Monthly Archives: April 2009

An Earth Day 2008, April 22

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Today, Wednesday, April 22nd is an Earth day. (The United Nations celebrates Earth day later in the year on the March equinox).

The weather has been gorgeous these last few days. Although, bike to work week isn’t till May 11–17, it’s awesome to see so many people biking to work. I do chuckle a little at the awkward commuter cyclist in their business attire and inappropriate shoes, but good on ‘em!

Now, when I think of Earth Day, I think of my son, and my son’s future children. I get an anxious energy to do my part for Earth every day.

I regularly think of child Canadian Severn Cullis-Suzuki in 1992 addressing the UN Earth Summit 1992:

“If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it. … You grownups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, make your actions reflect your words”

Daniel Jalkut, WordPress Hero!

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Daniel Jalkut, the proprietor of Red Sweater Software, is the developer of the excellent Mac desktop blog editor MarsEdit. He is also a code contributor to WordPress.

I became acquainted with him about two years ago when he started submitting detailed bug tickets (often with patches!) to WordPress.

I’m the developer of MarsEdit, a Mac desktop blogging application that works with WordPress. When my customers have trouble with the “upload image” functionality, the error responses from WordPress are lackluster. I tracked this down to a simple failure case in xmlrpc.php where the verbose error returned by wp_upload_bits is not being propagated out to the response text.

I’m attaching a proposed diff which addresses this. The diff is against /trunk/ as of today, but I would really love to see this integrated into the 2.1.x branch, because it will have a major impact on my customers’ ability to debug MarsEdit interoperability with their WordPress blog.

Daniel Jalkut
Red Sweater Software

That’s the description of ticket #3981: “Patch: Improve error propagation from newMediaObject failure in xmlrpc.php”.

Starting with #3981 he has participated in 50+ bug reports and fixes in the XML-RPC and ATOMPub areas. He has literally participating every month for the last two year! He collaborates regularly with Joseph Scott and the other members of the WordPress XML-RPC and AtomPub community.

As I have been navigating around the edges of the Mac development communities lately, I’ve learned what a well regarded, active participant Daniel is the indie Mac developer community. I highly recommend his and Manton Reece‘s podcast Core Intuition if you are interested in Mac development.

Daniel comes across as a pragmatic, thoughtful, eloquent person. As the bug above suggests, it’s in the interest of giving his customers fantastic service that he participates in WordPress development. And WordPress is much better software thanks to his participation!

He also regularly recommends the WordPress.com service or the WordPress.org software depending in his customers’s needs and tech savviness.

Daniel Jalkut is a WordPress developer and advocate. He is a WordPress Hero!

Trying a little Objective C – Cocoa – Mac OS X

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As well as surely-but-slowly working on a little web project, I’m trying to learn a little Objective C – Cocoa – Mac OS X.

My motivation is two folds:

  • Create some small (open source) Mac Apps to solve my own itches.
  • Exploration of what makes Mac special; the Mac tools and communities, and new insights into the Mac experience.

Apple “Tax”, Being Able to Get Things Done

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Is buying computers a strange game of screen size and hardware numbers? Or is it about looking for a solution in hardware and software that helps you get things done?

I’ve given up waiting for the next Vista update to finally fix the long pauses on my Dell desktop. I’ve given up flushing away my time on it. These days it’s always booted up in Ubuntu, where it works very well.

I’ve recently had to help a friend downgrade from Vista to Windows XP, so their laptop would “work again”. He was about to buy a new laptop instead!

Another friend just bought a gorgeous Lenovo laptop. Vista is painfully slow to start up! So, he hasn’t even been using it — instead I find him on his old XP desktop. I’ll soon have to help him install XP on the laptop, or it wil continue to be an expensive paper weight.

I’m praying that Windows 7 is good. In the meantime, Microsoft’s Lauren campaign is a great conversation starter to help people solve their computing problems by considering the costs of their frustration, and what their time is worth.

I think most people will be trashing a Windows with their next computer purchase.