“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” — Pablo Picasso

Then I found a better quote on the Web and replaced Picasso’s one with it:

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein

It turns out, Albert Einstein didn’t say that. Instead, this quote is from Leo Cherne, an American economist.

This was discovered by Ben Shoemate, and he wrote a post in his blog about it:

People use quotes as a way to strengthen their own position. If I can quote someone you respect, it adds credibility to whatever argument I’m making. Over time, the truth gets further and further away. The biggest names have always attracted people who are more than willing to put words into their mouths for their own gain – Confucious, Jesus, Aristotle, Shakespere, Einstein, and the biggest, most misquoted, of them all – God. All of them have probably been quoted more for the things they never said, than things they actually did say. I imagine this is the most disappointing part of time travel, waiting around to witness words never spoken and deeds never done.

Ben made a research to found the actual source and author. You can read more in his blog.

I’m totally agree with him, and I’m sorry that I helped spread the disinformation. Here’s the lesson: when you’re looking for a good quotation, don’t trust a few websites — do a better research.

xkcd comic

Thanks, Ben!

P.S. See also Wikipedia’s List of misquotations.

Make a commitment to write journal regularly.

Set up a schedule that suits you and follow it. Don’t skip writing sessions if you don’t know what to write about — just start with a rough paragraph and keep developing it (see “Write” section below).

Choose tools that are convenient and inspiring.

For instance, Mémoires, our journaling software, is a simple and effective tool that keeps you focused on your journal’s content, not the application itself.

You’d want to keep your journal on your computer, and here’s why:

• it’s searchable (easy to find everything your wrote about);
• secure (no need to hide anything, just remember your password);
• editing and rewriting is easy.

However, you may need a small paper notebook when you’re away from your computer — try tiny Moleskines or Field Notes. Just remember to type entries back into your journaling software.

Just write.

Writing is hard, but it becomes easier as you write more.

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.” — Plato.

Open your journal, type in a few words — just your thoughts — and you’ll get into the flow. You don’t have to keep your first paragraph — it’s just for a warm up.

Add photos to your journal.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

We are lucky to live in the age of digital photography — you can take millions of photos at no cost. Not everything can be described with words, keep some of your pictures in your journal.

Try different styles.

In your journal entries talk to yourself, your journal, or some imaginary or real person. Write as you would write a letter, or a newspaper column. Try different styles to find your true voice.

Review your journal.

Review your journal regularly (for example, once a week) to get inspiration. Keep notes about your feelings (you can even write them down in a new journal entry).

P.S. Try Mémoires, our journal writing software for free.

How to write journal.

We are pleased to announce the new Coding Robots website. It has a fresh modern design, better usability, and improved load speed. If you’re reading this through RSS, check it out!

Forums

We are also resurrecting the old forums in a new format. It appears, switch to Google Groups was a mistake: some users were complaining that groups were not as convenient to use as forums, discussions slowed down, plus there were a lot of spam. (I wrote a forum topic about this).

Welcome back to the old new forums at http://forum.codingrobots.com!

Blog and Twitter

Usually, we published a couple of posts per month in our blog. Starting today, we’ll be blogging more on various topics in our niche: blogging, writing journals, design, and more. If you haven’t subscribed to our RSS feed (or by email) yet, do it now, so that you don’t miss anything interesting. We also have a Twitter account you can follow — http://twitter.com/codingrobots.

Enjoy

Take a look at our website, and if you find any mistakes or bugs, please let us know.

Thank you for staying with us!

P.S. We have some t-shirts for you.

We are happy to announce the availability of the new version of Mémoires.

Release notes:

• Default font selection in Preferences.
• Better look in Leopard:
  - The bottom of the main window looks like iCal’s.
  - Left panel becomes gray when the main window is inactive.
  - Improved journal icon (now full-size 512x512).
  
• Faster startup.
• Importing from the latest versions of MacJournal and Journler.
• Fixed searching for license in selected message in Mail on Leopard.
• Fixed warning messages in Console for updater.
• Fixed memory leaks.
• Corrected mistakes in the English help file.
• Updated localizations.

You can get it from http://www.codingrobots.com/memoires/

Thanks to everyone for reporting bugs and suggesting features! Also thanks to translators for a quick response.

WordPress 2.6 is going to join Movable Type in discriminating against blog clients—they are going to disable XML-RPC APIs by default. Users will have to enable them manually. (Movable Type requires you to use special API key instead of your password.)

Daniel Jalkut, developer of MarsEdit, the excellent blog client for Mac OS X, has a good post on this in his blog:

In my opinion, an entire class of problems with WordPress (and other blogging systems) stems from this interface bifurcation. Establishing a single interface to WordPress would be comparable to the “pin code + card” interface at your bank. You pass through it by car, on foot, and even at the counter when they ask you to swipe before doing any transaction. If you’ve only got one “real API” that touches the critically important data, then you’ve only got one door to secure. Furthermore, when all views into the blog are required to share the same API, suddenly none of them is deprived of functionality that the other has. Imagine if the API that the web interface uses to access all features of a blog could be just as easily employed by MarsEdit or any other application you authorized. The end result would be lots less work “playing catch up” for the XMLRPC and Atom developers, and more time focusing on innovative and cool features for all blog users.

Read it now and come back.

Did I mention that most blogging clients (except for one) are made by tiny software companies, and that they spend a huge amount of time answering to support emails from their users who have various problems configuring their server software?

We do our best to make our software as easy to configure and use as possible: just enter your blog address, login, and password, and let the program do configuration as needed. Disabling API by default will throw this work away; it’s a way to increase the number of support requests, therefore, the amount of time we spend on support rather than perfecting our software.

Time to move on and develop other types of software? Or make our own blog engines? ;)

P.S. I have nothing against WordPress developers; actually they have one of the best implementations of the API, and I want to thank them for their work. However, I do not understand how disabling API will increase WordPress security.

Update: WordPress developers handled this issue with care: WP provides a meaningful error message and instructions on how to enable API. Thanks again, guys!

Here it is: the updated BlogJet This! extension for Firefox 3.

Apple will rename their .Mac service soon. Hints are everywhere in Mac OS X 10.5.3 update.

iCal’s Localizable.strings file contains the following string:

/* Label of .Mac button in iCal’s General preferences. %@ is the new name of Apple’s online service (was .Mac) (remove -XX02)

Safari has the following lines in its Localizable.strings:

/* Title of .Mac alert sheet, with .Mac brand name subsituted */ “You need a %@ account that has syncing enabled” = “You need a %@ account that has syncing enabled”;

Same with Mail’s Prefs.strings:

/* Title of button used to open the .Mac system preference pane. */ “AOS_SYNC_BUTTON_FORMAT” = “%@…”; /* Descriptive text for .Mac Sync. */ “AOS_SYNC_FORMAT” = “Use %@ to synchronize Accounts, Rules, Notes, Signatures, and Smart Mailboxes.”;

Almost everywhere “.Mac” has been replaced with %@, which means that the name of Apple’s online service will be inserted programmatically by applications.

I looked into binaries to find out what the new name is, but it seems like apps take this value from /System/Library/PreferencePanes/Mac.prefPane /System/Library/CoreServices/AOS.bundle (thanks, Mike!), which still has the old name. It seems like it will be updated via Software Update once Apple renames .Mac and — boom! — all your apps will have the new name.

Kudos to DeepApple [ru] for finding strings in iCal.

Update: next post: “Mobile Me” name found!

Also, we got rid of the old forum and moved discussions to Google Groups. There are two user groups now:

• BlogJet Users group

  This place is to discuss BlogJet usage, share your thoughts on blogging, ask for help and request features.

• Mémoires Users group

  This place is for Mémoires users to share their thoughts on journaling, ask for help, and discuss ideas for future versions.

We hope you will be satisfied with improved support!

Consider current version a beta release — it works okay, though it doesn’t report the uploading progress yet.

Get it here: http://www.codingrobots.com/acornflickr/

It’s free (and open source, MIT license). Enjoy!