believe I can be totally objective in my commentary. My religion is close to my heart and while I would try to be objective in my commentary, I can’t be a 100% certain that I was totally and completely objective in what I said. However, I went to mosque yesterday for Friday prayers and the sermon included references to the whole cartoon row and I must say that I totally disagreed with some of the comments by the Imam of the day and felt I had to write this here just so that there are opinions to the contrary – opinions which hopefully present a more balanced view.

Firstly, one of the tenets I believe Muslims should live by are words straight from the Qur’an – specifically Surah Al Kafiroon.The verses basically say, "you believe what you believe and I/we believe what we believe, you have your path and I/we have my/our path". This, to me at least, is one of the central rules of guidance for Muslims – both in dealing with others of different faith as well as other Muslims who decide to take a different path. We cannot try to enforce our ways, our beliefs on others nor does God want us to. Faith, any faith, is about belief – it might be belief in God, belief in an afterlife, belief in rebirth, belief that there is nothing after death but it is about some form of belief. This belief is personal to us. So why would we go worrying about what others say or do regarding our beliefs? Their beliefs (and actions) are theirs. Unless they forcibly try to stop us from believing what we believe or somehow try to coerce us into believing what they believe, what they do should not have any impact on what we believe. We should, as Muslims (and human beings), learn to co-exist with those of other beliefs because none of us will ever believe the same thing – even amongst Muslims, you have differences in belief. So why cry about the differences in belief that somebody else has?

Yesterday’s sermon started with something good. About the fact that yesterday, the 10th day of the first month according to the Islamic calendar, was a holy day for Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. Now I don’t know if this still is the case – this particular incident which was related was from the prophet’s (PBUH) time. At that time, both Christians and Jews had fasted on this day because that was the day Moses had led the children of Israel out of Egypt and defeated the forces of Pharaoh. This again illustrated something that I strongly believe in – whether Muslims, Christians or Jews, we believe in the same God We all believe in the God of Moses, so unless there were three separate Moseses, we believe in the same God! So whether it’s prophet Mohammed (PBUH) or Jesus or Moses getting caricatured, we should be equally offended. (Yes, I realize that there are other issues in the case of a depiction of the prophet (PBUH) but again, that falls under your beliefs/my beliefs).

Where the preacher diverged from Islamic tenets, (in my opinion of course) was when he started with such a good foundation and then went on to say that we should do what we can to oppose those who publish the cartoons by boycotting their goods. If he’d built upon what he’d started, said that we all follow the same God and that while there might be those who might do stupid things either for the sake of publicity, stirring things up or simply because they believe they are doing the right thing, that what we had to keep in mind was that our faith was ours and that we couldn’t force anybody else to believe what we did, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with him. But he didn’t say that. In a way, I’m glad that Islam does not have a clergy – because probably a lot more people would have blindly accepted what he said because he was "authority" if we’d had a clergy.

As far as I’m concerned, Muslims have three God given things that dictate our path – the Qur’an, the prophet’s (PBUH) hadeeth and our brains. We should try to interpret the first two using the last and decide our course of action instead of being told by somebody else what is right and what is wrong. If we all learned to do that, we’d have far fewer problems from Muslims as a group both within the Muslim community and outside. But again, being human, I am not sure we’ll ever get there …

Coding, Testing, Writing – Life goes on …

I finally finished editing my new short story, "The Wyrm’s Lair" and sent it out. I haven’t really tried submitting short stories anywhere before (heck, I only started submitting my novel less than a year ago :p) and so am not sure how it will go – keep good thoughts in mind for it 🙂 Of course, I’m not totally accurate in saying I haven’t submitted any short stories before – I have submitted two stories before. One, a long time ago to an e-mag and they didn’t like it and the other one was just before I started work on the short story that I sent out today. The second one was rejected as well but I’m not totally surprised about that one since that didn’t have too much action – it was more of a character/mood piece. This one, I really like and it sort of came together much better even than the first draft once I’d edited it. However, it might not be everybody’s cup of tea :p So now that that’s done, I have to consider what I start working on next. Probably editing "Honest" …

I’m also beta testing AstroSynthesis. AS is probably one of the best space mapping software out there 🙂 I love it because it helps me to map out the universe that I’m writing about. It fleshes things out and helps me keep track of what world is where and how far away each world is and so on. Now if I could take it a step further and I could also map out each planet as far as the land masses and stuff goes, it would be perfect. Actually AS has a sister product, Fractal Mapper which does help you do this but it takes quite a bit of work to create a good looking Fractal Mapper map and I just don’t have the patience :p Besides, I already have enough projects without taking any more on. But back to topic, I am beta testing AS 2.0 and I was really thrilled to be picked to beta test since besides my own apps, I haven’t beta tested anything much. Of course, what with all the other stuff going on, I haven’t been able to do as thorough a beta test as I would have liked and I feel a bit guilty about this since the developer is sort of getting cheated by having me beta test. Hopefully, I can make up for it in the future beta releases.

Now that WriteTrack is out, I have started work on another project – a Word add-in to highlight often used (and misused) words in a document. I’ve already written most of the code for this as a macro and so the logic isn’t too difficult but there is a UI to the add-in and that’s where I’m struggling at the moment. I hope to have the add-in done within a week and then I hope to keep adding more functionality to it as I go on, creating a suite of little utilities that will be helpful to writers. That’s something I see a great need for with Word – it’s not too shabby a word processor but most of the available tools are just as overpriced as Word is :p We need more free stuff so that us poor writers can actually afford to have them 🙂

When people care …

A few weeks ago, I talked about how people seemed to care only about money sometimes and not about the things that mattered. If you rant about the bad, you must also talk about the good 🙂 During the last few days, I had some very positive experiences with people who cared as well, so let me share.

I had gone to Soft Interface’s site a while back because I was interested in their Diff Doc software which does a great job at comparing two Word documents and letting you merge the changes. There are other such software around but Diff Doc is probably one of the more cheaper solutions and they do a great job. Unfortunately, the price tag of $400 was a bit too much for me since I don’t do any professional work using Word. I simply use Word to write my stories and Diff Doc was great for comparing changes between two versions of my manuscripts. Now if I had a writing contract and making money, I would have had no problems with paying the $400 but since $400 is more than a lot of people make a month here, I just couldn’t afford to. A few days ago, I received an e-mail from Soft Interface’s Allen Segall and he wanted to know if there was anything they could do to interest me in purchasing Diff Doc. I told him the situation and told him that if it had been about $50, I would have bought it immediately. Allen came right back and told me that they could drop the price down by $300 for me! To be honest, I was stunned. Not many people would care enough about a potential customer to do that. Of course, the price was still too high for me and I can’t afford to go for it but I still like how nice they were.

Then there is Eugene over at Add-in Express. I’d written a Word macro recently that would highlight often used (and misused) words and phrases as an aid to writers. The macro was a bit clunky to use since it didn’t have a nice user interface or anything. So I was looking around for a way to turn the macro into a nice user-friendly add-in when I came across the Delphi Add-in Express component. It was just what I was looking for! I wrote to Add-in Express and asked them if there was a possibility of getting a free copy to use in a freeware tool. I heard back from Eugene a couple of days later and he gave me a license, for free! For a piece of software which sells for at least $150!

These are just a few of the good people I’ve run into. There are more. There’s the nice folks at ElevateSoft, Addictive Software and WP Tools who have also been kind enough to donate software. Then there are people like Joana, Mary and Gino Sion who have been kind enough to agree to do covers for my book. These people are doing these things out of the goodness of their hearts, because they are genuinely nice people. So while I might rant about there not being enough care in the world, I do acknowledge that there still *is* care in the world – care for something other than money 🙂

Releases, bugs and other stuff ….

I released the next beta of WriteTrack yesterday. I’d been working to get the features sorted out for the last couple of days and I was finally satisfied enough with it to do a release. There was one major feature outstanding when I did the last beta – the ability to track income and expenses on your writing projects. I got that sorted out and I also fixed a lot of minor usability issues since I’ve been actively using it during the last couple of days to transfer over all my old tracked submissions from the Excel spreadsheet I was using into WriteTrack. It’s only when you use something that you figure out what doesn’t work and what can be improved 🙂 I still want a few minor features added to the app but I think it is more or less ready for a 1.0 release as long as nobody finds any major bugs in this beta.

Speaking of bugs, there has been a bug which has been irritating me in a major way and unfortunately, it’s not something that I can fix. The bug is with my banking system :p My bank is HSBC and they are probably one of the bigger banks in Sri Lanka, what with being an international bank and all. They have an Internet banking service where I can check balances, do transfers, pay bills etc and I find this very useful since I don’t leave the house much. I usually pay my rent via the Internet banking system but at the end of last month when I tried to make my usual transfer (the same transfer that I’d done for six months before) I was presented with an error message.

I call their customer support service and a Customer Support Rep (CSR) takes down the details of the issue and promises that they’ll call back the next day to let me know the resolution. The next day comes and goes, no call. I try the system again, it still doesn’t work. So I call them again. The same CSR takes the call, says that she’ll talk to the relevant people and they’ll get back to me and the next day comes, nothing again and the system still does not work. I call again. A different CSR this time and she says that the Internet banking department looked at it, that the problem wasn’t in their department and that it has been escalated to networking and that they’d "definitely" get back to me the next day.

We were out most of the day the next day but I didn’t get a call on my mobile nor were there any messages on the answering machine when we got back. It was too late to call by then and it being Friday, I couldn’t do anything over the weekend either. I call on Monday and get another CSR, I tell her the issue and tell her that I had not heard anything from them after repeated promises of calls. She escalates it to a "senior colleague" who is courteous and says she understands and that the matter will be dealt with and that I’d hear from them before 5 o’clock. True to her word, she does call back around 3 o’clock and says that it looks like a technical issue at their end and that it has been escalated to IT and that I’ll hear from them by the next day, which was yesterday.

End of day yesterday, still nothing from HSBC. I try the system again in the hope that they fixed it but didn’t call me. It still doesn’t work. So I call their support line and ask for a manager. I get to a manager explain the situation to her and tell her that I find this rather unacceptable. She makes soothing noises, says that she understands and that I’ll hear back from them the next day – today. I’m hoping that they’ll prove me wrong and fix the issue and call me to say that they did it. But given the track record so far, I’m not taking any bets on it.

I do have two questions though – is it so hard to keep a customer informed if you are taking a long time to resolve the issue? I work in customer support, I know it’s not easy for the CSRs to do this and I don’t expect them to. But if the issue is escalated, shouldn’t whoever it was escalated to take the time to let the customer know? My second question is, what the heck is their IT department doing? It shouldn’t take them over a week to fix a simple issue like this, should it? Come on, even without knowing anything about their system, I think I can fix it within a day :p Ah well, such is life in Sri Lanka …