July 9, 2002

First of all, a big thank you goes out to whoever who sent me “Daughter of the Empire” off my wish list! Either Amazon UK does not allow people to include a message or the person didn’t feel it was necessary but I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know who you are so that I can add you to my Hall of Fame 🙂

I’ve received reports from a couple of people who tried to upgrade to Blog 6.0 and discovered that the upgrade wouldn’t go smoothly and it turns out that this was because they were running a beta of Blog 5.0 instead of the final version and so didn’t have the database tables updated to the latest version. I’m just puzzled as to how this could have happened since I thought I had the version numbering in the About dialog set correctly for each version and you could tell the difference between the Blog 5.0 final and the betas but then again I might be wrong since it was quite a while back … But if any of you are having problems, this might be the cause. If you are one of the people with this particular problem, contact me and I’ll tell you what you need to do – oh yeah, also let me know where you downloaded Blog from since I’m beginning to believe that there is a rogue mirror site/download site which lists an invalid download file as Blog 5.0 …

I’ve been extremely busy at work since they’ve just given me the task of coordinating the publication of a newspaper page devoted to the issues discussed by two of our programs, in the three major languages of Sri Lanka – Sinhala, Tamil and English. Since all three have their own alphabets and are fairly different from each other, it’s a bit of a task to keep track of all three in written form – while I can read both Sinhala and English pretty fast, my Tamil reading skills are pretty atrocious and it takes me about an hour to read the page :p However, I think I am one of the few people at the company who can read all three languages and so I got “volunteered” <vbg>

In the midst of all the work, I’ve been beavering away steadily at Snipper and finally have a working version. I’ve currently tested only image extraction but do have three online comics displaying in one window with none of the banner ads or any of the other junk! I don’t know if it will always work or even if it will work for HTML extraction (while Snipper has the capability, I haven’t tested it yet :p) But hopefully, it should work fine in most cases. However, it is not as simple as selecting a bit of a page and expecting Snipper to show you that bit – you have to do some boundary definitions and to do that, you should at least have a basic knowledge of HTML. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Snipper is not a novice-user tool but the good news is that it’s possible to export definitions created by you to an external file and once I add the import feature, even a novice user can use Snipper as long as they have access to a large enough definition library :p Of course, before doing all this I should probably release Snipper and see if anybody really wants it but I’ve been reluctant to do so since I don’t have any documentation done but I think I will do a release sometime today anyway to see what the user reaction is ….

Tags: General
Posted by Fahim at 6:34 am   Comments (2)

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#1
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Raven 09 July 2002 at 1:57 am

There’s a great free program called Comic Reaper that uses regular expressions to isolate any image from any page. You zero in on the comic itself and deconstruct the page’s navigation. The program will navigate from page to page and go get all the comics. Neat Stuff. However, it uses regular expressions, which are definitely not for everyone. Knowledge = Power. Right? We’ll help you with a help file .

#2
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Tyran 17 July 2002 at 8:20 am

Whish I had read this earlier, I’m one of those with problems using Blog 6. I never even had the chance to try out the beta that you had sent me. I’ll email you.

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