August 22, 2001

Wow!! Yesterday’s rant had more comments than any other entry in my journal :p Thank you one and all for your comments and views. Let me clarify something here – my problem is not with the genuine concerns that theme or module authors may have with somebody using their work on a compilation CD. If WareWolf just upped and said that he was selling a compilation CD instead of saying that he was thinking of it and that if anybody didn’t want their work on the CD they could contact him and let him know, that was ill-adviced of him. But my whole problem is with the attitude of people when a person is in trouble. If you read some of the comments at LS2K, you will notice that one notable themer for whom I had a lot of respect till now (I will not name names) said that he does not want WareWolf making any profit from his work and another person commented that whatever problems that WW had was of his making and that he (meaning the person who made the comment) should not have to be bothered by it – or something along those lines. It is this callous and selfish attitude that makes me see red. But I’ve had enough of this stupidity – I will say, each to his own and still continue with the way I do things because I know there are a lot of good people in the LS community and out of it (again I will name no names because that is a pretty long list and I don’t want to leave out anybody <g>) who do believe in doing something good for their fellows with no mind towards profit or ego stroking. Now on to other stuff …

I find “Destiny’s Road” to be extremely interesting – so interesting in fact that I am almost at the end of the book. Three more chapters and I’ll be done!! I wish I had the ability of Larry Niven since he’s woven an extremely interesting world and populated it with a cast of characters who keep me totally engrossed. This is the kind of science fiction that I love and remember. Speaking of writing and science fiction, I know I haven’t continued my story (for the few of you who might be interested :p) but that’s only because I haven’t had the peace of mind to continue. I will do so as soon as I can since I like how this particular story has evolved and am looking forward to what happens next since even I don’t know what does happen <vbg>

As for Blog news, I thought I had version 4.0 complete except for a few finishing touches but Tyran suggested a change today that I think is right in keeping with the philosophy of Blog and so I intend to implement it today. Once that is done, I need to update the documentation extensively since 4.0 has added quite a few new toys to the mix and then I have to wait for a few other cosmetic things to be done and Blog 4.0 should be ready to go 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 8:13 am  |  3 Comments

August 21, 2001

I didn’t make a posting yesterday because if I had, I would have burst out ranting and raving but even after a day’s delay (is that equivalent to counting to a hundred? <g>) I still am sizzling and can’t contain the onset of a major rant.

I was involved with LiteStep for a very long time because I believed in the project and believed that I was doing something worthwhile and contributing to a cause that helped people. But the longer I was there, the more I began to see that it was becoming a forum for people to show off and to bicker. I moved on to a different project – DarkStep – and dropped that too since I didn’t have the time for it. But recently I have been somewhat drawn back to the happenings in the LiteStep community because of a controversy surrounding WareWolf selling a compilation CD of LiteStep themes, modules etc. People who did themes and distributed it for free are suddenly saying “You should not profit from my work …”. Now I can understand that attitude perfectly if somebody was doing that just for profit. But when somebody is out of work and is just trying to make some money to support their family, *I* would think that people would put all of these petty concerns aside but I guess it is not to be so.

People who uploaded themes for others to use for free are suddenly saying, no you can’t use my theme to make a little money – if somebody could make money selling these CD’s in the first place … which I think isn’t going to work in the bulk that it would have to if WareWolf is to make tons and tons of cash as the whiners seem to think. These people say, that they should get some share of the profit for their work. So should I start asking people for royalties each time they use LiteStep on their machines because I put about a year of work into LiteStep? It is at times like these that I really feel like abandoning work on free software completely and either code for myself and not distribute any of my work or start charging for it (not that I will because I know there are still a lot of good people out there – both in LiteStep and just generally …).

I can’t say that I’m feeling very good about people in general at the moment or about the LiteStep “community”. It is so easy for people to make suggestions and talk about alternatives without doing anything to help somebody. I would like to see any of the people doing all the talking taking some action. Ah well … as usual, why do I even bother? The world is going to the selfish, mindless and the childish … God have mercy on the future …

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Posted by Fahim at 8:09 am  |  6 Comments

August 19, 2001

Yesterday was interesting – for me :p Didn’t do much coding but did a lot of other stuff that I enjoy doing. I watched “Space Cowboys” – great movie! Clint Eastwood always gives a good performance and I enjoy his movies – some may think it’s a bit over the top and all but hey, who cares? It’s funny and it was interesting and it was even gripping at times. Certainly emotional too. I remember an old book that I read (I think it was called “The Kingmaker”) about a HollyWood movie moghul who thought a script was good only if it made him cry – I am kinda like that <vbg> If a story moves me to shed a tear for the characters, I think it was well written though that is not my only criteria for a good movie. Yes, I do cry at the movies :p I don’t know why they say that men shouldn’t cry … is there any logic to that? 🙂

I then played “Grandia II” and finally completed the game! Grandia is still the best game series ever as far as I am concerned. The sequel seems a bit easier than the first because I never had any problems at all and beat all the bosses pretty easily whereas in the first at the end, I died a couple of times and had to go back and level up. Maybe I’m learning :p I then took up “Final Fantasy IX” again since I’d given up on it the first time I’d tried it. I realized that my problem was in approaching Final Fantasy as I did Grandia and trying to do everything. Grandia doesn’t have too many mini-quests whereas Final Fantasy seems to have a lot more of them and at the very beginning of the game and I was failing miserably since the mini-quests depended on dexterity and quick reflexes and that is not a department that I’m very strong in <vbg> But once I decided to skip the mini-games and just go on with the story, I began really enjoying it – the FMV is fabulous and in a sense even better than Grandia’s on the DreamCast. I guess my old PlayStation still has life in it 🙂

The evening of course went to watching the various shows on the Sci-Fi channel. I’m really looking forward to the season finale of “First Wave” and I have a feeling that it will be something along the lines of Cade having to kill Jordan and the viewers being left in doubt as to whether he did or not or something along those lines … Or it will have to be about whether the second wave started or not … but why speculate? It should be here soon :p Once all the shows were done with, I began reading “Destiny’s Road” – I’d been reading bits for a while now but I didn’t fully get into the rythm of it till now and suddenly the story took hold of me and I was engrossed! I read on till midnight and couldn’t put the book down and finally forced myself to do so around 12:30 and go to bed …

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Posted by Fahim at 8:33 am  |  No Comments

August 18, 2001

My story is turning out to be pretty interesting 🙂 I caught up to what I had previously written yesterday and in fact had to do some editing to get yesterday’s episode in. I had forgotten that when you type on a handheld about a page or two can look like a lot <vbg> I had had only a basic idea about where the story would lead but I began thinking about it yesterday and completely altered the plot from where it was originally supposed to go … I still am working out the details but I like how it’s turning out but it might change again – so guess both you and I will have to wait to see how it turns out …

I did some more coding on Blog as well. The 4.0 release is shaping up pretty well and I have almost all of the functionality in place except for one element – remote templates. The idea was suggested to me by Phil Stopford – to have templates driven by external files which would basically update the Blog template if the external file had changed. I like the idea since it can be handy in certain situations but am still toying with the idea since there are a few other things to be considred.

Another idea that I’ve been toying with has been that of introducing an installer for Blog. I don’t particularly like an installer since an installer means that you have no idea of what goes on and have no control of what gets installed where. But then again, I can see how it can be helpful to not so computer savvy users. I even played a little with the NullSoft installer since it adds very little overhead, shows all the stuff it’s doing and is freeware but I can’t get the two different types of installs – full and upgrade – working right from one package. So I might not be doing an installer after all – just as well :p

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Posted by Fahim at 4:26 pm  |  No Comments

August 17, 2001

It just hit me – I’m finally running two journals and publishing both to multiple sites from Blog … basically utilizing Blog the way it was meant to be 🙂 Wow!! Did some more coding last night to add a new feature to Blog – the ability to customize the day and month names that are displayed when using Blog. This was primarily done so that users running a different language version of Windows could still do English Blogs (or vice versa) but it can also be used by people to just customize day and month names to have your own unique names – granted nobody else can understand what it stands for but still it has possibilities 🙂

The project deployment that we were supposed to do this weekend at work has been postponed – it’s good in a way since that means my weekend has been freed up but I hate having to go through the same anticipation, preparation and anxiety again. Ah well …

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Posted by Fahim at 8:18 am  |  No Comments

August 16, 2001

Did I say that I got my story online? I know I didn’t :p I did get a new template set up and put the story up at RazorSys which is the place that the side-bar link that I put up earlier on in the day (did anybody notice that? <g>) though there is actually a copy at Tripod too. This is an old story that I have written a few pages of (and talked of before too …) but I will be posting what I have written so far in installments 🙂 Let me know what you think and if you have any stories online like this, let me know so that I can link to your stories as well …

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Posted by Fahim at 5:57 pm  |  No Comments

Had an interesting evening yesterday. I was so pumped up about writing a story and then by Tyran’s and Greg’s comments about wanting to do serialized stories themselves that I started work on Blog 4.0 :p I got the reverse order entries thing done pretty fast but while I was at it, I decided to move quite a bit of the global options to the journal level so that you can have different settings for each journal. I had all of that done when Tyran suggested that I have a way to link to the previous and next journal entries and so Iadded two new tags – < $BlogArchivePrev> and < $BlogArchiveNext> and those work pretty OK except of course when you have no previous entries or next entries <vbg> I guess I could try to put in code to detect that and if so, point to the main file but that seems like a lot of work … so I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that – for the moment I’m leaving it as it is …

I had thought that I had most of the stuff done for 4.0 when I went through an e-mail from Bauke Schildt who suggested about four or five new features/options and since then I’ve been e-mailing back and forth with him and he’s managed to add a couple of more items to the list 🙂 So looks as if 4.0 will be a while coming but then again since 3.7 was just released, I’m sure you can hold on <vbg>

I need to get a new template done and get started on publishing that story that I was talking about but there’s so much other stuff to be done – Blog, the Data Conversion Utility since a lot is changing for Blog 4.0, work .. ah well, that’s always how it is, isn’t it? 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 8:40 am  |  No Comments

August 15, 2001

I finished Mike Resnick’s “Stalking the Unicorn: A Fable of Tonight” last night. It was a really good book as evidenced by the fact that I completed it in about three days instead of about the one month it usually takes me <g> but after I completed it I still felt somehow unfulfilled since it felt as if there was more to the story – I wanted to know what happened after that. Maybe I’ve gotten too used to having multiple sequels to a book as seems to be the trend these days but then again, multiple sequels don’t necessarily mean that I want to know what happened next. Take Gordy Dickson’s Dragon Knight series for instance – I love Gordy Dickson’s work … especially his early stuff which used to evoke a sense of wonder and make me want to write. The Dragon Knight series is not in the same category and I’ve enjoyed each of the books that I’ve read so far (and I think I’ve bought almost all of the series as well though I haven’t read most of them yet …) but when I finish one, I don’t think “OK, what happens to Jim Eckert after that?”.

You know, in a sense that saddens me. It’s as if the magic that I felt when I read books is gone. Maybe it’s again that sense of nostalgia but I know that I used to enjoy my reading a lot more. But then again, my reading habits have changed as well. I used to read almost anything that was SF and come away feeling invigorated, my head seething with ideas and wanting (no, almost aching …) to write a story like that. These days, I mostly read fantasay rather than SF but I never really want to write a story – except perhaps after reading some of Terry Pratchett’s work … So what happened? Where did that almost indescribable feeling of joy, of wonder, of being totally entertained and thrilled go? Or did I just grow out of it as I grew older? I don’t know …

What I do know however is that I’m about to begin on a book which has sort of rekindled that feeling in me. Last night I held Larry Niven’s “Destiny’s Road” in my hands and I felt that same old thrill, the anticipation of a good read that would stimulate my mind and make me dream of future times and far off places. The cover art by Michael Whelan evokes the same sense of wonder that books by Isacc Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. Van Vogt, Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster et al used to evoke in me in those days of long ago (at least they seem like long ago though in reality it is less than fifteen years …). I still haven’t started on the book because in a sense I am afraid of being disappointed – in losing that feeling of wonder, of joy that I haven’t felt in a long time …

But then again, Larry Niven is of that breed and era of writers who never ever disappointed me. I don’t know whether it is my unfamiliarity with contemprorary SF writers or whether contemprary writers have indeed moved on to different areas that don’t interest me as much, but to me SF will always be memorable for the writers of yesteryear (not that I think Larry Niven is by any means a has-been writer but I associate him with a different era, a different generation …). I still remember reading Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s “The Mote in God’s Eye” and being overwhelmed by the sheer brilliance of it, the completeness of the world that they’d created. I can’t really express most of the feelings that those books evoked in me in adequate words. I think Jerry Pournelle is the first writer that I wrote to after reading a book written by him/her – I e-mailed him and told him how much I enjoyed “The Mote in God’s Eye” and he almost immediately wrote back and recommended some other books. Perhaps it’s because of people like Jerry and Terry Pratchett who take the time to respond to their readers, that I try to be as responsive to the users of my apps as I do … it is strange how things work out.

But I drone on 🙂 I love those old books and I hope “Destiny’s Road” will prove to be just as good as I anticipate it to be but one thing it’s done even before I start reading it is to rekindle the desire to write SF in me again. So I intend to start something that I’ve been thinking of for a long time – to do a story bit by bit online … Blog will let me do it except for one thing – the entries have to be in normal order instead of reverse order. Tyran Ormond already suggested this feature to me and so I will try to get that in sometime soon so that I can get started on this story that I’m bursting to write and who knows, maybe I will provide somebody else with the same feeling of joy, wonder and make them dream of far off places and strange people like all my favorite SF authors did for me …

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Posted by Fahim at 7:39 am  |  4 Comments

August 14, 2001

I might not have much time for posting or for working on any of my apps for the next few days since we are preparing for the deployment of a project that we’d been working on for the last couple of months. The deployment is this weekend and it looks as if I’ll have to work at least Saturday and probably be here till late on Friday too 🙁 Ah well … anyway bear with me (and my silence if you do write to me …) till this weekend is over, I should then be back in full force … or maybe not … <vbg>

I know that NewsHoard is pretty buggy – especially the listviews that display stuff .. particularly the subscribe/unsubscribe dialog. I need to do a lot of work there and I’m already contemplating some major additions to Blog following certain suggestions made by Phil Stopford. ElevateSoft has just released the first beta of DBISAM 3.0, which is the database engine that I use in most of my apps. This release supports client server databases natively and depending on how it’s implemented, I might be going back to the client server version of Blog again as well. The old version is pretty much outdated and needs to be brought up-to-date but I’ve been reluctant to do so since nobody seems to want that functionality but maybe it’s time …

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Posted by Fahim at 8:31 am  |  No Comments

August 13, 2001

Ok, I finally managed to find some time to update the Gossip documentation to reflect the name change to NewsHoard and even add a little bit of information about the new functionality :p So I guess that means we are ready for a NewsHoard 2.0 Beta release and there it is on the side bar 🙂 Have fun and as always let me know of bugs, features, suggestions etc.

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Posted by Fahim at 3:19 pm  |  No Comments

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