Coda is the name of a new web development application for Mac OS X created by Panic, the same folks who created the file transfer application Transmit.

While there’s not really anything revolutionary about the individual components of Coda — remote SFTP browsing, text editor, browser preview, visual CSS editing, SSH terminal, programmer documentation — these functions are rather elegantly stitched together in a way that makes my existing toolset — YummyFTP, BBEdit, Firefox, and CSSEdit — look cumbersome.

The nice thing about Coda for me is that its basic assumptions about work flow mimic closely the way I actually work — editing “live” files from a remote volume via SFTP, previewing in a browser from the remote server, tweaking, repeat. While it’s possible to recreate this flow with things like YummyFTP’s ability to call BBEdit and re-save to the remote volume when the edited file is saved in BBEdit, having a closely-coupled remote volume browser and text editor takes one level of cumbersomeness out of the picture and makes for a much more natural rhythm.

The text editor in Coda, built around the Subetha Engine, isn’t quite as capable as BBEdit — there’s no function-browser (Wade points out there is one), and the search-and-replace functions are nowhere near as strong (seems like I missed the fact that Coda actually has very capable search-and-replace, with regex and everything!), for example — but it’s a pretty solid text editor nonetheless, and presumably will only get better in future releases.

Indeed one of the pleasant surprises of Coda is that it doesn’t suffer from the “Lotus Symphony” problem, where functionality is compromised for integration.

While there are some interface inconsistencies and other challenges in Coda — the integration of the Terminal application, for example, is visually confusing, and the documentation in Coda’s “Books” is too slow to be practically useful — Coda is remarkably mature for a 1.0 release, and I’ve been using the application for 3 days very productively and with surprisingly few “oh, I can’t do that in Coda” moments.

Spotted in the washroom of a Charlottetown business. Message on the side of the box says “not to be sold individually.” Do you think there’s much call for this?

Exove Oy has released a Jaiku Widget for Mac OS X. It’s very nice. It’s only a posting engine, however, not a “give me a snapshot of what my people are up to” widget, which would be extra especially useful.

When the office got cleaned a couple of weeks ago, an old copy of The Independent on Sunday ended up on the back of the toilet. As a result every time I pee at the office I look down to see a photo of Elton John and David Furnish cheering me on:

Only four years after I originally suggested to the City of Charlottetown that they install them, and two months after they were first installed, we now have working pedestrian signals at the corner of Prince and Grafton Streets in downtown [[Charlottetown]] (see my February note about their original installation).

Although there are 7.6 million different ways for me to walk to work (or was that 32 different ways — I can never remember), almost all of them take me through this intersection, and so I imagine I’ve waited at the horrible old vehicles-only signal lights as a pedestrian about 2,000 times.

And they were horrible. And dangerous. From two of the four corners you could hardly see the lights, and because the yellow light came on about 5 seconds before traffic started moving in the other direction, there was the ever-present risk of interfering with traffic.

The new pedestrian signals are wonderful — super-modern with a 20-second countdown timer and everything. They’ll be a big boon to pedestrian safety and will provide a great ease to my nervous morning constitution.

On last night’s [[Compass]] there was a story, reported by Kerry Campbell, about a illegal tree cutting inside PEI National Park by Island Coastal Services.

As is increasingly the case at CBC Prince Edward Island, the audio from the story was re-purposed this morning to run as an item on the local news during [[Island Morning]].

A small snippet of the story [MP3] illustrates a greater problem with this practice: when Kerry Campbell reports “these trees were cut to allow golfers a view of the water” it makes perfect sense when it’s on television because accompanying these words was video of the trees and the water in question.

But when the story aired on the radio the point was dulled because, well, we couldn’t see “these trees.”

While it may be appropriate in many situations for CBC Radio and CBC Television to share reporting — it doesn’t really make sense to send two reporters to tape the same speech, for example — if this “rip off Compass stories for the radio” trend spreads much further I think the CBC runs the risk of seriously degrading the quality and impact of local radio news.

Radio is not simply “television without pictures” (nor is TV simply “radio with pictures”) and good radio reporting demands a very different vantage point and expository style than television reporting.

I imagine the rationale behind this sort of re-purposing reflects a combination of fiscal issues and the CBC’s broader drive towards “synergizing the platforms.” While the old school, territorial “radio is radio and TV is TV and never the twain shall meet” world obviously had its own drawbacks, I think it’s important for we listeners to state clearly that local radio news is important, that it’s simply not good enough to re-run Compass on the radio in the morning, and to advocate for more resources for local radio news to make this happen.

I first met Lorna Hutcheson twenty years ago. We became casual acquaintances while both working at [[Trent Radio]]; when Lorna and my friend Al got together a few months later we entered that weird “the girlfriend of my friend” asymmetry, a combination of a free pass to friendship combined with the eggshells of each knowing that we might eventually end up on either sides of a break-up.

When Lorna moved to the west coast a few months later, and Al decided to follow, I agreed to come along for the ride — hitchhiking as far as Thunder Bay and then the bus the rest of the way — and then suddenly found myself in the middle of Lorna and Al grappling to figure out whether they could carve out a longer-term thing.

Lorna’s move west was precipitated, in part, by a desire to explore alternatives to the social work career that she’d developed in Ontario. Empathetic by nature, and constitutionally unable to pay only partial attention, she was struggling, I think, with finding a way of being helpful to others without losing herself completely.

While Lorna worked at finding a new path, she and Al persevered and I was their house-guest several times on visits west over the next few years.

While I flitted about on the sidelines of vegetarianism, progressive politics and what we used to call “social change,” Lorna and Al were all-in. Oddly my strongest memory of this was that their politics required making potato pancakes out of sweet potatoes rather than regular ones. And there were sprouts; lots of sprouts. I reacted by sneaking out after-dark to the Mac’s Milk on the corner to purchase contraband Reese Peanut Butter Cups.

After a while Lorna and Al relocated to Vancouver Island and while they remained intertwined, they eventually moved apart. I heard from Al from time to time, and other friends of mine crossed paths with Lorna and reported back, but we gradually lost touch with each other.

Then one day, several years later, out of the blue, Lorna called me. She’d been to Mexico, had fallen ill, had made it back to her mother’s in western Ontario to recuperate, and was looking for a place to crash for a while and plan her next moves.

I’d just moved into an overly large apartment in downtown Peterborough and so I invited Lorna to come and live in the back room.

It was strange having Lorna suddenly back in my life: we’d known each other for what, young as we were, amounted to a very long time, but we’d never really gotten to properly know each other as friends outside of our connections to others.

Spending time with Lorna was intense, and sometimes a little overwhelming. We were both on the precipice of large life course-corrections, and over the four three weeks we spent a lot of time talking about the big issues of life (to be honest, I’m sure that I did most of the talking and Lorna most of the listening; our natural inclinations tending that way).

While we never quite managed to completely overcome the “friend of a friend” geometry that was the bedrock of our relationship, in that month in the summer of 1990 we certainly got to know each other a lot better, and I came to appreciate a lot of Lorna’s approaches to life.

My closest companion that summer was my dog Penny, an irascible lab-spaniel cross with seemingly endless energy. When I was due to visit friends in Montreal for a week and needed someone to look after Penny, Lorna stepped in, drove up with me, and continued on with Penny down into New Hampshire (to rendezvous, I only realized much later, with her new friend Jay).

Lorna and Penny got on like gangbusters on that trip and so when, a few weeks later, I had an opportunity to move to Texas and needed a temporary home for Penny while I was gone, Lorna generously stepped in. And when Lorna got her own opportunity to move — back to Vancouver Island — she gamely took Penny with her and we made tentative plans to rendezvous a few months down the road to transfer parentage back.

As things worked out, I ran out of money, didn’t make it west, and eventually it became obvious that Penny’s new home was with Lorna. While Lorna and I weren’t in sync philosophically on everything, I had no hesitation in this regard, as it was obvious that she and Penny were meant for each other (and what better life could there be for a dog than having free reign to bound through the forests of Vancouver Island).

Every now and again I’d hear reports about Penny’s new life from traveling friends, and Al, still a friend and also living on Vancouver Island, sent letters with updates. I learned about Lorna’s new love Jay, and knew something of their life together, but for the most part Lorna and I lost touch with each other for several years after that.

I met Catherine, we moved to Prince Edward Island. And then one day came another surprise call from Lorna: she and Jay were living in Colorado, had two children, and were thinking about relocating to PEI.

Although I knew something of Lorna’s Island connections — I’d been working with her Uncle Merrill at Elections PEI for several years by this time — I didn’t know she’d spent summers here as a child, and that it was, in many ways, her second home.

Lorna was calling to look for advice on making the move. I helped out in whatever small way I could, and then, as was our habit, we fell out of touch again.

The next time I heard from Lorna she and Jay and their kids were set up in Little Sands making a go at running a camp-cabin operation. We visited them — and Penny, now almost 10 years old and a sort of “dog emeritus,” with the spirit to be energetic but not always the flesh — and got to meet Armando and Yolando and Jay for the first time and learn something of their path since I’d last seen Lorna many years earlier.

While we did a little bit of web work for Lorna and Jay, and ran into them from time to time around town, our lives didn’t overlap nearly as much as I think we each might have imagined them to have.

Last week came another call out of the blue, although this time not from Lorna but from her Uncle Merrill: Lorna suddenly and unexpectedly died on Friday morning.

Yesterday at the wake I got to meet Lorna’s parents and brother and sister for the first time and see Armando and Yolanda almost all grown up. And waiting in the long line I came to realize that in Lorna’s time back here on the Island she’d touched the lives of many, many others.

I’m happy to have known Lorna. My thoughts and prayers go out to Jay, Armando and Yolanda whose time with Lorna was so suddenly cut short.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the marriage of my great-grandparents Alexander Fraser and Agnes Elizabeth Jane Mathison. They were married April 24th, 1907.

I never met either of them, as they both died before I was born. [[Mom]] sent along this photo of the two of them at their 50th anniversary in 1957:

If there was ever any doubt that [[Oliver]] and I have Fraser blood, you’ve only to look at this photo of Alexander.

USA Today reports that Yotels are set to open soon at Gatwick and Heathrow airports. I’ve been following Yotel for a while; having now stayed near Heathrow overnight twice before catching a morning flight back to Canada, I’ve twice had to suffer the hassle of getting to and from airport hotels. Having a cheap, well-outfitted hotel right in the terminal will be a great boon to Heathrow travel.