June 12, 2002

I left work a bit early with my friend Robin since we had to attend a work-related meeting somewhere else in town and since we weren’t going to come back to office, he took his car and I took the bike. Half way to our destination, whammo! I slammed into a truck which was turning the wrong way and was not visible to me because it was covered by a big bus. The outcome was that I ended up laying on the road with the bike on top of me and the truck almost on top of the bike :p Thanks to God I wasn’t very seriously injured but escaped with some scrapes and bruises though I can’t say the same for the bike 🙁 I did ride it away from the accident but it’s going to need a lot of work. Of course, while I didn’t feel too bad yesterday, I got up today and feel stiff all over :p Ah well … guess that’ll teach me not to assume that people follow the road rules here in Sri Lanka <g>

On to much more positive news … I did do the bug fix and feature request from Phil and updated the documentation for Blog as well and re-uploaded the distros. Of course, I haven’t had the time to update the sidebar or the downloads page till today and so did that just now. Incidentally, I hit Publish accidentally just now and what do you know? Blog actually dialled out successfully! But the bad news is that Blog didn’t seem to realize that the dial-out was complete … so I guess I’ll have to do some more testing and fixing there before the final release of 6.0.

Nigel Powell had inquired about the possibility of a Blog version that would fit on a floppy so the he could take it anywhere and use the Client mode to update his blog. I had thought that that would probably not be possible considering that the Blog executable is a very hefty 2.3MB or so but then I came across something that I used to be really interested in about 10 years ago when hard disk space was limited and we all worked under DOS (well, at least those of us who were around then :p) – an EXE compressor! This one’s called UPX and is being developed under an Open Source project and when I ran Blog through it, it was reduced to an amazing 700+k! I’m impressed and since there doesn’t seem to be too much degradation in performance, I’ll probably start using UPX compression from the next release of Blog onwards and then you should actually be able to carry Blog around on a floppy with the data files 🙂 Umm … just checked how big the spell check and thesaurus files are and they come to around 1.11MB so I guess you can either scratch that idea of a totally portable version of Blog 🙁 Though I’m certain that a compressed file of the full installation of Blog will still fit on a floppy …

Since I’d completed the latest changes on Blog, I went back to working on PostMan. I managed to get the mail composition window code done as well and it’s beginning to look pretty good … But I haven’t tested sending mail yet and I’m sure that when I do, I’ll find a few bugs that I hadn’t considered <g> Once I get that bit working, I’ll have to work on responding to existing e-mails and e-mail redirecting (which is still a mystery to me – I mean the “how” of it …) since that’s a feature that I really like in both Eudora and PocoMail – much better than that pesky Forward when you’re moving stuff around from one account to another. I’m also considering whether I should try to incorporate some sort of web-mail checking feature into PostMan and how I should go about it but not too sure about that particular feature yet … Guess that can go in to the to-do list for the moment :p

Tags: General
Posted by Fahim at 6:29 am   Comments (5)

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#1
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GeekXSteel 11 June 2002 at 5:28 pm

Well …. I still believe that being on the bike puts you in danger….. ..get a car dude! 🙂 haha…

#2
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GeekXSteel 11 June 2002 at 5:29 pm

I’ve actually used UPX before you released the latest blog beta to compress it ..and it works fine. I think u should compress your *.exe files from now on … 🙂

#3
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Cindy 11 June 2002 at 10:24 pm

I am glad that you are ok!! I am with GeekXSteel..I think that you should get a car too!! 🙂

#4
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DeViLbOi 12 June 2002 at 6:00 am

Forget the car, get a tank…its much more reliable and sturdy. 🙂

#5
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Phil @ leaf 12 June 2002 at 8:08 am

Plus parking isn’t an issue any more & you’ll always win out during any road rage incident 😀

(BTW UPX can apparently cause fake virus warnings in programs, but if you make it clear the program is compressed by UPX, it shouldn’t be an issue for most people).

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