July 27, 2001

OK Blog 3.0 is finally ready for release though just as I was getting the docs ready, I realized that there was a little tiny hole in how things work <g> I have added a new tab to the Journal Management dialog and the old Journals tab is now actually the Sites tab while the new Journal tab allows you to define individual journals and modify certain attributes for each journal – confusing, huh? Anyway, that particular journal and site set up has problems when you delete stuff … so I guess it was a good idea to call this Blog 3.0 Beta 1 since I can fix that in the final release :p

A word of caution to those who are existing Blog users! Blog 3.0 modifies the database structures again and so you will need to download the Blog Data Conversion Utility and convert your existing data before you can use Blog 3.0. I am not going to give versioning numbers for the Data Conversion Utility but what’s there now is a newer version than what was released for Blog 2.5 – so you do need to download it again. You should see a new Convert menu option for Blog 2.5 -> 3.0 … if not, you have the wrong version of the convert utility.

Another thing that you might notice if you’re upgrading to Blog 3.0 is that your menu bar does not appear or that the toolbars don’t appear. This probably will happen if you copied over only the Blog.exe and not the Blog.cfg file. You can either delete your existing Blog.cfg file and let Blog recreate it for you or copy over the one in the Blog 3.0 distro. Either way, you will lose your toolbar customizations 🙁 But I promise I’ll try not to do that again …

Tags:
Posted by Fahim at 11:55 am  |  No Comments

I’ve received several complaints about problems with Scope and Shell32.dll and at least one person said “I do have the Shell32.dll file on my machine, so what gives?” The problem is not that Shell32.dll is missing but rather that it is too old for Scope to work with. Here verbatim is some information I found on the Net about the problem and a possible solution …

“The shell file is not missing from your computer but the version is too old for the Browser to use. As Windows 95 evolved, Microsoft released upgrades to the operating system that were distributed with a new release of Internet Explorer. If you are getting the [shell32.dll] error message then you are not using the upgraded files. The solution is to install IE4.0 SP2 with the “Standard Install” This will upgrade the SHELL32.DLL (and other files) on your system and the Browser will then work. Upgrading to IE5.0 or 5.5 do not fix the problem because they upgrade the browser only and not Windows 95. If you already have a newer version of Internet Explorer installed on your computer, you must first uninstall it before installing IE4.0. After 4.0 is installed you can reinstall 5.0 or 5.5 to upgrade the browser.”

The IE 4.0 SP2 is a pretty big file I’m told (about 15MB) and I’m not sure where you can find it but a search of the Microsoft Site should turn something up. I know that the above is a pretty awful solution :p I’m working on a separate solution which might deprive you of certain of the features of Scope but will let you use it as it is without having to upgrade your Shell32.dll file … Lemme know if you have any preferences about the above two options …

Tags:
Posted by Fahim at 10:28 am  |  No Comments

Guess what? Blog 3.0 is done!! (Do I hear cries of “Noooo!!”, “Really?”, “That fast?” etc? Probably not :p) I have all the major features that I wanted to have for Blog 3.0 and in the process basically exhausted all the list of features that I had for Blog <g> So unless somebody else comes up with some new ideas or I start getting fresh ideas, I’ll be leaving Blog alone for a while and move onto some of my other neglected apps like Gossip for instance 🙂 I’ll probably release Blog 3.0 today as a beta though I think it is stable enough to qualify as a final release … But there is one thing I’d still like to add but am not sure how to proceed with – the customization of archival links. Currently archival links are just two dates separated by a hyphen to say that that particular link points to entries for dates in that range but that seems umm … not very user-friendly. Of course I could give an option so that you can at least format how the two dates looks to your taste but is that all? Would anybody need any other customization – perhaps some specific text in front of each link or the ability to display just the beginning date or the ending date? If anybody uses the archives much (besides me) let me know and I’ll try to include that as well for the Blog 3.0 final release.

Speaking of new stuff, Jay Mendoza suggested that I do a News Reader 🙂 I am kind of tempted by the idea. Actually sinesolis suggested a long time back that I make Scope kind of a super-Internet tool which integrates an instant messenger, a browser and what not <g> While a news reader will fit in right there, I’d rather have the components separate if I do decide to create a news reader – it is an intriguing thought … I’m gonna let it simmer in my brain and see what transpires …

I heard from an old friend from the BBS days back in Sri Lanka. I hadn’t heard from him in ages – actually not since I left Sri Lanka but suddenly he appeared out of the blue in ICQ! It was good catching up and to think back to the good old days … are the good old days as good as we think they are or is it just us trying to escape from the reality of the present? I’m not sure …

Tags:
Posted by Fahim at 7:09 am  |  No Comments