The Developer's Corner

Sat, Oct 26 2002

I am sort of back in action again - I'm partially rested, caught up on most of the support e-mails for my software and am slowly getting back into the swing of things. I even tried recompiling Blog with the registered version of PlusMemo and what do you know? The nag screen is gone! However, I only have the source for something like Blog 7.0 Beta 5 on my notebook and guess where the source for the final version of Blog 7.0 is? It's on a CD, in my baggage, still lying somewhere in a baggage holding area in Singapore :-( I'm really concerned at the moment as to the safety of my baggage since that CD is probably the only single copy of the final source around and I'd hate to have to work on all the fixes for Blog 7.0 final - again. Oh well ... guess we wait and see ...

In the mean time, I probably should get to work on PostMan since I've been getting a few inquiries about PostMan and when I intend to get to work on that. Yes, I know that there is all the stuff about user-defined variables for Blog etc. but there was another conversation I had with Nigel where he pointed out that I was probably better off getting all the bugs ironed out of the latest release of Blog before I went on to work on new features. I agree with him :-) As far as I know, the biggest bugs seem to be with the customized code snippets stuff and since user-defined variables will closely parallel the code snippet stuff as far as the UI goes, I would think it would be beneficial for both features to get the bugs sorted out. I haven't heard of any other problems from other users but Nigel seems to have problems with publishing as well. He tells me that occasionally, Blog will not publish the main page on the first try but instead does so the second time around. Now we'd traced this to him having a separate image folder and that this happened only when he had linked images to upload and I put in a fix for it as well into Blog 7.0 - so I have no idea why it still continues to happen since I can't duplicate the problem in my tests. Anybody else out there with similar problems or somebody who has a separate image directory but publishes their blog to the root folder of their FTP server? Let me know so that we can get to the bottom of this ...
posted at 11:04:28 AM link comment

Fri, Oct 25 2002

Ok, I am back ... sorry about the unannounced hiatus but I've been traveling again - specifically, I've gone back to the US and been turned around and sent home ... again! I feel tired, discouraged and sad - why does this have to keep on happening to me? I went up to Chicago this time and was stopped by the INS, they pulled me out of the line, questioned me and searched my baggage and in the process informed me that my visitor visa was automatically canceled since I intended to talk to a lawyer about my greencard while I was in the US visiting friends. I had not thought of talking to lawyers as an intention to stay in the US but according to the INS it is and so I was inadmissible :p I was held in in one of their rooms at the airport for a day, put back on a flight to Tokyo the next day and was sent packing!

I got as far as Singapore on the trip back before I hit another snag - the first available flight (for which I had to wait for about seven hours ...) was full and the next flight was around seventeen hours later! There was no help for it and so I stayed at Changi airport. Of course, if I had to be stuck at any airport, I would choose Singapore's Changi since it's like a mini-city. There are showers, restaurants, movie theaters, cafes, hotels, shops and a cybercafe - all inside the airport. I discovered that the cybercafe allows you free access if you have your own computer and since I was traveling with my trusty notebook, I was able to hook it up and be online and checking e-mail in about four days! Jen was online and she kept me company through most of the day and since I had hooked up my webcam, we could almost have a one-on-one conversation even though we were separated by thousands of miles.

I finally got my flight back to Colombo and I was surprised to discover that it was only about three hours long - I'd been stuck in Singapore for almost twenty four hours to travel just three hours worth of distance :p Ah well, the wonders of modern travel! I got home in the wee hours of the morning and slept for only about three or four hours before getting up again to travel with my parents to Kurunegala since there was some stuff that I needed to attend to there. Now I'm finally able to sit in front of my computer and attend to other matters but I really don't want to - I need a long rest and an even longer think as to what the heck I am doing and where I go from here ...
posted at 02:59:18 PM link comment

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