Website Down on Christmas Day
Not sure why, but I’ll get it back up and running ASAP.
Even if I have to be late for Christmas Dinner.
Update available – 2.0.1.6
I added a long overlooked feature: time-based goals.
If you want to:
- study for 3 hours every day
- Practice French for 1 hour and a half, every M/W/F
- Reduce watching TV to 1 hour per day…
… now you can!
To create goals like these, just type in the format “hours:mins” for your starting and goal values.
Installer now working on version 2.0.1.5
I completely rewrote the installer, meticulously. I tested it on a few machines, and will test more as soon as I have access to more (it’s 6:30 in the morning).
Later that day:
Alright, it is fixed.
During the installation of .NET, the progress bar isn’t very responsive though.
I’ll get to fixing that next.
Install not working on latest update – (2.0.1.5)
I am aware that recent downloaders may be having problems with the HabitShaper installer.
I am working hard to track down and fix this problem.
Will update you soon.
UPDATE: I figured out where the problem is. As a temporary fix, if you go to this site and it says that you have anything less than .NET 3.5 SP1, you can download the file it tells you to get.
That should fix it.
Sorry about this, new users!
Writing a Novel – Done!
Final official word count: 51,480 words!
It was harder than expected towards the end, especially since I slacked a on the 18th-20th, and on the penultimate weekend.
However, it was definitely within the realm of possibility. Especially now that it has helped me realize some important improvements to the ‘Project’ target calculations.
Before I started this grueling Project goal, the project targets were being calculated with the ’start slowly’ idea. I realized that, though this works brilliantly for shaping habits, it is somewhat counter-productive with ‘Project’ goals, where the total is what counts.
Also, because of the structure of the formulas I was using, if I skipped a day or more with this goal, HabitShaper would take the words I needed to make up for, and spread them throughout all the remaining days. If we were machines, this would be the sensible thing to do… but as it was, it’s main effect was to make me think “Well, missing a day isn’t such a big deal.”
This was a great learning experience, and I am glad I got to use HS for this goal, since I am it’s harshest critic.
The good news is, I improved the Project formulas, and updated the app for you (from HS: Help > Check For Updates).
I also fixed a crash when you input the last value of a Project goal.
Now I can focus more energy into improving HabitShaper in time for the New Year’s Resolutions 2010 spike!
Writing a Novel – Day 16
Wow, with all this novel-writing, I kind of skimped out on the blog updates!
Anyway, I’m still here and still going strong.
The targets I’ve had have helped me to ease into this nicely.
I will say that there are several tweaks and improvements I will be making to the ‘project’-type algorithms as a result of this extensive first hand testing. (While the standard habit curves have been tested and tweaked over years, these project algorithms were only added in version 2).
In short, the tweaks are mostly concerned with how the targets adjust to missed days. I missed my target two days out of the last 16, and I think I can improve on the way the rest of the targets adjusted to compensate.
More details on this after Nov 30.
Now, back to writing!