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Burningbird's Religion
I could only hope one day to join Burningbird's religion:
When asked my religion I tell people that I belong to a religion that is tolerant, open, has a sense of humor and perspective about itself, never suppresses others, lives each day in the same spirit of celebration as every other day, practices respect rather than hymns, and focuses on doing good to others regardless of their beliefs.
2:27:01 PM #
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Categories, God, and Israel
I've been giving the whole category thing a bit more thought and I've decided I should make more use of them, not less. Lately my weblog has been filled with Radio and REALbasic junk. That's just where my head's been lately. I tend to flow those to relevant categories, but I also flow them to my home page as well. My strategy has been to flow everything to my home page. But maybe that's a bad strategy. If anybody is reading my weblog, they are almost certainly more interested in the personal stuff than the Radio and REALbasic stuff. So I should keep that stuff to their categories and off my home page.
And perhaps I should write more personal stuff. I'm always deleting posts I might make for fear of offending someone. For example, I am both an atheist and very pro-Israel, both potentially put-offish positions. Occasionally I will put something on my weblog about god and such that is, perhaps, in poor taste. Sorry about that. I've come a long way towards understanding how somebody could believe in god. I was a real jerk in high school and college when I criticized people for their beliefs. I made a lot of people mad. Since then, I've come to realize that god and religion can be a very important and valuable belief system. We all have belief systems. Why should I think that my system is any better than anybody else's?
As for Israel, if you want to know my position, go read Meryl Yourish's weblog. I agree with everything she says. I will say one thing, though, and I'm bound to get into trouble for it. It seems to me that if you are going to question how Israel deals with terrorism, then you should definitely be questioning how the US deals with it as well. To accept the US actions in Afghanistan but not accept Israel's actions is just not consistent. My wife, for example cannot support the US answer to terrorism and she cannot support Israel's answer to terrorism either. Although I don't agree with her, I think she is, at least, consistant. I, on the other hand, support both the US and Israel.
As I said, go read Meryl Yourish's weblog.
2:01:27 PM #
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What's the point of categories?
I have several Radio categories (REALbasic and Baba are two examples) and I even update some of them regularly. But I'm beginning to wonder what the point is. It seems like a cheap way to have multiple weblogs. With Radio, you can't really have multiple weblogs without paying $40 for each one. But with Movable Type, you can set up one MT and add as many weblogs as you'd like. MT has limited support for categories but until they support the MetaWeblog API (which they claim they will do in version 2.01), MT categories have little appeal for me. So I'm thinking that ultimately I should get rid of categories and have multiple weblogs, if my weblog environment supports it. I bet I can keep the content on them separated better if they are different weblogs and not just different categories of the same weblog.
1:05:23 PM #
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Two More Radio Poster Bugs
I found two more Radio Poster bugs. It's a good thing I'm using it before I release it tomorrow :) The first bug is a bug in REALbasic. It has a TextConverter class that I'm using to convert my MacLatin text to Latin-1 text. But it only converts 1k of text. Anything more than that and it just returns an empty string. So if your post is too long it gets sent as an empty post. Fortunately, I save all of my posts locally, so it was easy to repost after I had fixed the bug.
The second bug was that I wasn't correctly encoding quotes in the XML I save as a document file. So Radio Poster's XML parser (which I wrote) barfed on the file. Fixed that too.
10:43:23 AM #
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Burningbird says "No" to Google
Burningbird is trying something new on her site. Well, actually a number of new things. One new thing is that she is moving her site to Movable Type. That's cool. I really like Movable Type. I threatened to move my site to MT before UserLand fixed the MetaWeblog bug. But I'm betting that I will have to move eventually.
The other new thing Burningbird is trying out is a no-Google site. You can do that by putting a robots.txt on your site. If that file is present and formatted correctly, then robots like the kind Google send out to index the web can be told to go away. That's what Burningbird has done. She's decided that Google adds no value to her weblog and that in fact it brings visitors to her site that don't really want to be there.
She may have a point. I'll have to think about that. Of course, I don't have control over the server my Radio weblog runs on, so I can't put a robots.txt file there if I wanted to. But if I ever move to MT running on my own server, then I'll have all the control I'll need.
9:42:53 AM #
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Radio Poster's Compose Field
Anybody who uses Radio Poster, knows that the typing in the compose field slows down the more stuff you type. The REALbasic guys claim that's a problem with Apple's text engine and that Apple is working on it. Perhaps. But I can do something about it myself. I can use WASTEfield instead of REALbasic's EditField. WASTEfield is a plugin by Doug Holton that wraps WASTE, a replacement text engine for Mac OS. WASTE is used in a number of applications on the Mac (including REALbasic itself) and is quite mature. It doesn't have a problem with slowdowns when typing, but it also doesn't use ATSUI, which is Apple's going-forward text engine on Carbon. Unfortunately, there are problems with using WASTEfield with REALbasic 4.0.2, the current version. The problems appear to be solved in REALbasic 4.5, but I'm not ready to build Radio Poster with an alpha version of REALbasic. As soon as I can start using WASTEfield, however, I should be able to do quite a few interesting things. WYSIWIG editing is one thing I'd like to add to Radio Poster. Then you could just make things bold, or italic, or whaterver, and Radio Poster will figure out the tags for you.
9:19:17 AM #
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Chimera Rules!
I've been using Chimera for the last day and it rocks! It's basically Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine inside of a Mac OS X browser. One of the things I don't like about Mozilla is that the UI isn't really Mac OS X specific. Especially the UI inside of the browser window. That would be forms and such. Form buttons and popups and edit fields are all the role-your-own variety and they just don't look like OS X controls. Chimera has good-looking OS X controls. And it is fast. As with Mozilla it feels much snappier than IE 5. I would switch completely except for a showstopping bug or two. For example, I can't get Movable Type's bookmarklets into Chimera's favorites tray. I can't seem to edit my favorites at all, actually, and that is a problem as well.
8:54:59 AM #
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© Copyright
2002
Will Leshner.
Last update:
4/28/02; 8:55:01 AM.
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