The Poop Report

Grok Headline matches for The Poop Report

poop poop

poop poop 04/09/2004 03:55 PM
Abridged too far. Best Headline Ever, for a truly saddening story. It turns out, oh humanity, that people are abridging, editing, shredding, destroying, positively breaking some of the greatest children's books ever. A man messes with the Wind in the...

The Poop on Eco-Friendly Diapers

The Poop on Eco-Friendly Diapers 04/27/2004 04:40 AM
Quick, which is better for the environment, cloth or disposable diapers? If you're just not sure, you're not alone. Despite reams of research, no one can give a definitive answer. By Elisa Batista.

Japanese poop-and-scoop reminders

Japanese poop-and-scoop reminders 05/13/2004 04:53 PM
This is a gallery of Japanese poop-and-scoop nagware signs. They rawk. Link (Thanks, Tim!)

Thief Steals Poop From Woman Walking Dog
(AP)

Thief Steals Poop From Woman Walking Dog
(AP) 03/30/2005 08:32 PM
AP - The hunt is on for a turd burglar. Police in San Diego are searching for a gunman who swiped a bag of poop from a woman out walking her dog.

TheDenverChannel.com - News - Poop All
Over Pavement: Waste Closes I-225

TheDenverChannel.com - News - Poop All
Over Pavement: Waste Closes I-225 02/17/2004 02:37 AM
TheDenverChannel .. Poo everywhere .. Poop :D .. Shit!

thedenverchannel.com/news/2846717/detail.htm
track this site | 4 links

Camel POOP: Object Oriented Programming
in Perl

Camel POOP: Object Oriented Programming
in Perl 12/23/2002 05:51 AM
Most people are not aware of the fact that Perl has support for object-oriented programming. If you've used another object-oriented programming language such as Java or C++ or been exposed to object-orientation then object oriented programming in Perl is nothing like that. To do real useful object-oriented programming in Perl you only need to use three simple rules as put forth by Larry Wall in Object Oriented Perl.

The Next Level of Database Report
Generation: SiMX Releases Report Manager
Pro

The Next Level of Database Report
Generation: SiMX Releases Report Manager
Pro 07/22/2004 08:00 PM
SiMX Corporation released Report Manager Pro, a powerful software that facilitates and expedites reporting by providing an intuitive concept-driven drag-and-drop interface, standardizing data connectivity, and eliminating redundant tasks such as document formatting. [PRWEB Jul 21, 2004]

this report

this report 09/09/2004 06:49 PM

justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2004/09/is_nick_kristof.html
track this site | 3 links

Report: Bad RAM

Report: Bad RAM 06/11/2004 10:01 AM
Here's a very interesting workaround tip for problems with PowerBook memory.

Report: DVD

Report: DVD 06/09/2004 10:30 AM
Apple notes more Mac OS 9 DVD issues.

Report: UML

Report: UML 08/19/2004 11:30 AM
and some more Unified Modeling Language applications

Report: Mac OS X

Report: Mac OS X 08/30/2004 09:59 AM
Julian Vrieslander raises Mac OS X Finder issues, and other readers offer suggestions for file-renaming.

Report: ".Mac"

Report: ".Mac" 06/07/2004 10:24 AM
lost and delayed mail, inconsistent availability

"The report"

"The report" 04/01/2005 05:30 PM

Report: Mac OS X 10.3.4

Report: Mac OS X 10.3.4 05/28/2004 11:10 AM
A new chapter in our "Panther" series covers the latest version.

Report: USB

Report: USB 03/17/2005 02:51 AM
advice about USB 2.0 cards and how down-sampling may be the main cause of slow downloads to an iPod Shuffle, rather than USB transfer speed

Report: Mac OS X 10.3.3

Report: Mac OS X 10.3.3 05/27/2004 09:12 AM
We have a detailed backup/restore procedure, along with questions about FileVault vs. AppleScript, and notes on FinalDraft copy-perversion pain.

Report: Mac OS X 10.3.9

Report: Mac OS X 10.3.9 04/18/2005 10:56 AM
Readers discuss login issues, Java updates, a fan fix, DVDs not mounting, a CheckPoint VPN-1 problem, Mail issues and successful successful update procedures.

"UPI report"

"UPI report" 02/10/2004 02:52 AM

Report: Mac OS X 10.3.5

Report: Mac OS X 10.3.5 08/11/2004 10:29 AM
Readers discussing sleep issues, kernel panics, an Entourage slowdown, Thermoindock .71 breaking but SMB getting fixed. Panther freeze problems remain.

What the report didn't say

What the report didn't say 01/29/2004 03:49 AM
What were the areas that Lord Hutton felt were outside the remit of his inquiry?

New Report: UML

New Report: UML 08/18/2004 10:41 AM
"UML" applications, for object-oriented design notation, are also covered today.

"report"

"report" 05/18/2004 02:44 AM

Report: Mac OS X 10.3.7

Report: Mac OS X 10.3.7 12/17/2004 06:26 PM
Readers discuss performance (particularly related to network connections), issues with Preview, Finder, Firefox, Print to PDF and iChat, plus successful upgrades, and FireWire/installation issues.

Report: PC-TVs set to take off

Report: PC-TVs set to take off 06/28/2004 01:01 PM
"Sky's the limit" for entertainment PCs in the next few years, as tech breakthroughs drive sales, according to a new study.

Report: Mac Justification

Report: Mac Justification 04/13/2004 10:04 AM
switching from PC to Mac creates email problem

Report: Recycling

Report: Recycling 02/01/2005 08:47 PM
letting consumers off the hook?

Rebelscout Report

Rebelscout Report 12/22/2004 01:33 AM
Rebelscum reader Mike Pawuk from Brooklyn, Ohio reports : Just FYI, I spotted the new Titanium die-cast series of SW ships at my local Parmatown Wal-Mart. They were around $4.87 each. Didn't purchase any, but for all the die-hard die-cast fans, be sure to start looking at your local Wal-Mart.

Report: Tax Applications

Report: Tax Applications 02/05/2005 09:01 PM
TurboTax problems, possible explanation for problem with WebTurboTax

Report: iPhoto

Report: iPhoto 02/10/2004 11:51 AM
sharing issues, corrupted thumbnails, merging databases, printing on Epson 2200

EA to buy 20% of Ubisoft - report

EA to buy 20% of Ubisoft - report 12/22/2004 01:11 AM
Consolidation comes to games publishing biz

Report: Scanners

Report: Scanners 03/06/2004 02:07 AM
installing Omnipage X, plus some less positive experiences

Report: Final Cut Pro

Report: Final Cut Pro 02/10/2004 11:51 AM
more about running FCP 4 on a G3

Report: TurboTax

Report: TurboTax 04/15/2004 09:00 AM
portrait print problem, Mac vs. Windows version, pop-up bug

Report: Safari

Report: Safari 02/10/2004 11:51 AM
Readers offer a tip about fixing Java install problems, much discussion of browser performance, plus compatibility issues and choosing between GIF and PNG files.

DC Museum Report

DC Museum Report 12/17/2004 06:36 PM

Wrapping up my stay in Washington, DC, here's a report on the museums.  The National Gallery has a Dan Flavin show.  Even if you have seen his fluorescent light works in Marfa, Texas or at Dia:Beacon this exhibition is worthwhile.  My favorite piece is "untitled (honor of Harold Joachim) 3", a corner installation that graces the cover of Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights.  The new National Museum of the American Indian has a temporary show of George Morrison wood collages.  Morrison was a 20th century Chippewa artist.  The cafeteria is fantastic.  The rest of the American Indian museum is worth seeing in the sense that a train wreck is fascinating.  The project cost more than $220 million and is kind of a sick supersized parody of Frank Lloyd Wright's NY Guggenheim.  There is a huge cylindrical atrium that is basically empty and that barely relates to the exhibits, which are well off to the side in dark claustrophobic galleries.  The artwork and artifacts are dimly lit and crammed into crowded display cases.  Compared to the anthropology museum in Mexico City or the average American Indian museum in Oklahoma or South Dakota this new Smithsonian is a depressing example of the current state of American non-profit organization management.  It reminds one of the disappointing Udvar-Hazy Air and Space annex at Dulles Airport, where nearly $1 billion seems to have been invested in the kind of museum that Polynesian cargo cultists might have built.  I.e., a lot of interesting objects (airplanes) are displayed but the assumption is that they can't be understood or explained.

[Update:  Ellis Vener just emailed a photo that he snapped of Alex in the back seat.]

MarsEdit report

MarsEdit report 12/17/2004 06:34 PM
In the spirit of Gus Mueller’s after-development report on VoodooPad 2.0, here’s mine on MarsEdit 1.0...

(Note: I may ramble a bit. And: this is mostly about programming.)

Mitosis

The genesis of MarsEdit was the idea of mitosis, that we could remove NetNewsWire’s weblog editor and create a new, separate weblog editor—and thereby create a better newsreader and a better weblog editor.

We had long planned to support external weblog editors in NetNewsWire—but it wasn’t until autumn 2003 that we considered supporting only external weblog editors. That’s when we first sketched out MarsEdit’s user interface.

To my delight, the final version of MarsEdit looks very, very much like our original vision, done originally as a non-functioning prototype in Interface Builder.

Splitting up NetNewsWire like this was a big risk, though, and we didn’t know how it would be received. (It turned out that the feedback far surpassed our hopes.)

We not only split up the product but created an open interface so that various combinations of newsreader and weblog editor could work together. This is something we’re very proud of—even though it increased the risk.

Programming stuff

Early on, before testers even saw it, I had a few challenges...

1. Morphing user interface

I had to develop an adaptable user interface that morphs based on the capabilities of different weblog systems—and not have the morphing be obnoxious.

This was a response to one of the major problems with NetNewsWire’s weblog editor: fields that a given system couldn’t use were just disabled rather than disappeared. This led to lots of email and bug reports. Though I’m not generally a fan of UIs that morph, it had to be done here—and I was utterly pleased with the result.

At first, actually, I was entranced—I used to just keep changing the weblog system to watch the animation of fields appearing and disappearing. But I got over it and went to work on the next thing.

2. Asynchronous XML-RPC

I had to do a better job dealing with asynchronous XML-RPC calls than I did in NetNewsWire.

Here’s the deal—you click a button like Post or Refresh, it kicks off a call to the server to do something. MarsEdit waits for the response—but it can’t lock up while waiting, it has to be responsive to your commands, and it has to do things like run a progress indicator. And calls have to be chainable: make a second call after the first completes, but not before.

Well, I had this working in NetNewsWire’s old weblog editor, but I was never pleased with it, and there were times when the UI would miss the response, and a progress indicator would run forever.

This was just an architecture job. I ended up with a system both cleaner and better than what was in NetNewsWire. (The second time is usually better than the first, after all.)

What I ended up with was solid plumbing. With leaky plumbing, you spend all your time patching it and not enough time working on the UI—and the UI is where you need to spend your time.

I have barely touched this code (except to add a minor feature or two) since MarsEdit first went into private testing, which says alot for the code.

From a high level, every net operation looks like an Objective-C method call that, instead of returning a value, returns immediately and calls back to a method when it’s done. Since the code is object-oriented, maintaining state is almost not even an issue. (Simple stuff, nothing revolutionary, just plain old-fashioned goodness.)

3. Documents

Cocoa has wonderful built-in support for document-based applications.

The only trouble is, that support assumes that you’re saving documents to disk.

The whole point of MarsEdit was to be document-centered, like email—but, also like email, you don’t save files to disk, you send your document to the internet somewhere.

I had to learn about Cocoa’s document-based app features—and, at the same time, I had to learn how and where to over-ride it so that it didn’t think it was loading and saving disk-based documents. This turned out to be difficult—lots of trial-and-error. The docs don’t talk about this much.

And the early, private testers would tell you that I didn’t have all the kinks worked out in the first versions they saw.

Design philosophy: maximum elegance

Throughout the process of working on MarsEdit, the phrase “maximum elegance” repeated in my head. The idea was to keep it as simple and focused as possible.

As I’ve written before, weblog editing is far more complex than email: you have things like categories and text filters and trackbacks and all this stuff you don’t have with email.

The phrase “maximum elegance” was just a personal reminder to myself to simplify as much as possible. With something as complicated as weblog editing, you have to be relentless about simplification, or it will get away from you.

Note, for instance, how short and small MarsEdit’s menu is. How many other productivity apps do you use have such a small menu? Note how the design of document windows is influenced by Apple Mail rather than, say, Microsoft Word.

The “lightness” of an application is a matter of feel rather than number of lines of code or number of resources. It’s a design issue. I wanted MarsEdit to feel weightless in order to balance the heavy complexity of weblog editing.

Note to developers—regular folks, please skip this—there is, oddly, a danger to making an app feel light. People sometimes get the impression that it’s not light but slight—that it can’t possibly have very many features and couldn’t have taken much time to develop, so it can’t possibly be worth paying money for. That’s not true, of course. (It’s like that old line about not having enough time to write a short letter.) However, even though there’s this danger, it’s better to go for lightness, because the vast majority of Mac users appreciate quality.

The early, private testers were a huge help with this. I simplified—but they simplified even more. There was lots of feedback about stuff that could be removed from these early versions, and I think I used all of it. (I’m a strong proponent of development-by-subtraction—after all, MarsEdit exists because we removed the weblog editor from NetNewsWire.)

Of course, there’s no design nirvana. MarsEdit is very close to my original vision, and that’s wonderful—as long as the original vision is good. But is there room for improvement? Could the user interface be better still? Yes, of course. (And I already have plenty of ideas for how to make it better.)

Last-minute features

Once MarsEdit was in public beta, it was fairly close to what 1.0 would become, but of course there were bugs to fix.

And it turned out that there were a couple features I was putting off until after 1.0 that really needed to be in 1.0:

1. Preview with text filters—Markdown and similar.

2. Customizable list of URLs to ping.

That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of other feature requests, but so many people asked for these two that it became apparent that they had to be in 1.0. If I could have waited on these, I would have.

Before deciding to implement them, I had to answer a few questions for each feature:

1. How much time would it take to develop?

2. How much time would it take to test?

3. Is this feature a likely site of bugs, or will it be straightforward?

4. Can it fit in the existing user interface without major disruption?

For text-filter-preview and customizable pings list, I guessed (and all you can do is make an educated guess) that they would be quick to develop and test, that they’re straightforward, and that the user interface wouldn’t require many changes.

Another popular feature request was supporting titles for Blogger. This we didn’t do in 1.0, because it would take too long to develop and test and it would be a likely site of bugs. It sounds crazy—we’re just talking about titles, no big thing, right?—but it required adopting the Atom editing API, which is a big job. (Now that 1.0 has shipped, this is MarsEdit’s top priority, by the way.)

Wrong turns

There weren’t many features pursued that I had to drop or change drastically. Just a few things:

1. At one point during the private beta I wanted to add what I thought was a cool Rendezvous-based feature—but it didn’t interest the testers, and finally it didn’t interest me personally that much, and I dropped it before spending programming time on it.

2. The first versions of MarsEdit did previews quite a bit differently: the preview appeared in a drawer attached to the document window. This was cool for one major reason: it tied the editing window and the preview together. In a way, this is much better than having a separate, single preview window. But it had a serious drawback: you couldn’t resize the preview independently of the size of the editing window.

At one point I considered doing the preview as a splitview in the document window, which would have let you semi-independently resize it—but I ended up going for a separate preview window. (There were testers on all sides of this issue, by the way: there was no consensus. Sometimes a solution is obvious to everyone but the developer, but not this time.)

3. For a long time during the beta process the app icon looked very much like the Firefox icon. (This was just coincidence—the MarsEdit icon was originally created before the Firefox icon was created. The final icon Bryan Bell created is fantastic. I love it.)

The real story behind the name MarsEdit

In an alternate universe, MarsEdit is an outliner instead of a weblog editor—and its name is MarsLiner. It has the exact same icon MarsEdit has.

When I first asked Bryan to make a Mars-with-spaceship icon—way back in early 2003 (I think—could have been 2002) it was for an application named MarsLiner. The idea was to do an outliner that could fill in for MORE.

It’s been a sore spot in my computing life that no outliner for OS X feels as good to me as MORE did. This is purely subjective, of course—there are several really great outliners for OS X. But I want MORE, and I was willing to write it myself. (Just the outliner, that is—I didn’t care about the presentation stuff in MORE.)

The idea was to have a text-oriented outliner—I didn’t care about embedding movies and sound clips and whatnot—that was designed for keyboard users, felt very light, and was super-fast.

The rough draft of this idea was the Notepad in NetNewsWire 1.x. But MarsLiner was to be a huge improvement, it was supposed to be the outliner of my dreams.

But then I discovered something important: most people don’t care about outliners. And the people who do care about outliners, many of them would want the embedded media features that I didn’t care about. So I realized that the market would be small, just a subset of the outliner market, which is small enough already—and there are already some great outliners already.

When we decided to bag MarsLiner and do a separate weblog editor instead, I wanted to use the name “Mars” somehow and use Bryan’s cool icon. Hence the name MarsEdit. We rationalized the name by saying it represents editing at a distance, since you’re not editing local documents, you’re editing documents that live on the web somewhere.

But really it was because I like Mars and spaceships and we already had a great Mars icon.

How much programming time had I spent on MarsLiner? Very little, thankfully—I built NetNewsWire’s Notepad as a stand-alone app. I didn’t even get as far as supporting multiple documents or doing a save command.

But still today I wish for the outliner of my dreams.

From time to time I’m tempted to do it as a Terminal-based thing, all done with ncurses. This way it would have to be purely keyboard-based; it wouldn’t be able to display pictures or movies; it would be fast.

Maybe you will do it. I can dream, right?

Report: FileMaker 7

Report: FileMaker 7 04/16/2004 10:28 AM
tips on time-display issues and more

Report: Mac OS X "Panther"

Report: Mac OS X "Panther" 04/19/2004 09:43 AM
Readers have a fix for ATI Radeon 9800 DVD playback problems, plus notes on Finder size calculations, fixing cache and permissions, Java problems, PowerBooks running hot, Firewire port problems and a solution for missing *.o files.
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The Poop Report

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