Scavenger hunt

There are days when I just spend all of my time hunting for something. No, not the meaning of life :p I’d set my sights on a specific set of features for an app and then I’d go hunting. There’s a lot of interesting stuff such a hunt turns up but sometimes it ends up being just a waste of time :p

Following up on yesterday’s comments about a good blogging client which supports the MetaWeblog API, I launched a search for such a client. Sure, I found lots and lots of them but the question is, were they any good? :p Most of the ones I found, I’ve added to the list of clients provided at the above wikipedia entry. Not sure if that entry will remain as it is but if you’re interested, you can take a look there 🙂

Basically, I was looking for the following features – full MetaWeblog API support (including the uploading of images – no FTP!), should fetch the complete post (most of the clients I tested fetched only the first part of the post if there was a more … tag), should have a WYSIWYG editor, should fetch all categories correctly from the server and mark each post with the correct categories. Those were the major features. In the "nice to have" section you have, the ability to fetch and save old posts from the server and the option to fetch only posts made by yourself.

Most of the clients I tried out failed the "must have" list of features. Quite a few of them did not fetch the full post for some reason – I’m guessing that they implement the MetaWeblog API but don’t look at the text returned by the more part of the entry for some reason or other. And an interesting thing was that there were a lot of clients out there which use the .NET Framework – I guess apps using the .NET Framework are going to be as common as VB apps soon! Wait, what am I saying? VB now use the .NET Framework :p

Yes, all poking fun at the .NET Framework aside, I found all the apps using the framework to be rather clunky, glitchy and slow. Sometimes things would work and sometimes things just didn’t. It gave me a rather bad taste in the mouth after a while. But moving on, I found only a few clients which actually met my standards – BlogJet, Anconia RocketPost and Chrysanth WebStory. I must mention that BlogWizard appeared to be capable of meeting the standards but I could never get it to work well or reliably. I was able to look at a post it fetched by opening it in a text editor and the post had everything but the category info but I could never open the post in BlogWizard itself :p

As far as the successful candidates go, I don’t like the editing interface in BlogJet since it seems to be a bit minimal but it does seem to do the job very competently. RocketPost is the one with the most bells and whistles and the one I would call the closest to my ideal. It had only one issue that I could find – it consistently removes an HMTL comment tag that I placed at the beginning of each entry. This comment marks where the system would later insert a Google AdSense code and so it was irritating :p WebStory had a lot of bells and whistles as well but while it fetched the category list correctly from the remote server, for some reason, it wasn’t assigning them to the posts at all when it fetched posts. Besides, it seemed to have set limits on post titles when the remote server didn’t – this was annoying.

Unfortunately, all of my final choices are commercial apps and while I like RocketPost, I am not about to pay $99 for the professional version which supports multiple blogs. (The home version costs $37). BlogJet on the other hand is $40 and does support multiple blogs. Of course, given that I still can’t find something within my price range that has everything I want, I might be better off simply coding the features I want into Blog :p Though looking at all these new blogging clients has made me re-think the user interface in Blog. Hmm …

A good app is hard to find …

Why is it so hard to find the perfect blogging utility? :p I’m currently writing for another blogging site and so, my blogging requirements have gone beyond simply typing out text and publishing it 🙂 Blog does all that pretty well but Blog doesn’t handle draft publishing or uploading of images via the MetaWeblog API (instead of through FTP) just yet. Since I was feeling rather lazy and didn’t want to spend another week coding these features in, I decided to see if I could find an alternative.

The new Word 2007 beta has some interesting blogging features and it works pretty well as a blogging tool on its own rights. But even there, the image support and category support is limited. Images are only uploaded via http (using FrontPage extensions I assume) or FTP and the FTP upload has issues since the image location sometimes gets messed up in the resulting links.

All I wanted was a simple WYSIWYG editor which would allow me to create an entry, add images to the entry and provide one-click publishing where I could either publish or save as draft and also have all of my linke images uploaded to the server automatically. Apparently, there is no such app as far as I can discover and my own software is the closest to what I want to find 🙁 So I guess I’ll just have to sit down and hammer out more features into Blog and try to get it to the point where I want things to be … unless I find an alternative before then :p

Wiki, wiki, wow!

I mentioned yesterday how I was looking for an new note-taker/information manager utility which had keywords. Well, since yesterday was my day off, I decided to devote the full day to my search 🙂

First, I went through page after page of Google searches and came up with a couple of possibilities – TexNotes Pro and TaoNotes 3D Pro. They both had keyword-based searching of notes but the UI of each app itself turned out to be the problem :p In the case of TexNotes Pro, each note is opened in a new tab and there is no easy way to close tabs quickly. So, given that I go through dozens of notes in a given work day, I’m going to end up with a really cluttered UI pretty soon with TexNotes. I believe TexNotes is meant for somebody who has multiple large notes. Not somebody like me, who has tons of tiny notes 🙂 The issue with TaoNotes was similar – I didn’t like the UI or the way it was laid out. It seemed way too clunky :p

At this point, I had another idea. Keywords was what I had been looking for up till then but what about tags? Tagging has been pretty big lately and there had to be somebody who thought of combining information management and tagging? I found that there were a lot of people who talked about the "concept" (mostly with regards to web 2.0) but there didn’t appear to be any actual desktop apps around (at least ones that I could find via a Google search) that did what I wanted. Then I had another idea – what about a wiki? Or rather, a personal wiki?

This led me to a list of desktop Wiki software at Wikipedia which in turn led to several possible candidates. The most likely looking were Notebook, WikiPad and TiddlyWiki – though I actually found TiddlyWiki elsewhere and later saw it listed in the Wikipedia list under a different section :p Notebook was a straightforward note taking app which behaved like a wiki. WikiPad had an automatic treeview created from the wiki entries but it didn’t have tags and it used non-wiki syntax to format the entries, as did Notebook. So the sole contender left was TiddlyWiki. (Actually, that’s not quite how it went down – I found TiddlyWiki before I found the other two but it reads better this way :p)

Now TiddlyWiki deserves a paragraph to itself because it’s quite the marvel 🙂 First of all, there is no installation. Secondly, it’s just one simple (OK, maybe not quite simple …) HTML file. Yes, that’s all there is to TiddlyWiki! You download the HTML file, load it in your browser and you have a wiki. I really like this solution. There is no complicated installation. No software to lug around. And no proprietary file formats to deal with. All my information is in one HTML file which lets me access the information I want, the way I want! And it supports tagging! What more could you ask for? (I don’t yet know what more I can ask for but for the moment, I’m using TiddlyWiki as my new information storage/management engine …)

Information overload

As you go through life, one thing that you don’t stop accumulating (besides bills :p) is information. Now if you’re one of those people who can keep all that useful (and useless) information in your noggin, the more power to you. Me, I prefer to rely on one of Sherlock Holmes‘ maxims – as Holmes himself says in "A Study in Scarlet": "I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

So what do I do to not fill up my brain attic with useless information? Why, store it all on the computer of course :p The problem with storing information on the computer is that you have to remember where you stored the information in the first place 🙂 The easiest way to solve that problem is to have all your information in one place. So I began using TreePad a long, long time ago. In those days, the app was free and it was fairly straightforward – you saved text in a file which represented various folders and branches of information in a treeview.

For close to ten years, TreePad was all that I used. But during that time, TreePad itself evolved, spawned new versions, added new features and my information capturing needs changed as well. A year or so ago, I looked at what was available for capturing, storing and organizing information and after going through several possible candidates, I selected TreeDBNotes. One of the reasons for my switch was the much better interface on TreeDBNotes, but that wasn’t the only reason :p I believe it was also cheaper, had more in the way of features and it was free to upgrade. I’ve been using TreeDBNotes for a year now and have been perfectly happy with it but a few days ago, I got that old itch to change information managers :p

The reason? The tree paradigm no longer cuts it for me. Sure, I can organize information into different tabs of trees and different branches in each tree but I still have to remember which tab or which branch holds the information I want :p For instance, I have like 4-5 tabs in my TreeDBNotes file – for work, writing, personal information, passwords etc. On the work tab, I have different branches for the different things I work with – mysql, Plesk, cPanel, qMail and so on. But what happens when I have a bit of information that relates to mySQL under Plesk? Do I put it in the Plesk branch or the mySQL branch? Sure, I can put it in one or the other and put a bookmark to it from the other location but that is a lot of work and I still have to remember where to look for the information the next time I need it. Or I have to keep hitting "Search" and hope that I know what to search for :p

So I began thinking of a keyword based information manager. Simply store the information but tag the information with keywords. So, for the above scenario I described, the bit of information would have both the mySQL and Plesk keywords and I’d find it no matter which keyword I used. Simple right? Well, not quite :p The problem is that such information managers don’t appear to be there yet. Or if they are, they are either very expensive and meant for the corporate market or not very user-friendly. About the closest approximation to what I want, that I’ve been able to find, are Personal Knowbase and knowledgeBase. But they each have their own shortcomings. Yes, I’m picky :p So I’m still in search of that perfect information management tool …

Attack of the purchase pains

My new computer purchase pains that I’ve been chronicling for a while now, decided to strike back in force yesterday :p Of course, the story stretches over a few days and begins day-before-yesterday.

The story actually begins on Wednesday the 3rd when I last referred to the purchase pains story 🙂 I received a call from the notebook sales guy and he said that they had the RAM and that they were ready to come over to our place and install the RAM. I said fine and they said "see you in about half an hour" and hung up. An hour goes by, nothing. Two hours go by and still nothing. So I call the guy up and ask him if he’s lost or something and he says, "Oh sorry, our boss had an urgent job for us and so we’re doing that instead. We’ll try to come over to your place tomorrow".

And of course, they never turn up on Thursday :p On Friday, we had to go out and so I decided that we might as well take the notebook over to the shop and get the RAM since otherwise we’ll probably be waiting forever and still get nothing. So over to the shop we went, got the 2GB of RAM installed, got the USB flash thumb-drive we were promised as well and came back home.

Everything appeared to work fine on Friday. Saturday morning (yesterday), I turn on the notebook and start working and half an hour in or so, the screen suddenly goes blank and the computer reboots. I get a sinking feeling in my stomach since these are familiar symptoms (at least for me :p). When the computer comes back up, it doesn’t even get through the boot process. I think perhaps the new RAM is not seated properly and so I open up the machine, remove the RAM and replace it. The machine boots up, stays up for another half an hour and then reboots again. So it goes through the morning – sometimes the machine boots up immediately, sometimes I have to keep it shut down for a while before it will come up again and it always appears to go down soon enough.

I had sent a Windows crash report in there somewhere and Windows came back saying that it was probably a RAM issue and to use their Windows Memory Diagnostic utility. I download the thing and realize that there is nothing remotely Windows about it – it’s a DOS-ish utility which needs to boot via a floppy or CD-ROM and I don’t have any CD’s to burn at the moment. So I find an alternative – AleGr MemTest, which can be launched from XP itself. I launch the test and one screen into the test, the screen goes blank and the computer refuses to come up at all after that :p

It’s around 9 o’clock at that time and shops do not open for another hour. I get read, call a trishaw and go to the notebook shop. The shop is closed! I call the guys and they are like "Oh, we had a meeting and so we are opening late but we’ll be there soon!". They come in, get the machine open and test the RAM and it turns out that one of the RAM sticks are bad. And guess what? They don’t have any more RAM in stock! What about the two 512MB sticks they removed from my machine a couple of days ago? Oh, they’ve already sent it over to their head office since they needed RAM badly! So now I’m down to 1GB again and they tell me it is going to take at least a couple of weeks for them to get the other 1GB in because they’re having cash-flow problems. If mine is any indication of the kind of experience in dealing with them, I can perhaps see why they might have cash-flow issues …

Spammers and scammers

Have you heard of Blue Frog? It’s this anti-spam solution by Blue Security. It comes as a free tool installed on your computer as well as a FireFox extension which automatically submits spam from your Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail accounts to Blue Security for processing. (Don’t follow the links above at the moment since their servers appear to be under attack and they are trying as hard as they can to combat the issue and we don’t want to aggravate things, now do we? :p)

So why am I writing about Blue Frog (besides the fact that it is a good tool)? Well, I signed up for Blue Frog a while back, used it for a while and then uninstalled it. The reason I uninstalled it is because I’m too lazy :p I get about 20-40 spam messages a day and it’s all through my regular e-mail client, not webmail. The way Blue Frog works is that you have to forward the spam mails to Blue Security and they send a complaint to the spammer’s sponsor organization when you complain. The idea is that the more people who complain, the more complaints that the spammer gets – sort of a reverse spam :p

So being, totally lazy, I just couldn’t be bothered to forward mails to Blue Security and so I gave up on it. Gave up that is, till a few days ago. "What happened a few days ago?" you might ask. I got a message from spammer saying that they had hacked the Blue Security registry and that they had my e-mail address as a Blue Frog user and that they were going to keep spamming me till I stopped using it. Now the thing is, I wasn’t a Blue Frog user at that point. I don’t know for certain that Blue Security was hacked. Actually, it’s rather simple to find out if somebody’s e-mail address is registered with Blue Security or not. Blue Security has a feature where a spammer can run their mailing list through Blue Security to find out which addresses are protected by Blue Security so they can remove those addresses from their mailing list. All a malicious spammer needs to do is run their mailing list like that, pick the protected ones and start spamming them :p

What annoyed me was the effrontery of the spammer in thinking that all he had to do was to start spamming you more to get you to stop complaining about them. I ignored the message at that point but I got several more copies of the same message that day. The next morning, instead of the usual 20 spam messages, I got around 80. Now I am not sure if the two events are linked or if it was random chance. But since my spam count has increased since then, I decided to take action. I wasn’t doing anything to combat spam till then except to delete them when they came in but I sure as heck was going to report them if they thought they could scare me :p

That was yesterday. I looked around for a good solution and came back to an old faithful – MailWasher 🙂 I used to filter all my mail via MailWasher before opening it in my mail client but when I got PocoMail, I decided to do away with MailWasher and rely only on PocoMail’s internal junk mail filtering. It does work fairly well (I mean Poco’s junk mail filtering) but what brought me back to MailWasher was the fact that MailWasher now has built-in support for reporting spam to Blue Security :p So, I installed MailWasher again, ran all my mail through that and have been reporting spam left, right and center to Blue Security. Only problem is that their servers are under attack (I guess they must be getting effective and the spammers really hate them :p) and so, my spam reports are bouncing 🙂 Hopefully, they get the attacks sorted out and will be back to normal operations soon ….

Wordsmithing tools of the trade

I am in the process of setting up a new notebook computer and so have had to re-install all of the software tools that I use on a day to day basis. In hte process, I came to realize just how many tools that I use quite frequently for writing 🙂

If we take things sequentially, I started the morning yesterday by using Blog, one of my own apps, to write this blog. Then, I received a rejection for a query that I’d sent out via e-mail (let’s not even get into e-mail and web browsers in the writing process :p) and so had to fire up another one of my apps, WriteTrack, to enter the rejection into my tracking database. I then installed MindManager since all of my story ideas are mind mapped so that I can keep track of the connections between different stories and also keep different sections of a single story – such as characters, locations, history etc. – connected.

Towards mid-day, I started installing Office 2003 since I needed to start working on again on my latest short story and all my works in progress are in Word format. There was a time I used my own editor (which saved everything in RTF format) for my writing but overall, I prefer Word since it has all the features I want and it gives me more time to write since I don’t have to spend my time coding a new feature in to my editor :p

After work, I did some editing and realized that some of my other writing tools were missing 🙂 So I installed WordWeb and Visual Thesaurus. I’ve been using both of these tools for a long time now. They are great for looking up words and for making associations between different words. I have WordWeb running from my system tray and since it will give you the definition for any word highlighted in the current windows with a simple hotkey combination, I use it to check my spelling (or to see which variation of spelling is correct if I’m confused as to if I’m using American or British spelling) and to play all those scrambled word games 🙂 Visual Thesaurus comes out when I need to do $more heavy duty work – such as find a non-adverb replacement for a word or find a suitable alternative for an oft used word.

The above are just the day to day tools that I use all the time. There are others which are not so often used (and which I have not yet installed on my computer). There’s PlotCraft, another one of my own creations, which I use to keep track of story ideas and quotations. Then there’s TheSage – another interesting dictionary and thesaurus which is absolutely free! Sequence Publishing, the people who developed TheSage, also have a couple of other writing tools which are worth taking a look at too!

This is just the tip of the ice berg. There are a lot more tools out there (both free and for a fee) which can help you write better or to organize your writing process. Sometimes, I feel that I spend more time looking at tools than actually writing :p However, it is undeniable that the correct combination of tools does help you, if writing is your craft 🙂

Downloads away!

Software tools are such funny things. Sometimes they work fine, sometimes they give the appearance of working fine and sometimes they don’t work at all. Sometimes you put up with a few idiosyncrasies in the app because you believe that the app is overall sound and then you discover that the app is nothing but idiosyncrasies :p

Take the case of DownloadStudio from Conceiva. In my early days on the Internet way back in the nineties, my download manager of choice was Net Vampire. I would rave about Net Vampire to all and sundry and would install it on every machine that I worked on. Somewhere along the way, I switched over to FlashGet which at one time I believe was also known as JetCar (don’t ask me why :p). I used FlashGet till about a year ago when I began looking around for a new download manager – mostly because FlashGet didn’t integrate well with FireFox and the solutions around for making FlashGet work with FireFox didn’t seem to always work that well. That was when DownloadStudio came into the picture.

Now I must start off by saying that I’m a sucker for a nice looking interface :p DownloadStudio had a really spiffy interface and it seemed to do everything under the sun (and I’m a sucker for all-in-one tools too – it’s the little boy in me still hankering after that Swiss Army Knife :p). So I fell in love with DownloadStudio at once. It did integrate with FireFox and it seemed to work fine and so I used it for a few months without any problems. A few weeks ago however, my Internet connection started becoming really flaky. Downloads would fail all the time and would have to be resumed and the download manager became a really important tool. That was when I began to notice the cracks in the pretty facade of DownloadStudio (DS).

For one thing, DS would not retry a failed download even if it was set to retry indefinitely – it would simply give up after the first failure. For another, if I had a half-complete download and I changed some of the download properties (for instance, instead of downloading the file as 5 different segments, I set it to download as one segment), it would start the download all over again. Yesterday was the straw that broke the camel’s back – I had a 60MB download that I was nursing along forever. It would download 500k to 1MB and would fail and I’d have to hit retry again and then after a few minutes, it would fail again. At about the 50% mark, I decided to change the downloading from 5 segments to one segment – my mistake. It started the download all over again, argh! I had had enough, I began looking around for a new download manager.

After some searching, I came across Download Express and its big brother Mass Downloader from MetaProducts. Both the products integrate well with FireFox and what is even better, they can download multiple files at multiple segments and seem to have no issues with restarting after an error like DS does. In fact, I was able to download the 60MB file that I’d been trying to download the whole day in about four hours with no user interaction at all except for one minor change. I had set the job to stop on 10 retries and that’s what the job did after downloading about 20-30MB. I then set the retries to unlimited and the job completed just fine. Guess the pretty apps aren’t always the most reliable ones :p

Styling suggestions

After I wrote the post for yesterday, I realized that that particular post wasn’t going to help anybody except for those who are already familiar with Word. Since the whole point was about using Word effectively as a writer, I wrote another entry about how to use styles in Word to make your life easier for a writers’ forum that I’m involved in. I’m having a bit of a lazy day by posting that entry back here :p (Just remember that I was working with Word 2003 when I wrote the following and the same features/menu options might not be there in your version of Word)

One of the most important things to keep in mind in working with a Word document is to use custom formatting sparsely. What do I mean by custom formatting? I mean taking a line and increasing the font size and making it bold when you want a title or a heading. Instead, use the built-in styles in Word. How do you do this? Simply select the style you want from the Style Selector on your toolbar. What’s the advantage in doing it this way? If you want to change how your document headings or chapter headings look later, you only have one change to make instead of hunting for each chapter or section heading and modifying it individually – seriously 🙂

So how do you change a document heading later if you have used styles? Easy. Use the Styles and Formatting Pane. If you don’t have the Styles Pane open, you can show it by clicking Styles and Formatting … under the Format menu in Word. Once you have the pane open, select the style you want and you will note a little downward arrow next to the style name, click on it and you’ll get a menu. On that menu, you’ll see an item named "Modify …" – that’s the one you want. Simply modify the style and it will be automatically applied to all instances on the current document. Easy or what? 🙂

One particular use for this feature that I can think of is for italicised text. Some manuscript guidelines say that you should underline text in italics because italics don’t show up well. All you have to do is select "Italic" from the Style Pane, Modify it and add underlining. Have another agent/publisher who wants no underlines for italics? No problem, go there again, modify, remove underline! All it takes is a few seconds 🙂

That’s not all. You can see how many places you use a specific style. Yes, that doesn’t sound very useful but there will be times when you’ll actually want to know :p If you select a style and drop down the menu again, you’ll see that at the top of the menu it says Select All: Not Currently Used or Select All x instance(s). This basically lets you figure out how many times a certain style is used and also to select all instances of the style used on your document for further modifications.

The writer’s tools

They say that a good craftsman does not blame his tools. I would think it would be just as important for a good craftsman to know his/her tools 🙂 The sad thing is, that most writers don’t seem to think this is important. Take for instance your humble Word, the word processor of choice (or necessity) for most writers. Everybody and their grandmother seems to use Word, but how many use it effectively?

There are many resources online (free ones at that) which help you learn more about Word. But people either don’t know about them or think that they don’t need to know how to effectively use the program. Or, they are not aware that they are not effectively using Word. Take for instance this tip – it was displayed on the Word page I linked to above. It gives a lot of valuable information on formatting sections. But how many people take the time to read it? Then there’s the Crabby Office Lady, Office Tips & Tricks and the Microsoft Office Training site all of which have a lot of free information and advice that would be useful to Word users.

It was at one of these sites (I forget which) where I learnt about the top ten tips for working with Word documents. It was a live video training session and I would just like to list the top 10 tips just in case they are of any help to somebody else.

1. Macros are a great time saver. You can easily record a macro to repeat a common task. Simply start the macro recorder and do what you need to do in Word. If you take some time to edit the recorded macro, you can take the power of the macros to a whole new level.
2. Create and edit field codes directly – you can type in a field code and then select it and press CTRL+F9 to create a field and then F9 to update it. You can use ALT+F9 to show field codes.
3. Use Open & Repair. If your Word document becomes corrupted, you can use the Open & Repair option to correct the document. The Word Open dialog has a drop down arrow next to the Open button – this allows you to select other Open options such as Open & Repair.
4. Find & Replace is not just for words. You can use Find & Replace to find (and replace) special characters like a paragraph markers, formatting, styles or for specific text patterns.
5. Sections. Word stores all of the formatting for your current section in the next section break except for the type of the section break – that is saved in the next section break. If you are aware of this, it helps you to understand a lot of the quirks of Word.
6. Use tables to simplify complex documents since they allow you to layout your document just the way you want using tables.
7. The styles and formatting pane – this pane allows you to select all instances using a specific style and to modify them all in one go. It also lets you see which styles are used and which aren’t in the current document.
8. Use the ALT key when dragging anything on the ruler – this allows much better control and shows on-screen guides.
9. Keyboard shortcuts – they make your life so much easier. CTRL+SHIFT+C and CTRL+SHIFT+V are much more powerful format painters than the toolbar button; F4 repeats the last action; CTRL+Q clears paragraph formatting; CTRL+SPACE clears character formatting.
10. Take advantage of what the Word environment offers – use zoom, compare, revision tracking, the different view options, reveal formatting, the object browser etc. to make your life easier. Learn about each of these features.