Author Archives: brad

I know I said I wasn’t going to write much about Tangelo on this weblog anymore, but I can’t help myself. And, what, are you gonna stop me?

Huh?

Didn’t think so.

Anyway, I’ve released a new version of Tangelo into the wild, version 1.2b5. The big news, aside from some bug fixes, is that it supports the new Tangelo Skin system I’ve devised. The original templating system left some things to be desired. For example, the only way to specify a background image for a page element was to use an absolute URL OR to require the user of your theme to upload a certain image manually. Both options suck. So I worked around that by creating a file format (based on SQLite – Will rocks!) that bunches all the images and templates together into one file. Tangelo can then open that file, show you a preview of the skin, upload any necessary images, back up your old templates, and replace your old templates. Republish, and you’re done.

So, how to create these special files? With Ugli! Ugli is a free add-on to Tangelo that lets you create and distribute your own custom skins. And I have to say, it’s pretty cool. I still need to produce some skeletal documentation and get it over to Dave so he can flesh it out.

And the burning question: Ugli? What the crap kind of name is that? Well, an Ugli is an exotic breed of Tangelo from Jamaica. So there’s the Tangelo connection. Aaaaaaand… I couldn’t resist going for the cheap joke and releasing a design tool called Ugli. It’s too funny.

A few people (including Tom) are already working on Tangelo Skins using Ugli. I hope to see a lot of third party skins developed in the future. That would be really cool, to see a tool I created being used like that. I’m personally developing several to include with the release of Tangelo 1.2.

Warning: This entry is rather rambling and disconnected. It’s been a strange evening.

Where to begin?

My stepgrandmother passed away a few days ago. She was my paternal grandfather’s second wife. Now, before you get all weepy, understand that I haven’t seen her since his funeral in 1998. Before that, our last encounter was at my wedding in 1994. So it’s not like we were close.

But, still, she was a decent woman from what I could tell, and I know that many in my family will miss her.

Tonight was her viewing. The funeral is tomorrow, but I won’t be attending that. Because the relationships in that branch of my family tree are, well, strained a bit, we debated whether to attend even the viewing. But my parents decided to go, and my sister and I went with them.

We all met at my parents’ house and drove together. Talk about strange. I can’t honestly remember the last time my parents, my sister, and I rode in the same car alone. It was like being a little kid again: Dad was driving, Mom rode shotgun, I sat behind Dad, and Becky sat behind Mom. There was no prior discussion of where anyone would sit. We simply regressed fifteen years and sat in our “assigned” seats.

This is a hard entry to write. There’s a lot of backstory and history, but very little of it is appropriate to share. Or at least, it’s not my business to share it.

At any rate, we made our appearance at the viewing. I don’t recall seeing any tears. This is largely becuase my stepgrandmother had been quite ill, and her passing ultimately came as a relief to those who were closest to her. Someone told me tonight that she was heard saying, “It really takes a long time to die.”

We ran into a bunch of people that know who I am: Rusty’s kid. But they don’t know me. And I sure as crap don’t know them. But I shook hands and smiled politely, just like Dad was doing. He didn’t know all of them, either.

We also saw some people I used to know quite well: my Dad’s brother and his family (well, except for my cousin who is a year younger than I am, who would have been one of very few people I would very much like to have run into tonight). We used to hang out with them all the time, but a family argument drove a wedge between the two families. Thankfully, that wedge is slowly being removed. I hope one day it’s gone altogether. It’s a sad thing to lose friends. It’s a sadder thing to lose family.

Becky and I talked for a bit after leaving our parents. We’re both so thankful that our kids get along well. Gracie genuinely counts Becky’s boys as among her best and truest friends. And I can honestly say that I consider my sister to be a good friend as well. Same for her husband. Yet here we are, siblings with families that get along well, just like my Dad and his brother. Kind of a sobering thought. So my sister and I agreed to make every effort to sustain friendship between our families and kids.

Like it says in that “Sunscreen” song: Be nice to your siblings; they are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Of course, it also says: Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good.

Via Slashdot:

Viggeh! writes “An overly excited Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software, today proclaimed at an internal company meeting that if the download numbers of the new Opera 8 Web browser reach 1 million within the first four days of the launch, he will swim from Norway to the USA with only one stop-over for a cup of hot chocolate at his mother’s house in his home country, Iceland. The new browser was released Tuesday and was downloaded 600.000 times in the first 48 hours since release. The challenge will end on Saturday at 0900 a.m. CET, so if you want to try out some new software and make the CEO stick to his big words, download it at Opera’s webpage(direct link).”

Reference

Interestingly, this is still not enough to make me want to try the new version of Opera. Anybody trying to make money selling web browsers in this day and age is deluded. I’ll refrain from further comment.

I can’t wait.

Tomorrow, at long last, I get to see Michael Penn in concert.

I’ve been enamored with MP’s music since 1992, when I saw his excellent “Long Way Down” video on MTV. The video was cool, but the song was enthralling. Who was this guy? Michael Penn? Wait a second… he did that song about Romeo in black jeans, right? Yep.

I rushed to the record store and bought his first two CDs: March and Free-For-All. I listened to them intently and repeatedly. I was hooked. The guy’s music is amazing, his lyrics are astonishingly fresh and intelligent, and his voice is mesmerizing. Finally, I though, some music I can sink my teeth into.

And then I waited five years for his next album, Resigned. It was worth the wait. Some of my all time favorite songs (like “All That That Implies” and “Small Black Box”) are on that album. That year, he toured in support of Sheryl Crow, and came within a two hour drive of my house, but I couldn’t afford tickets at the time.

A few more years went by and he released MP4 (Days Since a Lost Time Accident), which is another excellent album (“Trampoline” is a great track from that one).

And tomorrow, I get to see him in concert at The Point in Bryn Mawr. My wife doesn’t share my enthusiasm for Penn’s music (in fact, she actively dislikes his music), so Dave will be joining me.

I can’t wait.

I can live with that.

Thanks to Tom “Dizzle-Hizzle” Crawford, I’m back online and no longer a victim of Comcast’s DNS issues.

Don’t ask me how, though.

Via Slashdot:

renai42 writes “A new survey has revealed that Americans overwhelmingly support strong censorship for blogs, even though a substantial amount have never actually been to one. Eighty percent of the 2,500 respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens. However, more than one-third of respondents had never heard of blogs before participating in the survey, and only around 30 percent of participants had actually visited a blog themselves.”

Reference

Since when did publishing other people’s private information for all the world to see become fair game? And at what point did protecting other people’s privacy become censorship? That’s a really loaded word for what we’re talking about here, don’t you think?

I wouldn’t want some goofball posting my home address and phone number on the web. Heck, I keep my number unlisted so that other employees where I work don’t call me at home for tech support.

The news.com article goes on: A further 72 percent favored censorship of personal information about celebrities, and 68 percent, information about elected or appointed government officials such as judges or mayors.

Sorry, but I don’t the rules should be different for those in the spotlight. Celebrities, judges, and your next door neighbors all have the right to a certain amount of privacy.

How is this even news?

Sheesh

Tom and I were iChatting about the origins of our department’s gaming names.

Me: I was always Rhino, for obvious reasons.
Me: Joe was Bulldog, because he looks like a bulldog.
Me: Mike was HowlinMadd, A-Team reference. H. M. Williams, H. M. Murdoch.
Tom: ahhh–thats’ where the howlinmadd came from
Me: Remember that show?
Tom: yes, i remember the A-Team
Tom: i used to watch it all the time
Me: Dave didn’t get the reference for a long time. When we finally explained it, he get offended and said he didn’t watch the A-Team, because it was a kids’ show.
Me: We said that’s all right, we were just kids when it was on.
Tom: it was a kids show?
Tom: never
Me: That’s what Dave says.
Tom: i’ll still watch it when it’s on
Tom: i still like trying to predict when the army jeep will flip
Tom: because it happens every episode
Me: I used to love that 45 minutes into every episode, they would have the “work montage” where you’d see everyone’s hands busy at work on Hannibal’s plan.
Tom: I love it when a plan comes together

REAL World was, once again, a great time. It was fantastic to get to talk with the folks who make the development environment that enables me to do things like Tangelo, Frequency, and Kodiak. Geoff Perlmann, CEO of REAL Software is such a down to earth and approachable guy. He doesn’t just fly in, give his keynote, and leave; he’s there at the conference, rubbing elbows with his customers, meeting as many as possible, and earnestly striving to find out more about what they want and need from REALbasic.

Now, to be fair, he does live in Austin, and as he pointed out himself yesterday afternoon, flying in for the keynote and flying back out would have amazingly inconvenient, not to mention a huge waste of money. But I digress. I had the opportunity to talk with him for a few minutes, and I can see why his company is successful. He listens to his customers, he listens to his staff, and he acts on what he believes they need the most.

For several meals, I had the pleasure of dining with Mars Saxman. Mars writes the compiler for REALbasic. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and this is not a compliment I give lightly. He’s astonishingly intelligent, and he’s equally passionate about what he does at REAL Software. He’s also very proud of the work he’s done, and with good reason. Several times over the course of lunch on Thursday, someone would ask a compiler-related question of Mars. In response, he usually ended up whipping out his PowerBook and showing them why things the way they are, while explaining how things ought to be and how he hopes they’ll be in the future. It was enlightening, to say the least. At one point, I said to him, “You really get off on this stuff, don’t you?” He just smiled and said, “Oh, yeah.”

At Thursday evening’s dinner, he shared with me that he lives in a world where REALbasic “sucks,” as he put it. This is any developer’s dilemma: you work so hard on a program or product, and you rarely hear your users’ success stories; usually you only hear the complaints. Why isn’t this faster? Why is the download so big? Why doesn’t it do feature X? Why did you bother with feature Y? With a project of the size and scope that REALbasic encompasses, I would imagine these complaints are frequent and pointed. Now, to be honest, I’ve had issues with REALbasic, but nothing earth-shattering, and there were only one or two I was utterly unable to work around. But Mars, and REAL Software in general, hear more complaints than success stories. I took the opportunity to tell him how much REALbasic had changed my life. I talked about Tangelo and Frequency, and I told him all about Kodiak, and how it not affected made my job easier, but several hundred other people.

Also on Thursday, I was able to talk to David Grogono, REALbasic Product Manager, at dinner. Another extremely talented guy, and also passionate about his work. That’s what I love most about the REAL Software staff: they love what they do, and it comes through in everything they do. David showed us his new PowerBook with the velocity sensors that park the hard drive heads in case you drop it. That was cool enough, but then he showed us a program, written in REALbasic, of course, that used those sensors to control a Rubik’s-type cube on the screen. We were all floored. It was just too cool.

I didn’t get as much time to talk to Jon Johnson as I would have liked, but we got a couple minutes to touch base in person.

Another conversation that occurred over dinner was two mathematicians discussing quarternian mathematics with a 14-year-old whiz kid named Asher (and yes, meeting a 14-year-old whiz kid is extremely humbling). Several of us on the opposite side of the table were less proficient in the mathematical arts. When the pad and pen came out for scribbling calculations, Brady chimed in to let them in on a little-known mathematical secret: an upside-down 3 looks like an E.

There was talk of REAL Software’s new Software Maintenance sales model, which makes sense, and which will probably benefit me. They’ve committed to more frequent upgrades, and that’s a good thing. The big news for me is that Swordfish, their technology for compiling web applications, will now be part of REALbasic 2005 instead of a standalone product. There’s simply a new project type called “Web Application” in addition to the existing project types. That will save me some money. The keynote featured a short demo of Swordfish as well as a slightly longer demo of REALbasic 2005. They spoke of really cool new features in RB 2005 like Container Controls, assisted refactoring, and an HTMLViewer Control. Good stuff.

One thing that was kind of gratifying for me was that people knew about Tangelo and Frequency. Several people approached me to ask how Tangelo was doing. Someone even said, “Oh, that has podcasting support now, right?” Sweet.

Speaking of Tangelo, I thanked Will Leshner of SQLabs once again for doing the SQLite plugin for REALbasic. Tangelo is powered by SQLite under the hood, and it’s a great little database: fast, cheap, reliable, and fairly standards-compliant.

I attended Stephen Tallent’s sessions on XML, which were very informative. I learned about about XPath, which is basically SQL for XML. Very cool stuff, and I think I might be able to use some of what I learned in those sessions in Kodiak-related endeavors. Plus, Stephen is an absolute riot. I also attended sessions on building the best cross-platform apps, using networking to communicate with other apps, creating custom controls, and more.

The only suggestion for improvement I had was to increase the length of the conference. My idea is to add a day of longer, more in-depth sessions, on the day of the keynote, that people would pay extra for. As the conference is now, the keynote starts it off on Wednesday evening, followed by two days of one hour sessions. This works well, but there are some topics that simply can’t be covered in an hour.

All in all, I had a great time, and I learned a ton. Again.