So I've been working on German localization of Lockdown.. Turns out it's harder than you would think to localize a plugin when the main app is not localized, however it's taking me much longer than normal to get this complete.

The reason? The weather. It's been a really beautiful warm weekend here in Northern California and we've had friends over for dinner, bar-b-que's etc so instead of pounding on objective-c code I've, well, had a bit of a life.

Take rockets.. My 4 year old son and I have been working on a little project to make water rockets out of 2 liter bottles of soda, this weekend was so nice that we were outside most of the time and spent a lot of time working on it.

The result? We've been flinging 2 liter soda bottles all over the neighborhood, I took a video of him launching one of the bottles and extracted a photo (below). In this photo I extracted from the video you can see the bottle mid flight and if you look closely you can see the water spray as it ejects water. I did the math (looking at the bottle as it traverses the frame) and it's at 25km/h (16 mph) and accelerating as it leaves the top of the frame (not bad for a used soda bottle and bicycle pump)

My friend Nik pointed out today that I got another TUAW mention (that's two in April!) for GoogleFill. Nice enough of the TUAW folks except they called me "Longhound" which is substantially different that "Loghound"

But you may wonder, gentle reader, what exactly is a Loghound, and how I come across this canine handle.

The answer (as is often the case) is quite boring.

Back in the darks ages of the internet I could get accounts and email addresses with things like, well, "John". In fact until 1998 I was known as "john@hp.com" (totally true!) but then something happened. "John" was harder and harder to find so I switched to "johnmcl" for things like hotmail, forum's, etc. which worked for a year or two but about 2000 that stopped working also and I was often given the choice of login or account names like "john_47" which didn't really suit me because I wasn't 47 and even if I was that would only be a temporary condition.

So one night I was logged in and trying to set up a account (I forget for what) and I started my usual list

"john" - Nope
"Johnmcl" - Nope
"john_mclaughlin" - Nope
"John_F_McLaughlin" - Nope
"ccrjohn" - Nope! (this was my email at college)

I was in a panic with the idea of forever being known as something like "john_47" and as I sat there I looked down and saw my keyboard which was made by Logitech and I thought "Log" and then I thought about a movie I had seen earlier that day and I thought "Hound Dog" -- Ah Ha! "Loghounddog" but my plan was foiled when the site complained about the length of the name so i shortened it to "loghound" and It's been with me ever since.

I was on a tear last night moving to Universal Binaries.

First of all, PorDiBle the open source convert to palm doc format that I maintain is now universal Binary.

Secondly some, ahem, other-projects-that-I-can't-discuss-3.5-plugins were ported to universal binary.

Initially nothing seemed to work and I was in a fair panic but once I actually sat down and calmly read the docs it was as Steve described... you more or less select both i386 and ppc and hit compile -- Kind of amazing.

Of course I can't actually test the universal binaries but maybe I should get something to fix that problem (for testing purposes only of course)

Sitemap 0.84 is finally up (in the download newest tab)... Lots of improvements but also lots of internal changes and limited testing so I've also kept 0.83 up (in the download stable tab)

Change Log is here...

Well I had really hoped to get sitemap 0.84 out tonight but it's not going to happen.

Progress has been a little slow mostly because of the Easter Holiday (Relatives in town) as well as in the US April 14 is 'Tax Day' (e.g. you need to figure out and pay taxes). Needless to say I've been scrambling the last few days gathering receipts!

I actually have a build that seems to work (mostly) fine but I've not had enough testing and i really don't want to subject people to quite yet.

Hopefully I can get 0.84 out Tuesday evening (California time)

-john

I've gotten a lot of great feedback and suggestions on SiteMap that I'm working on for a 0.84 release. One of the ideas I'm playing with is a better way to document your web site. I've hooked up the ability to create some pretty nice documentation via OmniGraffle & OmniOutliner...

These examples took a few button clicks and then a slight amount of tweaking.... I have no idea if there is any interest or not.... What do you guys think? Let me know


sitemap-notes
sitemap-org

Thanks to everyone who has tried SiteMap and given great feedback... Although it works well I hope we can work out the last few niggling details soon. Speaking of which we are on the usual beta per day roller coaster (in this case two beta's per day)

I discovered a performance problem where a SiteMap could slow down the editing of your page (it was how I handle notifications of changes).... Version 0.82 is on the server and should fix this. I wouldn't have put one out so soon except for on very large sites it could cause a noticeable delay when editing pages.

It's pretty fun to map out your site....

There are lots of opinions on the internet for how to do it best... For instance some people like the good ol tree view

Other folks prefer alphabetical or even by category



What do you prefer? Do you have a favorite?

There is a new feature on my page. I have a site map now...

It wasn't as hard to generate as you might think.

Rapidflickr got a nice mention at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (or TUAW as it's known to its friends).

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/04/03/publish-flickr-images-to-rapidweaver-with-rapidflickr/

The great thing is that they used it in a way that I never considered but it works out to be a pretty neat solution.

If you've tried Rapidflickr and want to purchase a registration to get all of the features I've set up a 10% off coupon to sweeten the deal. Simply use TUAWRPDFLKR at checkout to get your 10% off (note the coupon is limited use so when it runs out it's done)

I'm back from Vegas. It's an interesting town -- it's hard for me to say "I recommend it" since honestly I don't care for it that much but if you have never been you should see it at least once.

The real upside is instead of heading to Germany next week (Which was my original plan) I'm staying home. This is a really good thing. Nothing against Germany but I've been traveling a lot recently (I'm in Monterey right now) and I'm looking forward to a few quiet days at home.

I just put Lockdown 1.5 final up on the server. I've had no problems with b2 and there are only a few minor changes. If you haven't tried it now is the time as it has some nice improvements over Lockdown 1.1

-John