Update: Now with photos from the party!

Cobra La La La La La La! I’m off to ride in the Low-Key Hillclimb Series ride #3 up Mt. Diablo, so I don’t have the time to post some more photos. Here’s one of me with members of the Cobra Terrorist Organization — Cobra Commander, Zartan, Storm Shadow, Serpentor, and the Baroness — at the annual Rotten Tomatoes Halloween Party. Rae and I have been playing Knights of the Old Republic II, and we dressed up as Darth Nihilus and Darth Traya/Kreia respectively. Muhahah!

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In Timeature, I have the app tell Aperture to switch to the Library via AppleScript. What should be a very fast operation turns out to be glacially slow. Any AppleScript wizards care to explain why this is the case? Here’s offending code that you can run in Script Editor:

tell application “System Events”
try
set gLibraryRow to a reference to item 1 of every row of outline 1 of scroll area 1 of splitter group 1 of splitter group 1 of window “Aperture” of application process “Aperture”

select gLibraryRow
end try
end

The script tells Aperture to select the Library row in the Projects Pane. Getting a reference to the library row takes no time at all. It’s the select operation which takes something on the order of 30-60 seconds to complete.

With the slew of work this week, I haven’t had time to put down my thoughts on the second Low-Key Hillclimb ride up Old La Honda until now. I’ve been riding up this benchmark climb to Skyline Road off and on ever since I got my road bike in 1997. It’s my test to see how fit… or fat I’ve become over the years. On November 29, 1997, I did my fastest ascent up OLH as part of a 40+ mile ride:

But still, I am proud of my perfomance up Old La Honda. 3.3. miles with 1330 feet of climbing at 21 minutes 40 seconds. That puts me in the E class of riders. It was such a beautiful ride; if I had known about cycling while at Stanford, I would have had a much nicer time my four years. Well… here’s where I get to make it all up, Journal.

It’s 19:41. I am reading up on cycling websites and the like; emailing this one guy who works at Lockheed Martin, Tracy Colwell… this guy is an animal. Did Old La Honda in 16 minutes flat. Wow. A machine or an animal… I can’t figure out which!

Ah yes, this is the same Tracy Colwell that killed everybody up Montebello Road the previous week with a time of 26:42. It was clear to me that he has taken far better care of his body than I have over the past 9 years!

Other times up OLH for me included:

• 1997-11-29: 21:40
• 1998-08-16: 22:01
• 2002-09-17: 22:46
• 2003-09-03: 23:08
• 2006-10-21: 26:04

That’s right, my latest speed up OLH is 4:24 slower than my previous fastest time. What happened? It’s got to be more than just my blubbery weight gain, right?

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In the course of the next week, I expect to have three software applications for Mac OS X available: Annoture, Timeature, and a yet-to-be released enhancement for Apple Mail.

I’ve gotten help localizing my apps into French and German. What other languages are in typical OS X apps? Japanese is definitely one, any others? I’ll roll these languages in the next update of the app.

I need to fire myself and hire a real QA team. A couple of international users discovered a problem related to number formats and localization in Timeature and Annoture. Since both apps share some of the same codebase, I had to release a point update — 1.0.2 and 1.0.1 respectively — to them.

The issue only manifests itself during registration, so if you haven’t paid, buy a license to experience the full gravity of receiving an AppleScript error dialog! All kidding aside, there’s no reason to update your apps to these versions unless you’ve purchased the app already and are experiencing difficulties during registration.

I’m happy to announce that Annoture 1.0 has been released! It’s taken me a little longer than I expected to get it out, but I think it will be worth the wait. Users of iView MediaPro and Aperture who need a metadata bridging solution can look no longer. Annoture makes it simple to transfer annotations back and forth between the two applications.

Version 1.0 brings dramatic speed improvements over previous versions of Annoture. Selection support in Apertre has been added, as well as German localization. You can find out more details on the Annoture webpage here.

I have been using Annoture on my 80,000+ image collection, which I’ve finally imported (by reference) into Aperture. It’s not done processing all of my photos yet, but it’s good to know that I don’t have to worry about manually copying annotations anymore.

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I updated Release Candidate 1 of Timeature to full release status. One change was made in the application to overcome a bug discovered in a SQL statement call by Timeature.

A little late in coming. Here are photos from the Digital Vision Program’s Kickoff event earlier this month. From Karen’s description of the night:

The DV Open House was a hit - more than 80 members of our Silicon Valley network came out to formally welcome the 20 new DV Fellows, including some of the generous partners who make our Program possible - the Reuters Foundation, SAP, and Motorola) and our speakers from that day (Susan Davis, Ashoka and Ajit Jaokar)

Also in attendance were industry leaders such as Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Zazzle, AMD, and WorldChanging.com; esteemed Stanford faculty such as Terry Winograd, Byron Reeves, and Stig Hagstrom; and social sector organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Inveneo and OneRoof. Many of our alumni came by to show their support and it was wonderful to catch up on their recent developments.

Check out the photos below the fold.

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Had a router blow a fan at the CoLo last night. Sorry for the interruption in service. Things should be back up and running now.

Bugs are the bane of any software developer’s life. Many of us would much rather focus on adding new functionality than fixing things that are broken. It’s sad truth in engineering that a vast majority of time is often spent isolating and squashing bugs.

I’ve come across two bugs which have been driving me batty. The sad thing is that I can’t fix them myself; they are big bad motherbugging bugs in Apple’s software, Aperture and Interface Builder.

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