July 2005
Saturday 30 July
- Ultimate Boot CD (22:10) - This is too cool: Ultimate Boot CD. It's a tech person's dream come true! It has hard drive diagnostic tools, installation tools, wiping tools, cloning tools, sector editors, partition managers, and file tools, plus other great stuff like CPU and memory test suites, network tools, free anti-virus tools and much more. Why haven't I discovered this before now? This will make so many things easier!...
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Friday 29 July
- You will see ads in AIM. But you get to choose where! (17:08) - I don't know if anyone else will find this as amusing as I do, but I find it absolutely hysterical that the latest AIM beta now has a preference so you can choose whether to see ads in your contact list, or in your IM window. Note that there's no option to disable the ads, you just get to choose where you want them. Check it out: And to think, some businesses use adware for conducting business! Now that's really...
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Thursday 28 July
- Wow, the book really exists! (19:56) - After many months of work, I finally have a physical copy of the wxWidgets book in my hands. Coupled with a great jog on a beautiful morning (weather in the 70s instead of the 90s like it has been the last 2 weeks), today has been one of the most uplifting days I've had in a while. Hopefully copies of the book will begin flowing through retail channels shortly. It's very exciting (but a bit nerve-wracking) waiting to hear what...
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Tuesday 26 July
- 1.0.6 Beta 1 released featuring UPnP for XP (16:15) - After much clamoring for UPnP support, today's 1.0.6 Beta 1 release offers UPnP support for Windows XP. We look forward to hearing back from the community about the UPnP support and how it hopefully makes using BitWise much easier! Another major change in this version is the ability to request multiple files at once from a user's shared file list. The requested files will be presented to the other user in a list, and the files can be all approved...
Monday 25 July
- New features come... sooner or later (13:10) - Part of what makes the BitWise world go around is the stream of new ideas from our users. Every once in a while someone suggests something really brilliant and realy easy, and a few hours later we can come back and say, "Alright, it's done, and this feature/improvement will be in the next version." If only it worked that way all the time. Some ideas are more complicated, will take a lot of time or resources, or don't have an...
Thursday 21 July
- Book delay & Presentation title (19:28) - Here's something a bit more on-topic for today after my previous post. There was a delay with the printing of the wxWidgets book, so the release date of the book has slipped to Wednesday, July 27th. :( I have begun working on my presentation for the LinuxWorld Expo. The title is: "Dispelling cross-platform software development myths." The bulk of the presentation gives the advantages of wxWidgets by showing how wxWidgets is unlike the common cross-platform development myths. For example: one...
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- This could be the stupidest thing I've ever heard (19:20) - Attention teenagers: It's not cool to suffocate. I was reading in the paper yesterday about teenagers who are intentionally choking or suffocating themselves or their friends in order to induce a 5-10 second high from lack of oxygen / fainting. There have been 10 or so accidental deaths in the past few years that have been determined to be the result of this practice. It has these horrible nicknames like "Suffocating Roulette" or having a "Passing Out Party." This could...
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Tuesday 19 July
- Sneak peek of the wxWidgets book (17:57) - Head on over to the O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf and you can see some excerpts from the wxWidgets book. I especially like Appendix F. Too bad the screenshot doesn't have the new icons. Grr. The publisher's web site now lists tomorrow, July 20, as the publication date, so I think that means we should be seeing the book in stores and available online very soon!...
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Sunday 17 July
- A niche isn't a bad place to be (19:50) - Call me old-school, but I'm still a Matrox fan. Yeah, I know, most people say, "Matrox? Didn't they go out of business already?" Well, no, they haven't. In fact, for the market they serve, they're still doing some really cool things. I just hope that market is bigger than, um, just me. ;) The latest news from Matrox is their Millennium G550 PCIe graphics card, a universally compatible 1x PCI Express graphics card with Dualhead support. Even better, Matrox finally...
Saturday 16 July
- Mirror mirror on my web site, what's the best layout of all? (14:49) - If you haven't seen our BitWise IM home page since yesterday, check it out. Notice anything different? In case you need some assistance, here's what it used to look like. Isn't it amazing what a difference a little switcheroo makes? We hope you agree that the new layout is much improved. Special thanks go to Ooklah for sending the full non-cropped version of the really cool 3 OS logo. Tux looks so much more complete than before. ;) PS In...
Friday 15 July
- UPnP comes to BitWise, at last (16:42) - If I had a dollar for every time anyone has inquired about UPnP support in BitWise, I probably could have treated all of my friends to a fancy dinner at an upscale restaurant. Too bad I don't have those dollars... In any event, my windfall is coming to an end, because the newest builds of BitWise here in the "lab" fully support UPnP when running on Windows XP (or Server 2003). It's unfortunate that earlier versions of Windows don't support...
Thursday 14 July
- Now the [UI] wizard really is magical (17:21) - There are going to be two likely reactions when you read this post: "Oh, I thought it was always like that." or "Why the !#&@*% did it take you so long?" At long last, the UI Selection Wizard that appears when you first run BitWise shows reduced screenshots from your OS, rather than always showing the Windows [XP] screenshots. In case it wasn't obvious, reaction #1 above is for Windows users, reaction #2 is for Mac OS X and Linux...
Wednesday 13 July
- The surveys aren't just for our health (12:31) - I was reviewing the survey results the other day (imagine that, we don't just do user surveys for our health!) and one of the responders indicated a bug that they had found. Using the Windows version, since 1.0.5 the tooltips on the status bar icons in the conversations don't work. This particular user had a very good reason for wanting the tooltips, which is why (s)he noticed it. Within 10 minutes, it was fixed for the next version. We really...
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Tuesday 12 July
- Nuclear pifs (10:22) - Not too long ago I posted about MSN's new filters against programs with extensions commonly used to exploit Windows machines (like .pif, .scr, .com, etc). It turns out that there is a really bad side-effect of all this new protection in a recent build of MSN. If you type a forbidden extension like ".pif" in a group conversation in MSN, it boots everyone out of the group conversation and closes the group conversation. Too funny. You can read more on...
Monday 11 July
- do-du-lu, do-du-lu (20:51) - I have a nice series of short blog topics queued up, so maybe I can have a post every day this week. :) I called the 800 number for the Sears repair center to have someone come and look at the dishwasher (it leaks). While I was talking to the nice lady, I repeatedly heard the unmistakable AIM do-du-lu (raising pitch) and do-du-lu (falling pitch) noises. What I wondered is if it was being used to actually conduct business, or...
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Sunday 10 July
- Where there's a will, there's a hack (16:34) - A common request that I've received is to release a "headless" (no GUI) Routing Server for Linux. This is certainly an understandable request, but the current architecture of the Routing Server simply does not lend itself well to a GUI-less environment. The architectural reasons are based in both wxWidgets and in the design of the Routing Server itself. I would like to thank Yelo for demonstrating a brilliant "hack" for the headless Routing Server problem. By using Xvfb, as long...
Thursday 7 July
- Timezone adjustment for offline message forwarding (15:56) - We are very pleased to announce today the introduction of yet another great BitWise Professional feature. Each BitWise Professional Network can now specify a time offset for the timestamps shown when offline messages are forwarded to email. Previously, offline messages forwarded to email were always timestamped using the server's time (US Eastern time). Each Network's Master Account can choose the time offset from the Network Web Services menu. The time offsets are based on US Eastern time, for three reasons....
Tuesday 5 July
- Accomplishing nothing, and everything (17:54) - This weekend was a wonderful combination of my birthday on Saturday and the Fourth of July on Monday. I know that this is going to come as a huge shock from the owner of a small business, but I actually did almost nothing business-y the entire 3-day weekend. I think I did about 30 minutes of "work" responding to emails and forum postings, that was it! Using really backwards logic, that's a huge accomplishment for me! Yay for accomplishing nothing!...
Saturday 2 July
- Books, not a DOS attack (10:24) - Well, here it is, another year older and another year wiser. Last year, someone out there must have thought I wanted a DOS attack for my birthday (remember this?). Fortunately, this year, someone figured out that I would much rather have a book published. With an upgrade like that, what's due for next year? A private jet? :) Here's the final scoop on the availability of Cross-Platform GUI Programming with wxWidgets. The book is scheduled to be delivered to the...