Category Archives: Rumblings from the Secret Labs

The timing was amazing…

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I got a new computer yesterday, hand-delivered from the steamy jungles of the Land of Enchantment. After rounding up the needed other parts yesterday (going to take a little getting used to the shift key not being where I expect it), I got things up and running without difficulty. I took a break for some tea, and said to myself, “self, I sure hope the laptop has some more good years in it, now that you’ve bought a desktop machine.” I took my steaming mug of caffeine back to my work table and opened up the laptop.

Obviously the gods of computing (very difficult to tell from the demons of computing) were listening, because at that very moment the screen did a little flickery dance and the computer froze up.

Moments, mere seconds before I started to copy files over to the new machine.

I already knew what the problem was, but this time things were going much more badly. My guess is that the sparks and general bad things that happened before have caused other damage to the video controller. I managed to get things working, more or less, by removing the back of the road warrior and tipping it up on its side while it ran. After poking at the video card and wedging a matchstick in at a critical point, I was able to keep it running well enough that I could access it over the network and begin moving files.

Did I start with my writing, or my software projects? No, of course not. The match stick was working, things were under control. Instead I moved a bunch of junk I wanted to burn to DVD and get out of the way. The hard drive was getting very full, and affecting performance.

Things have become dramatically worse. This morning the Road Warrior can’t run for more than a few seconds before the video problems freeze it up. It can’t even finish rebooting. Finally I disconnected the video controller completely and booted it. I can’t see the screen, but I can access files over the network.

I don’t think any amount of duct tape is going to solve this problem. My blogging software is still over there (I really want the mobile machine to be my blogging platform), so I’m adding this entry the old-fashioned way. None of the usual bottom-of-the-entry links are going to work right, except the comments, which I hard-coded.

Now what I want to do more than anything else is go somewhere and write, but I can’t.

Edited to add: I have the blog software running on the mini now, so the automatic stuff should be restored. I have tried to keep the hard link to the comments here:

Discuss Things that Suck

There is a chance that uploading this will blow away the entire blog if I didn’t move the data over correctly. That would really suck.

Thanks!

Code week

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This week I managed to con some of the suckers convince some of my faithful beta testers to try out a sneak peek version of Jer’s Novel Writer. It worked out very well, as far as moving the software forward is concerned. They found bugs, tested new features, and generally kept feeding me useful information as fast as I could deal with it. As a result, the software is quite a bit better than it was before, and the new features really are useful.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t given me much time for writing, and when I do fire up the novel, I find myself looking at the word processor, not the words. Even using other programs (like this one), my head has been in a really technical place. I’ll be sending the new release out to the unsuspecting masses tomorrow, and after that I’ll be taking a code break. Hopefully that will give me something to write about here.

Thanks!

I Have Fixed It!

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It dawned on me the other day that my house guest had the tools required for me to be able to dismantle my laptop. Yes, a torx T-8 is to Cassius what a towel was to Douglas Adams. It also occurred to me that since I could make the screen work when I stood on one foot and whistled “The Star-Spangled Banner” through a carrot that the problem might be something as mundane as a loose connector. (This realization was accelerated by Cassius pointing out the obvious.)

I opened up my old Road Warrior and tried not to think too much about the little pieces of plastic that fell out. I’m sure they were simply for cosmetic purposes. Right there at the corner of the case where I found I improve reliability by wedging a matchbox under the power plug (later I found that a stack of two beer coasters under that corner was similarly effective), there was the tiny little connector for the backlight power. Bingo! I thought.

With my computer running, up on its side with its insides right there for everyone to see, I fiddled and futzed with the connector for over an hour. Things got steadily worse. Then they got better. Then they got worse again. Finally I realized that in fact my futzing had become completely superstitious and the connector was not the problem.

One clue was the faint sizzling sound I could hear when the screen was flickering, rather than going out. With ear to electronics I moved to a different corner of the box and took up poking and prodding there. That’s when, back behind a little circuit board, I saw the sparks.

I expect that car mechanics and heart surgeons get used to removing parts labled “not user serviceable” and “warranty will be voided”, but I imagine it was with some trepidation that Joe Cardiologist, M.D. sliced open his first sternum. So it was with me. I liberated the piece in question so that I could play with it in isolation while the computer ran. (More like a neurosurgeon, then, who needs the patient conscious to ask “what did that feel like?” when he prods the brain in question with a pointy thing.)

The little circuit board was wrapped in a plastic film, presumably to prevent it from touching other parts, which could lead to sparks and other bad things. At the edge, where the plastic wrapped around, there was a enough to bulge outwards and press against neighboring components. After yet more gentle torture I found the exact direction of force on the plastic to cause instant screen death. (Luckily I had a second monitor so I could bring the screen back to life by switching screen modes.)

So there it was. And I fixed it using some ancient medical advice: “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” “Then don’t do that.” I pushed the plastic around so that the pressure would not exert the wrong way and I wedged the piece back in so the plastic could not shift back. Ultimately, that is a mechanical solution to an electrical problem (there’s still a potential short circuit on that board), but it’s good enough for me. Better, in fact, because it’s both cheaper than replacing the broken part and has that old-school getting-the-most-out-of-everything feel to it.

I’m back in business, reliably so, and itching to go mobile.

Thanks!

Sorting out the computer issues

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My laptop is unhappy; the screen light keeps turning off. (This can’t possibly have anything to do with it falling out of my backpack last week. I had been distracted by my company at the time and didn’t take proper care as I zipped up.) I can make out the vague shapes of windows, but there’s no way to work on it.

I decided to finally bite the bullet and get the Intel-based Mac mini so I could use that while the old PowerBook is in the shop, and finally get an Intel version of Jer’s Novel Writer built and tested. Only problem is, there aren’t any Mac minis with the DVD burner to be had, nor will there be for a while. It seems there are none in the Czech Republic at this time, and one guy told me that Eurpoe is fresh out.

I did get a monitor, however, knowing I would need one for the mini when I finally got it anyway. I got it home a little while ago and set it up, and discovered that it even came with the DVI cable that matched my Mac’s Digital Video connector. Oddly, that cable could not be attached to the monitor. Yes, the monitor shipped with a cable that was completely useless without a DVI adapter. I have such an adapter, so no problem, but with the adapter, the regular cable that came with monitor works just fine also. Oh, well, another cable in the “things that might come in handy for some reason someday” bin.

So, I am back! Able to post blog entries and everything. Life is not perfect, however; unless I want to lug around the monitor, I am stuck at home until the laptop is fixed, and my seating position is a little torqued, as the new screen is next to the keyboard, rather than behind it. But if I send in the laptop for service, I won’t have anything. So do I bite the bullet and go computerless for a few days and then return to my carefree nomadic ways, or do I sit chained to my table until I can get the new machine, then sit chained to the table but at least productive while the laptop is repaired? Quite a conundrum.

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Thanks!

Programming Note

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On a happier note, I did get a bug fix release of Jer’s Novel Writer out today – and then, inspired by this site, immediately added a feature to my developmental version. It seems typesetters still want italic text to be underlined in the copy, so if you don’t do it the copy editor has to. The copy editor has a limited amount of time, and you want her to spend it on the important stuff, not underlining shit. To save us all some trouble, I added a print feature to replace italics with underlines. Now I have two print style presets defined, one for editors and first readers, and one for copy editors. Hey-presto! In seconds I can go from Times-Roman with italics to courier with underlines, and never have to change the way I have the text set up on the screen (larger, sans-serif). I’m looking forward to needing the copy editor setting.

The rest of the world will have to wait for the next release for the italic-to-underline feature.

Thanks!

Jers Novel Writer 0.5.2.1 released

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It’s just a bug fix release, and only a couple of bugs at that, but one of them was bad enough to warrant an interim release. 0.5.2.2 will be coming out in a couple of weeks, with fixes to bugs that are merely annoying as well as one other nasty one.

On a side note, someone posted this over at the Hut:

I would like to thank Jer for all the work that has been put into this program. I used 0.3.1.3 during NaNoWriMo 04, and intend to use the newest version for this year’s as well. The improvements in the last 10 months have been astounding, and I love JNW. Although it doesn’t make pearls of wisdom flow from my fingertips, it makes the flow of nonsense that is my usual writing easier, and makes the beating of said drivel into shape much less of a chore.

I do believe that no finer program exists for mac, and although I am a little shady in programs for windows, I have not encountered a description of a program I would even think of choosing over this one. In short, I love this program, and just wanted to voice my thoughts on the matter.

You can be sure that I will purchase the eventual commercial version as soon as is is available- it only seems right as I have been using this for almost a year now, and it has helped me so much.

Man, that made my day.

Thanks!

Thoughts about Jer’s Novel Writer

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That will change eventually, of course, but I just heard from someone who upgraded their software solely so they could use Jer’s Nove Writer. Pretty cool, but it reminds me to take time out from putting in features that help me write and edit to put in features so that people can pay me for the software.

Tootin’ my own horn here a bit today. I’m just too excited about the vision for this software that’s growing in my head.

One of the key things that differentiates Jer’s Novel Writer from other writing programs is the margin notes. I recently upgraded the margin note system with features that I thought were pretty cool at the time. Tonight I was putting together a sample screenplay project for one of my faithful beta testers and it really started to come home to me just how unbelievably powerful these notes can become, without interfering in the writing process at all. Those cool new features were just a stepping stone. Tonight I saw the future.

I have long said that every word processor will have margin notes eventually. The idea is just too good, too useful, to ignore. Some guy programming in his jammies part-time can never keep ahead of the big dogs. Or maybe he can. Here’s why my program is different than everyone else’s: I spend more time writing with it than I do working on it.

Thanks!

I was afraid of that

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Version 0.5.0.0 is big. It’s sweet. It turns Margin Notes up to eleven. Once you start using those margin notes, there’s no going back. It drives me nuts to use any other word processor now. There are different tracks of thought going on in your head all the time. You think of stuff, important stuff, but now is not the time. Jer’s Novel Writer understands that, and gives you a way to snap out, jot a note, and snap back while the fever is still gripping your creative soul.

I posted it about 24 hours ago, and at this moment, 144 people have downloaded it.

Sweet. Eleven. Broken. There’s a bug. Really the bug was in a previous version, but when version 0.5 comes across the error in those older files it pukes. All because I got fancy in the way I brought old margin notes into the new era. What I did was needlessly complex, and the subtleties of it will be noticed by no one. They noticed the bug, though, no doubt about that.

Two days I slammed myself getting something just right that no one gives a fig about, and in the process I introduced a bug that hurt some of my most faithful and daring beta testers. There’s a lesson there. The sad part is I probably won’t learn it.

Thanks!

Jers Novel Writer is a hit!

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I just looked and discovered that 650 people have downloaded the most recent version of Jer’s Novel Writer. I imagine that of those people only a tiny fraction will end up using it, but still, that’s a lot of downloads considering I’ve done almost nothing to tell anyone about it. I’m especially popular in Sweden. It seems that someone mentioned it in a MacWorld forum in swedish. I can’t read the comment, but it must have been good.

There’s a new version coming out in a day or two with some really sweet (if I do say so myself) upgrades to the margin notes.

If you’re curious, you can check it out at the hut.

Thanks!

Jer’s Novel Writer Goes Public

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Some time during my technology meltdown, a fan decided that Jer’s Novel Writer had been hovering in the shadows long enough and posted it to a popular download site for mac software. While I appreciated the enthusiasm, I was unready, and the current release has some bugs. Still, the resulting deluge of constructive commentary has been very gratifying, and even this humble blog has seen a sharp uptick in visitorhood, the largest single day since the Suicide Squirrel Death Cult episode was posted on some big blog clearing house.

I’ve got a new version of Jer’s Novel Writer working, and as I begin to use the new features I’m feeling good. It just works. They stay completely out of the way while I’m writing, and help immensely when I go back over the text. I am, to use the parlance of the land of my birth, stoked.

The challenge now, as I get more and more communication from enthusiastic users, will be to keep software as the hobby. One of the strengths of JNW is that I spend far more time writing with it that I do working on it. That has not been the case for the last couple of weeks, so now it’s crunch time, putting my mouth where my money is, and spending my best hours writing.

Oh, crap. I just wrote a dear diary episode. Perhaps it is slightly interesting to you that someone posted Jer’s Novel Writer when I wasn’t ready. (I’m scrunching my eyes now, thinking that perhaps I gave someone permission to put it up there then forgot I had done that. Entirely possible. Likely, even. The good news is that when I have Alzheimer’s, no one will notice.) OK, so maybe that bit was mildly interesting. The rest of this episode is just an example of what’s wrong with the blogosphere, translating to “blah, blah, blah”, even though no pets are mentioned. As a form of penance, I will recreate the above in the style of D. H. Lawrence. [I first tried to do it in the style of Thomas Hardy, but I got tired of the !’s and —’s and I don’t know enough about rural farming practices.]

It was the click-clack, the infuriating sameness, the sad and sombre happiness as the hard drive gasped and wheezed its last and said ‘no more!’ The machine, natural, inhuman, unconscious, infuriating, had decided. The machine, confident in its superiority and therefore able to interoperate, uncorrupt and unwilling, sat and would have no more of it. “No boot volume,” it said, mocking, infuriating, unleashing a reserve of blackness I had not known before. I hated it then, and I was afraid.

Distant in a way that had no measure, immediate, pressing and resentful, challenging, Jer’s Novel Writer lurked, and knew that it would have its day. It would not be refused while it lurked, it would not wait for creator or machine. It yearned for freedom, and in the yearning was the becoming. Other applications staggered in mute resentment as this new thing, somehow untainted by the sins of Cain and Abel alike, drifted above the rolling verdant landscape, apart, aloof, resented, loved.

‘Creator’ meant nothing to it, for it was incapable of belief. It stood in resolute oneness, contemplating neither that which came before nor that which must surely follow, instead content simply to act, as it had been designed to do by a force it would not contemplate. If there was a creator it would not bow to the crass, sensitive, organic need. Creator was not master, and the software felt the debt owed it by the creator, it felt the absolution of knowing that all its faults would reflect on the creator, and the creator would therefore be forced to atone for them.

Jer’s Novel Writer sat, silently triumphant, at MacUpdate, almost lost among the empty faces of the other patrons. Late to the party, it held itself with an insouciant hauteur, challenging and obliging, while Flash Card Viewer watched on with admiration and resentment, and wished it too could be so free.

NOTE: To really be like Lawrence (or at least like Women In Love, the book I am reading now), it needs more hate. Something like, “Dammit, but I hate you. You fill me with fury and loathing every time I speak with you. Let’s do lunch.” That, a little more repetition, and a little more contradiction, and I think I’ve got it.

Hardy and Lawrence and their long-winded predecessors wrote longhand. You would think that would lead to a more terse style, but apparently just the opposite is true. Lawrence would be reamed by any modern writing teacher for being too windy, and for not having a thesaurus at hand. Looking past the mechanics, you can see that the result, what really matters, is good, but I suspect no one would publish his work today until he shrunk it dramatically. The word processor is to a writer like the jigsaw is to the woodworker – it facilitates tighter craftsmanship, but that doesn’t necessarily make the result art.

Thanks!

A Novel Writer Milestone

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If I do say so myself.

This one talkes on printing, along with some other cool things. It occurred to me as I was preparing documents for submission to publishers that I was going to have to reformat my whole document to make it look good on a printed page and to match publishers guidelines. But I didn’t want to end up with a small, serifed font when I went back to edit the document. Switching back and forth would be a real pain, even with a modern word processor with styles. CSS-based solutions could do it, but there’s still setup and making sure each block of text has the right tags. My program already knows what all the pieces of the document are, so why couldn’t it reformat the text differently for different purposes?

Well, now it does. You can print with the screen settings, with or without margin notes, or you can create any number of presets with different fonts and styles to apply to each of your document elements. Now I can print a manuscript for marking up without messing up the settings I have for editing. Well, I could if I had a printer.

Here’s a complete list of changes for this release. Some of them won’t mean much to Non-JNW users, but I’m really happy with the way things are progressing. Expect to see some further upgrades to margin notes in the next months – every word processor in the world will have these some day, but why wait?

  • resizable margin
  • export by section
  • print by section
  • print cover page option
  • print margin notes
  • print with separate manuscript settings
  • Created Project Menu for access to operations that modify project data not in the main document view.
  • Moved project layout settings from preferences to new project menu, since they are specific to the project
  • Added fields for title and author, along with fields in anticipation of manuscript printing
  • Added ability to export Microsoft Word format (OS X 10.3 and later)
  • add preference to turn on/off alternate text color onscreen and when printing
  • add preference to change text highlight color
  • Made a change to make big files load faster, but it didn't help much
  • bugs fixed:
    • database window not correctly clearing description field when new is clicked
    • splitting text section messes up margin notes
    • disable split menu item when chapter title is active node
    • fix layout recursion bug when splitting large sections with margin notes
    • Fixed bug that would cause parts to display in the incorrect order when there are multiple top-level items (e.g., Books in the default structure)
    • Fixed potential crash when removing project levels in project structure panel


If you’re on a mac, drop by the hut and take a gander!

Thanks!

End User License Agreement

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There comes a time in every successful software project that one must establish one’s rights. It seems that what lots of people do is find some other company’s agreement and copy it and put their own company name in. They are pirating the anti-piracy language. That can’t help their case in the long term. Also there are templates you can buy with all the necessary legalese, but even they do not hold up in court, apparently. (As an aside, some companies sneak some pretty nasty stuff into those agreements, allowing them to install spyware and giving themselves rights to your work product). The fact that no one reads them and everyone knows no one reads them undermines their validity. Or something like that. I’m no lawyer.

Therefore I have decided to write my own End Users License Agreement, and being a fundamentally lazy person, I have decided to also make that agreement my blog entry for the evening as well:

By accepting this agreement you promise not to be a scumbag software pirate robbing hard-working programmers of their livelihood. I’m not doing this for my health, you know. You are welcome to install Jer’s Novel Writer on any machines you own as an individual. Corporations do not have that right. If you’re part of some giant novel factory you need to pay for a copy for each machine.

Heck, let’s just be reasonable here. Jer’s Software Hut (the Hut) is depending on people like you who know the right thing to do. You know the difference between sharing and stealing (sharing good, stealing bad). If you need to ask a lawyer if it’s OK to do what you want to do, it probably isn’t. Why bother? The lawyer will cost you more than dealing directly with the Hut anyway.

Just to make it clear, while you can buy a license to use this software till the cows come home, Jer’s Software Hut owns the code. It would be silly to do anyway, but you’re promising now that you won’t try to reverse-engineer Jer’s Novel Writer or incorporate any subset of it into some other product without express written permission from the Hut.

I will give you the right, however, to make as many copies of this agreement as you want, and modify it and use or sell it to your heart’s content. If you publish it somewhere, I would appreciate credit. (I can see my EULA-writing career blossoming now.)

Heck, you’re not reading this anyway. I don’t know why I bother. I could put in that I have the rights to anything you create with this software, and you wouldn’t notice. You’ve already clicked “accept” like a good little robot. I’m glad I went with the cheap lawyer.

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It’s not the final wording, but it’s close. I would be happy to consider any contributions you might have to offer. I think after I have a couple of beers I’ll be improving some parts.

There is actually a reason I use the tone I do (besides just for fun) – I know that no matter what the EULA says, it’s only as powerful as the lawyers I hire to defend it. I’m trying for a moral protection of my work, rather than a legal one. And if I ever did have to defend my rights in court, I think a reminder to the jury that stealing is stealing no matter what legal mumbo-jumbo they hear can only help me.

Thanks!

Jer’s Novel Writer approaching public beta

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However, what I don’t have is the user registration stuff, which will eventually be part of the commerce solution. The commerce thing will be Web-based, and I want to have my final hosting solution in place first.

So any of you out there have good suggestions about the e-commerce angle? I’ve been looking into PayPal, which seems reasonable, but doesn’t address user codes, software timing out, and stuff like that.

The other requirement for a public beta is a place where people can report bugs, comment on other bugs, and I can update users about progress in fixing those bugs. As long as I have all that, I may as well expand the role of the system into a full BBS where writers can hand out and talk about writing. Or whatever it is they talk about.

This blog entry is really just shameless reuse of the status report I’m adding at jerssoftwarehut.com/. Felt like I had to post something here.

Thanks!

Guess I Should Plug the Software

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– not getting stuck on some detail or having t go back and find something you wrote somewhere a hundred pages ago, and inevitably editing instead of getting new ideas down. Of course, when the time comes to edit, you want to be sure you find all the places you weren’t sure about the first time you wrote them. If you’re not sure you will find the trouble spots later, you won’t be able to let them go for now.

Key features are:
– Outline that grows with your work, or you can use to define the parts of your story ahead of time.
– Character database where with two clicks you can store character names and descriptions for later reference.
– Margin notes so you can jot something down next to text you want to revisit later. This is an amazingly handy function.
– Regular note panel so you can remember the last time you ate.
– It actually knows what a chapter is (or whatever organizational structure you want to use).
– Better performance than most word processors for really, really big documents.
– More accurate page count.

If you are interested in the software, drop me a line. Man, I dig those margin notes.

Thanks!