Learning to Dance in the Rain

Archive for July, 2007

Where do smokers get the idea that they’re not subject to littering laws and decency?  We’re all taught not to litter, so how come every smoker I’ve ever seen discard a cigarette butt has done it on the ground instead of an ash tray?  There are some smoking areas where there must be hundreds of them on the ground.  Whether it’s from their moving car, at the bus stop, or outside their office building.

Come on, smokers.  If you’re going to injure yourselves and others through smoke and second-hand smoke, the least you could do is respect property and cleanliness.  Use an ashtray already!

In response to several requests for feature enhancements that I do not have time to provide and several requests for the source code, I have created the Ward Photo Directory project on CodePlex. 

The source code will be uploaded shortly, but the setup program for version 1.1 is already there for download.

Now as a personal request: if you download the source code in order to make a change, please consider contributing back to the project in one of the following ways (in ascending order of preference):

1. Add a comment here or shoot me an email with what you’re doing so I know what’s going on and how people are using the software. 
2. Add an Issue to the Issue Tracker for the feature you want to see fixed or added.
3. If you fix the issue yourself in a generalized way, please either send a patch back to me or ask to be added as a developer on the project so you can check in your changes to help everyone else who is using the program.

So my previous post about how to generate a ward photo directory PDF in just a couple minutes has generated some great feedback.  I hadn’t realized the hard-coded values (like my ward name!) that was in the version I published.  I’ve just uploaded version 1.1 that allows some additional customization:

1. Change the ward name
2. Select which families get included

I also disabled the Upload to Ward Web Site button because it had code in it that is hard-coded for my old ward, and until I can get admin rights to at least one more ward I won’t be able to generalize it.

To download Ward Photo Directory v1.1, visit my previous post and make sure you follow the installation steps.  The link to download the app has already been updated to the new version.