The basic editing and management features are very good. I’m very happy with this as a basic journalling tool. I’ve also figured out all the server configuration issues, successfully posting articles to both WordPress as well as Blogger/BlogSpot.

The editor is weak in its support of HTML. I’ve been using a lot of HTML paste-in from Google Maps, Urbanspoon, and others, and this really doesn’t work. I thought a nice workaround would be to add a link to an image, but you don’t seem to be able to do this. A link only seems to work for text, primarily because images don’t seem to go along for the ride with posting a journal entry. This might be a setting, since the images need to go somewhere else but haven’t figured this out yet (or didn’t receive any errors on posting which would tip me off something wasn’t going well).

So, all in all pretty satisfied, with some small nits I think I can live without. Might be a purchase.

I came across “MacJournal” (from http://www.marinersoftware.com/products/macjournal/, and maybe http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/), which has very positive marks from MacWorld and CNET. Simple word processing (good), effective document tagging (good), and automatically posts to blogs if you have the right services (which I do). The full screen edit option seems interesting as well. The downloading of blog entries into the tool is quite excellent.

We’ll see how this goes.

Review: IE 9 Is Microsoft’s Best Browser Yet — InformationWeek.

Screenshot and Feature Tour of Mac OS 10.7 Lion.

Meraki Stumbler Stapshot

Very nice browser based WiFi stumbler.  Uses a graph to show you overload on a particular channel, although doesn’t consider multiple points as part of the same LAN.  Maybe this is bad architecture anyway, the points are colliding with each other.

http://www.tools.meraki.com/stumbler

While I was very happy with the folder feature – especially how it defaulted the folder name from the program types you pushed into them – I was very disappointed I upgraded.  The phone very quickly had lost all of its processing power, to the point of being unusable.  When waking up the phone, the processor was so overloaded with some unknown tasks that it was unresponsive to most user input for a very long period of time.  I wasn’t able to pick up calls in some cases as I couldn’t get the sliding widget (on wake up) to respond.  And, since the phone has no tools to understand what it is doing, I went through a period of severe frustration.  I was even thinking that I was going to give up on the smartphone concept if the software was moving forward so quickly that the hardware was obsolete in less than two years.

Apple recently released iOS4.1, a minor upgrade to 4, and a colleague told me that his phone had a noticeable performance boost from the upgrade.  While hesitant, I upgraded thinking that it couldn’t get any worse.  I’m happy to report that the phone is performing much, much, better without any of the problems I was experiencing.  And, the folder feature still works great.

SCPlugin Snapshot

I was using SmartSVN for a while – so long that the open source version I was using seems to have been replaced with a commercial version for $79.  Not a bad price for a heavy user, but I’m an extremely light user.  My old SmartSVN version was not dealing well with the file constructs in OS X for an application.  It had always worked fine when I was just editing PHP, HTML, or XML files.  But, it was breaking trying to maintain the application links so I looked for something else.  Here was my start: http://theappleblog.com/2009/02/23/12-subversion-apps-for-os-x/.

I didn’t bother with the cross-platforms and the commercial ones, but the SCPlugin one fit my needs immediately so I didn’t look further.  First, free and open source.  Second, comes from Tigris.org, which I’ve used for a long time and always liked their site and forums.  Small download, drag and drop install.  Installs directly on to the Finder tool bar.

I haven’t quite figured out how it knows where the server is – it “learned” this from a folder already in control of Subversion for my first try.  But, I like the Finder integration and it seems to work well.  No problems.

A lot of times you’re working with dates and trying to understand the age of things.  iReports lets you create variables and attach Java code to them, which gives infinite flexibility for logic and conversion.  Unless, of course, you don’t know Java in which case its a bewildering concoction of spaces, periods, parens, and references to mysterious methods and objects in classes buried in attached, unseen, places.  A visit to a number of forums focused on Java or iReports will connect you to Java experts who berate you to read API documentation.

Or, use the DATEFIFF function in SQL (MySQL, in this case) to do the math and assign it to a SQL field:

SELECT
 DATEDIFF(table.`date_pickedup`, table.`date_arrival`) AS agedInSystem,
 DATEDIFF(table.`date_pickedup`, table.`date_service`) AS agedSinceDOS

FROM table

No point spending time in Java when SQL has a canned function for this.