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Couldn't upload even a private beta of Blog 7.0 yesterday since I was taking the afternoon and today off from work and I was in meetings from almost the time I got to work till the time I left work :-( The meetings were basically about me being part of another project group - this time to do a full spectrum multimedia campaign including TV, radio, print-media, posters, street drama etc. While it looks like an interesting project and could provide some good experience, I'm really not sure that I want to be saddled with more work since I already manage about three groups (five if you count the newspaper teams as three separate teams ...). Plus, my boss asked my friend Robin and I to come up with a proposal for another new project within two week's time while we're doing all the other stuff. I came back to my current employer because I liked the people I had to work with but I'm beginning to remember the reason that I left - they just keep on piling you up with work :p Of course, the fact that a lot of people are leaving the company might also have something to do with the distribution of work being the way it is ...

Further bug fixes, improvements I forgot to add and minor new features were all added to Blog 7.0 yesterday. Unless I forgot something major that I intended to include in this release, I think that's as far as new features go and there will now be a freeze on feature addition. I started the testing yesterday and was able to go through the stuff like the new templates, the new archival tags, the displaying of entered comments and the links for creating new comments and the categorization displays - it all worked fine! Yes, there were certain things where there were bugs in the code or logical errors and I had to fix them but now it all works fine :p But I still haven't tested any of the stuff that works off of e-mail - digest subscription/unsubscription, how comments received via e-mail are handled, the deletion of existing an entry by the same author for the same date and time if the message body is empty (yes, I added that as well) or even the replacement of an existing entry in the same scenario if there is a message body. I'll have to do all of that sometime today - or if I don't have the time, release a private beta anyway since I'm going to be away from my computer for a couple of days ...

There are a few caveats to the new features however. The remote editing and deleting of entries will probably work only from Blog running in Client mode since the date and time for the entry has to be exactly the same down to a fraction of a second and I don't think you can set those values specifically from an e-mail program - even if you resend an older e-mail, (which Eudora and a few other mail clients allow you to do even if Outlook doesn't :p) I'm not sure that the client sends it with the older date and time - it probably inserts a new time at least. So if you want remote editing/deleting, you'll probably have to use Blog in Client mode to do the original entry as well as the changes. While not as flexible as being able to blog from anywhere, this is better than nothing ... I hope <g>

Unless I've forgotten something, the major work on Blog 7.0 is done :-) I finished the archival by category feature yesterday and changed the archive generation UI so that the user can decide whether to generate archives by date or by category. Of course, auto-archiving is still done by date since it would be impractical to do it by category. There's a bunch of new Blog tags (I have the distinct impression that I said this before :p) and I think one of the biggest problems is going to be documenting all the new tags and what they do and where exactly they can be used, since some of them can be used only in specific places or in combination with specific tags.

Tyran was kind enough to volunteer to do some proper documentation for Blog. I know he's got a full plate in front of him already and was reluctant to ask him to take up something I know is going to go on and on and on since such a lot of things change with each release of Blog (you should see the changes list for the next release :p) but he said that he'd still do it. So thanks a bunch Tyran - you're a gem :-) Incidentally, Tyran already sent me a proof of concept that he'd built around the current Blog.txt file and to me it looks great! I couldn't even recognize that it was the same document at first because it looked so different :-) It's got a table of contents, a proper index and a search facility and when done, will be a great help to all new users - hope you're all properly grateful to Tryan :p

Incidentally, I'd intended to pan a movie yesterday but forgot all about it when I got carried away by my rant :p The movie was "Doctor T and the Women" and is it just me or does anybody else think that it is one of the worst movies ever made? It tries so hard to be a "women's" movie (at least that's how it seemed to me ...) but ends up being extremely condescending and patronizing towards women - not to mention negative. I hated it from start to end and only went through the whole thing in the hopes of finding something redeeming about the whole experience but there just wasn't anything!

I've started working on Blog 7.0 again and I made a slight change to one of the Server mode features based on a discussion I had with Anders Nystedt. He mentioned the fact that if he's using Client mode to remotely post, that he sometimes submits the same post twice and that crashes Blog server. Now this is a known defect but still something that shouldn't happen. So I had a little discussion with him about it and decided that it would be better if the post could somehow be handled. So now what Blog does is that if a post with the same date and time already exists, it checks the author and if the author is the same, it replaces the existing entry (incidentally, that provides instant remote editing facility - ta da!) but if it's by a different author, then it logs the error and skips the e-mail. I just realized that I can extend the same principle to delete an existing entry by having the user send out a blank message body! Anybody else think that's needed?

"They" say that you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. This is a saying that I particularly dislike. Well, not because I don't like breaking eggs - though here in Sri Lanka they have (or used to have - not sure now with the mass producing farms and such ...) what was called "Buddhist eggs"; they were basically unfertilized eggs since the Buddhists do not like the taking of life of any creature and since there was no life involved in an unfertilized egg, they were OK with eating it. But I digress. What I don't like about the whole breaking egg theory is the fact that while it might not be a big deal to break eggs - it becomes a big deal when you transfer the metaphor to human beings. You can't hurt people to achieve your ends and then say, "oh well ... you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs!". That's inconsiderate and unfeeling!

Why am I going on about this? Well, we went on another one of our now-becoming-routine trips this weekend to look at another prospective bride. My parents liked her, my brother says he liked her (not sure since he has a habit of not being contradictory unless necessary :p) but I didn't because I've told my parents that if I'm to spend the rest of my life with somebody, it will have to be somebody that I feel an affinity to. I don't know how I can express it better (and that's probably what's frustrating my parents as well since they don't have anything concrete to go on ...) but that's not the problem. The problem is the other side - the bride's side. I feel bad about going somewhere, meeting somebody and then saying "no, won't do" when they probably have a lot of expectations and hopes. It's all fine to say that it's about the rest of our lives for the both of us and that we have to make the correct decision but what about the people who feel rejected or whose hopes had been dashed?

I finished the last Ludlum in my collection - "The Hades Factor" - sometime last week. I was losing momentum while reading that book anyway since it was a collaboration between Ludlum and another author and I didn't like the pacing as much as I do the rest of Ludlum's work - maybe I was subconsciously thinking that it wasn't really a Robert Ludlum novel because it was a collaboration :p Anyway, I did finish the book and since I'm all out of thrillers, I decided to go back to fantasy and read another one of my regulars - Terry Pratchett. Strangely enough, this was the last book in my collection from Pratchett that I hadn't read and it was a collaboration too :p This time the collaboration was with Neil Gaiman, whom I've been hearing a lot of good things about but whose work I had never read apart from a couple of issues of the Sandman comics - and I'd never really gotten into those, if I recall correctly after about five years that is <g>

I've tried to read "Good Omens" (that's the book BTW) for a while now but couldn't get up enough enthusiasm - again I suspect that the fact it's a collaboration has something to do with it but it could just be that I'm getting tired of reading ... There have been periods when I get tired of reading continuously and need a break. So I decided to take a break yesterday and watched movies. I watched "Lucky Numbers", "Meet the Parents" and "Fight Club". "Lucky Numbers" gave me a few laughs but I hated Lisa Kudrow's character and Travolta seemed to be hamming it a bit - especially at the very beginning when he meets people at the restaurant. I had some laughs towards the end of "Meet the Parents" and had a sappy tear in my eyes at the romantic conclusion <g> but basically thought that it was rather an annoying movie - maybe it was Greg's (Ben Stiller's character) stupidity throughout most of the film in stumbling into one disaster after another or maybe I just was feeling a bit impatient at all of the improbability but it just didn't work for me except towards the end.