Today, with the help of beta testers, Michael actually tracked down a bug that was only happening to our users with Hebrew or Greek versions of Windows 2000. So we installed Hebrew Windows 2000 on our handy dandy VMWare machine to debug it…
The bug? One of the libraries we were using was using Chr(255) as a separator character in lists. This got mapped through the Hebrew and Greek code pages to a different character (y umlaut was mapped to plain y).
A New Look
Ever since I first posted to Joel on Software almost two years ago, this site has been built and maintained using UserLand Manila. Manila is a fine blogging tool and I’m grateful to Dave Winer for making it available, for free, at editthispage.com. Later to improve performance I moved it to my own server, and Dave was kind enough to provide a free copy of Frontier on that server. Joel on Software has always been free and ad-free, thanks to sponsorship from UserLand and from Fog Creek Software.
But it’s time to move on. My company’s product CityDesk is in beta, and I’m a strong believer in eating your own dogfood. So starting today this site will be produced using CityDesk, and thus the new look.
CityDesk is a desktop application — I’m running it on my own Windows 2000 laptop. It produces plain ol’ static HTML files which are then ftp’ed to a generic web server (in this case, Microsoft IIS 5.0). This is different than what I was doing with Manila, where each page is constructed from a database whenever it is requested.
Porting Joel on Software to CityDesk involved a lot of manual copying-and-pasting — something I never would have had the patience for if it wasn’t for the opportunity to thoroughly test CityDesk. I’m bending over backwards not to create “linkrot” — all old links to Joel on Software stories have been replaced with redirects, so they should still work. You may discover the odd broken link or picture buried deep within the site; if so please let me know and I’ll fix it. It will take a few more days before all the domain names and IP addresses have completely moved over.
Have a look around. The biggest visible change is a nice new, organized Archive page cataloging all the stories I’ve written over the last couple of years.
Hit and Run Management
Alyosha` asks: “How do you subconciously train your managers not to get involved bungee-cord-jumping style in the design disagreements of the implementors?”
David Bau, a veteran of the Internet Explorer development team, wrote an incredibly cool search utility/address bar/calculator for your taskbar. Download it here.
We’re going to try to release another beta of CityDesk today.
At the same time, we’re shifting stuff from an older server to a spiffy new one. (Is that asking for trouble, or what?) While that happens, the discussion groups may be a little flaky.
I hate the way that when I change a server’s IP address, even though our TTL is set to 15 minutes, people are still using the old IP address almost a week later. Why is that?