When you look in NetNewsWire and your own blog has long since popped up in the dinosaurs window, you know it’s time to break the radio silence and write something. Today’s post isn’t about anything specific, but about a few things I’ve been working on and a few thoughts I’ve been having. It’s more of a braindump to get the things rattling around in my head out. Here’s where I’m at:

Back at Bishops

I’ve been attending Bishops University in Sherbrooke, Quebec on and off for a couple of years now, and I’m currently working on finishing up my fourth term. In a couple of months I’ll be halfway done my BSc in Computer Science. The material is fascinating but my course load this semester is making hogging all the time I’d rather be writing software and blog posts. Next semester should be considerably lighter while I take all the intro courses I skipped for the meat. It’s almost impossible to describe how much I’m looking forward to the summer so I can get back to writing software full time.

New Blogs

I’ve decided to split this blog into five separate blogs to avoid mixing my subjects to much. They’re going to be blogs for Stone Hill Invoicer announcements, Locations Pro announcements, Stone Hill Prerelease announcements, and Locations Prerelease announcements. This blog will stay around to be more informal with tech related musings business musings, and code. I intend for this blog to have a more personal tone in the future. I’m setting the new blogs up as I have new announcements to make, so the only blog that’s been setup is the Locations Prerelease blog which you can find at http:///www.codehackers.net/locations/prerelease. Speaking of which…

Locations Pro Beta

I’ve produced a beta of Locations Pro that’s available for download. So far it’s receiving mixed results on various test machines, and I’d like to gather some more test data. If you’re interested in installing a copy you can find it’s newest beta at the prerelease blog.

Stone Hill Invoicer Work

Stone Hill Invoicer is a huge project for me. Because it’s a business product which is in steady use by a number of businesses, I’m always hesitant to roll out major changes until I’m sure that the application is 100% ready. For this reason, I expect it’s going to be a minimum of another month or two before the Stone Hill update that’s been in the works since last July is released. Improvements include a drag and drop template editor, a new in-app address book editing system, and improvements on the inventory. Earlier this weekend I revamped the first run assistant to be quite a bit friendlier and much less of an eyesore. I’m currently working on improving the workflow to make the user experience quite a bit better.

Schoolwork – This Week The Trend

After a class got cancelled at the last minute, I landed in Interactive Web Design for my fifth course. Rather than trudge through HTML/Javascript/PHP again I’ve been picking up Ruby and the Rails framework to evaluate them by writing a project. So far I’m extremely impressed with Ruby, and I haven’t seen anything in Rails that’s swaying me either way.

To learn these systems I’ve been working on a small webapp which uses word frequency in your RSS feeds to determine the popularity of specific topics among the authors you respect. With that data it compiles a list of relevant articles to those topics and presents them to you. The idea behind this is that you can keep up with an industry or peer group by reading about the most discussed trends, rather than just a hodgepodge of what happens to be the most popular articles every ten minutes.

I’m only working on this during lab time, so it might never appear as a public facing project unless I’m satisfied it’s polished enough.

The OS X Package Manager Project

I’ve been brainstorming on the OS X Pacakge Manager project, as proposed by Andy Matuschak. I’ve mostly been working on the question of how do we sandbox arbitrary third party applications without heavily modifying the system or breaking the users experience with those applications. Exploring ’seatbelt’, the sandbox built into Leopard has been giving me some hope that this can be pulled off without intercepting system calls with a custom kernel module. If you’re interested in sandboxing, I found this paper about application level security to be particularly interesting.

Reading Week

This week I’m at my apartment in Fredericton trying to work through some of my todo queue before heading back to school next weekend. I was planning on devoting a lot of this week towards learning the iPhone SDK, but it looks like that’s not going to happen. If you’ve got opinions about anything I’ve talked about in this blog entry, this is my week off so it’s a great time to engage me in a dialog. My email address, as always, is warwick@codehackers.net