What's it all about, Alfie?

Hey! This morning the guys at Panic released Coda 1.5.1 - a bug list of bug fixes for the all-in-one web development tool. They have an interesting way of doing the updates - within the app, but not with Sparkle - at least not that I can see. No matter, it's nice to see that they were so quick with the update given the time it took to get 1.5 out the door.

I do wish I did more of this kind of web development on my Mac - just because I like this tool so much. It really is a nice way to deal with the non-web app sites.

I got a neat little tweet this morning from Twitterrific saying that they had a new public beta available with more tweets, better security and a host of fixes. I had to get it - I tweet every now and then, but love listening to the tweets of friends, and Hodgman - that's an interesting guy.

They have been working hard on the iPhone version so it's understandable that they haven't updated the Mac desktop client in a while, but it's nice to see that they are back at it. Cool.

I am really surprised that I missed this given that I was dealing with my London counterparts all day yesterday, but the London Stock Exchange (LSE) was down for seven hours yesterday. Now I'm not one to point fingers, but the Slashdot crowd is pointing out that the system they are using is based on Microsoft's .Net platform, and are certainly making fun of that little tidbit. Even so, seven hours is an incredibly long time to have an exchange down. Holy Cow!

I'm guessing that someone is going to be in big trouble, and there will be a scape goat for this issue. There are too many people angry they couldn't trade for a day - and yesterday at that. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac bailouts... mis-reporting UAL's bankruptcy and losing 80% like a shot... it was a Big Day to be unable to trade.

I saw a tweet this afternoon that BBEdit 9 is out! I had to get it. Well worth the $30 upgrade from 8.7.2 that I was using. The list of new and updated features is impressive. I like the 'Ponies' feature myself. 🙂

What I think I'm going to like most is probably the under-the covers changes like rendering speed and such. It will also be nice to have the ctags colored differently than the standard language-binding tags. I use ctags a lot in my code.

I might get into the habit of using the auto-complete with the delay timer. I'm not sure as I do a lot of typing very fast, and the odds that I'm going to hit that are slim, but it's something to play with.

I general, if you like BBEdit, get it. Great tool.

I've been on the Coda mailing lists for quite a while and have heard the rumblings about the possible death of the product. Nothing more than rumors. A small shop like Panic needs to pace what they are doing to make sure that they deliver a good product year after year. In contrast to popular belief in Corporate America, you can't expect to have a home run app (or release) every month on a tight budget. So we have had to wait.

Coda 1.5 is finally out, and it looks to have some significant improvements, and yet some significant omissions. Maybe these follow a certain usage pattern, and if so, then it's my usage of the tool that's abnormal. For instance, Coda 1.5 has built-in support for Subversion. Great. Why not CVS too? It's not that different. The core tools are on Mac OS X, so they don't have to worry about that. Still, it's nice that they have something in the way of source control, I only have to make a subversion server and migrate a repository to there, but that's a weekend.

Secondly, they add find/replace across multiple files (along with a significantly improved editor - don't know what that means for SubEthaEdit) which will help people fixing multiple links in a web system, but they have no facility for invoking a graphics editor like Photoshop, Acorn, etc. You can drag an image into a page, and it'll place the img tag there, but you can't shell out to a third-party graphics editor? Seems that would be an easy addition and then even if it's not "all in one", it's available for seamless workflow.

I like the tool. It's slick and polished. I don't have a great use for it at this time because I'm not maintaining a dozen websites daily. What I have used it for, I like, and will continue to try and fin things to work on with it. But even I can see the trade-offs they had to make on this release. It's showing more of how it's meant to be used, and what it's not meant to do.

IMAP vs POP3 - classic debate these days. IMAP has 'push' email, POP3 doesn't. Pop3 is old, IMAP it new. GMail is using IMAP now... MobileMe is using IMAP... Everyone is using IMAP - or so they might have us all believe. So I looked into it this morning and decided that POP3 is really quite good enough for me.

First, I had to see if the email servers I hit supported IMAP. First, Google's GMail - Yup. Next, HostMonster - Yup. Lastly, Comcast - Nope. Shucks... we'll, 2 out of 3 isn't bad. I could still move those two to IMAP. And then I started looking at the security of IMAP - just to be safe.

See... I use POP3 and SMTP over SSL to all my mail servers. I simply do not want my mail snatched as I send or receive it. Sure, from server to server it's all in plaintext, but that's going to take a lot more effort on the part of the "snooper" to intercept a major ISP's email. Sure, they can do it, but it's harder. For the last several years, I've been using POP3/SMTP over SSL and have been very happy with it. Every mail server I've needed supports it... and it's just plain secure.

IMAP is plaintext. Period. I'm not a big fan of plaintext passwords and the logins to GMail and Comcast are the logins to my accounts there. So if they snoop it once, they are golden for those accounts. I don't like that.

So I'm going to stick with POP3/SMTP over SSL. It would have been nice, but it's just not something I'm willing to compromise on at this time. Security of my email comes first.

I'm not a big one for rumor sites, but this rendering of the possible new MacBook is about as cool as I think a laptop can be. While I understand a friend's criticism that the size of the pad could create issues for hands and wrists trying to type, but I think the size issue is a compromise. It probably won't be this big, but it'll be bigger than the Air's trackpad.

I have to say that I like the black border on the screen as well primarily because my background is dark, and this lends to the illusion that the border simply isn't there. This is going to be vastly different for folks with lighter backgrounds, but it certainly hides the iSight camera nicely.

In the end, I'm still waiting for the quad-core, 8GB RAM MacBook Pro with the high-end graphics and HDD, and if I'm lucky, I mean really lucky, I'll get to have something like this with a nice, large trackpad, with gestures, that will make it much easier to do some of the graphics work I want to do. It's like a built-in graphics tablet.

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.

My daughter is a huge fan of movie-making and her next foray is into the realm of green screen (or blue screen) movies. She's talking about getting a loft bed to make room in her bedroom to put up the screen. That's a clear vision, I have to say.

So I did a little digging and I have to say that there seems to be a lot of plugins for the older versions of iMovie - you take two clips, one that's the background, the other is the screened clip, and then layer the second on the first. It's a nice way of doing things, but as I've also found out, Final Cut Express ($199) does all this and a whole lot more. So that may explain why I haven't seen any plugins that have kept up with the latest iMovie.

Of these, she seems to be most interested in eZedia's eZeScreen plug-in for iMovie 6 (or later). It's a Universal Binary, and says it'll work with anything after iMovie 6, so we'll have to see what happens when we get the demo and try it out.

I've also seen Norrkross Movie, which is sort of an iMovie replacement, and it's not bad looking for $59. It's got all the things she's looking for, and is probably the place to start as it's a nice entry point for what she's doing. If she keeps up with this, Final Cut is a reasonable alternative, but it's after she's kept with it.

I've been working with this software package for months now, and while I can't use the name for fear of lawsuit, I think I'll borrow a page from J.K.Rowling and call it The Software Package Which Must Not Be Named or maybe just You Know What for short. OK, it's silly, but here's another silly lesson to be learned from this million-dollar fiasco: Sometimes, if things are slow enough, they will be technically working, but the users will think them broken.

Case in point with You Know What was a certain instrument's trade ticket. There were supplemental data fields on the form, and they appeared not to populate after being programmatically set on the committal of the trade. I was testing this very thing this morning and after seeing it happen in front of my own eyes, I reached for my pencil to make notes of the fields I'd populated, and the ones that hadn't been correctly populated with the calculate values.

After a few seconds of writing the notes, I looked up to see the empty fields and amazingly, they had been filled. I'm convinced that this was what was happening all along. The way in which this system is wired up is to save to one database, replicate all changes to another and then reach from the replicant. If the changes went in programmatically, then the GUI might not have known to update them, and so they had to go through the replication chain and that was going to take several seconds. It might just be that the users/testers were impatient, and when they didn't see the data in these fields immediately after the saving, they assumed the fields weren't going to be populated and closed the window.

So... this morning I'm going to sit with the tester and make them wait to see if the fields don't appear. I figure that it's about a 30 sec wait, and if they show up for him like they did for me, then we know it's not a bug... it's a feature. Unfortunately, this is a nasty feature, but there's no helping that short of a significant reconfiguration of the system. Don't know if and when they might happen, but if it does, then this delay should lessen. But we'll have to see.

For now, You Know What seems to be OK. You just have to be patient. I wish I felt that described more of the users, but I don't.