What's it all about, Alfie?

My favorite IM client - Adium, released version 1.3 this morning and I had to get it. The release notes indicate a ton of improvements, but there's enough bug fixes to make it worth the time to download the version.

They have made it a big deal to revamp the entire contact manager system in the app. Now you have much more control over your buddy list as well as being able to set different activity alerts (sounds, events, etc.) for each buddy's different actions. While I don't do that now, I can certainly see why that would be a very nice thing to have.

There's also now Facebook chat as well as new MSN chatting libraries to make that smoother than before. It's a heck of an upgrade, and if you haven't tried it, you really should. Highly recommended.

I haven't had a lot to do today on current projects as I'm waiting for others to get things lined up or deployed for me to do my stuff. So I've spent most of the day transferring the contents of my HTML journal at work to the WordPress weblog I've got there. I accomplished about 4 months of postings - quite a lot of work, actually. At this rate, I should be able to get all the entries into WordPress in another week.

But even making this nice progress is tiring. I'm really tired. Sitting still... hammering in changes. Trying to stay focused so as not to make mistakes... it's just plain tiring. But it's still good to see the "To Do" list shrink. My goal is still to get it all into WordPress - even if it takes longer than a week to finish.

Today is the first day of school for my kids. They are all excited - some more nervous than others. I can remember loving school and being really excited to go back in the Fall. It's a great time to be a kid. Sure, my new High Schooler is a little intimidated - as all changers are... but after a week he's going to love it! Have fun kids!

UPDATE: everyone had a great time. Joseph didn't get lost in the halls at the new High School... Marie loved being in 7^th grade and knowing the school like the back of her hand... and Angelina loved being the big 5^th grader and Traffic Guard. It was a banner first day!

Today I was back-filling a lot of journal entries from my old HTML-based work journal to my WordPress work weblog and I noticed that there was a serious problem with the table representation. There was a hugs gap at the top of this one table, and on another the gap was smaller. I could not, for the life of me figure out what the problem was until I glanced at the page source one time and looked at the data in the table.

I'd been focusing on the CSS and classes and such, but when I looked at the table's data, I saw that there were TD tags and not td. This may seem very innocent, but I've learned from experience that WordPress does not like the upper-case tags, and will not even recognize them. What was happening was that WordPress was putting line breaks ('br' tags) at the end of each row, and somehow that was getting turned into the large gap at the top of the table.

When I went back and made all the TD tags td, the gaps at the top of the tables were exactly the same. Then I went into the CSS for the theme I was using and made classes for the header row, and even and odd rows so that I didn't have to remember the coloring of each row. This is going to make the tables all look the same and that's a lot nicer.

Also, I learned an interesting point. In a margin: statement, you can use negative values to "encroach" on someone's space. I used this to offset what I thought was an excessive buffer at the top of the table. Works like a charm now.

Because I have had some spare time today, I've been transferring some of the old journal entries from my work journal to a WordPress blog I created for just that purpose. The old system was a single, giant HTML page, and while it loaded quickly, and you could do searches of sorts, it wasn't as flexible as a WordPress system. Which is, of course, why I made the change.

Anyway, it's not all that bad if you get the data formatted reasonably well. Sure, it's tedious, and it's not something you'd do for fun, but if you want to move the entries into the system it sure beats re-typing all those pages. I'm close to getting 2008 into WordPress, but that still leaves 2006 and 2007, and that's a ton of entries.

Baby Steps... just keep taking baby steps.

I just got a little pop-up saying that NetNewsWire had an update for me - to v3.1.7b4. Seems there was a problem at startup, and someone wanted to be able to execute Javascript for the given page from Obj-C. Nothing major, but nice to update in any case.

But after the update I noticed this same problem I've had for a while - every now and then, when refreshing the list of articles, the parser gets "stuck" on PHPmac.com and the "out of" number of RSS feeds climbs rapidly without bound. I typically just cancel the activity, and I'm OK. But I decided to check, and sure enough, the site is there, but I'm not allowed to see anything. I think this is what's causing the problem.

So... if I get time tomorrow I should send in a little bug to the developer and let him know what I've found. I'm not the only one, I'm sure, and it's probably a much larger issue of proper error handling.

[8/20 3:44am] UPDATE: I sent in the bug report. We'll see if they contact me, or an update appears to correct this in the next release.

I saw that Apple released another update to the iPhone/iPod Touch OS - now to v2.0.2 and so I once again got out the cord and updated it via iTunes. It's really easy enough, but I was surprised today when my laptop tried to sync the updates I'd gotten for a few apps off the App Store - one of them failed and gave a very cryptic error message. I'll have to look and see what the status is after the update.

I'm sure this is hard for a company to become so diverse in it's product set when it's still relatively small. I appreciate they are doing their best, and in a few revisions they'll get it stabilized and things will run a lot more smoothly. I wish they'd get MobileMe worked out - and add SSL to the site. I would like to be able to use that someday, but for now, I'm doing it the old fashioned way - manually.

This morning I remembered that yesterday I was having a few issues getting into the house from the net. Actually, I couldn't. So I wanted to have a look at things before I took off for the train. When I hit the router's configuration page I noticed that there was a firmware upgrade - several minor-point updates, but nothing apparently major. So I decided to update it.

I probably should have thought this through first.

I was on my MacBook Pro. Connected to the router. So I killed the update.

I had to go down and use my iMac which was hard-wired into the network and even then I had to power-cycle the router because it was smart enough to know that it was being managed from another IP address. The problem was the WiFi was dead due to the update. So I had to power-cycle it and then do the update from the hard-wired machine.

Now, had I been smarter, I'd have switched to the other WiFi router before connecting to the first router and doing the update. Had I done that, I'd have been golden. Alas, it was clear right away when I didn't.

In the end, the update was good and the connectivity returned. I'm not really sure if that was the issue, or something else, but the update was necessary and that fixed things.

I got this email from my daughter today. It's not often I get to look up and a puppet is staring me straight in the face. Nope... not too often at all. In fact, if I had to bet what would happen to me today, I might very well have laid money on the fact that I did not think I'd get a puppet email today.

Just goes to show you, you need to keep an open mind.

This morning I read that there was an update to Scribbles - the new drawing app I'm looking at, to v1.2.3. The release notes said something about a bug in one of the brushes, which is nice to know they are paying attention and listening to users. I was able to pick up a nice wireless Mighty Mouse for my MacBook Pro, so I'm hoping to really start to use Scribbles soon, but it's going to depend on the task(s) at had as well. I've got to have something I need to do to really test it out.