Truer Words - A Journal

Familial Update, and Grumpy Seth's Advice on Raising a Baby

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:04:23 GMT

We're still moving, probably in October. The landlord is still planning to sell this place. It's a little stressful as we've lived here over 9 years (will be ten years in October) and I really like the neighborhood. Still, if we leave the house for more than a few minutes, then we're probably headed for Westerly. Moving over there will save us five or six gallons of gas and many hours of driving every week.

Corinne seems to be looking forward to it. I don't think it's entirely because the kitchen she'll be getting is thrice the size of what we have now, but that's probably a big part of it. ;-)

Business has been decent this year. Back in December, one client sent me some money to pre-pay for some work "to be decided." Work with Bare Bones has been steady, and I finally produced a working (though incomplete) module for YAML.

Shannon is no longer working two jobs. The second job, at a Hallmark (greeting cards) store, was paying minimum wage and only giving her 12 hours per week, so after a few weeks she told them she wouldn't be coming back.

Instead, she's going to school! She got Pell grants and various other forms of financial aid to cover almost all the costs of going to the Connecticut School for Massage Therapy. She started this week. It takes (I think) 18 months to get her certificate, and when she's done she'll finally have a real, employable skill for a job that pays a lot better than retail ever will.

She'll be about half done with her schooling when Mike comes home in January.

Thursday I went to court with her in Waterford for a "status update" on her appeal to get custody back of her son Richie. Richie's father, Dick S., decided to contest it. We went to the court thinking that she was going to walk out with custody papers, and instead all we know is that this is going to take longer than we first thought. (That's good, as we've asked Shannon not to rush this. We're already doing most of the work with Lauren. Neither of us mind that, but we're not ready to add another kid to the house.)

Corinne wanted pizza on Thursday night, so I was going to take Lauren with me to get it from Olympic Pizza in Norwich. Shannon came home from work early because (in her words), she "didn't feel like working," so she went with us. On the way, we had a talk about her relationship with Lauren.

Had very late second thoughts about posting the rest of this, so for now I've taken it out. Sorry...

Other BBEdit Language Modules

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:29:49 GMT

Rich read the Why I Wrote a JavaScript Module for BBEdit story, but like everyone else at Bare Bones decided to respond to me directly instead of posting something on the site. (Jim Correia has been guilty of this so many times it's now an old joke.) Anyway, he suggests that list the other languages/modules I've added to BBEdit since the JavaScript module

They are, in no particular order:

Strings (for MacOS X developers)
Python
Markdown
SQL (five flavors)
Ruby
Java
TeX
Lua
YAML

My favorite is still the JavaScript module. My least favorite is definitely the Markdown module (see Markdown.pl's source code and look for the author's comment, "This is an aspect of Markdown's syntax that's hard to parse perfectly without resorting to mind-reading" and maybe you'll understand my issues with it.)

My second favorite is the Python module, because Guido van Rossum wrote the gold standard of language specifications. He doesn't just describe the language syntax with near perfect clarity, he also has implementor hints! It's like he was in the room with me when I wrote that module, telling me what I should do here or there. His work made my work better, and there have been very few bugs reported in the Python module since its release.

My second least favorite module is YAML, for the same (or opposite) reason. The specification is obtuse, repetitive, unclear and unrealistic. It's full of internal language which you can only comprehend by looking for definitions elsewhere in the document, and inevitably those definitions have more internal language. (I'm working on an update to the YAML module, and the authors of YAML actually admitted to these problems in several IRC chats we had in the last few weeks).

I have various other unfinished language modules sitting around on my computer, waiting for me to make time for them, but all of the above have been released with BBEdit 8.5, 8.6, or 8.7.

A New JS Mode for Emacs, and Why I Wrote a JS module for BBEdit

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:02:51 GMT

Stevey's Blog Rants: js2-mode: a new JavaScript mode for Emacs

For the OOD-loving and API-minded among you, the "beautiful" way to do syntax coloring would have been to finish parsing, then walk the AST using a Visitor interface, applying the coloring in a second pass. I tried it, and it was, as they say, "butt slow". In fact (perhaps not surprisingly) walking the AST takes exactly as long as parsing, so it was twice as slow as doing it inline.

So I bit the bullet and moved my syntax-coloring to happen inline with parsing. Fortunately it only introduced about 30 lines of code to the 4000-line parser/scanner, because most of the coloring happens in the scanner, at the token level. Go figure.

Steve Yegge describes (at length) his new JavaScript mode for Emacs. For much of the article he's talking about (trying to) parse the JavaScript file at the same time that he's applying syntax coloring. It's absolutely NOT a simple task, not by a long shot. He had the benefit of direct access to Brendan Eich (the author and maintainer of JavaScript itself) at least twice so far, but still describes how difficult it was. And this is someone many people consider a superstar programmer who has been working at Google for years.

Well, next to Conversant, my favorite-ever project is/was the JavaScript module in BBEdit. I won't go into all the technical details like Steve does, but I will say, "I feel his pain."

Thinking about this, I realized that I never wrote the story of how I came to be contracted with Bare Bones. With all the explosives experts, martial artists, photographers, and "connected" individuals at BB I need to be careful not to cross the lines of my NDA, but I think I can tell this story safely. ;-)

How It All Started

In early Spring of 2006 — almost exactly two years ago — I was doing a lot of work with JavaScript. Prototype was my new favorite toy, but 1.0 hadn't yet been released. My editor of choice was BBEdit, but I was frustrated that it didn't list the functions in Prototype.js (follow that link for more details, including pictures). I wrote to Bare Bones tech support to ask if they knew of any third-party, BBEdit, language modules for JavaScript.

The answer was "no," but I was told that a couple other people had asked about improvements to their JavaScript support. I wrote back to say that I'd like to take a crack at it, if I could only see "the source to the current syntax module." Hah. Yeah, like that was ever going to happen. "Could you send me some of the source to your app, so I can write something better?" (That's NOT what I said, but that's probably what it sounded like.)

After lots of email back and forth, on May 10th we had only reached the point where Bare Bones was "planning to update it in a future release." I'm a developer, I know what that means. So I wrote again, and said I was going to start my own language module (based on BBEdit's public SDK for language modules), and could they just send me their current list of language keywords?

A month later, Rich himself finally sent them to me. That was June 12th. I wrote back with a better list of keywords, and told him I was going to start working on my own module unless they told me I shouldn't bother because they already had one under development. They didn't, but Rich seemed to be trying to call my bluff: you go ahead and start working on it, and if you come up with something good maybe we'll work something out. (I've been on both sides of this discussion, and I know that usually nothing happens.)

Three days later, I sent them a copy of a fully functional JavaScript language module, written in C++. (Looking back, I'm all impressed with myself!) When I'm telling this story in person, especially if Rich is nearby, I like to say that they tried to call my bluff but found I wasn't bluffing. I still think there was a little of that, but mostly I think they just dealt with this nagging, mostly-unknown customer the best way they could: "go ahead and do your thing, and yes, maybe we'll work something out."

A few days after that I sent them another one, with some more features and some bugs fixed.

A few days later, I went to RailsConf in Chicago, and found out that lots of Rails developers were using TextMate. I'd barely heard of it! (Probably because I don't go looking for new toys very often when I have work to do.)

While at the conference, I talked to other JavaScript devs about their editors, and showed them what I'd done for BBEdit. I even showed Sam Stephenson, Prototype's author, at the same time that I was showing him what I'd done for custom events in javascript. Everybody liked it, and it was definitely better than anything else out there. I also asked people why they were using whatever editor they were using. Most of the Rails folks who were using TextMate were using it because that's what the top Rails guys recommended, and because it had really good integration with Rails itself.

I wrote up all this "research" and sent it to Bare Bones when I returned home.

Writing the language module, peppering them with lots of email, and sending in the research I did at RailsConf were enough to really get their attention. In early July (can't remember... July 3rd or 5th), Rich came down here and we had lunch at Costello's Clam Shack, right on the water. I got an early look at BBEdit 8.5, we talked about my 1,001 feature requests, and I signed an NDA with a handshake (and later with pen and ink).

Perhaps as import as the business that was done that day, Rich and I became friends (and have had a casual breakfast almost every Tuesday morning since then).

BBEdit 8.7.2 Released Today

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:02:19 GMT

Bare Bones just released version 8.7.2 of BBEdit. This is a free maintenance update for anyone who owns a license to 8.5 or newer. Here are the release notes.

I had a small hand in this update. In the release notes is a list of fixed bugs, two of which are mine:

Fixed bug in which TeX syntax coloring would get out of whack if "Color Math Strings" was turned off and the scanner encountered certain constructs in the document.
Fixed bug in which the JavaScript function scanner could crash on certain malformed (usually because of in-progress edits) constructs.

There's lots more good stuff in store (way more than just bug fixes!), but some of the fixes in this release needed to get into people's hands sooner than later.

(Remember the BBEdit Disclaimer.)

Faster Code (Converting HTML to Text)

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:01:17 GMT

Over the years I've written this code in a few different languages: take some HTML input, process it according to some of the basic rules a browser would use, and spit out plain text (no tags or HTML entities). By "basic rules a browser would use," I mean that e.g. a series of <p> tags should not result in a long blank gap, but a series of <br /> tags should. Line breaks (\r or \n) don't matter except within a pre-formatted section. Etc., etc.

My first attempt, I think, was in straight UserTalk. Then i rewrote it a couple of times with regular expressions (still UserTalk) to make it faster. Then a client needed it in a language that could be used on any Mac OS X box, so I rewrote it in Perl, which was faster still (and was much better about converting the HTML entities to UniCode).

The Perl script uses lots of regular expressions, and so makes many passes over the input, changing the text in place. It worked well enough for most HTML, but long documents with a very high ratio of tags-to-text (that is, very tag heavy) would process very slowly. Unfortunately the script was run automatically in the background by a "regular" GUI application, and so the app would seem to freeze up for a little while as it processed one of these pathological cases.

Over the last week I rewrote it again, this time in pure C++. It's a command line tool with the same basic interface that the Perl script had: you can pass it an argument to specify the input file and output files. Omitting either one causes it to use standard input and/or output.

The new tool makes a single pass through the text, doesn't use any regular expressions, and generates slightly better output. Actually, it's more honest to say that it makes three passes through the text: first it converts UTF-8 to UTF-16 (but that's an OS API service), then it processes the UTF-16, then it converts back to UTF-8 (again, just done by the OS) for output.

The timing results speak for themselves. These tests use the worst, most pathological example we had. It's a 200 KB file that's about 90% tags (specifically, it's a long email exchange where everybody top-posted and quoted everything else, and everyone used HTML messages.)

$ time striphtmltags.pl - < ./striphtmltags.input.html > ./striphtmltags.output.txt # old one
 
real    0m20.201s
user    0m19.774s
sys     0m0.352s
 
$ time newstriphtml < ./striphtmltags.input.html > ./striphtmltags.output.txt # new one
 
real    0m0.048s
user    0m0.039s
sys     0m0.010s

They wanted it faster. For this worst-case scenario, it's 420 times faster. Zoom.

What About Conversant?

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:19:22 GMT

With all the work I do on BBEdit for Bare Bones these days, some friends and clients have asked me, "What about Conversant?"

Conversant is still loved, don't worry. In fact, here are the three things I'm working on, and hope to have ready by the end of the year:

Tagging — Enough with the annoying ‘category checkboxes.’ Other sites and systems have proven a million times over that people prefer free form tagging. (That is, "categorize" your messages by typing words or quoted phrases, rather than selecting from a predefined list of checkboxes.) Not that the old way will go away. They may even work together.
Tweeting - Sites (conversations), zones and servers will be able to tweet. Because it's easy, that's why.
MySQL - This one has been on hold, but I can't let it wait forever. We'll be able to move individual sites over to a SQL database. This may or may not be done by the end of the year.

Birthday, Postponed

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 10:32:01 GMT

Today was supposed to be my "birthday century". Couldn't do it Sunday, but today should have worked out perfectly.

Unfortunately, I'm behind on work (mostly due to this stuff). I know I *could* take the day off anyway, but I felt guilty about it last night. By the time I went to bed, I'd made the decision to put it off for next week. Probably Monday.

It's too bad, because the weather today is going to be perfect for a long ride. Now, I'm not sure that any weather is good enough to make 135 miles (century plus my age) an easy ride, other than a really strong tail wind that follows me through the whole course, but 74°, sunny, with almost no wind and 50% humidity is really the best I could ever hope for.

I'll ride today, but it'll be just a regular 50.

Resignation?

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:32:10 GMT

I've already mentioned how "over committed" I am right now. It's so bad that I decided to resign, at least temporarily, from the Prototype core team.

Then I felt so guilty about it that I attended this morning's all-hands chat room meeting.

On the other hand, I've actually finished a few items on my to-do list lately.

Who knows... someday soon I may even be able to start the PMC Software Auctions. Hope so, since the PMC itself is less than two weeks away.

Firefox? Isn't That a Movie?

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 18:11:32 GMT

One of my clients has recently signed up for an online shopping cart system to work with his catalog (which is based on Conversant).

When a customer buys something through this shopping cart system, they're shown a confirmation page with a link back to a specific page on the vendor's site. That's totally standard.

The link appears to use JavaScript to submit a form which POSTs the sale's data (minus the truly private info like credit card number) back to a page on the vendor's site. Still pretty common (except their implementation doesn't actually work).

They claim that it only works in IE. Not in Firefox, not in Safari, not in Opera. Why worry about those, they're just a small percentage of the marketplace, right?

I'm sorry, but those people are morons.

Without even testing it, I can tell you that they're wrong: it doesn't work in ANY browser, not even IE. How do I know? The link just runs the script, and the script just causes the browser to navigate to the vendor's thankyou page: it never does anything with the form at all.

The form is all hidden fields, looking something like this:

<form action="url/of/thank-you/page" name="postData">
<input type="hidden" name="firstName" value="Seth" />
etc., etc., etc.

The form's action is pointing to the correct URL... but the form is never used. The script looks like this:

function submitForm()
{
	window.location.href="url/of/thank-you/page";
	return true;
}

If you understood the above, then you know how easy it would be to fix:

function submitForm()
{
	document.forms.postData.submit();
	return true;
}

Sigh. (Even easier: do away with the javascript entirely, and replace the link with an actual submit button.)

Old Ma Bell: Memory is the First to Go

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 17:57:19 GMT

Macrobyte's business phone line went dead yesterday, for no apparent reason. Really dead. No dial tone, no buzz or hiss, no 'presence', no nothing no how.

I'm a forgetful type, so the first thing I checked was our last bill. It just came in, and we're not overdue, so that's not it.

Now, I don't use the phone all that often — most of my clients just write to me — so this wasn't a big emergency. A little later I was back working, having procrastinated on this minor annoyance.

This morning I tried to make a phone call (oh, yeah... that's why I pay for this line!), but of course it was still dead. So I grabbed a phone and went out to the box on the side of the house to test the line. Great signal on the house phone, no signal on the business phone. This officially pushes the problem into AT&T's lap.

Keep in mind that there are no longer any actual people working at AT&T. Ma Bell is just a big network of computers and phones. And she's a big OLD network.

When I called (from the home phone), I spoke with a computer, running the latest AI/VSR. At first, it wanted yesses and nos, and I was bored. Then it wanted the phone number that was having trouble. I entered my office phone line, and it said there was no record of this number, and that new customers should call a different line.

Hmm. Did the old lady forget about my phone number? Is that why my line died?

(Wait, sorry, it's not fair to call it an old lady. She has a fancy-new-3D logo, with transparency!!)

So, I tried again, and this time told it I was having trouble with my home line.

It asked me to describe the problem in plain english! No longer bored (in fact, I considered playing with it for a minute, but I have work to do and wanted my phone back…), I said, "My phone line is not working."

After just a couple more questions, it had figured out that I wasn't actually talking about my home line. "Please enter the number for the phone that is not working." I did, and it ran some line tests while playing some lovely muzak.

(Paraphrasing...) "Our line tests are complete, and a repair ticket has been opened. Your line will be repaired by... Thursday, February First, 2007, at... Six Thirty PM."

I believe AT&T is actually run by the Lawnmower Man. That's fine, I guess, but we all know he can't affect the physical world (remember the bomb...). If this is an actual problem with my phone line, and not just a memory lapse on Ma Bell's part, who is going to fix it!?

Update: Just a few hours later, the phone is working again. Did the old lady simply "remember" me?

Happy New Year, One and All

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 15:22:11 GMT

2006 was a good year for me and mine, in many ways.

To all of my family near and far, to my ecclesia here and worldwide, to all of my friends new and old, close or distant:

Happy
New Year!

Hoping 2007 will be even better, for all of us...

Season of Change

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 20:38:20 GMT

I'm not afraid of change, generally, but that doesn't mean I'm immune to the stress it brings. Right now so much around me is changing that there seems to be another source of stress no matter where I look.

Macrobyte has been doing fairly well this year... enough that Corinne put in her notice and is finally staying home again. It's been a long, long time. She still has some healing to do. Hopefully being able to focus on some other areas of her life will help with that. (Plus, I never wanted her to have to work in the first place.)
Our plans for Thanksgiving this year have been pretty messy. Corinne thought she was going to have to be working so she didn't sign up to serve the shelter. That was a disappointment. Then she gave her notice. I believe things have worked out and we know where we're going, but it hasn't yet been finalized. Wherever we end up, they'd better allow us to bring some food! :-D

Seriously, I can't imagine going to a big dinner like that, with Corinne, without at least a few pans/dishes in the back of the Blazer.
Jed (my brother) has lived with us since late July, 2005. Despite the obvious stuff like space issues, (occasional) fraternal friction, and some loss of privacy, I have truly loved having him here.

Unfortunately, he's not just moving out, he's moving away, putting an entire continent between us. It's for the best of reasons: he has found true love, but Alycia lives in British Columbia. Logistics were such that it made more sense for him to go there than for her to come here, at least for now.

So there's a trailer-full of mixed emotions over this one. I couldn't be happier that he found her, but I'm selfishly sad that his find is our loss. Plus there's a hint of jealousy, because he's moving to my favorite place, somewhere I haven't even managed to visit since Corinne and I went to BC on our honeymoon in '97.
Jed has been our ecclesial secretary for years. Him leaving is a bit like throwing all the cards up in the air. While I think it's good to shuffle things around, it's most definitely a source of stress.
Mark & Michelle are pregnant! This is officially 'super cool,' the only downside to it is that Mark isn't willing to be the secretary in Jed's place because he's going to have a new baby to care for. I don't blame him, but it's too bad because he was the obvious choice.
As long as I'm listing stuff that's changing... my Mom and Dad are moving their 'warehouse' to a completely different facility. This isn't a real big deal for me, but it's one more happening in a family that's a little overloaded at the moment.

That's all I can think of at the moment. Isn't that enough?

What Is In that Bread Pudding, Anyway!?

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 16:08:26 GMT

By now most everybody knows that Macrobyte is doing some work for Bare Bones on BBEdit. I've also become friends with Rich Siegel, the president at BB.

How did this come about? Rich tells the story in short form, and along the way heaps praise on me, Corinne for her cooking, and even does appropriate obeisance before the telekinetic bread pudding.

Rich is awesome to work with, has proven himself a true friend on at lest one occasion already, and (frankly) I'm benefitting massively from his years of experience in this field. All this praise from him could go to my head, though, if I didn't know it was really the bread pudding influencing his thoughts. ;-)

My favorite line:

… she obviously enjoys cooking: big family events, small catering jobs, to say nothing of keeping Seth appropriately fed and watered. Which brings us to the sentient bread pudding …

Authorize.net is Driving Me Nuts

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 15:40:04 GMT

Macrobyte has its merchant account with a merchant service providor that uses Authorize.net for it's payment gateway. Confused? Macrobyte processes credit cards through company A, and company A's services are basically a "wrapper" for Authorize.net's. That's how it looks from the outside, anyway (at least to a programmer, since nobody else would call it a 'wrapper').

We've been doing things this way since late 1999 or early 2000; I can't remember exactly when. Years ago I knew why we were using company A, now I'm not so sure (and this is something I'm going to look into).

Earlier this year one of these companies (and I think it was Authorize.net, but sometimes it's hard to tell) decided they don't like their customers anymore. First, verybody's login ID's stopped working. We all had to create new ones, after answering a long list of security questions. In order to set up the new ID's, we had to provide our old ones, along with the old passwords... but I had been doing this in the same browser for so long that I had no idea what password to use: the browser on the computer in my office remembered it for me.

Eventually I figured it out. This morning my new password expired. The browser's eagerness to update it's password database interacted with Authorize.net's "reset your password" form in such a way as to lock me out of the system, again.

That's all fixed now, but wait, there's more!

In 2001 I started processing most cc transactions as 'batches'. That is, recurring transactions are stored in a database, and I jsut have to select which ones to run on a given day, enter any special notes to be attached to the individual transactions, and then let'er rip. A few minutes later each client receives an email receipt, and I receive a copy. Then at the same time every day I receive a Batch Settlement Report which tells me that everything was processed successfully, if there were any batches to settle that day. A few days later, the money is deposited into Macrobyte's account.

Back in June, the batches started failing. No settlement report, no money, and no notification of the failure! If I didn't notice that I hadn't been paid, then I was simply out of luck.

A very courteous rep from Authorize.net just told me that he can see that many of my batches have "errored out" in the last five months, but he couldn't see why. Nothing changed on my end, at all, so the problem must be at their end. He agreed, and said he would "try to have an engineer offer some suggestions."

Yeah. That's customer service in the twenty-first century. A courteous, friendly black hole from which no light or information can ever escape.

My Newly Extended Workspace

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:49:58 GMT

My workspace, with my new-to-me 20" Cinema Display. If you click on the photo, you can see all the notes I added to it in Flickr.

It's amazing how much you can learn about a person with a single photograph. For example, I obviously have no problem with clutter. ;-)

(Man I need to toss some of this junk.)

Apple claims that larger displays make you significantly more productive, so Macrobyte's future is looking bright. (Speaking of bright, the Cinema Display is at least twice as bright as the laptop.)

Recovery

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:30:45 GMT

The last two months have been some of the busiest I can remember.

It started with RailsConf in June (Chicago). Due to some persistence and a friendly contact, I landed a big new project on July 1st. I've been flat out on that project almost nonstop since then. Plus, July is my heaviest month of training on the bike for the PMC.

August included the PMC, an exhortation on the 20th, and my first lecture (an hour long talk to which the public is invited, at the ecclesial hall, though guests rarely show up). The lecture was last night. Two days earlier was the true deadline for the big new project. I made it (with minutes to spare!) but this left very little time for actually writing my lecture.

All the time-pressure of the last few days has kept me off the bike: I haven't ridden since Thursday. The endorphin withdrawal has hit hard, but this is somewhat offset by the relief of not having any pressing deadlines. I've tried to work on some other stuff (I do still have other clients!), but mostly I've just been drifting all day.

I'm hoping/planning to take off the next sunny day. No work, no computers (mostly). The weather reports suggest that will be Wednesday. We'll see.

Chicago for Five Days, PMC in Six Weeks

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 10:54:24 GMT

Corinne and I are flying to Chicago today. For me it's work (mostly), as I'm attending RailsConf, and working out a Rails app I've written for a client who will also be there. For Corinne, it's a vacation, and it's safe to say she's pretty excited.

However... this is keeping me off my bike. I have to be honest and blunt, here: I'm really, truly worried — almost scared, in fact — about the PMC this year. The weight just isn't coming off in spite of a lot of time on the bike, and taking five days off is certainly not going to help. If the PMC was starting today, I don't think I'd be able to finish it. When we get home on Monday, I'll have about six weeks to whip my butt into shape.

Another thing worrying me is the lack of support for the PMC this year. There has still been only ONE donation. What's going on? What happened to all of my friends who said they'd continue sponsoring me because they recognized this was an important cause?

Nothing like stressing out before a trip...

Invoice Troubles

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 17 May 2006 16:07:28 GMT

I've been working on one project for the last nine days. Long hours (which is a good thing about all the rain, as there was no temptation to go outside), and my head has really "been in it."

Today I need to generate the invoice, but looking back over my time sheets I see that — on many of those nine days — all I did was write down the name of the project and how many hours I spent on it. Which means producing this invoice is going to take ten times longer than it should because I need to review all of my work in order to figure out what was done when.

As I told Greg, I'm tempted to fire me for this mess, as I certainly know better than to go so many days without putting down any details. Inexcusable and unforgivable. However, firing myself would mean that I have to do all the work, plus I'd have nobody to boss around anymore. We wouldn't like that. ;-)

Conversant Patterns Contest is Live!

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 14:27:08 GMT

At long last, the Conversant patterns contest is live!

Prizes include a 60 GB video iPod with a $50 iTunes gift certificate, a 30 GB iPod, and one year of Macrobyte's "Domain Hosting" package!

This contest was originally the idea of Terry Frazier. Terry, Clark Venable, and Macrobyte are the sponsors.

We've been planning this for months. :-)

A New Conversant Branch?

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 19:55:23 GMT

The following is a copy of a letter I just sent to the Frontier-kernel developers' mailing list.

(This is no April Fools Day joke, I promise!)

Hi all,

I've been maintaining my own local branch of the kernel with the changes we need for Conversant.

The only significant difference between the trunk and my copy is one verb group (builtins.conv) with a single verb (compileString). The other differences are all to resources, either to support the extra verb group or to change various static strings in the app (like the name and version number).

More parts of Conversant can/should/will be kernelized, so the number of verbs in that group will grow with time, but that's all there is for now.

It's been Macrobyte's plan, from the very beginning, to release Conversant as open source. Now I'd like to follow through with that by setting up a conversant branch on the sourceforge-hosted svn repository, and maintaining the source code there rather than locally. This code would be available under the same license as the rest of the Frontier kernel, of course.

Does anyone have any significant objections, questions, or concerns before I proceed with this plan?

Now the FAR bigger problem for me is actually the Conversant-related .root files. This is a totally HUGE amount of data, much bigger than everything in Frontier.root and MainResponder.root. These should all go into the repository also (probably as another branch, like Thomas did with Frontier's .root files), but I haven't yet figured out how to handle root updates with a cvsSync-based system.

(Perhaps I'll actually do everything twice: check all changes into a root updates server, AND check the changes in with cvsSync. Honestly, I haven't spent much time investigating this yet.)

Anyway, I hope and assume that my plan is ok with everybody, but please speak up if I'm mistaken.

Thanks,

Seth

We'll see what happens. I'm not anticipating any problems, but who knows? Not knowing is why I asked in the first place (and is why I probably shouldn't hav ended the letter by saying that I "assume" the plan is ok with everybody, since asking shows I wasn't assuming that at all!)

Bargaining

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 18:15:13 GMT

Have you ever had a client that dickers with you for a better price?

I have one (occasional) client who has done this with me each time he's purchased from me. I'm surprised to find that I quite enjoy it.

In fact, I used to expect all of my clients to do this. If my quote was too high, I expected them to tell me. Unfortunately, over the years I found that if my quote was too high then my regular clients would simply put the job off until they could afford it (which often meant skipping it entirely), and new clients would just go with someone else. This meant that when business was 'lean', I would intentionally low-bid projects, just to be sure I'd have some work (even with regular clients).

If more people were willing and able to dicker, buying and selling would be a lot more fun! (My impression is that this practice is still quite common in other countries. The person I mentioned in the second paragraph is not from the U.S., which may have something to do with it.)

To be fair, I should also mention that I have one who usually tries to talk me into a *higher* price. ;-)

Saturday in Lancaster

seth@macrobyte.net — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 23:34:15 GMT

Breakfast with Larry

Saturday morning I was up at 6:30 so I'd be ready (and fully conscious) by the time Larry Fox picked me up for breakfast.

Who's Larry? A voice from my past, that's who.

Background...

For three-and-a-half years I was a consultant to RR Donnelley, primarily to the facility in Old Saybrook, CT. When I started working with them, they received film from their customers, stripped it up, and created printing plates. I helped them migrate from that traditional workflow to Computer-to-Plate (CTP). By "help" I mean that I was in charge of training the employees, designing the workflow, reviewing and recommending purchases, meeting with their clients, making sure the jobs were finished on time (which was very hard to do in the beginning), solving problems, meeting with the vendors (especially Creo, now part of Kodak) and supporting the sales people.

Larry was part of the core team that was retrained in the digital workflow. I worked very closely with him and just a few others, and eventually that core group was split up across the three shifts and were able to handle most of the work that came through the department.

In early 1996, I accepted an offer to work at RRD as a 'technical supervisor'. It was a huge cut in pay (but still not a bad paycheck), but I really wanted to see the project through to the end. To accept this job I had to turn down an offer for my dream job at Creo in British Columbia. It wasn't an easy decision to make, but for one thing: Corinne was out here, and I didn't want to be 3,000 miles away. Plus, I wanted to see the project at RRD through to the end. (I sometimes wonder how I'm doing in that parallel universe where I chose the other path.) Absolutely no regrets, though: I'm happy with those parts of my life that are under my illusion of control.

In early 1997, I quit RRD. It was almost exactly a year from when I took the job. My boss (the manager of the print side of the facility, second in command in the entire building) didn't like a report I wrote and asked me to change the numbers to make them look better. He wouldn't take no for an answer, so I walked.

I haven't seen Larry, Bill, Dick, or even Art C. since then.

Larry picked me up in front of the hotel, and we went to Cracker Barrel for breakfast. I had a great time! Larry looks good, and he seems to be enjoying his new IT job at a local college campus. He misses New England's weather, but says he's managed a lot more cycling down here than he did in CT.

I guess we ate and talked for 90 minutes (+/-), then he drove me over to the (small) campus where he works. It's brand new, and is right behind the gargantuan RRD Lancaster East plant.

Larry had three generalizations about Lancaster. I definitely agree with two of them, but I don't really know about the third (maybe, maybe not).

The corn in Lancaster County is unbelievably good. It's really funny that this was his first point, as Corinne always says the same thing.
There are "mountains of good food" in Lancaster, so there are a lot of fat people.
There are a lot more smokers in Lancaster than in CT. That seems like it might be true, I've certainly seen quite a few, but that's anecdotal so I'm not sure.

Lunch with Clark

After he dropped me off, I worked while waiting for Clark to show up. He was driving down from Hershey so we could have lunch at 11:30.

We went to the Taj Mahal and sat in the parking lot for a little while because they open at noon. No problem, there was plenty to talk about (Clark is always interested in what and how Macrobyte is doing).

Lunch was delicious: they had a buffet! This my second or third time at this restaurant, and I'm pretty convinced that they have the best Indian food outside of India.

After lunch we (accidentally) drove around for thirty minutes before finding MacHeads just one exit up from the restaurant. I'm happy to say that their advice for Clark regarding a couple of old, dead iBooks was the same as my own: sell them for parts on eBay.

Back at the hotel, I wheeled out my bike so he could have a look, and realized one thing immediately: it's very badly in need of a bath. :-( It's only been a little over 100 miles, honest!

Oh, one other thing: Clark has an excellent car. Vroom! Like, I could feel it pushing me back into the seat like only a real sports car can. (Jed, if you read this: I said the same thing about his car that you've said about your truck a few times!)

Riding Solo

After Clark dropped me off I worked for a couple hours and then went for another ride at 4:00. The weather was fantastic again: 65° and sunny. Clouds were starting to come in from the west, but the rain wasn't supposed to start for a few hours.

I tried to go off in a different direction than yesterday, but somehow ended up on 772 again, headed east. Two years ago when we were hear in the Summer, staying at a different hotel in a different part of town, I found myself on 772 every day except when I rode up to meet Corinne at the cat show. This road really is a 'collector'!

There were two riders about 1/4 mile behind me. I kept trying to 'shake' 772 and ending up back on it again, and eventually I saw them up ahead of me. I caught up with them and chatted for a little while. When I asked about any big hills in the area to help with my workout, they both exclaimed at the same time, "You're on it!" Yeah, it figures. This is flatland!

My intent was to ride forty miles, but the clouds seemed to be coming in and I didn't want to be caught out in the middle of farm country (where I really am the tallest structure around!) during a thunderstorm. Ended up with 32.64 miles at 18.2 mph.

Dinner with Corinne

For dinner, Corinne and I had wings from Lancaster Brewing Company (takeout) and tenderloin tips subs from Villa Nova (takeout, again). Those subs are pricey, but they're really good. (Corinne has perfected their recipe, though, so I don't really feel like it was worth the price.)

Great day, and thanks again to Larry and Clark for the meals and conversation!

Boston Bounce

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:05 GMT

Today was a good day. I met with a client in Boston for a few hours, and now I have a big, new project.

I can't say much about the project yet because the client would be disappointed to know that I was blabbing about their business before I've even written a line of code (though I'm not under NDA). However, I can say that this project is going to use every scrap of technical skill and experience that I have, and I'm psyched!

The project is big, but not so big that it will prevent me from doing other work as long as I manage my time. (And it's a long-term, ongoing project.)

However, the trip is 109 miles each way, through (or around) Providence and Boston traffic. Combine that with the need to be 'on' and engaged for the whole time I was there, and the result is one very tired Seth.

Happy tired, but still tired.

This isn't the first good news for Macrobyte this year... and that may be the best news of all.

Macrobyte Really (REALLY) Loves Its Clients

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:14:59 GMT

A client in Boston wants me to come up for a visit, to kick-start a big new project.

The president (a gentleman who sounds nearly identical to Steve Davis on the phone) proposes a couple of dates and times. I forward the relevant part of the message to Corinne, with the following note to see if she knows something about my schedule I haven't remembered:

Honey,

[president's first name] wants to meet again.

Any day seem better or worse, to you? I'm leaning towards next Tuesday.

I love you!

A few minutes later I get another email from the client:

I don't understand your email.

Are we on for Tuesday? What time? 10:00 is good for me.

Best Regards

My face immediately turns bright red, even though I'm sitting here in my office, all alone.

Yes, that's right, I just called a client "honey" and told him I love him. Smooth move!

I've wondered about this client's sense of humor, but after I explain what happened...

I feel better. I was wondering what you had on your mind. Isn't email great?

Indeed. What would I do without it?

Update on the Email Conundrum

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 19:58:52 GMT

The email conundrum gets weirderer and weirderer.

First, a little more background. I should have pointed out from the beginning that this contractor (XXX) has been working with the client for awhile. More than a year. Initially, he took over the management of their Conversant sites. We spoke a number of times on the Conversant support site and in private email. Personable guy (though he sees the world through Windows-colored glasses).

Now, here's the additional weirdness, the 'further evidence' I mentioned a little while ago.

The client had asked me for some additional services before shutting down their site. XXX was cc'ed on that request. I responded in the affirmative, and also cc'ed XXX.

On February 7th, after the work was done, I sent a message to the client to let him know the work was done and what I was charging. I have the original email in front of me right now: it was sent ONLY and SOLELY to the client. There's only one 'To:' address, and there are no CC or BCC addresses.

The client didn't respond. The charges were only a couple hundred dollars, which I knew wasn't a problem. 28 hours later, I resent the same email, again only to him.

On the 9th (yesterday), when I still hadn't received a response, I wrote to XXX. Here's what I said (note that BBBB is my replacement for the client's name, just like XXX for the contractor):

	>XXX,
	>
	>I have been completely unable to contact BBBB. All of my email to him
	>just seems to vanish into the ether. I never get any bounces, but he
	>doesn't seem to receive my messages, either. (I've actually wondered
	>if they're being intercepted.)
	>
	>Could you please have him call me tomorrow, towards the end of his
	>work day? I just want to put the charges through for [SNIPped for privacy]
	>
	>I'm in the US (guess you knew that), at 860-572-0244.

He wrote back and said that he would call the client to have them call or email me. They didn't. So, I wrote to him again to see if he knew why.

His response is where things turn weird again:

	>Sorry, Seth it's not a conspiracy - just me.  Today was hell and I
	>forgot they take Friday afternoons off (lucky folk).
	>
	>I HAVE sent them an email and am sure they will contact you Monday.
	>
	>I had already told BBBB what your charges were and he accepted them.

OK, so he didn't call them, and it was too late by the time I reminded him. What about that last sentence, though?

This is ridiculous.

I wrote to ask him how he knows what my charges are, but have not received any response.

If the contractor was a talented individual who (I believed) really wanted what's best for the client, there would be no issue here. Instead (warning: assumption alert) this looks more and more like a more-technically-knowledgeable-than-the-client HACK who has taken the client hostage and they don't even know it.

Maybe I'm wrong and nothing shady is happening. I haven't yet come up with any realistic alternatives, but I guess it's possible.

Mystified in Mystic

An Odd Situation, an Email Conundrum

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 00:09:26 GMT

One of Macrobyte's long-time hosting clients wrote to me a couple of weeks ago to say that, after almost five years, they're moving to a new platform. They contracted someone about a year ago to handle their technical needs, and he has developed a completely new site for them in ASP. This contractor convinced them that their sites needed to be redone from scratch.

Eh, whatever, these things happen sometimes. They professed to be extremely happy with our service, but their contractor really felt that this other technology was more appropriate for their needs. Here's a slightly modified (to omit names) excerpt of my response:

My guess is that, in the end, the real answer will simply be that XXX was more familiar with the other system. That's often the real reason web sites are moved from one platform to another.

If that sounds harsh, it wasn't. I was politely asking if they would mind explaining the decision a little more fully. If there's something Macrobyte could have offered, but didn't, I'd like to rectify the situation for the next client. Still, as you can see, I had my suspicions.

I still have that email. It was only sent directly to the client who wrote to me. The contractor -- who had already taken over all hosting responsibilities for this client, including email and web -- was not cc'd or bcc'd.

This is where things start to go weird.

Three hours after I sent that email, I received a response from the 'new guy'. He cc'ed the client, and confirmed that yes, in fact, the move had more to do with familiarity with the other system than with technical reasons.

Another three hours later, and the client responds to the email from the 'new guy'. Here's the first paragraph of his email (anonymized, again):

I have read your email to me at the end of XXX's email.for some reason I haven't received the email direct.

So... he never received my private email, but somehow the new contrator and hosting service both received and responded to it.

If the client didn't receive it, then he couldn't have forwarded it to the new guy. Note that we're only talking about a matter of hours, here, not days. He didn't simply forget.

I believe all of these facts to be completely correct. With that, I can only come to one conclusion, but I'd like some other opinions. Maybe there's some answer to this which I haven't considered.

Let's leave it there for now. Comments greatly appreciated!