When you don’t test your software developers work…

An old friend asked me to look over some Objective-C code to see if I could help him identify why the program stopped working. I was going over the code to see if I could help and noticed the code had no exception handling!

It seems they recently noticed when their program connected to a remote server it crashed hard. So hard that some times they had to reboot a Mac!

Really, they paid some guy to write what I call “Blue Sky” code! You know, when the developer assumes nothing will ever go wrong…

To make it worse, when they tested it they let him do the test and so of course he never entered “bad” data.

Besides that problem there were memory leaks all over the place. He was allocating variables all over the place and didn’t do a single release! Nope, he didn’t use garbage collection either.

The really sad thing is he took a year and charged them double my hourly rate!

Well, I’m going to fix the code and clean up a few ‘rough’ spots. Then I’ll teach them how to write a software specification that covers exception handling and debugging.

Kindle Notes (mac version) update

Well, things are going very well! The amazon AWS interface for looking up book descriptions and getting the cover artwork.

Now I just finished the class to convert long URL to short ones using the bit.ly shortening service. I’ll be adding others as time goes on especially if Google makes theirs public!

Anyway, in a few days I’ll have the screen shots up along with a beta copy of the Mac version!

Kindle Notes is ready!

We’ve finished all the nit picking little stuff and Kindle Notes is published at

http://www.brb2010.com/kindlenotes

It’s working great and so far everyone seems to like it. It’s surprising to find out that most of the users want it for the KindleForPC support!

Give it a try if you are running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7.

We’ve started the Mac version and have the UI shell up and running. We should have the Kindle parser done shortly with the KindleForMac (assumed name) waiting for Amazon to actually release the application!

Give Kindle Notes a try, we are sure you’ll like it!

Some KindleNotes odds and ends…

First, I thought it might be interesting to mention that we’ve discovered how to find the Kindle eBooks on the iPhone/Touch! this means we’ll be making a version of KindleNotes for them also.

We retrieve the cover artwork and amazon descriptions from the amazon.com web site. Most of the books don’t actually have descriptions in them and generally their cover artwork doesn’t look or scale very well.

Finally, did I ever mention I use the mac application Blogo to write this? How about that I do it on an old iBook G3 Dual USB (500mhz PPC, OS X 10.4.11 Tiger)? It runs well and makes a great internet computer since I get about 5 or 6 hours of battery time.

KindleNotes – A new name

We decided to rename the application from KindleTweeter to KindleNotes. This seems more fitting since the sending tweets is a small part of what the application does!

We also finished adding a search function to make it easier to find the specific book (or books) you are looking for. This also searched the amazon descriptions and the user created notes. This will make it easier to find something you read or wrote about a specific book.

Getting close, we are testing the automatic update feature as I write this!

Solving the Mac OS X “Cannot verify server” mail app error

Cannot verify server “the server name here“

OK, this error appeared out of the blue right some time ago after I upgraded from OS X 10.5.5 to 10.5.6 and I could never find the answer! Everyone was asking about it on the net and in apple’s forums but there didn’t appear to be a ‘real’ solution. Oh yeah, there were plenty of suggestions but no answers that worked…

I got fed up with the form wanting me to verify the server every time the mail app was started. This happened on all of my upgrades from 10.5.6 to 10.6.2 and even on a couple of new machines when I set them up.

I tried all of the web suggestions about the SSL checkbox and deleting then re-installing the accounts in the mail app but nothing worked.

*** Remember, it’s not my fault if you break something or this doesn’t work for you! ***
So, being totally fed up and in a drastic kind of mind set I logged in to my godaddy.com account to delete all of the email accounts there and start over.

When I got to the list of active email accounts I noticed something strange… Some of the email addresses had the server name in upper case while some were in lower case! I looked at the email addresses on one of my other accounts that does not have the problem and they were all lower case there!

So I deleted all of the accounts with upper case server names and re-created them and the server names were magically lower case.

Next I started the mail app on each of the macs and guess what? No ‘Cannot verify server’ message!!! Yup, it was gone and hasn’t come back!

Just to be sure, I shut the machines down and did a cold start and again no errors!

So, for some of you with hosted email accounts this may solve your problem also! But if it doesn’t keep looking and trying, Maybe you find the right juju that will work for you!

Good luck.

A little amazon secret…

Just got asked why I’m writing MyKindleLibrary.

Well, for one thing I don’t like amazon.com keeping track of every book I read, where I’m at in the book or how long it’s taking me to read the book. This can be valuable information for them to sell to publishers and others.

Also, I have the same fear that many do of amazon coming along and deleting content from my Kindle.

Mainly, it’s my Kindle and I purchased the book so I want to be in control of them and MyKindleLibrary gives me total control!

http://bit.ly/15EapU

Book Descriptions and stuff

Well, I’ve finally got most of the scraping engine done for retrieving the Kindle book descriptions from the amazon.com website!

This means you can retrieve the book description in your MyKindleLibrary to show others or simply remind your self why you purchased the book!

One of my testers pointed out that amazon now has a twitter link at the top of the page for a book (other places also I assume) so you can twitter the book.

He noted how simple it is to do the same thing without all of the trouble of logging into amazon, finding the book and filling in your twitter account information! With MyKindleLibrary you simply right-click on the book and select twitter!

When you use MyKindleLibrary for your twitter messages you get the book title, author, asin, your rating (in stars) and a bit.ly link to the actual amazon.com page for the book! Much quicker and easier to use!

Now I’m going to add the description data to the catalog and printed reports functions.

This will allow you to keep all of the book information (including the cover image) locally!

Moving the Blog…

Decided to o move the blog here and make it more generic. Having one blog on 2 sites has become a silly pain.

Anyway, this will be the central home of the good stuff!