Upgrades and changes

Recently, there seem to have been a lot of new minor releases – FireFox 1.5.0.1, Directory Opus 8.2.1.0 and WordPress 2.0.1 for instance. Now I do use all of the above and I upgraded to all of them. The FireFox upgrade required that I also upgrade the AI Roboform extension but other than that, it worked fine. The Directory Opus upgrade has not produced any issues yet. The biggest upgrade, for me at least, was WordPress since I had not yet made the transition from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0 yet.

As I’d mentioned before, I didn’t particularly want to upgrade to WordPress 2.0 since there wasn’t anything much there that I really wanted. However, what with the release of 2.0.1 and the announcement that they’d fixed 100+ bugs in it, I figured that I might as well upgrade now since all future fixes would come for the 2.0 branch anyway 🙂 The thing I hate about upgrading WordPress is that they recommend deleting all WP PHP files and then installing the new code. I have WP installed in a folder where there are hundreds (yes, really, hundreds :p) of other files and trying to find just the WP files can be a pain in the posterior. I have tried simply overwriting existing files and it has worked every time I’ve tried but being anal retentive, that just doesn’t sit right with me :p I *need* to do it just the way the documentation says.

So, this time what I did was, I pulled out the WP 1.5.2 zip file, extracted the contents to a temporary folder, got a file listing and created a shell script from the listing to move all WP files to a temporary location. I then extracted the WP 2.0.1 install ZIP file’s contents on to the location where WP had been installed and we were up and going in a short time 🙂

Of course, now that I had WP 2.0.1, I had to go upgrade some of my plugins and remove unused ones as well. I found that I had a bunch of old plugins in the plugins folder for no reason – so out they went. Then I upgraded to Spam Karma 2.1 since I still had 2.0 installed. Now that I had WP 2.0, I could also go for the AKismet plugin to combat spam. I didn’t want to install the built-in AKismet plugin though since I prefer Spam Karma. So I got the Akismet plugin for Spam Karma and we were all set! Incidentally, Dr. Dave who develops Spam Karma had some stuff to say about a new breed of spam-bots but that’ll have to wait for another day …

From the depths of the dungeon …

I finally managed to get a release of WriteTrack out yesterday :p This is the second beta release but except for one area, I feel much happier about this release than I did about the previous one. This one has a real-installer (not a self-extracting executable) and also has some rudimentary documentation and better overall GUI help in the form of tooltips. The one area that I’m not happy about is templates. The template feature itself is working now so that you can create a submission letter or a query letter based on a template and have it either e-mailed or printed out for multiple contacts in your WriteTrack database. What I don’t like is how the templates are created. I hadn’t given enough thought to the template entry screen and so the UI is not as easy to use as it could be. The good news is that that issue will be fixed by the time the next release rolls out 🙂

The next release of WriteTrack will probably be a non-beta and so that will probably mark the end of the development cycle on WriteTrack since I can’t think of any other features that I really want to add :p So, I’m thinking of getting back to work on Blog and finishing off all the little things which has contributed to this extraordinarily long delay in the release of Blog 8.0 … On the other hand, there is another completed app of mine which has never been released – PlotCraft. That one’s for collecting all your plot ideas together in one database. The app was completed a few months back but I still haven’t gotten around to releasing it. I need to write up documentation about it and I’ve kept on putting that off :p I’m also thinking about shifting to some sort of help file format (either HLP or CHM) for the documentation instead of the text files I currently use. The text files are so easy to update for me but aren’t so easy to cross-reference for the end user. Guess I’ll have to look into that …

Images of the imagination

As I’ve mentioned so many times over here in the past couple of weeks, I am obsessed with art at the moment :p It’s not that I believe I can do a better job than a professional artist when it comes to a cover. In fact, I prefer the professional artist who does my covers to work on their own and come up with their own vision because I like to see what images (or imagery :p) people get from reading my writing.

However, I have a vision in my head for what I’d do with the cover if I had the artistic talent and I would like to make that vision a reality just to see how well the reality stands up against the vision 🙂 Besides, I’m a tech-junkie and I just like to tinker with stuff :p So, I’ve been working towards making the cover in my mind a reality. Of course, the first thing was finding the right tools for the job. I had intended to use PhotoShop at first because I’m most familiar with it and use it on and off for various graphic related jobs. However, as I considered what I wanted to do, it became evident that I wasn’t good enough of an artist to do the job in PhotoShop :p So, I turned to Bryce since it allows you to build a scene using 3D building blocks much more easily.

The snag was that I’d never used Bryce before :p But this is where I say that the Net is a wonderful tool once again. I found a set of excellent set of Bryce tutorials online. They are totally free but the quality of the tutorials are worth more than the $20 the author says that they charge for the actual 6 week course! I’ve been working my way through the tutorials bit by bit everyday whenever I have a moment. I do some stuff in the morning and then a bit more in the evening after work. So far, I’m only up to lesson two and have managed to make a toy wagon :p The little image shows how the final output looked though the actual output was honking big 3MB file :p

I’m happy with the progress I’m making though and am hoping that I’d know enough soon to start setting up the basic scene for the cover I have in my mind. Boy, it sure looks much easier when they do it in the movies :p

Mindscapes

Every once in a while, I get drawn into a new dream – or a new vision 🙂 Recently, I’ve been searching for cover artists and that in turn made me think "hey, what if I try to put my vision for a cover down on paper (or rather, the computer screen) as best as I can?" This is not to say that I will actually use what I do as a cover but it was more of an experiment to see how far I could go with it and what I could achieve with currently available technology. Of course, the problem with me is that I tend to get a bit carried off at times :p

I began simply enough. I got paper and pencil and drew a rough layout of what I would like the cover to look like. Then, I wanted to scan in what I’d drawn so that I can get the drawing into PhotoShop and then work on it from there.This is where things started to spiral out of control 🙂 I had wanted the text on the cover to have a 3D look and so I began looking for PhotoShop plugins which could do some realistic looking 3D text. I came across Vertigo who offer HotText – a plugin for PhotoShop which is supposed to do really good 3D text. At the same time, I renewed my acquaintance with AlienSkin since they too had at least one product that could do 3D extrusion of text. In the old days (I mean 6-8 years back :p) when I used to dabble in PhotoShop, 3D Studio Max, LightWave etc for work, I used to use AlienSkin a lot and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there were a whole range of AlienSkin plugins available now for PhotoShop.

Now that my quest for 3D plugins were over, I thought of the background for the cover. I wanted a rugged landscape which was totally bare of anything except for grass. So do I try to draw it? Heck no, I went looking for more software! This time my discovery was the Terrain Generator from Nem’s Tools. That looked really nifty, appeared to allow you to manipulate the terrain to your liking and also was free! So I downloaded it.

Mind you, I still had not done any actual work on the cover except the hand-drawn image. I had not even scanned it in. However, I got side-tracked again. I remembered Bryce. I’d never actually used Bryce but had known of it since like version 1.0 or 2.0. So I had to mosey on over to the Bryce site and take a look and drool at all the new features :p While there, I read about DAZ|Studio, a product from the same company which allowed you to take pre-made content and put it all together to create scenes or characters. And would you believe it? It was available for free download! So I go ahead and download it. Of course, I then realize that the software is free but the models/content has to be bought separately :p So here I sit with all this new software and my cover still not done and now I’m thinking of learning how to use DAZ|Studio :p If you think I’m mad, I wouldn’t do anything to dissuade you ….

Not on the right track …

I’ve been working on WriteTrack whenever I have a spare moment. In case you’re wondering, WriteTrack is this submission tracking program that I’ve been working on. When I first started submitting my novel to agents, I didn’t keep track of submissions at all. Then, when I started seeing the same agent listed on another website and couldn’t remember if I’d queried them or not, I began keeping track in an Excel spreadsheet. I wanted to write WriteTrack at that point but I was too busy with other stuff to actually get around to it.

Now that I’m becalmed again, waiting for an agent to get back to me, I thought I might as well get started on the project. Especially since this agent is really taking their time and it probably will end up in me looking for another agent after I finally hear back from them :p I’d looked at a few other submission tracking applications out there and while I liked some of them, none of them had all the features I wanted. I didn’t simply want a tool to track submissions I’d already made, I wanted a tool which would actually do the submissions for me as well. Doing the first part, tracking submissions that I’d already made, turned out to be rather easy and so I got that done and put the first beta of WriteTrack up for download – go on over to the Bits & Bytes page and get your copy if you’re interested 🙂

The next part, the one I really wanted, proved to be a bit tougher. Not only did I need a mail merge facility so that I can have a template which could be filled in with random bits of data such a agent details, book title, synopsis etc., I also needed a way for the user to select multiple contacts/agents from a list and then either mail them or e-mail them enmass. I haven’t even gotten around to the e-mail part though I’m hoping to use the default mailing app on the user computer and simply send all the information over to the mailing app via MAPI or something. What I’m stuck on at the moment is setting up a user-friendly mechanism to select multiple contacts :p Sure, you can do the whole CTRL+click or SHIFT+click thing but that is not intuitive. It would be much easier if the user had a list of contacts and they could check a box to indicate that they wanted to mail such and such a contact – but that’s proving to be harder than I thought with the approach I’m taking. Oh well, sooner or later I’ll crack it I guess …

Pressing Matters

WordPress 2.0 is right around the corner. They released RC3 (Release Candidate 3) a few days ago and I downloaded it but have been too busy (or too lazy :p) to do much with it. I read up on what was new in WP 2.0 a few days ago after I downloaded the RC and none of it was actually appealing from an end-user point of view :p Most of the major changes are under the hood or in the admin panel. The under the hood changes promise new plugins and new functionality further down the road and the admin panel changes gives you pretty coloured feedback on when you delete a line or activate a theme. From an end-user perspective, big deal!

Of course, I’m not belittling all of the hardwork put in by the WordPress developers. But then again, given that when I came into WordPress a couple of years ago and they were working on WP 1.3 (I think?) there was all this talk about multiple blogs from the same WordPress installation. Every new release would be accompanied by the (perhaps implied) promise that multiple blogs were right around the corner and would be there soon. Now WordPress 2.0 has come around and it appears that the developers have dropped multiple blogs altogether since there are other projects around working on this. I feel cheated :p

When I switched from Movable Type to WordPress, I wanted a blogging system that would handle multiple blogs. There were other reasons for the move but at that point, one of the deciding factors in me picking WordPress was the fact that multiple blogs were supposed to be "just around the corner". Of course, it’s beside the fact that I don’t really need the multiple blogs functionality anymore – I still feel cheated :p Yes, I’ll stop whining about the multiple blog support now … though I might try to get at least one more whine in before this entry is complete 🙂

Overall, I’m happy with WP as it is. It does the job and some of the plugins actually make it totally worthwhile. For instance, Bad Behaviour and Spam Karma have almost eliminated all spam comments from my blog – now that’s a great thing. However, I don’t get a feel for where WordPress overall as a blogging tool is heading at the moment and that makes me wonder if I should start looking at alternatives again … and yes, I’d want an alternative which also has multiple blog functionality :p

Those darn critters!

Sometime after I made that entry about writing, getting published and so on, Laurie convinced me that I needed to join a crit group. A "crit group", what the heck is that? I hear you ask :p Basically it’s a group of people who get together to critique each others’s work so that everybody could become better writers … and the people who submit crits are known as, critters :p

Laurie already had a crit group in mind and we both joined up after looking around a bit and deciding that they looked OK. Most crit groups require you to do some crits before you can submit your own crits – so as not to have people join up, get their stuff critted and then immediately leave. This particular group required you to crit six pieces before you could submit your own stuff and both Laurie and I started critting stuff immediately. I think I did one crit the first day and three crits the second day. On the third day, I discover that one of my crits from the previous day had been short critted.

Now a short crit, in this particular group, is a crit which doesn’t count as a crit. For each crit you give, you receive crit credits and you can later use the crit credits to "pay" for getting crits for your own submissions. So when you are short critted by an admin, you basically have your crit moderated down and you don’t get the credits for your work. I had worked several hours on that particular crit and I had stated in the crit itself that there wasn’t much to crit since the writer had done a good job. Besides, somebody who had critted an earlier chapter in the same novel, and who had written about 80 words more than I had (yes I counted :p) didn’t get short critted.

So I asked the admins about it and their explanation was that we were newbies and so were moderated and could have our stuff moderated down but the long-term members could call it a crit and it wouldn’t be judged till later – when the admins distributed crit credits at the end of the month. She went on to say that different moderators judged differently as to if it was short crit or not. I went back and did some checking – the other crit had been moderated as well and it had been moderated by the same person. So the explanations didn’t really hold water and as far as I could see, what it boiled down to was that they were simply looking at crits and deciding whether they qualified based on their whims and fancies, the phase of the moon and however they felt at a given time. I didn’t like that one little bit and quit that group immediately.

Laurie started looking around for other crit groups but we didn’t like any that we came across and so we started talking about starting our own group and how we’d go about it. After a little discussion, we both agreed that we really wanted to do it and so, the next day we bough the domain name we wanted and set about setting up the technology to do things the way we wanted them to be.

We wanted things to be as automated as possible but we also wanted the author of the submission to have control over a critter being credited or not – not some moderator/administrator who might not even have read the crit. We also wanted to take the critting process online – away from mailing lists though we wanted people to have recourse to a mailing list if that’s the format they liked. I looked around for a forum software which integrated well with a mailing list and the only candidate around seemed to be Fud Forum. But Fud Forum would not integrate with my choice for running the rest of the site – Mambo.

Because of this incompatibility, we decided to drop the mailing list idea for the moment and go ahead with the rest of the stuff. I set up Mambo and found that Mambo could be made to integrate fairly well with SMF – which was my choice for forum software. We also wanted a fully fledged web-based database system which would keep track of submissions, allow users to give themselves credit for crits they’ve done and also allow authors to either grant extra credits to critters or to take away already granted credits from a critter if they had done a poor job of critting. It turned out that Mambo had some pretty nifty add-on components which made coding all of this fairly easy. So, about a week after we had come up with the original idea, Speculative-Fiction.com was launched 🙂

Laurie had already gotten expressions of interest for the project from quite a few people on another forum where she’s a member, and by the time we launched we already had around 10 members. It’s been about a week since the launch and I’m still adding stuff to the database, we’ve had around four submissions and people are still signing up. It’s not a major success in terms of traffic but I’m happy at the direction its taking as far as getting stuff critiqued, encouraging people to write and making my own writing better 🙂

The right time to write …

I’ve been meaning to write here again since my last entry … but never seem to find the time :p But then again, that seems to be a common complaint of mine recently. I’ve been thinking of getting to work on the novel that I started a while back thanks to Laurie but even that has been progressing in fits and starts. I’d never really thought of writing a novel before I met Laurie – all I really wanted to do were short stories because I didn’t think I could sustain the effort needed to produce a novel … mostly because I’m really impatient and want everything done now but also because my writing style changes from day to day and depending on what my mood is. But somewhere along the way (probably because I heard her talk about writing novels day in day out :p) I got started on a novel and suddenly I realized that by Jove, I could actually do it 🙂

Another incentive of course was the program that I’d started on for Laurie. She’d mentioned the need for a good writer’s text editor and I scoured the net for something which had all the features that both she and I needed and couldn’t find anything that had every feature we wanted. In fact, in most cases, we didn’t even come close. So I decided that I might as well go ahead and write my own :p So was born Amanuensis – which is still very much a work in progress – and I needed something to test Amanuensis with and since I tend to hate using junky test data, I actually decided to use the novel that I wanted to do as the test data 🙂

Anyway, the first rush of work (and testing on Amanuensis) got me up to around 20,000 words and I am pretty happy with that since I don’t think I’ve ever written that long a story before. But then I got stuck – as usual, I got sidetracked, Amanuensis was put aside and I went on to other things. Since then, I’ve come back to Amanuensis several times and made some major changes to the program for Laurie but I haven’t actually gotten back to writing on a daily (or even extended time period) basis. I do think about the story and add to the characters, dialog, events and so on but haven’t actually sat down to do any extensive writing. I feel that it’s time to do so … but have been finding that time is always the issue. Of course, if one wants to write, and I mean really write, I don’t think anything would stop you. So, I’m still probably making excuses for myself since I’m a lazy git :p But I’m closer to actually putting down words on paper again … so let’s see where it goes 🙂

Magellan, Vasco Da Gama and Dr. Livingston

A long, long time ago (but not very far away ….) – almost at the dawn of time in fact – when Windows ’95 first came out, I hated it! I wouldn’t install it on any machines at work and if a machine came pre-installed with Windows ’95, I would format the hard drive, installd DOS and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and I’d be as happy as can be afterwards :p One of the reasons that I didn’t like Windows ’95 was the fact that I could do things via the command line much faster – I had everything in three-letter-named directories and everything was off the root, this was of course before we all became slaves of folders within folders within folders :p The other reason was that I hated Windows Explorer.

Eventually I came to at least tolerate Windows ’95 and even allow it to be installed on machines at work but I still hated Windows Explorer. It was at this time that I learnt of an application named PowerDesk ExplorerPlus from a company named Mijenix. It gave you a split window view so that you could have two explorer instances side by side and move and copy stuff to your heart’s content from one pane to the other. I loved the app and continued to use it through various iterations. I remember PowerDesk Utilities 98 – that was probably the first time I used the app. Then I remember PowerDesk 3.0 – so I don’t know if there was ever a PowerDesk 2.0 or not and if there was, I probably used it. The thing is, the feature set didn’t seem to change much even when it hit PowerDesk 4.0. I think somewhere along the way they added FTP support but that was about it.

Then came PowerDesk 5.0 and the app actually seemed to take a step backwards because it lost long filename support for a bit – not really lost it but it wouldn’t show the full long filename in list view – and that’s my favourite view 😛 But they got that sorted out. In the meantime, Mijenix had disappeared and the application suite bought over by a variety of different companies. I think 5.0 was with Ontrack and when it came time for 6.0, the new owners were VCOM. I didn’t much like PowerDesk 6.0 since it had these really ugly, huge toolbar buttons and didn’t seem to have much more in the way of added features than that. However, me being the software junkie that I am, I continued to use it. That is, I did till I learnt of Novatix.

It turns out that the original developer of PowerDesk ExplorerPlus had either joined a new company or set up a new company (not sure which) called Novatix and he had wanted to continue development on his creation – PowerDesk. So he’d bought the rights to the source code to the original app to start development on a new app which was named ExplorerPlus 🙂 So now you have PowerDesk and ExplorerPlus developed by two different companies. When I heard all this, I just had to try ExplorerPlus and unlike the stagnating PowerDesk, it turns out that they’d actually done work on ExplorerPlus! There was a tabbed browser interface so that you could have multiple Explorer sessions going on from the same interface, various UI changes and enhancements. I didn’t initially like the feel of the app much but I still gave it a try and it has won me over since then. So, I’m going with ExplorerPlus for the time being … let’s see how it goes …

Oh yeah, the title? They were all explorers (in case you didn’t get the reference :p) There is even a file manager named Magellan – I’ve given that a try too but didn’t really like it :p

Blacklists and blind-spots

After yesterday’s post about the apparent problems with my WPBlacklist plugin, I decided to do some testing on my own to see if things were indeed not working. And I’ve got both good and bad news :p The good news is that the WPBlacklist plugin does work and there are no hidden loopholes – the bad news is that it doesn’t exactly work the way you think it would :p I realized during the course of my investigation that I had either not paid as much attention to what happens in the WordPress core as I should have when I wrote the WPBlacklist plugin or that I did know one critical piece of information which I had then proceeded to forget all about :p

The piece of information? Well, actually it’s two bits of information :p One was the fact that I had not added any code to notify the user when a comment was held for moderation by the WPBlacklist plugin – it simply holds the comment silently – the strong, silent type :p The second bit of information was that the WP core code actually sends out confirmation of a comment posting (or of it being held for moderation) based on its internal spam list before it initiates the hook which allows external plugins like WPBlacklist to take a shot at comment spam. So basically, if a comment is not caught as spam by the internal spam list in WP, then the user gets a notification saying a comment was posted on his/her site but WPBlacklist in the meantime might have actually caught the problem and put the comment on hold silently. This actually explains several reports I got from users who said that WPBlacklist wasn’t working even when certain words were in their blacklist – they were probably depending on the e-mail confirmation instead of checking the actual comments appearing under an entry – or, at least, that’s what I think now :p

Of course, finding the cause is just half the solution. Now I need to find a way around it. Unfortunately, to provide a solution that works for all, it looks as if I will have to modify some of the core WP code and submit it to the WP devs and hope that they accept the change – or something. I’ve already checked the CVS code from the end of August and it still has the same problem. So, unless they’ve fixed it within the last two weeks, I think I’ll need to submit my own fix to the WP devs. Of course, this also brought up the possibility that I might have my own bug hiding in the WPBlacklist plugin code – I don’t remember whether I checked to see if a comment was already held for moderation and if so, then simply exit the check routine. Because if I didn’t do that, then it is possible that something which got tagged as spam by the internal routines (perhaps because it had too many links in the comment ..) might get untagged by WPBlacklist – now that just wouldn’t do :p So now I’ve got lots of stuff to keep me occupied for the next few days 🙂