Monday, February 4, 2002

Once I upstreamed (is that really a word? Guess so.), it was trivial to determine the URL's for the Radio Commentary and Software Released categories. Of course, neither of these URLs will work correctly in the context of my Radio desktop. Off to dig through macroland again.... 10:26:30 PM

$40 sucked. I have bought Radio UserLand, now I need to use it. The exploration has begun. In theory, I have created two categories. The first category is called "Radio Commentary" and is devoted to commentary on this whole Radio thing. The quoted "Radio Commentary" would have been a link to the category, but the help I have found on using Radio so far assumes you have upstreaming enabled. I would much rather the various howtos, tutorials, and documentation assume your content is intended to be universal. Example: The 'Including Images' HOWTO would be 10x more useful if it demonstrated the use of the radio.macros.imageref() macro to create an image ref that works on the desktop (without a network connection) and 'in syndication'. Second example: I would bet that there is a way to use a similar macro such that I could have a link the categories on my desktop and 'in syndication', but I have no idea how to figure that out. Worse; I have no way of generating-- well, I don't know of a way (admitting full ignorance)-- the URL to a category without having a live, fully upstreaming, network connection. The second category is called 'Software Released' and is generally devoted to commentary regarding bits of code that I have unleashed upon the world. The category will also contain commentary on other folks' software as I see fit. 7:35:13 PM

It annoyed me that everytime I lost power to my TiBook, the clock would reset to 1970, I would subsequently forget to reset the date/time and a bunch of people would make fun of me for sending email from the distant past. Worse, some people sort their email by date and, as such, never noticed that I sent them email that their mail client thinks is from Jan 1, 1970. This silly little bit of AppleScript can be installed as a login item under OS X and will automatically launch System Preferences and select the Date & Time preferences pane if the year of your system's clock is preposterous (as in, prior to 2002). An RTF document describing installation and implementation in detail. (Aha! Figured out how to refer to an image such that it renders both locally and [hopefully] remotely. Neat. And a bit more digging revealed that optional arguments are passed as key/value pairs. Cool. radio.macros.imageref ("http://radio.weblogs.com/0100490/images/BadClockDetector.jpg", width:64, height:64, alt:"Bad Clock Detector Icon") does the trick. Now, why did I have to dig and dig and dig until I found the Frontier macros guide to find documentation on the macros in the local Radio desktop??) 5:18:49 PM