October 2005
Monday 31 October
- Is the version half full or half empty? (22:41) - Today was the release of BitWise 1.0.6.5 Beta 1. I'm sure you're all wondering: what's with the half version? Why not 1.0.7? The answer is relatively simple: all of the functionality that we want to include in 1.0.7 isn't ready yet, but we don't want to delay the release of all the new stuff until we have everything ready for 1.0.7. A half version seemed like the perfect solution! Of course, one could ask why we wouldn't just make 1.0.6.5...
Saturday 29 October
- Are you allowed to gloat after being internationally published and translated? (10:37) - Co-writing the wxWidgets book was an amazing opportunity. I was lucky enough to find a followup opportunity by using my leverage as co-author of the book to write an article about wxWidgets that was accepted for publication in Software Developer's Journal. Even more amazing, the article was translated into Polish, German and French, and included in each country's corresponding version of the magazine. The original English article will be published in SDJ's electronic-only English magazine in November. If you live...
Thursday 27 October
- I hardly recognize the whiteboard anymore... (19:47) - Everything looks better on a Mac. So it's only fitting to show off some new whiteboard toolbar icons using a Mac screenshot: Not only are they more colorful, a lot of them make more sense, at least to the few early testers. ;) The OS X 10.4 toolbar doesn't have the line width control; it's a menu instead. Just in case you were worried about the beloved line width control....
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Tuesday 25 October
- The whiteboard found its colors (17:37) - Here's another one of those "What took so dang long?!" features. Check out the new whiteboard: Having a palette will certainly make switching colors easier; the palette even saves between sessions and updates globally if you modify it. Also, to make drawing even easier, you can draw using the right mouse button, which will draw with inverted colors (using the background color as the foreground color and vice versa). Oh, and you can right-click on an image and copy it...
Friday 21 October
- No port forwarding. No UPnP. Yes direct connections. (13:40) - After the release of 1.0.6, we immediately began investigating the possibility of being able to establish direct connections through routers without having to set up port forwarding or enable UPnP. As it turns out, there is a little-known method called "TCP Punching" that works with some routers. UDP Punching is used by many common VOIP applications, but applying the method to TCP is not very common. This method is not operating system dependent, so it can work on any platform...
Thursday 20 October
- An audio CD is just an audio CD after all (22:56) - Last fall I ranted up and down about copy protected audio CDs, and how I couldn't rip the tracks off of a copy-protected audio CD to mp3. I have since learned that there's a really easy solution: don't allow copy-protected CDs to auto-play. It turns out that the copy protection software is loaded when the CD auto-plays (they are hybrid audio / data CDs) and if the CD never auto-plays, the copy protection software isn't installed. The CD drive then...
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Tuesday 18 October
- Security software gripes increase 650% (20:36) - Interesting timing: one of my email newsletters today linked me up with Larry Seltzer's column on eWeek entitled, Only Suckers Renew about the rising cost of anti-virus product subscriptions. He makes a good point: in 2001, Norton Anti-Virus annual subscription updates were $3.95. Now, they're $29.99. I can't think of much else that has gone up 650% in the last few years. Even gas has only doubled or tripled since then! So in other words, now I have to pay...
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Monday 17 October
- What's with security software? (21:09) - I was reading a recent advisory on ComputerWorld, and had a question: why is a scanning engine vulnerable to malformed HTTP requests? Maybe I am being a bit naive, but is this implying that some security packages are web servers? While I realize that anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware, etc. software are all quite complex, it seems again and again I am finding these packages to be overbearing, cumbersome, quirky and sometimes unusable. I recently helped someone install Norton Anti-Virus, a process...
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Saturday 15 October
- Bigger is not always better (20:44) - You've probably seen the news by now about MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger becoming interoperable sometime in the second quarter of 2006. Perhaps they feel threatened by Google, or Skype, or AOL, but in the end, I'm not sure that it will matter all that much. Let's consider a few possible usage scenarios: 1) I use only MSN Messenger right now. I don't have much need for any of the others, or I'd be using them already. So I can...
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Wednesday 12 October
- The adolescent contact list (15:06) - Bugs in today's software, as much as we try to eliminate them, are an unfortunate reality. While the ideal goal is to have no bugs, the realistic goal is to have only minor bugs. :) A new version of BitWise of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) was uploaded last night around 8:30 pm EDT to address a minor, but annoying, bug. The contact list seemed to be experience some sort of adolescent growth spurt; each time you logged in, the...
Tuesday 11 October
- BitWise IM 1.0.6 released (16:04) - BitWise IM 1.0.6 has been released for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Major new features include: BitWise Plus, an upgrade to BitWise Personal that provides identity verification and stronger encryption, UPnP support on Windows XP, native toolbars on Mac OS X Tiger, stacking corner popups, new status bar icons, UI enhancements, and platform-specific improvements and bug fixes on all platforms. See the versions page for a complete list of changes, or download now.For more information about BitWise Plus, see...
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Monday 10 October
- Removing Plus access for testing (09:53) - Sometime Tuesday morning, all of the Plus memberships automatically granted to testers for testing purposes will be removed. To ensure uninterrupted access to your Plus features, you can purchase (via credit card or PayPal) a Plus membership before that time. Don't forget that right now we have a buy one, get one free offer, so for only $25 you get two memberships! You can purchase BitWise Plus using Web Services. The testers who won memberships, the translators, and other media...
Sunday 9 October
- Gaming becomes a social disease? (14:39) - They can't stop playing video games (CNN) Jun Mung-gyu remembers the throbbing pain in his head and shoulder aches from spending as many as 15 hours a day hunched over a computer keyboard battling his online foes. "You have no life, you only focus on gaming, putting off everything, like getting a haircut," recalled the 27-year-old Jun, who was able to kick the habit earlier this year though he remains in the milieu, running an Internet cafe in southeastern Seoul....
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Thursday 6 October
- In Kevin-Euchre, Enya is the right bower (19:05) - I would hereby like to announce that I will have limited availability on November 22nd (date subject to change). On that day, I will be making a beeline for the closest store that sells CDs and be snapping up a copy of the new album, Amarantine, by Enya. It's been 5 years since her previous effort, A Day Without Rain, was released. BitWise didn't even exist back then (the horror!). Any other big Enya fans out there? Maybe I should...
Tuesday 4 October
- With bugs that impressive, who needs features? (18:44) - Once again, blog material just landed in my lap. This story was sent to me today from a BitWise User: "In other news, MSN is giving me an extra hard time. I now have two contacts that have me somehow automatically blocked when they load up MSN, for no apparent reason. We can't figure it out. With bugs that impressive, it's no wonder it's so popular!" That, and who do you turn to for help? Where do you go to...
Sunday 2 October
- The Kool-Aid Point (14:14) - I was reading the latest issue of Wired and came across a very interesting blulb in a side-panel. Excerpt from: Head First Design Patterns You don't really have passionate users until someone starts accusing them of "drinking the koolaid." You might have happy users, even loyal users, but it's the truly passionate that piss off others enough to motivate them to say something. Where there is passion, there is always anti-passion... or rather passion in the hate dimension. If you...