Thursday, July 22nd, 2004

Slowly, ever so slowly, the next update to VoodooPad gets closer to being finished. Or at least ready for a public beta. I've been using VP itself to store all the current bugs and ideas and whatever, which is working out nice and giving me lots of ideas to try out. It's even giving way to making some new plugins to add functionality that I really like. I think alot of my customers will like them as well.

I've also been reading "Pragmatic Project Automation" by Mike Clark, and I'm about half way through it. (Downloadable PDF's rule. I also bought the physical book as well.. don't ask why.) I really like it so far, it has inspired me to finish up the last little bit of automation for VP that I didn't have done yet- the disk creation process. I've got a shell script "vpbuild.sh" that pulls it out of subversion, performs a little bit of sed magic on the Info.plist file, builds the plugins, sets the bundle bits, builds the app, and now new new new, scripts FileStorm to make the disk image and then scp's it up to the private beta area. Predictable results, every time. Gotta love it.

insert dramatic pause here

So I've given out copies of the latest VP builds to 4 or 5 folks, and there were a couple of little things to work out at first, but I think I'm almost to the point where I can expand on that list of people a little more. So if you are interested in beta testing VoodooPad, go here. I've put up some "random" questions, inspired by what Panic did a while back.

The questions are there mostly to amuse myself, but the point of having a form is to make sure a little bit of effort goes into getting access to VP (although it isn't guaranteed that you'll get it by filling out the form- it really depends on how much response I get). I will however be having a full public beta at some point as well, but I'm not ready for it just yet. I'm a little afraid of letting my baby out into the cruel mean world to early :) But that's a post for another time.

-- posted 11:24 pm

Something must have rubbed off on me when I saw Brent at WWDC a couple of weeks ago. (let me explain...)

Kirstin is in Arkansas the next 8 weeks for a clinical, which leaves me alone with the dogs. So I've been making dinner by myself, and Sunday night I had spaghetti. Monday night I had spaghetti. Tuesday night I had... spaghetti. Wednesday night I had Pho Noodle soup, which is pretty close to spaghetti. However I did not have spaghetti tonight, which is a good thing I guess. It sounds like Brent always eats spaghetti when Sheila is away.

Anyway, the place Kirstin is staying at in Arkansas is a big place, owned by a lady who likes to rent it out to students like her, and they even have wi-fi. Cool. So I get to chat with her a bit online. Then tonight I remembered I had an iSight that I just never use... so I hooked it up and started a one way video chat with her. It went something like this:

Her: "Whoa- this is kind of neat. I'm talking to my computer.. this is weird" Me: "Yea, it's pretty handy" Her: "And it's free?!" Me: "Yep." Her: "But.. don't other companies charge lots of money for this?" Me: "Yep." Her: "Let me see the dogs!"

I guess I'll have to get her one as well, especially since she's going to be gone at another clinical in the fall for 12 weeks. And my mom just got a new iBook, so I'm sure she'll want one as well once I show it to her.

-- posted 10:47 pm