Schwieb

In the process of redirecting my RSS feeds away from FeedBurner, I managed to mess up the FeedBurner settings, so it is redirecting RSS readers to the (now bogus) invisible FeedBurner feed on my site. I’ve futzed with the .htaccess mod_rewrite settings to redirect old RSS subscriptions from that bogus feed to the real one, and I think I’ve got it right. The redirect should be reported to your reader as a permanent one, so NetNewsWire and others should automatically notice the change, but if you have problems, please let me know.

(Of course, RSS-only readers who are having problems won’t see this post… Catch-22.)

I just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.5, and removed a bunch of hidden spam in the last few posts. I’ve been amazingly remiss in blogging (that’s what a couple of crunch periods at work will do to any desire to talk about it), and haven’t kept close track of what spammy people have been doing.

Much better now. Much blogging to resume…

As I said a few weeks ago (and has been readily apparent if you look at the lack of posts here), I haven’t had much time to blog in a while. I’ve been spending some long days (and evenings!) at work polishing off stuff to get Mac Office 2008 ready to ship, and I haven’t felt like sitting down in front of the computer at home for long periods of time. However, I have been keeping up with the various RSS feeds that I read on a regular basis, and last week I read Adam Engst’s Confessions of a Twitter Convert on TidBITS. I’ve heard a lot about Twitter, but mostly ignored it as it seemed too hyperkinetic and “who the heck would care what I’m doing at any given moment”-ish. But, after reading Adam’s article, I decided to give it a shot.

I’m only following a few people at the moment (Adam, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica, and some MacBU folks among others), and it’s actually been pretty interesting. As Twitter intends by asking the question “What are you doing?”, the stream of pings is more or less random snippets of folks’ lives that they want to share, and thus not terribly heavy on Mac development or Mac news. However, I’ve seen entries fly by ranging from Daniel discovering that MarsEdit’s icon has been copied by a Linux distribution, to Adam fighting spam for the TidBITS domain, and a whole lot else in between.

I’ve tried to post little bits throughout the day myself, since Thursday or so. Tonya Engst is right, it is a whole lot easier to blurt out the ‘topic’ of a blog piece than it is to write up the whole thing. It might be of some minor interest to a few folks if I wrote up a blog piece about the byteswapping bug I spent most of Friday tracking down, but I was absolutely exhausted yesterday evening (my son woke me up at 6am, I had an eye doctor appointment at 9:15am which included getting my eyes dilated, so that I couldn’t read a computer screen for hours, I had 2 different triage meetings to attend, and a one-on-one meeting with my manager’s manager that day, plus fixing bugs) and had no energy to blog. Instead, I put up a few ‘headlines’ on Twitter throughout the day. Admittedly, my following on Twitter is very small so practically nobody saw them, but I felt like I was actually doing something public again for once.

So anyway. Yep, I gotta blog more. Folks have asked about Xcode over on Mac Mojo and now that we’re reaching the end of a major product development cycle on the new tools it’s time for an update. I’ll work on that, but in the meantime if you’re curious about some of the day-to-day stuff going on inside the MacBU, come follow me!

I put up my first post to this blog on May 30, 2006. Today is January 16, 2007, which is 231 days later. In that time, I’ve made a total of 44 posts and received 482 comments. That works out to about one post every five days, and about 10 comments per post.

In that same time period, I’ve received 9043 (!) spam comments, or just over 39 per day. The number is actually a little higher because I’m only counting the comments caught by Akismet — every so often it misses a few and I have to manually delete them.

That’s a spam level of 94.9%! Funny enough, Akismet’s own world-wide statistics show spam at around the 94% level, so I guess I look like a nice average target to the comment spammers. Oh for the days before Canter and Siegel!

Hello everyone… My apologies for being away for so long — there’s a lot going on at work (some of which I’ll talk about in my next post) and a lot going on at home, so I haven’t had the time or the inclination to sit down in front of a computer in the evenings. In any case, I’m still here, still employed with the MacBU, and still working on Mac Office 12.

My hosting service had a partition get corrupted during a normal server reboot early Monday morning, and it took over 26 hours for the fsck to verify the drive. Grrrrr.

It’s all back up now, with no lost content. Any mail sent to me in the last day or so will be trickling in today and I’ll try to get to it tonight.

Just really busy and tired. I’ll hopefully get some post up this weekend. Sorry for the long wait!

I’ve added a new ‘Contact Me’ page to the sidebar on the right. You can use it to send me a private email if you wish to make a comment that will not show up on the blog.

Hopefully I won’t get too much spam.

I realize in reading some of Pierre Igot’s latest posts that the intent of the title of my last post on bugs was not very clear.  In the absense of some specific cultural knowledge of American popular music of the early 1980s, my title “Bugs stink! Yeah Yeah!” could very easily be interpreted as condescending or as a brush-off of user concerns.

That is not what I intended, however.  See, there’s a song called “Love Stinks” (from an album of the same name) that was performed by the J. Geils Band in 1979 or 1980 that was very popular on the radio when I was growing up.  The chorus of the song is roughly this:

(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah

where each of the “yeah yeah” bits is an affirmation of the sentiment that “love stinks.”

That’s the spirit in which I used the lyric as a title for my post — bugs do stink, and there is much agreement about that. If you look at my post titles, you’ll see that many of them are silly puns or simple plays on words. As I was writing my last post, “Love Stinks” was playing on the radio and I thought it might be a silly little pun to use.

So, if my post title sounded like a brush-off or a put-down, I’m sorry. I definately didn’t intend it to be one.

I will be leaving the full text of my posts in the RSS feed. I definately don’t want to lose readers in exchange for minimal statistics.

I’ve rerouted the RSS feed through FeedBurner — that will give me plenty of data.  Please let me know if you have any problems reading via syndication.