Dave asked for a screen shot for all the "Mac-impaired people" out there... so here it is.

I just released Manila Envelope 1.0. It's a native Mac OS X app, written in AppleScript Studio, that allows posting to a Manila-compatible site via SOAP.

I think this is what Dave was asking for last week with respect to Watson. But my app isn't a screen scraper--it is a non-browser-based simple native blogging tool that uses the Manila API.

The software can be downloaded from my software and scripting page. Source code is available, not because I'm an open source movement guy (I'm not) but because AppleScript Studio is a young environment, I don't understand it very well, and I figure other people can learn from my pain.

You can read about the development of Manila Envelope by clicking on the application icon to the right.

It looks like preferences have been broken for almost two weeks in Manila Envelope because, while rewriting the code on the train, I swapped the order of two arguments to a function. Two weeks!!! As Dave says, "We make shitty software....with bugs!!!"

Looks like some of my genealogical research is seriously suspect, according to this article. This is really disappointing: the Freeman family (my grandmother's family) was one of the genealogies I was pretty happy with, but it looks like some of the records (and it's not clear how far back) are suspect.

This is an important lesson to me as an amateur genealogical researcher: always document your source...and investigate any second hand evidence before adding it in.

I've been playing around more with Radio UserLand. As a reminder, my blog is available for subscription in RSS format. The link is http://discuss.jarretthousenorth.com/xml/rss.xml.

It's snowing here in Boston. I missed the first snow of 2002 while I was on my trip; it's nice to be able to see the second one.