Curiouser and Curiouser!

Is there no good software for building web sites on a Mac?

I've been looking for a website building tool for a little while now. I'm long past the point where I have any interest in writing HTML, I don't want to create a Rails app for this, I just want to author (and maintain) some reasonably good looking pages for some software I am releasing. I should point out that I'm not looking for a behemoth like Dreamweaver but something more consumery that, if I'm lucky, will allow me to futz with details when I need to.

I tried iWeb and didn't get along with it, same with RapidWeaver which was better but... well we didn't click. Then I tried Sandvox. I can't say I was blown away and at $50-$80 it's not disposably cheap but I saw some things to like and supposed that the odd stuff about the pagelets could be worked around once you got familiar it. In short it seemed promising enough to give a go.

So I started building my first site and got to a point where I thought I had something reasonable and wanted to see how it was going to look. At this point I ran aground; there was no way to successfully configure it to publish via SFTP. I had some errors, some crashes and the local disk publishing didn't work in any way that made sense to me. I reported this to Karelia and was encouraged that they responded pretty quickly and suggested I try the beta of their upcoming release. Using the beta I was able to set up an SFTP connection to publish my site. All systems go! Well... not quite.

Sandvox is a web site building tool but since it's also shareware we expect it to be hampered in some way to encourage users to actually pay for it. Indeed it nags you when you start up and paints a garish yellow banner at the bottom of the published page. I say "the page" because, as I was flabberghasted to learn, the trial version will only publish a single page. What?!?

How can this make any sense? I appreciate that Karelia may have legitimate concerns about piracy (not that any of their efforts will put off a real pirate) but I'm hardly going to plunk down $79 for a site building tool when I only get to see it publish one page. Answers I would have accepted would be 10 or maybe 5, or even 4. But this thing is crippled beyond my credibility.

I sent more feedback request to Karelia and (I hope) politely indicated that I didn't think this was a very sensible policy and that if they couldn't come up with a better approach they'd lose a sale. It's been 5 days since I got an autoresponser acknowledgment of that feedback. I guess I must infer the message:

"Dear potential customer. Kindly take yourself and your $79 and get lost."

I'm quite opinionated, maybe this rubs me up the wrong way more than average? Maybe if it had been super clear to me up front not to put a lot of effort into the trial as I wouldn't be able to publish most of it I would have been less annoyed? Maybe, but I think this is the wrong way to go about deterring the casual pirate. And it has certainly cost a sale from someone with a handful of cash and a need.

I think the yellow banner and a reasonable page limit is enough to deter the casual pirate. I'm certainly technically skilled enough to get rid of that if I were so minded but... well not having to jump through this kind of technical hoop is exactly why I was looking for something like Sandvox in the first place! I suspect this is true of most of Sandvox's potential customer base. Seems extremely daft to me.

So, I still have a need. I've been trying webgen but, honestly, it's quite painful to use and - to my mind - barely documented (there is reference documentation, but very little of a practical nature). Besides if I'm going to be writing templates, plugins, and so on and I figure I might as well build my own software that will work how I want it to.

A budget of $80 is acceptable to me for a good solution. Some kind of WYSIWYG and (nice looking) template support is preferred. What tool should I be trying?

Blair is such a credit-monkey

On Sunday I heard stuff on the Radio about Blair saying there would be new laws on gun-crime. Isn't that the job of the Home Secretary? Today on the Radio I heard Blair going on about new targets in the NHS. Isnt' that the job of the Health Secretary?

I guess if the government is lucky and something good happens Blair can point back and say "It was all my idea."

Pzizz'ing on

I've been meaning to write something about my use of Pzizz over the last 3 months. Whilst I would hesitate to call Pzizz life-changing I definitely think it's been life enhancing for me and I have only positive things to say about the software itself and Edward's company.

My use of Pzizz breaks down into 3 main areas: napping, shields, and sleep.

I work from home which, in theory, makes napping easy and convenient. In practice I probably don't take advantage of the opportunities as much as I should. But when I do I find it beneficial. I use an energizer program of 25 minutes length with the voice track just loud enough to hear but quiet enough to ignore. I do find the naps very refreshing although, to my disappointment, I've never actually managed to fall asleep. There are moments though, drifting along in the rich soundscapes, that feel sublime. As an added comfort I bought myself a (relatively cheap) memory foam pillow from Homebase that does a good job of support my neck (I store a lot of tension in the neck and shoulders) and this has enhanced the experience considerably.

On the train in the morning I sometimes find myself tired and irritable and wanting to shout "Shields up Mr. Worf!" and see a shimmering perimeter appear between me and the other passengers. Until such time as personal shields become available, and if I am not in the mood for music, I am relying on a 40 minute long, no voice-track, energizer program. It helps me to put a little distance between me and the world around me, relax, and slide more gently into my day. More often than not I get off the train feeling somewhat better than I got onto it.

I routinely use Pzizz to get to sleep now. To the point where I really could do with the software helping me out more in terms of program & iPod management. I've never had serious, insomniac, problems getting to sleep but I often find my mind buzzing and it takes a long time for me to get past that and fall asleep. Pzizz helps here a lot, leading me gently away from thoughts of the day and into sleep. This is, I think, where I've had the most benefit from it.

I would definitely say my quality of life has been enhanced by using Pzizz. If I am tired in the afternoon a 25 minute nap definitely raises my energy levels and makes the remainder of the day more productive. Since I've been using Pzizz my ability to just go to sleep has been considerably enhanced. These are small things but they do make a difference and I am sure there are new tricks still to learn that will offer further benefits.

My biggest complaint right now is that managing keeping my iPod (and, hence, iTunes) full of fresh energizer & sleep tracks is a chore. I want to see the next version of Pzizz take control of this and automaticallly ensure that there are new tracks (according to my schedule) to sync over the old when I dock my iPod. At the moment I do this manually based upon a suggestion of Edwards (where's your blog Edward?):

For example I manage my sleep tracks this way. In iTunes I have 7 playlists named PZIZZ_MON through to PZIZZ_SUN. I generate 7 sleep tracks and import them into iTunes assigning one to each playlist to replace the previous track in that playlist. This means that, come evening, I just need to select that days playlist and click play. I don't need to do anything complex before going to sleep. The reason for using a playlist is to ensure that, when the track is finished and I have just dozed off, the iPod doesn't decide to play 'God Save the Queen' or 'The 1812 Overture' which might, perhaps, spoil the effect.

In the future, as well as better track management, I would also love to see a "Wake Up!" module (for which I would probably buy an iPod compatible clock-radio... maybe a tie-in opportunity there Edward?) and maybe an exercise module too... might be enough to get me back into the gym. Oh and, as a last point, I think the Pzizz website needs revising so that it really sells the benefits, not the software. I can imagine a lot of people visiting the current site aren't convinced of the benefits of the software to them. Perhaps I'm wrong but that's my feeling.

All in all I think Pzizz is easily worth the $30 asking price ($50 if you buy the sleep module at the same time) and possibly a lot more.

[Disclaimer: I, quite unexpectedly, received a free energizer license after a support email mix-up. However, after I trying the energizer module for a while, I sprang for the sleep module without hesitation.]

The revolution will be scrollable

My trusty MX-Laser mouse has been getting a bit unreliable recently so I went out yesterday and bought an MX-Revolution for £59. I was briefly tempted by the bluetooth Mighty mouse (at £49) because I like the trackball. But I could never figure out how to right-click with the Mighty Mouse and, when you include the price of rechargable batteries, it turned out more expensive so I opted to go Logitech again.

So far I find the shape of the MX-R an improvement over the (admittedly still quite good) MX-Laser. The end is much more sculpted making it a more snug fit in the hand. It has a small USB 2.7GHz receiver (the MX-Laser had the receiver in the charging base station) making it portable at last. Tracking is great (it was on the MX-Laser as well). And the scroll-wheel in free mode is just amazing. With some practice I am now able to slow-scroll as well as fast-scroll which turns out to be just dandy in all kinds of situations. It's really a killer feature.

I'm not sorry to lose the rocker buttons on the MX-Laser (I never used them) or the side switches (never used them either). The side-wheel is a disappointment though as the Logitech Control Centre software only allows you to configure it for application switching and it's really not very good at doing that so I've disabled it. I've also raised a support query with Logitech hoping to see that improved in a future revision of the software.

All in all I really like this mouse. Recommended.

Update: It's really quite spooky when the scroll-wheel changes automatically from the ratcheted mode (e.g. for scrolling through the pages of a PDF) to the free-spin mode (e.g. for scrolling through lists of search results in a Spotlight window). Free-spin mode is very cool and lets you fly gracefully through long documents and lists.

President in waiting

So I heard Senator Jeff Bingaman, chair of the Senate energy commission, on Radio 4 this morning talking about a new US approach to greenhouse gases. He was certainly trying to sound very reasonable but, when being pressed on the matter of whether the United States might actually set a meaningful target, he came out with this classic line:

Everyone wants to skip ahead and talk about the goals, without talking about the steps you need to take to reach those goals.

That's presidential material right there.

Okay.. you *do* have a choice

I was listening to a piece on Radio4 this morning about BT deciding to charge customers for trying to pay in cash. Jon Humphries was getting his panties in a bunch over this and asking why customers should pay??

Err... they shouldn't.

If customers don't want to pay BT an extra 4.50UKP for the privilege of paying cash then they should GO SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Thank you.

Philosophy of Food

A 10,000 word piece by Michael Pallan about the state of our food (he's talking about America but I think the same lessons apply here). I couldn't be bothered to read it all, his arguments against processed food didn't seem controversial to me, and skipped ahead to the advice which I have summarized here:

1. Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims.
3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number - or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.
4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.
5. Pay more, eat less.
6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
8. Cook.
9. Eat like an omnivore.

Over the last 3 or 4 years my diet has drifted in this direction although I confess I have lapsed a bit recently. Time to refocus on eating well.

I'm dropping the BBC

Just reading about the BBC's proposed move to lock customers into Windows for their on-demand service:

A report from the BBC Trust said that services will be unavailable to consumers who do not use Microsoft software or have an up-to-date version of Windows.

I'm pissed off enough about the BBC's continuing use of RealPlayer for their Radio services but this is the limit.

Despite not having TV reception (I still have the box for playing DVD's and using the GameCube) for a year I have continued to pay my license fee. I have asked the TV license authority whether I am okay to cancel it (I'm not sure how tricky their rules are). If necessary I will ditch the TV altogether and just use the computer for playing DVD's.

This is not any kind of public service broadcasting that I want to be a part of supporting.

Jobs on a DRM-free future

Steve Jobs writes on the Apple site:

With the stunning global success of Apple’s iPod music player and iTunes online music store, some have called for Apple to “open” the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPods. Let’s examine the current situation and how we got here, then look at three possible alternatives for the future.

...

and, having heard him I really wish he'd blog.

His thesis is that Apple keep Fairplay proprietary to protect their rights to sell music from the Big 4 who require DRM on online but (for the most part) not on CD sales. He calls on people to ask the Big 4 to remove the DRM restriction on online music.

What his argument fails to acknowledge is that the music companies are not persuing DRM to protect sales now but to create a strangehold in a CD-free world. At the point where they can stop CD production they hope to have everything safely DRM'd.

Expect Sony/BMG, Universal, Warner, and EMI to hold onto their DRM with a deathly grip.

Creating a new Rails application in Subversion

Every time I come to start a new Rails project I end up looking for instructions on putting the project in svn, removing log files and so on. Today I came across a bash script by Akhil Bansal that does this and is quite neat.

However I hate being prompted for stuff I can just as easily put on the command line and I hate having to remember to construct file:// URL's when working locally so I converted Akhil's script into Ruby, added William Morgan's Trollop library to process command line arguments and automatically convert relative file paths into fully qualified file:// URLs.

Now I can do this:

Alia:~/Projects/cominded matt$ svnrails --url ./localrepos/project/trunk project
Repository path: file:///Users/matt/Projects/cominded/localrepos/project/trunk
Creating rails application: project
Importing application into repository
Replacing application with SVN version
Removing log files
Removing tmp files
Moving database.yml to database.example.yml

and life is good.

Here is my script, svnrails. Use svnrails --help to see how to pass username & password if required. Note that I have only tested it with a local repository so far.

Reconsider method_missing

Assaf notes an interesting problem that arose from the use of method_missing. In his case what passed in testing failed in production because of an unexpected interaction between Rake and SFTP's method_missing based delegation. I think that the problem with method_missing is that it's a neat trick and, once you have it, it's tempting to use it... even when there are better solutions available (which, outside of Proxies, I think there usually are).

On the other hand Jamis find a cool use of method_missing within ActiveRecord::Base:

Calling super forces the superclass, ActiveRecord::Base, to be sent the notificationaddress message, which it won’t understand. This causes methodmissing to be called on AR::Base, which looks for the notificationaddress attribute in the record’s attribute set. If that has not been set, it will be nil, in which case we then default to the emailaddress value.

I guess the thing is to weigh up the benefits and decide if the potential brittleness of a method_missing solution is worth it.

One hour costs too much

I've waited a little while before posting this just to make sure they didn't fall apart but, after over a week, I am ready to say that buying glasses from GlassesDirect seems like a really good deal. After getting my last eye test I wandered around Vision Express, whom I've been using for years, and was shocked - once more - at the price of glasses most of which I just don't like.

Someone suggested I take a look at GlassesDirect and I'm really glad I did. Being the cautious type I opted for the cheapest (rimmed) frames and an anti-glare coating (for computer work) and the total including P&P came to UKP32.50. They quoted 14-28 days for delivery. Mine came in about a week.

So far they've been great. The frames ("Luke" model in black), I think, look pretty good and are sturdy (with sprung arms) and although I went for the thick lenses they don't seem particularly any thicker than past lenses I've had. Maybe it would be more noticable with rimless frames. Anyway I'm pleased with them and, once again, that total price was UKP32.50.

Based on this experience I will probably order some nice rimless frames with thin lenses which will come to about £90 and keep these as a backup pair. For £120 I'll have two good pairs of glasses. I realise Vision Express are amortizing the cost of their operation in their glasses but really they need a different model. I'm not buying glasses from them for UKP200+ when I know they come from China just like the UKP17.50 jobs I get from GD. And if, as I hear rumored, they are trying to get competitors like GlassesDirect shut down I will boycott them on principle.

One thing to note: the next time you have an eye exam ask them to write down your pupil-to-pupil distance. They probably should but don't (to make it harder for you to buy glasses elsewhere).

Wendy Spero: funny

Listening to the Radio 4 afternoon play today I heard a reading from Wendy Spero who was telling funny and enchanting stories of her early life in NYC. The video she has of her & her mother on stage is very amusing. I'm hoping she tours the UK. I'd love to see her on the same bill as Jo Caulfield.

One giant leap for politics

Okay so it's only one bill, by one politician, in one state... but I think what Utah representative Steve Urquhart has done using a SocialText wiki to get a bill debated, debugged, and through to legislation is intriguing and promising.

Mr. Urquhart was so confident of his math that he started an interactive Web site modeled after the interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia. He posted his bill on it and invited comments. Thousands of people logged on to www.politicopia.com and participated. "If anyone can show evidence (not just alarmist rhetoric) that public education does not come out financially ahead with this bill, post your arguments and data in the comment section," Mr. Urquhart challenged his readers. No one was able to effectively rebut him.

If this sort of thing takes off it could change how we govern ourselves (or, indeed, lead us down the path to where we do, finally, govern ourselves).

What are the telco's doing?

Why the hell do I have a 1mbps/256kbps broadband connection in 2007? That's the same speed I was using about 4 years ago and considerably slower than the 8mbps/768kbps cable connection I was enjoying one year ago. "Broadband" pfft. ADSL surely does suck.

When is a document window not a document window?

I'm writing up this problem in case it ever bites another Cocoa newbie. If you're not into Cocoa programming or you're an old hand you can safely skip this.

I've just spent a day pulling my hair out trying to work out why the window for my NSDocument based application had lost it's proxy icon and was no longer displaying the file name as it's title. A seemingly related problem was that when I closed the window the NSDocumentController still seemed to think it was open.

Now Cocoa is a really great framework, I love using it and think you can get great results with it. Nevertheless it requires a lot of effort to get started because it is a big framework with a lot to master and quite of implicit behaviour involved in how gets things done. Until you get your battle scars you just have to muddle through. You spend your time split between Interface Builder with it's nibs, actions, outlets and bindings and, seemingly on another plane of existence, XCode and your Objective-C source files. I am finding that, although I am making progress, it is still very difficult for me to keep on top of everything that is going on.

A few days ago my understanding of the workings of Cocoa Document MVC had improved to the point where, when it came time to implement some menus, I realised that I made some poor choices in how I had implemented the controller. Without knowledge of NSWindowController subclassing and the use of makeWindowControllers I had blithely instantiated a subclass of NSObject in my nib file and made it onto a poor-mans controller. The blocker came in trying to wire up the menu actions and realising my controller was not firstResponder.

I decided to refactor and the advice I was getting advice was that, in relatively simple cases, it was okay to roll the controller code into the NSDocument subclass (making it a Model-Controller). I did this and life seemed to be grand - menu handling worked nicely - until I noticed, some while later, that the list of open documents saved when the app shut down wasn't being updated properly. I would shut the documents before closing the app and they'd still pop back into existence later.

After establishing that the user default were being updated properly I narrowed it down to the fact that, when it came time to shutdown, NSDocumentController still thought all these documents were open. It was then that I noticed that my document windows had lost their proxy icon and filename window title. It didn't seem to make any kind of sense. I spent quite a while messing with the code trying to compare it to past revisions and see what I might have changed, maybe something being hidden, whatever .. in time I was grasping at straws.

The breakthrough came today when, faced with the prospect of restarting from a fresh Project template, I started listing facts and trying to make inferences. The key insight came when I put together the lack of proxy icon, the lack of filename window title, and the open document behaviour as indicating that although I had a window, it was not a document window! This even though the process by which it was created had not, so far as I could tell, changed.

In desparation I turned to Interface builder and started searching for document window type attributes that might be wrong and, spotted that the Files Owner has a window outlet which was unconnected. Once I reconnected them everything was fine. Time to fix 3s. Time to figure out fix... well, lets not go there.

I think this may have happened when I followed some instructions for renaming your document subclass but I can't be sure. Since the window was working I have to assume that, at some point, the outlet got disconnected.

The key insight for me was putting together the lack of proxy icon, proper title, and closed status as meaning my window was not a document window. From there it was guess work and fiddling. There doesn't seem to be an awful lot of material to help you work that out so if your answer is not as simple as mine then I wish you luck!

I don't need the details on this one!

Wil Wheaton brings up some viral-marketing-campaign come terrorist-hysteria going on in Boston:

You know, the way the Media is behaving regarding the whole [adult swim] marketing deal in Boston is really pissing me off. The Media decided this thing was intended to be a terrorism hoax (when there is no evidence at all that's what it was) and now they're all howling for some terrible retribution against Turner, [adult swim] and the advertising agency that came up with the idea.

It brings to mind the maxim:

Media != Journalism
Media == Hogwash

Hang on, let me fact check that and get back to you.

Suspend/resume for processes

I can't immediately think what I, in particular, would use CryptoPid for:

CryoPID allows you to capture the state of a running process in Linux and save it to a file. This file can then be used to resume the process later on, either after a reboot or even on another machine.

If it ever came to support MacOSX/Cocoa applications then the idea of suspending some or all of your applications when you need to restart the computer (or logout/login) is quite appealing. I'm also guessing there are some situations where, when you come across them, nothing else will do.

Link from Steve Dekort

Taxation on the honor system

Steve Dekort wonders:

I wonder if those that advocate a honor based system for content sales (no DRM or license audits) would also advocate the same policy with respect to tax collection.

Perhaps unsurprisingly I, for one, would. Or at least I'd like to discuss how such a system might work. I think that what it could do would be to focus tax raising efforts on the common good. In turn I think this would necessarily lead to a localization of tax raising & spending powers (since it's easier to agree what is 'the common good' on a smaller scale) and to a more effective use of taxation. If we have to have taxation that's a model I would prefer, until presented with a better one.

My hope is that it would leave you and I a great deal more flexibility in how we wanted to support wider concerns. I, for example, am interested in expanding my porfolio of Kiva interest free micro-loans. Yesterday I read about Moses from Uganda:

Entrepreneur: Moses Eliko
Business Name: Home of Spares
Location: Mbale, Uganda
Amount Repaid: $300 of $800

Moses is quite a success story, and for me it was a very emotional experience to meet him When we met, I went to shake his hand he gave me a hug instead. His life has been so profoundly impacted by his loan that a handshake was simply not adequate. As you may know, Moses is HIV positive, and I strongly believe that without his loan he would have died by now. When he first got the loan last June, he was incredibly sick (started at ~130 lbs before getting sick, and dropped to 80 lbs !!!!!! after getting sick), and could barely walk. Previously, all of his money went to his medication, transport to health care, and feeding his 9 children (8 of his own and an orphan of his brother's, who died of AIDS). Once he got the loan he was able to spend some money on goods to sell (supplies for an Ox plow), and now has enough income to take care of his illness, eat properly, support his kids, and even send some of them to school. He’s since regained weight and weighs about 115 lbs, and can now walk with the help of a cane. He attributes most of the improvements in his life to his microloan. To show his gratitude he absolutely insisted on giving me a live chicken! and was visibly upset when I tried to politely refuse his gift. He's pictured below with his wife and children at his home, which is a hut made of clay bricks with grass roofs (without running water or electricity).

As for business, sales are going well for Moses. The growing season is rapidly approaching (begins around March), which will be Moses's busiest time. He currently sells his ox plow spares on a mat he sets on the street, but he's also used part of his profits to purchase the space for a store. In the very near future he's hoping to construct a store in that space!

Finally, Moses used a small portion of the profits to purchase some seeds to plant apple trees. These seeds are very expensive, and growing the trees is very difficult as they are not extremely well suited for the African climate. Their fruit, however, is very valuable since it is somewhat scared. In addition, the apples would be a great addition to Moses's diet to help him with his sickness.

Moses really couldn't express his gratitude enough, and all of the lenders should feel pretty great knowing that their loan has literally saved a man's life!

Best-
Shelby Clark
Kiva Field Rep

I didn't lend to Moses business but found his story uplifting. Given the choice I could live with paying the state a decent amount to fund police, health, water, power, and the trains. For the rest I'd rather have put - for example - that chunk of my taxes paying for the war on Iraq into Kiva.

Perhaps, if we'd been on the honour system, I could have.

On the pleasure of existence

There are silly things that can depress you and silly things that can give you pleasure. Today it's all about the pleasure!

I've probably bored a lot of people with the saga of how my blog suddenly disappeared from Google sometime back in 2005 from searches for my name. Well not so much disappeared, it was more like it got buried somewhere in the appendices to Volume XXXIV. It's been a sore spot with me ever since, but there was nothing I could do about it: no explanations, and no appeal. Gruding all those still basking in the glory of the first page of results I learned to live with it.

This morning I got a ping from Paolo:

and so it is. A google search for me now brings up my blog as the 1st hit again.

I still don't know if I ended up on a Google blacklist of some kind, fell victim to splogs copying my content, or was just the victim (and now beneficiary) of an algorithm change. I'll probably never know.

But, for however long it lasts, I'm glad to be back :-D