#cat software

Moth wife in the snow ❄️

Follow This How To Translate Your #Moodle Course Workflow #moodlenews

Marco Cevoli at translation company Qabiria has created a process to translate Moodle courses. The 5-step procedure focuses on finding the list of sentences, or for developers, “strings”, to be translated, which means this does not cover translation of additional media, like PDF files. On the Moodle end, you will need administration permissions for the download and upload operations. 1. Download…

After a long wait, MoneyWiz 2 from the smart people of SilverWiz is out! MoneyWiz is a great financial software suite I'm using for quite a while now very happily. And I was looking forward to the upgrade for better reporting et al.

First thing I noticed was, when MoneyWiz 2 for iOS (App Store link) was released I hadn't been notified - A (one-time!) in-app info would have been appropriate, I think... That MoneyWiz 2 was out I realised just by accident through a twitter post. Immediately I bought it for the currently "discounted"1 price of 6.49 AUD.

Then I ran it and connected it to my MoneyWiz cloud data (the SilverWiz people call this "SYNCbits"). Everything went smoothly; MoneyWiz 2 for iOS loaded the data and I enjoy it since on my iPhone and iPad. On the iPad (an iPad 2, which is a few years old) the app runs a tad slow, but is still usable.

So far so good. But then I headed back to my Mac for some more serious budgeting - and what did (the old) MoneyWiz 1 for Mac tell me?: It cannot connect to the cloud data, because another device has upgraded the data without backwards-compatibility!

I was pretty annoyed! Firstly MoneyWiz 2 for Mac wasn't available yet2, and secondly this meant I now have to buy MoneyWiz 2 for Mac if I want to do budgeting on the Mac as well! I did intend to buy the Mac versionin any case, but it is ridiculous that SilverWiz didn't warn me more clearly before using or even better buying MoneyWiz 1 for iOS!

OK, they have an in-app warning when reading/upgrading the data in the new iOS app, but it wasn't obvious that the old Mac software would not be able to connect anymore. There should have been:

A clear in-app warning with spelled-out ramifications plus

A big info on the front page of their website

I am quite disappointed by this lack of transparency. - The SilverWiz guys do such a great job with their software, but the failure to inform us long-standing users about this issue shows a certain lack of customer-focus.

SilverWiz has to manage the discounting via time-limited price reduction, because Apple offers no other means of upgrade pricing - like many people have pointed out, this sucks! ↩︎

I use Emacs TRAMP for my handling of remote file and it works reasonably well. Until today whenI got the mysterious message "Couldn't find exit status of test -e" - and no connection to my remote files.

So I searched the Internet (Google's your friend - or Yandex or DuckDuckGo) and found "by accident" a TechSnuffle blog post, exactly outlining the solution: Run "M-x tramp-cleanup-all-buffers".

A while ago I was reading an old post in an email list of the Lua programming language. The post reads:

But ultimately, we [the makers of Lua] decide. We do not do this because we consider our judgment better than others’. It is only because we want Lua to be the language we want it to be, not to be the most popular language in the world.

This statement got me thinking: The makers of Lua didn’t claim that they closed the development process to their own small group because they think they know it better than others, but “because we want Lua to be the language we want it to be”.

This is bold - and artistically wise, I think. I read their statement in the way that control over the creative process is can be an essential part of the creative process. And for this you might need to put restrictions over the decision process in place. It comes down to the old dilemma: Freedom of artistic expression sometimes cries out for outer limitations.

I have upgraded to Mac OSX Mountain Lion. And I went for a clean install, so that I can change a few things on my system:

Firstly, as package manager I want to ditch MacPort in favour of homebrew. over the years MacPorts developed into a huge beast, homebrew seems to be more flexible.

Secondly, I want to get all GUI apps into the /Applications folder, so that Spotlight (and other GUI launch utilities) easier recognises them as apps.