the finger-keyboard synapse - March 2006 Archives

March 2006

Skype and Intel sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G (10:21) - Thanks to everyone who commented on my anti-virus post. I enjoyed reading all of the comments and have proven to myself once again that controversy is good! So here I go again. Earlier this month, Skype announced that its conferencing feature would be limited to 5 users on AMD chips, while people using Intel chips could have conferences with up to 10 users. This is, in my opinion, complete B.S., especially in light of some interesting testing that shows that... | 2 Comments

I'm a bad computer user (or, why I don't use anti-virus software) (18:44) - I generally am a pretty honest, open person. But there's one question that I always hope people won't ask me: "So, Kevin, what anti-virus software do you use on your computer?" The honest answer is that most of the time I don't run any anti-virus at all, or it's disabled. Considering that many of the people I know consider me a computer "expert," I don't set a very good example. It's even harder to answer the inevitable follow-up question: "Why?"... | 7 Comments

New sounds for BitWise? (16:45) - I am pleased to post some potential new sounds for BitWise that were designed by user FreakyFwoof. The sounds are available at: http://www.bitwiseim.com/download/BitWiseSounds.zip Even if you don't regularly use sounds, we'd appreciate anyone willing to give these sounds a try and provide some feedback as to whether or not they should be adopted as the sounds included with BitWise. Comments, questions, reactions, praises, bashes, etc. welcome! Please use this forum thread. Thanks!...

Please reboot if you are having trouble connecting to BitWise (13:56) - If you are having trouble connecting to BitWise beginning today at 1 pm EST, please reboot your computer. The old servers have been removed and are no longer forwarding connections to the new servers that were installed on March 10th. Rebooting will force your computer to get the IP addresses of the new servers....

Potential service disruptions Sunday, March 19th (12:34) - We have been advised by our new ISP that there will be some network maintenance and expansion taking place Sunday afternoon. They will be installing new routing equipment that will provide faster access to our servers. As a result, BitWise and OxONet may experience short service disruptions anytime between 3 and 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 19th. While we realize that the timing is not ideal, this expansion confirms our decision to move the servers to be hosted with an... | 4 Comments

Offline message e-mailing fixed early this morning (15:43) - Part of our relationship with our users and customers is fessing up when we make a mistake. If you noticed that you were not getting your offline messages sent via email since our migration late Friday night, you're not alone. A mail configuration bug was silently blocking all outbound messages generated by the offline message emailing script. Thanks to the alertness of our users, this bug was noticed Monday morning and was fixed late Monday evening. Emails are now being...

BitWise IM back online after migration outage window (02:12) - BitWise was brought back up at about 2:10 am, just minutes past our scheduled maintenance window. If you are having problems connecting or establishing direct connections, please click Setup and use login2.bitwiseim.com as your login server. Some computers and DNS servers cache IP addresses, which could cause you to continue to connect to the old server. Connections are being relayed from the old server to the new server, but your IP address is not maintained. We appreciate your patience and...

DNS snafu and possible connection problems (08:57) - Yesterday afternoon, we converted DNS services from the old servers to the new servers. It has come to our attention this morning that the old login server name, login.bitwisechat.com, was lost during the DNS changeover. If you are unable to connect, please go into BitWise's Setup and change the login server to login.bitwiseim.com. We apologize for any inconvenience caused....

Planned downtime Friday, March 10th (11:59) - This announcement is a reminder that there is planned downtime Friday, March 10th while we migrate from our current servers to our new servers in a new data center. The full maintenance window is from 10 p.m. EST to 2 a.m. (Saturday morning), but we anticipate that we will be back online well before the end of this window. It is also possible that we may come up and go back down more than once during this window. If you... | 2 Comments

Hack of the month: Enter key on Mac OS X (16:25) - This post is a direct follow-up to my post Saturday about the Enter key bug on Mac OS X. After another user on a PowerBook reported the same problem, I began thinking about keyboards on laptops. Using one of the small wxWidgets demo applications, the tester was able to relay to me that the Enter key was not producing the key event corresponding to Enter, but to the Numpad Enter key. Since the Numpad Enter has a different keycode, BitWise...

Mystery of the month: Enter key problem on Mac OS X (19:28) - Every once in a while, a really weird bug comes along, and yesterday was apparently our lucky day. Has any using Mac OS X experienced any problems with the Enter key for sending messages since upgrading to BitWise 1.7.1? A user has posted a thread in the forums that the Enter key quit working to send messages on his G4 PowerBook running 10.3.9 after upgrading to BitWise 1.7.1. When running 1.7 again, the Enter key works fine. I tried everything...

Throwing a release party on the 2 year anniversary of 1.0 (16:39) - In case it somehow managed to escape your memory, today is the 2-year anniversary of BitWise 1.0, just shy of our overall 4-year anniversary of BitWise 0.1 (March 17th). To celebrate, we're releasing a new version of BitWise and a new version of the BitWise Routing Server! BitWise 1.7.1 is a bug-fix release, with one major new feature: native support for Intel Macs through a universal binary for Mac OS X 10.4. This means that users with Intel-based Macs can...