the finger-keyboard synapse - April 2005 Archives

April 2005

Getting ready to "flip the switch" (14:50) - If nothing catastrophic happens in the next day or so, I'll be throwing the switch on the new web site sometime tomorrow (Saturday). What this will mean is that the old site will no longer be accessible; redirects will automatically move you from the old site to the new site. About time, eh? Hopefully doing it over the weekend will allow for a smoother transition and any major fires can be put out before Monday (though hopefully there won't be...

It's a match made in heaven (16:57) - One of the tasks for the new web site was integrating the navigation of the site into the phpBB forums. I did this a while ago, and the result was functional, but not completely satisfactory. The navbar colors clashed with the default theme, the navbar "shifted" a bit between the forums and the other pages, and the shadow had to be removed for the integration not to look really bad. So, basically, it looked... bad. After realizing that the new...

No garbage! (21:12) - There are some days that everything is worth it. Here's a message [edited for clarity, grammar and language] that I received today from a long-time BitWise user: "So I refuse to install Yahoo on my laptop. At the beginning, I was given 2 options: "typical install" or "custom." I of course chose custom. However, by choosing "custom" so as not to install all the toolbars and other stuff... it permanently checks "use Yahoo as my default search engine." No amount... | 2 Comments

1.0.5, 2.6, and 24 (10:07) - The new web site is only about a week or ten days away from launch, and the new 1.0.4 client is scheduled for May 5th. Even amidst this, I started procrastinating, I mean, experimenting, with icons in the client. Lyrion has created some really nice new lightbulbs, and we have access now to over a thousand icons from the icons purchased for the web site. I thought to myself, "Self, wouldn't it be great if the web site and the...

Choosing the right name the first time (12:09) - I have some advice for anyone who thinks that they will ever be selling a product or service: name everything correctly the first time. As is evident on the new web site, quite a few things are being renamed in conjunction with BitWise 1.0.4:bitwisecommunications.com -> bitwiseim.com BitWise Chat -> BitWise IM Free BitWise -> BitWise Personal Professional BitWise -> BitWise Professional Pro Group -> Pro Network Group ID / Group # -> Network ID Chat Room -> Conference Pro Group... | 2 Comments

All eyes set on the first week of May (09:53) - The first week of May is going to be one of the most important weeks in BitWise history. Here's the plan: Big item #1: On May 2nd, we plan to switch over to the new web site. The old site will be programmed to redirect to the new site, with many pages having specific redirect targets (for example, trying to reach the old download page will take you to the new download page), while secondary pages will simply direct to... | 1 Comments

"Medicine" Ball? (22:19) - So here's something I've always wondered and just went and looked up tonight: why is the heavy ball used for exercise called a "medicine ball?" Google wasn't being very helpful, so I tried Ask Jeeves and came up with this result: "Legend has it, that the term medicine ball goes back to their use on transatlantic ships during World War I. They were promoted by navy medics who stuffed kapok and rags into a leather basketball for the seasick or...

Come visit me at my PO Box! (20:10) - This is another one of those problems that really should have been solved a long time ago by databases and intelligent programming. Has anyone else ever received a catalog addressed similarly to this one that I received last week? Kevin Hock OxONet Inc Or Current Occupant PO Box 331 Even if I had the largest PO Box size available, I still don't think anyone could be an "occupant." How hard would it be to do a search and replace, looking...

BitWise 1.0.4 Beta 3 released (16:09) - Well, we blew right past all of the possible release dates outlined in the Beta 2 post. That's OK though, we weren't expecting to enhance the client so significantly, nor did we expect that we would spend so much time making the new web site as advanced as it is. Anyway, both the new site and the client are very close to release, and by May 1st (or thereabouts) both the old site and BitWise 1.0.3 should be memories. For... | 2 Comments

X's or Y's? (14:47) - This is the "bring your little brother or sister to campus" weekend at the local University, and I was reminded of one of my long-standing questions about life. Assuming that you are the younger of only two children, is it better to have an older brother or an older sister? If you like, I can make it even more complicated by asking that question separately for the younger child being a boy vs. being a girl. I have two much... | 3 Comments

The plan for April (22:18) - March coding brings April testing (similar to that April rain and May flowers line). The web site is completed inasmuch that all the major elements are now in place. Many updates remain to be made, such as embellishing certain pages, updating various documentation with new features and screenshots, making sure items have been changed consistently, etc. For example, "chat rooms" have been renamed to "conferences" and "Pro Groups" are now "Pro Networks," leading to other changes like Group ID becoming...

Progress or backwards compatibility? (21:28) - Unless we're working on a "major" release of BitWise (e.g. the last major release was 1.0 last year), we've always tried to ensures that everything is backwards-compatible. That is, someone running 1.0.4 can chat with someone running 1.0.1 and not have any problems (unless the feature is altogether missing from 1.0.1, of course). However, 1.0.4 will have two non-backwards compatible changes to the whiteboard. Here are the two non-compatible changes: 1) Previously, resizing a whiteboard image changed the original image.... | 4 Comments