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It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

Sometimes I think Radio UserLand has too much bootstrap

Some grumbling before I hit the sack for the night. Since January, when I bought RadioUserLand, I've been getting sucked into the platform. I resisted at first.. I mean why learning another language, especially one bound to a single, commecial platform? Well, the more I played with it, the more the platform looked elegant, and the $40 I spent on it was chump change for what it can do. I can see the foot-in-the-door when I start thinking if there's a way we can use Frontier at work.

So, I'm tinkering and playing... And I'm putting up with flakey things happening, which confuses me. Inexplicable delays, screen flashes, stuttery speed-up and slowdown of text entry. The PipeFilters app I'm working on is killing Radio on my iBook. Sometimes RadioUserLand crashes. I just can't see what's to exotic about what I'm doing in PipeFilters what would prepare me to think it would hobble Radio regularly.

Sometimes, when testing PipeFilters, RadioUserLand somehow manages to bring my iBook to such a grinding, HD thrashing halt, that the CPU Monitor no longer scrolls and I can't even get response from the Dock to kill Radio. My only hope in this situation is to have a Terminal ready with a kill command typed out, launch the script in Radio that only sometimes offends, and then hit enter if things wig out, hoping that within the next 30-90 seconds the Terminal will be able to get a slice of time to eke out the kill command.

Part of it might be the iBook itself. This thing, though pretty and nice, is just not meant to run OS X. It runs it, but I beat the crap out of it. It feels like a 486 laptop. I just switched to a dual 800 G4 Mac at work, and OS X is a dream there. Though... Radio still crashes from time to time.

The more these things happen, the more it starts to make me think maybe I should cut loose soon and take what I've liked about Radio and do some wheel reinvention and cloning in the Python-based things I was thinking about.

But I so want Radio to work well. It's got so many nice ideas in it. I'm just worried that there's too much bootstrap in there.

shortname=ooooho

Archived Comments

  • Jon Schull
    I’ve got the same misgiving about Radio, and I’ve been thinking about the wiki weblog connection too (so, happy to make your acquaintance ;-). However, the pace of development in the Radio space is telling us something too. In particular, Simon Fell’s Word-to-Radio-via Soap hack strikes me as an instantly invaluable tool. Which brings me to Wiki/Weblog/Radio convergences. I’m thinking… * the most impressively wonderful thing about Radio is the author’s ability to work locally site and have the results mirrored on the hosted site. Its not clear a heavily-collaborated wiki site could or should survive that. * Why then isn’t the solution to build an RSS aggregrator into the wiki so that the contents of subscribed-to weblogs are displayed by the wiki. (Or are you trying to replace Twiki altogether via Radio? If so, why?) Now authors get to continue authoring weblogs in a tool optimized for weblogging and syndicating. But readers get to read (and even modify!) the syndicated content on a tool optimized for *that* purpose.