Ranting and Roaring

BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6.4 for Windows is now available from here. Jäger 1.6.4 fixes a serious bug that was wiping out the values of text fields in dialogs. If you’re using Jäger 1.6.2, we highly suggest you upgrade ASAP.

Here’s a screenshot of Jäger running under Redhat Fedora Core 3 (Test 3) using the Konqueror browser. Click on the image for full size.

We’ve just completed a major section of documentation for Jäger: Tuning in to Podcasts with BlogMatrix Jäger. Go read it!

Although I haven’t been posting much recently, I’ve been reading you all with great interest. The vast majority of my time is now spent either with my family or trying to get my project, Jäger, firmly off the ground and steadily producing revenue.

One of my big issues with blogging (and creating web content) is it’s so damn difficult to make posts – there’s just too many steps involved and too much HTML has to be known, even with the best of tools. Almost every post you see on this blog is written in Microsoft Word (because I like the interface) and converted into HTML afterwards. I’m working on a tool to automate this process. You can see the first results here.

The US election. My prediction? 311 electoral college votes for Bush. How did I get that number? I pulled it out of my …. Never mind. My recent background in risk analysis says that this is a more realistic look at the situation. If there’s a 100 parallel universes run in parallel on Monday (and who knows?), Bush will win in 62 of them and lose in 38.

I hope for a Bush win, but I won’t through myself in front of a bus or anything if he loses. I think Kerry is a loathsome insect of a human being and at best his politics could be described as “declinist” but probably more accurately as “defeatist” or “American self-loathing”. He’ll cut and run from Iraq and the subsequent slaughter will be of a scale not seen since … well, since the US bugged out of Vietnam. This won’t concern too many of those currently shedding crocodile tears for US troops (“bring our baby killers home”) or Iraq “civilian” casualties, as their only interest seems to be in blaming the US for something.

What else. Well, read go read Peaktalk. He’s blogging about what I’m thinking otherwise. And what’s up with Bruce? I’ve been drinking lemon water (without sugar) at night before I go to bed in the hope that it will help me a lose a few more pounds (with mixed successes). I think Bruce might be drinking lemon water too, but just because he enjoys the taste of sour stuff in his mouth.

We just checked out Jäger 1.6.2 to see if it would work with Webjay’s enclosures format (which doesn’t include the proper length). It works just great, though the current download is showing “-1″ bytes which is a tiny bug we’ll have to fix.

If you’re thinking about getting a license to get rid of the nag screen (and help us out greatly too!), today’s a good day to do it: PayPal is waving our merchant fees, meaning we actually get to keep all your money today!

BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6.2 is now available from here. Jäger 1.6.2 continues our concentration on Podcasting, bring a number of new features to the table. In addition, 1.6.2 fixes a number of minor bugs that were in the 1.6.1 release.

The major change with 1.6.2 is the addition of the “Attachments and Podcasts” List, which will appear near the bottom of the application. This List provides:

• the status of every attachment in the webpages you are monitoring
• mousing over the paperclip icons will give a mini status report
• by right-clicking and selecting “Attachments and Podcasting” on an item will allow you to selectively download items, play items, or item the folder the attachment has been downloaded to
• mark attachments as “never expires”

In addition, Jäger 1.6.2 adds attachment expiration. Attachments that are downloaded now expire after 7 days, unless marked as “never expires”. A future release will allow more detailed control of the expiration period on a blog-by-blog basis

Here’s a screenshot from the Macintosh version. The currently displayed list is the “Attachments and Podcasts” List. The mouse pointer (not displayed, due to peculiarities of the Grab utility) is over a paperclip and the popup window displays details about that particular attachment.

Also note the cute little jellybean icons for the Search and List options near the left side of the Jäger application.

We’re just putting the finishing touches on BlogMatrix 1.6.2. Initially, this was intended just to be a “catch up” release for the Macintosh but after using the Podcasting code for a while, we noticed several shortcomings that needed to be addressed. We’re not including any screen shots with this announcement; we’ll save that for tomorrow.

Here’s what’s new:

• there’s a new “major” list in the application, similar to the “Updated Favorites”, “Updated Webpages” and “All Webpages” lists. It is called “Attachments and Podcasts” and will list every attachment that Jäger currently knows about. This is great for finding Podcasts you have already downloaded or are in the process of downloading
• we’ve added the concept of “expiring” attachments. That is, after a certain period of time, attachments will automatically be deleted from disk. You can control the length of time before expiration on a global basis or on a per-weblog basis. You can also stop an attachment from every being expired.
• the “Attachments and Podcasting” submenu (available from the “Actions” menu or from a right mouse click on any list) has been greatly extended. You can now:
  • get more information about an attachment
  • remove an attachment from the disk
  • stop an attachment for ever being expired
• You can now combine selective downloading with Podcasting. In the original release, you had to download every attachment within a weblog to have the attachments added to your Podcast lists. Now you can use the “Attachments and Podcasting” submenu to choose which attachments you want to download.
• Mousing over attachment paperclips gives more information about the attachment and its status

The following bug fixes have been fixed:

• sometimes attachments were being downloaded multiple times after restarting your computer. This was because information wasn’t being marked as “save to disk” correctly with the application. This is fixed.
• There are some issues about choice of download folder reverting to the default after restarting. We’re tracking this down.

The Macintosh version (for OS 10.3 only, unfortunately) will be using several new pieces of technology:

• the application will be constructed with Bob Ippolito’s “py2app”
• the controller for iTunes podcasting will be built with Hamish Sanderson’s “appscript” module

Update: I correct the version number.

Home safe and sound. Someone smashed up the rear-bumper of our rent-a-car and Knot’s Berry Farm while we were parked, which made me very unpleased. On the way home in the limo, someone right behind us missed the exit off the 401 onto Avenue Road but decided to go for it anyway. Result: one loud bang and one very f*cked up car. They really bounce quite well you know.

Danny Ayer has an interesting post on what he wants out of blog reading software.

Jäger gets tapped out at about 500 subscriptions. There are two problems in the design of Jäger that cause this. First, Jäger wants to keep a lot of information in memory — pretty well everything except the full-text content of blog postings, which is dynamically loaded at viewing time; and secondly the fact that each weblog and all its entries are stored as an individual file on your disk and thus we are limited by the speed of your filesystem which typically isn’t that great.

Both these problems can be overcome, but its not a priority issue at this point. There’s so much more that needs to be done for the average user before we start worrying about the outlying cases.

Jäger does have a quite powerful set of facilities for sorting through weblog content. You can set up filters to ignore certain blog postings OR to ignore all blog postings except certain ones. You can set up watch lists to highlight blog postings you’re interested in AND you can mark blogs to say only show watched entries.

One of the primary failings of Jäger is the documentation for all this is scattered throughout our blog postings. Our project for Novemeber is to collect this into a coherent set of documentation.

Danny does have the right idea though. In the next major revision of the underlying guts, we should be aiming for a two or three magnitude order of improvement in the number of blogs that can be handled, not just a single order.

We’ll be back in the office on Monday, so if there’s any outstanding e-mails or bug reports that you haven’t received a response to, you’ll get it soon.

We’re very pleased with the feedback from the 1.6 release. We’ll be sending out a minor bug release next week, but there’s no major complaints. If you have any suggestions, noticed any problems, or just want to say “hi!”, don’t hesitate to contact us. The best way to do this is via the “Help” menu in Jäger, but you can also just send e-mails to support@blogmatix.com.

Our priority for the next week is to get the Macintosh version of 1.6 out. After that we have more exciting developments in the works that we’ll be telling you about in the coming weeks.

I was off the net for the last few days: the hotel we were staying in Palm Springs only had WiFi Internet access and I forgot to bring my card. I won’t do that again. If you’ve been following California news, well, they had an incredibly rainy Wednesday. Normally in Palm Springs they get about 1/4″ of rain in October; that day they had 3″. Many of the roads that we were driving on earlier got washed out. Their flood control sucks over there.

Our plan originally had us going to LA for a couple of days but we enjoyed Palm Springs so much, we spent another two days there. There are not too many Yankee fans there, I tell you. I was watching the game at the hotel bar and the place went crazy after whatshisnamewiththelonghairandthefuzzyface hit the Grand Slam. A great moment in baseball – I’m not really a fan, but everyone I know is a Sox fan so I’m happy for them. They deserve a win every century or so anyway!

A great discovery in Palm Springs was a new restaurant called Zin. Phenomenal food, phenomenal service – if you ever get to the neighborhood I suggest you make it a point of stopping there. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays they have half-price wine, which is very nice. On the first night we got the real winner, as suggested by our waiter Jordan, a Pinot Noir called Orogeny. This is what a Pinot Noir should taste like. I had the Kobe Hamburger the second night we went there, which was OK, but on the first night I had the Hanger Steak + Frites, which was fantastic. Joanne had the beef stew the first night and the pork chop the second night. Both were great. We met the owner and the chef, both who came to our table to introduce themselves, which is a very nice touch.

We’re in Anaheim right now, getting ready to go home. We drove directly (if you call missing several of your exits directly) from Palm Springs to Disneyland yesterday and spent most of the day there. I have to say I wasn’t too impressed: many of the rides were broken and Trinity-Anne was too small for most of the other ones. Obviously Roy couldn’t do anything about the later though! The Pirates of the Caribbean was OK, though I was tempted to smack the person ahead of me who decided to take flash-photography pictures of her friends in the black tunnel. The Haunted Mansion wouldn’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t seen Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Trinity-Anne declared at the exit “I wasn’t scared at all”

The other weird thing about Disney was all these older – say in their 40s and 50s – types with seasons passes giddy as … well … more giddy than a three year old. Most were women though a small minority were rotund little men of questionable sexuality, sort of like Pat from SNL. One accosted us in the “Princesses” shop when Trinity-Anne made some inquiry about a Tinker Bell doll and started going on about how she was going to dress up as Tink for Halloween, so on and so forth. Once again had to I remind myself that violence was not the answer, made polite noises and backed away with my hands in plain view. How forgettable is it? Well, I was to the Disney before in 1993 or 94 and I had entirely forgotten about it. That’s forgettable.

On the plus side, everyone I know in Canada looks like a supermodel compared to the majority of people we saw waddling through the park yesterday.

We had an incredible run of luck in Hotels on this trip. We stayed at the Wyndham in Palm Springs twice. We booked the hotel only minutes before at the Visitor’s Center at the edge of town. We got a rate of $109 a night, which is quite amazing for any hotel these days. (For example, in Toronto $100 a night will get you a room that you’ll probably be hearing a prostitute in the next room trying to upsell “her” services so “she” can purchase another rock of crack later that night). The only hotel we had booked was the Westin Mission Hills, which cost us $90 for three days, since Joanne booked that on points. Pretty sweet. The only problem was that it’s kind of boring since you have to drive everywhere – Rancho Mirage is designed for driving everywhere, not for walking anywhere. In contrast, the Windham was a five minute walk from the main strip in Palm Springs. We’re now at the Hyatt in Anaheim, just south of Disneyland. This is a sweet place, recently renovated, nice gym, super friendly staff, and so on and so forth. We booked this the day before for $89 a night and after we got here they upgraded us to a kid’s suite, where Trinity-Anne got her own room and a bunk bed (she had to sleep on the bottom, despite her pleas otherwise).

The only sad part is my digital camera kept giving out on me. I’m fairly sure it’s because the battery has gone bad but unfortunately it means that I have no more photos for you yet.

I’m on vacation in Southern California. Here’s the story so far.

I’m on the road for the next week; I’m off to LA and Palm Springs. I’ll be in contact occasionally to check e-mail, accept your gratuities, comments, jeers etc..

Feedback for 1.6.1 has been quite positive and I’ve got quite a few ideas for incrementally improving the 1.6.2 release. Don’t forget to tell your friends!

Far too much time that I didn’t have went into this little project. Still, they’re happy, Trinity-Anne’s happy so I’m happy.

I’ve been very remiss in not welcoming the latest member to the Switching to Glide team, Rob Page from Chumptastic. My apologies to Rob!

Rob’s been posting up a storm (by StG standards anyway) in the last week:

• Mike O’Neill is back!. I bough O’Neill’s latest from Zunior for $8.88; you can pick up individual tracks for $0.88 — consider getting “We Live Happily” to see what it’s all about.
• The Mooney Suzuki: Alive & Amplified & Overproduced
• The Arcade Fire Lives up to the Hype

If you haven’t already, send a few readers over to Switching to Glide by giving us a link in your Blogroll (and in a posting!).

The Macintosh version of 1.6 will follow in the next two weeks and BitTorrent will (hopefully) be added at around the same time. The “bootstrap” list of weblogs has been updated (finally) from the original 1.0 version to remove some dead blogs and to add a Podcast section.

The complete source code for Jäger 1.6.1 is available here.

Thank you to Sean and Jay for coming to my defence over some incident with Warren Kinsella at the beginning of the year. It’s no big deal really: I took a swipe at Warren and he took a swipe back; that’s the way it should work, I’m not sure what the deal with the lawyers is all about and I hope it doesn’t become a habit.

The best part of whole thing was the comment in my followup by some fellow running a blog called Living in a Society: making fun of Ontarians?. Sheesh. I get the feeling that if the society we’re living in got structured more along his thought lines, my family would now be living in the meanest cinderblock apartment and always assigned last in line for our ration La Gruele (Product of Quebec).

BlogMatrix introduces Jäger 1.6 for Windows.

BlogMatrix is please to announce that Jäger 1.6 for Windows is now available. It can be downloaded from here. Jäger 1.6 contains many feature enhancements, minor bug fixes and three great new major features:

• Podcast Reception
• Bloglines Synchronization
• Universal Searching

Podcast Reception
BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6 is the first weblog reader to provide integrated Podcast reception. Podcasts are weblog attachments containing audio or video items, such as news items, MP3 music files or audio commentary. Jäger will automatically download these attachments and add them to the playlist of your choice on iTunes or on Windows Media Player.

BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6 has the best features of any podcast reception tool out there, including entry filtering, choice of media players, scheduling control, plus all the other features that come along with Jäger, such as drag and drop subscriptions and OPML support.

Bloglines Synchronization
BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6 is the first weblog reader to offer synchronization with Bloglines, the online weblog reading service. Simply enter your Bloglines account information and press “Synchronize Now” and Jäger will keep its blogroll up to date with your Bloglines account.

Universal Searching
BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6 is the first weblog reader to provide integrated searching not only its own stored content but also many external search engines and databases, such as Google, Yahoo, IMDB, Amazon, Sourceforge, ESPN, BBC News, CBS News and others. An upcoming release of Jäger will extend this functionality to add persistent searches

About BlogMatrix Jäger
BlogMatrix Jäger is a weblog and RSS syndication reader that uses the user’s browser to display content. Jäger is a cross-platform open source project that runs as a native application on both Windows and Macintosh OS 10.3. Jäger is one of the most feature rich weblog readers available, including features such as drag and drop subscription, OPML publication and subscription, Podcast reception, “universal searching” through online search engines, synchronization amongst multiple copies of Jäger, synchronization with Bloglines, automated weblog translation from foreign languages, a plug-in Tool environment, online and offline weblog reading, HTTP proxying, Technorati and other online tools integration. BlogMatrix Jäger can read for RSS 0.9, RSS 2.0, RSS/RDF, Atom; it also provides a number of “strategies” for reading websites that don’t support syndication feeds such as online newspapers.

BlogMatrix is please to announce that Jäger 1.6 for Windows is now available. It can be downloaded from here. Jäger 1.6 contains many feature enhancements, minor bug fixes and three great new major features:

• Podcast Reception
• Bloglines Synchronization
• Universal Searching

Podcast Reception
BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6 is the first weblog reader to provide integrated Podcast reception. Podcasts are weblog attachments containing audio or video items, such as news items, MP3 music files or audio commentary. Jäger will automatically download these attachments and add them to the playlist of your choice on iTunes or on Windows Media Player.

BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6 has the best features of any podcast reception tool out there, including entry filtering, choice of media players, scheduling control, plus all the other features that come along with Jäger, such as drag and drop subscriptions and OPML support.

Bloglines Synchronization
BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6 is the first weblog reader to offer synchronization with Bloglines, the online weblog reading service. Simply enter your Bloglines account information and press “Synchronize Now” and Jäger will keep its blogroll up to date with your Bloglines account.

Universal Searching
BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6 is the first weblog reader to provide integrated searching not only its own stored content but also many external search engines and databases, such as Google, Yahoo, IMDB, Amazon, Sourceforge, ESPN, BBC News, CBS News and others. An upcoming release of Jäger will extend this functionality to add persistent searches

About BlogMatrix Jäger
BlogMatrix Jäger is a weblog and RSS syndication reader that uses the user’s browser to display content. Jäger is a cross-platform open source project that runs as a native application on both Windows and Macintosh OS 10.3. Jäger is one of the most feature rich weblog readers available, including features such as drag and drop subscription, OPML publication and subscription, Podcast reception, “universal searching” through online search engines, synchronization amongst multiple copies of Jäger, synchronization with Bloglines, automated weblog translation from foreign languages, a plug-in Tool environment, online and offline weblog reading, HTTP proxying, Technorati and other online tools integration. BlogMatrix Jäger can read for RSS 0.9, RSS 2.0, RSS/RDF, Atom; it also provides a number of “strategies” for reading websites that don’t support syndication feeds such as online newspapers.

We’re running the first cut of the 1.6 release at the office right now. We’ll be releasing it later this morning.

CBC news reports:

Strong sales of its popular iPod digital music players helped Apple Computer to more than double its fourth-quarter profit, the company announced Wednesday.

[...]The results handily beat analysts’ expectations. Apple says iPod shipments are up six-fold in one year

Apple said it shipped 2,016,000 iPods in the quarter, up 500 per cent over the same quarter a year earlier.

GenericThread is a part of BlogMatrix Jäger’s “generic” library providing generally useful functions. GenericThread is a wrapper around python’s “threading.Thread” that provides a few useful extra functions:

• passing of arguments when starting
• pythoncom initialization, for applications which use Win32 COM objects
• methods which are called before and after the main body of the thread, for initialization and teardown
• the ability to gracefully halt thread operations

You can download GenericThread here.

Here’s an example of using GenericThread:

 import time import GenericThread  class MyThread(GenericThread.GenericThread): 	def __init__(self): 		# the named parameters are optional 		GenericThread.GenericThread.__init__(self, is_daemon = False, is_com = False) 		 	def CustomizeStart(self, a, b, c): 		# the command line arguments are arbitrarly defined -- you can as many as you want 		print "CustomizeStart.CustomizeStart: called -- we're in the thread, starting up" 		 	def CustomizeFinished(self, a, b, c): 		print "CustomizeStart.CustomizeFinished: called -- we're in the thread, shutting down" 		 	def CustomizeRun(self, a, b, c): 		print "CustomizeStart.CustomizeRun: called -- we're running: do your work here" 		 		for i in xrange(10): 			self.CheckHalt() 			time.sleep(.5) 			print i, a, b, c 		 thread = MyThread() thread.Start("a", 4784, [ 1, 2, 3 ])