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Thursday was a holiday here and we got Friday off from work since they wanted to do some repairs to the building - that would have mean four days of idleness ... or coding <g> but neither was to be :-( My parents wanted to go to Kandy on Thursday and then not return to Colombo the very same day because there was the matter of obtaining a driver's license for me on Friday for which we would have to go back almost to Kandy. Incidentally, I didn't realize how much of a problem the whole American system of impounding all other driver's licenses belonging to a person was till I got back to Sri Lanka and had to get a license again. Anyway, we spent the night in Kurunegala since that's closer to Kandy than to Colombo and we have a house there and then learnt on Friday that the guy who was to help us with the license was on leave. So much for that!

Work on Blog 7.0 is actually progressing much faster than I thought! (I really shouldn't be surprised since this usually seems to be the way things go with any project I undertake - I say it'll take a long time, I then do it really quickly and then it goes in to a long beta cycle and it still ends up taking a long time :p) I've completed the code on the digest feature - which will allow Blog in Server mode to send out a weekly or monthly digest of entries to subscribed users - and the remote comments - which allows users to have comments on their blog with no need for PHP or ASP or Perl or any other software on their server -. There are a bunch of new Blog tags to accommodate all of these new features. I've also added a backup option to allow people to backup their Blog data files and a repair option for them to repair a damaged data file from within Blog itself. Of course, I'm not going to be able to test the repair option completely and so will have to go with it on faith :p

I've always tried to keep my code modular so that the same code can be called from two different places to do the same job. However, I always have to fight the impulse to break the code down to the smallest functional modules all the time. What do I mean by the tiniest functional module? Well, even a module can be broken down into a smaller module to do only one specific job but I try not to do that if the sub-module will be called only from one place - the parent module from which it would be broken off in the first place. So why am I going into all of this? :p Because it kind of explains the work I've been doing on Blog 7.0 :-)

Originally, I'd written one module to do the publishing in Blog and that module handled the writing of both the archive files and the main blog file as well as, later, the handling of More ... tags. However, this module always wrote to a disk file and then uploaded it to the relevant FTP server. When the digest feature came along, I realized this wouldn't do. So I broke off the template parsing code into a module of its own and called that from both the publishing module and the digest handling module. The new template parser module simply returns a string which contains the contents of a parsed template along with all the entries for a given time period and each module can do what it wants with the string. It seems to work fine on preliminary test and basically, the digest feature now works - though I haven't tested it fully (or even cursorily for that matter) yet :p

I've come to realize that Blog 7.0 is going to break a few existing features - or at least lose a few configuration settings that you might have already set. For instance, I've had to add SMTP server settings to the Server tab which becomes visible under the Options dialog when you select Server mode for Blog. In 6.0, Server mode had only POP settings and Client mode had only SMTP settings and I kept two separate sets of values for both modes in case you want to switch between the two (as I often did for testing). Now, the SMTP settings are shared between the two modes and I've renamed some of the INI file values and so if you are using Server or Client mode and have customized certain values (such as the subject line filter value), then you will find that you'll need to reset those values when you upgrade to 7.0 - sorry :-(

I've started on my next Ludlum - though it's not really a pure Ludlum since I seem to have run out of those :p This one's a collaboration between Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds and is the start of a new series called "Covert One". It's called "The Hades Factor" and so far seems to be sort of a mix between a Robin Cook medical thriller (though I've never read Robin Cook :p) and Ludlum's own espionage stuff. I've only got to about chapter three but it hasn't hooked me yet - or maybe I've been reading too many Ludlum's and need to switch to something else :-)

The Ludlum was pretty OK till we got to the end and yes, I was able to predict at least part of the final twist though I went way beyond what Ludlum wrote in my predictions :p Guess I'm just too paranoid for the world of thriller writers <g> But one thing noticed was the similarity in the ending of this book, "The Prometheus Deception", to that of "The Matarese Circle" since all the conspirators gather in a mansion that gets burned to the ground along with all of them. A very neat and tidy ending - too neat actually since I don't believe that life works out that neatly. But I'm just nit picking :p One thing I did notice was that he sort of left off a hook for a sequel - something I don't believe he's done before - maybe he was learning from the money makers and that's too bad. But then again, guess we won't see the sequel now ... unless he's got a son who starts writing or something ...

Ludlum's current book that I'm reading "The Prometheus Deception" is indeed proving to be pretty good stuff. Maybe it's not "hist best thriller yet" as one reviewer is quoted on the back cover - especially since that would make it his best thriller ever as he's gone off this mortal coil. While I liked the last two books I read, "The Matarese Countdown" and "The Sigma Protocol", they didn't have the page turning quality that I was used to with some of the earlier Ludlums. But it's back in spades with "The Prometheus Deception" :-) In fact, I was hard pressed to go to bed last night instead of continuing to read till "just the next chapter" :p I guess this is due to the fact that he's at last got a conspiracy that I can't predict in advance or maybe it's just that he's got a tangled relationship around the protagonist and two women - the first his wife who left him suddenly and the other a beautiful agent who entered his life just as suddenly. Whatever the reasons, I have a feeling that I'll spend most of today reading :-)