That's why I am so excited with all the wonderful tools that are becoming more and more prevalent, that allow me to work in the medium in which I am so comfortable -- good old plain text -- and yet to output to very rich formats.

For example:

• I am writing this blog post in Markdown using the Markdown plugin for WordPress. Awesome! i love it. I no longer have to fight with the WordPress rich text editor.

• I recently needed to create some UML Sequence diagrams to demonstrate flow through the different components of a program I was writing. I'm on a Mac, so I can't use Visio. I spent a long time looking at a number of different options, like OmniGraffle, Gliffy, and so on. Finally, I found websequencediagrams.com, which is awesome. It lets me write a plain-text description of the interactions between the components -- for example:

  iPhone->Server: send request
  Server-->iPhone: xml
  

  ... and it will instantly create the UML sequence diagram for me:

  

  Once you have this capability, the possibilities are endless. For example, websequencediagrams.com makes it easy to write your own scripts in Python, Ruby, Java, or whatever, and create the sequence diagrams. So the point is, I can create the text representation locally on my own computer and check it into source control, and then recreate the resulting diagram whenever I want.

• yUML is similar, but for other kinds of UML diagrams such as class diagrams. Again, you just write it down in plain text, and it lays out and creates a pretty diagram. For example, with this input:

  [Customer]1-0..*[Address]
  

  ... you get this image:

  

• In case it wasn't obvious, both of the above services make it easy to just put an <img> tag in your own web page and point to their server, and your diagram will show up.

• And then there are things like PanDoc, which makes it possible to write an entire book in Markdown. Today I came across The Little MongoDB Book via Hacker News. So the guy writes the book in Markdown, and then runs PanDoc which creates a very nice-looking PDF out of the whole thing. And of course he stores the original Markdown in GitHub.

This is the way things are supposed to be. It feels so right.

Since I'm a Google fan and an Apple fan, and feel that both companies are really good at making things easy, and since my wife and I are both on Macs now, I thought I'd see how good a job those companies do.

For Google, searched for info on how to do mailing labels in Google Docs. They claim to support labels, but their "solution" is hilariously bad: Start with a document template (people upload tons of them), and then manually change each label. Ha!

Apple's solution is hard to find (I found it by googling), but once you do find it, it's awesome. Export your list to a CSV file, then import the data into the Address Book app, and then say File > Print. One of the printing choices is Labels; and you can specify which Avery label type you want, and you're done!

And they did a beautiful job of handling a few issues I was worried about:

• I don't normally use Address Book, so it was okay with me if it clobbered existing data that I had in there, but I was wondering if this would work for people who do actively use Address Book. It works fine. First I created a new "Group" called "Christmas Labels 2010". Then I imported into that group. If there are any imported entries that appear to be duplicates of existing entries, it asks me what I want to do (merge, keep both, etc.). I just told it to keep both. Then, after printing my labels, I deleted all the entries I had imported, and then deleted the group.
• My Excel spreadsheet is formatted in a way that isn't really compatible with the Address Book fields. Address Book has separate fields for first name, last name, address, city, state, zip. My spreadsheet just had three columns: "Last Name" (which was actually the full name), "Street", and "City, State, Zip". When I imported, Address Book did a good job of guessing which field each one should go into, but of course it might import one entry with the last name "The Smith Family" and no first name, and the city "San Francisco, CA 94134", and no state or zip code. Okay, that's incorrect. But it wasn't a problem. When I said to print, the labels looked just fine. (And no, there was not an extra space before "The Smith Family" on the labels, even though it is trying to print "<firstname> <lastname>".)
• Although by default it didn't guess the correct encoding of the CSV file, I was able to manually specify UTF-8, for the handful of entries that had special characters.
• A few entries had text that was too long to fit in the default font. Address Book handles that gracefully -- it just printed those ones in a smaller font.

So it's a knockout punch, Apple wins.

I typed Donner, as in Donner Pass.  The iPhone "corrected" that to Dinner.

Um, yeah, that's appropriate.

(I'm also sick of the iPhone changing its to it's.  Its spell checker doesn't know what it's doing!)

Any other funny ones?

Wheeeeeee owwww. Catching a fly ball (at least I caught it), I jammed my finger. Turned out I fractured the fifth metacarpal bone in my hand, and will be wearing a brace and/or cast for four to six weeks.

This is making it ridiculously hard to type. I don't really want to take any time off work, because I just got back from a nice long sabbatical and am eager to get back to Flex Builder features. So I'm just going to keep plugging away, albeit a lot more slowly than usual.

Voice recognition software helps with email and the like, but not with coding. I even had another weird but creative idea that didn't quite pan out: one funny thing about this is that with the brace on my hand, it is actually easier to type on my iPhone than on a computer keyboard. (I am writing this blog post on the iPhone.) So, I installed VNC software on my computer, and then installed Mocha VNC Lite on my iPhone. That way, I can use the iPhone got typing on my computer!  But alas, when you do that, you don't get the iPhone's auto-correct capabilities, and without that, the iPhone was too tedious to type on.

Anyway, I am plugging away on lots of really cool debugger features for Flex Builder 4. I can't tell you what they are, but I just can't resist mentioning that our awesome summer intern, Sedat Akkus, has implemented one of the most-requested debugger features. So what is the feature?  Well, that's a secret, but it rhymes with "fronditional schmakepoints."

The PCMWave file for Alex is much bigger than the PCMWave file for any other voice, so I wasn't surprised to find that Alex sounds far more realistic than any other voice.  Nonetheless, I'm gonna kill him, because he is taking too much of my disk space.

In any case, I amused myself by listening to all the voices. Try clicking "Show More Voices" -- the "Deranged" voice made me laugh out loud.

• Install Greasemonkey
• Restart Firefox
• Install Netflix Notes

Description:

This happens to me all the time: I decide to add a movie to my Netflix queue -- perhaps because it was recommended by a friend, perhaps because I saw a good review, perhaps for some other reason.

Then, months later, I can't remember why I put it in my queue! To address this problem, I wrote a little Firefox Greasemonkey script called Netflix Notes.

Netflix Notes changes your Netflix queue so that you can add a private "note to self" on each movie in your queue. The main point of this is to remind yourself why you added a particular movie -- e.g. because a friend recommended it, you read a good review, and so on.

It only works with the Firefox web browser. If you are using another browser, such as Internet Explorer or Safari, Netflix Notes won't work for you.

I would love it if Netflix obsoleted my work by integrating this functionality natively into their website! But in the meantime, you can use my program.

30-second demo:

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Can other people see my notes? A: No. The notes are stored on your computer, not out on the Internet. Only someone using your computer can see your notes.

Q: Where, exactly, are the notes stored? A: They are stored in your Firefox profile. To see them, navigate to about:config, and then type "netflix" into the filter box.

Q: You should store the notes on the Internet! I want to be able to see them from every computer I use. A: Yes, I would love to add that capability; but I haven't had a chance to do so yet.

Regarding motivation to get started implementing a product idea once you have one: Whatever you do, do something. Us programmers, we tend to overanalyze things. Lots of up-front design, trying to decide if it's the right thing to do, not sure if we have enough education yet, etc. But from what I've read about successful entrepreneurs, they are DOERS. They're Action-Oriented. So I'm inventing a new term: Action-Oriented Programming: writing the damn program instead of thinking about writing it.

But dragdropupload is a slick little Firefox extension that addresses this problem. Once you install it, you can drag and drop any file from your computer on top of the words "Attach a file" in Gmail. Sweet! (You can also drag and drop onto any other website that does file upload, but Gmail is where I find it most useful.)

What the?!?

So of course I clicked 'em all. "Wikipedia:Hauptseite" and "Accueil" take you to the home pages of the German and French versions of Wikipedia, respectively. "Tirol" takes you to the German-language page describing Tirol, which is apparently "a historical region of Western Central Europe" (according to the corresponding English-language page). The last three links take you to the English-language pages for the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Denzel Washington, and commodity markets.

While listening to podcasts:

• "back up" or "repeat" to back up a few seconds
• "pause," "play," etc.
• "faster," "slower," "normal speed"

Email:

• iPhone reads the email to me
• "next message," "delete message," etc.
• Dictation, a la Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  Okay, I know that's way too much to ask from such a small device, but maybe someday...

When using as a phone: "call Tom" (standard voice dialing, as some other phones already have).

What else?