August 16, 2002

Don’t you just hate it when they release a revised version of a book with extra stuff in it and you’ve already got the older version? I guess this is pretty similar to when I buy a DVD and then find out that they are going to release a special edition with lots of added features on but at least with books this hasn’t happened so much in the past. Maybe they’ve decided to take a leaf out of the DVD makers’ book because it seems to be happening much more frequently these days. As some of you may know, I’m a big Terry Pratchett fan and also a hardback hater since I prefer the less bulky paperback (yes, those two facts do have something to do with my rant – let me get to it :p). I’d bought PTerry’s (incidentally, Pratchett’s called that by his fans – don’t ask <g>) “The Last Hero” a while back in hard cover since it was an illustrated book and historically, they haven’t released the illustrated hardcovers of PTerry’s works in paperback (at least not with the illustrations ….) But now what do I hear? I hear that not only are they releasing a paperback edition with illustrations, they are adding 16 pages of new illustrations! Argh!! Save me from marketers and people out to make a buck!!! The same thing happened (if I’m not mistaken) with PTerry’s “Science of the Discworld” – or something similar, I forget the exact title – since they added two extra chapters to the paperback edition. What a gyp!!

But enough of my ranting, since most probably it’ll do no good anyway – not unless it inspires somebody to start a global network of people who’ll boycott all such consumer-gouging efforts by marketers :p I received an e-mail from somebody saying that they’d settled on Blog as a corporate-wide tool and wanted to register it and pay for it. I sent him the usual e-mail about how Blog is freeware and that if he’s worried about the nag screen, then he can simply purchase the relevant component for me and that I would release a new version immediately with no nag screen … No word from him since then :p Ah well … guess everybody will have to put up with the nag screen for the rest of their lives – or till the developer decides it’s not worth it to have the nag-enabled version and puts a timer or something on it :p I’d be up a creek with no paddle (or even a canoe for that matter <g>) if that happens since I still haven’t found a suitable alternative which has all the features of PlusMemo and is free. I guess, we’ll deal with it when we get to it.

Did one more bug fix in Blog yesterday – The link to older entries dialog now displays dates that have entries in bold. It makes it much easier to select older entries to link to instead of having to hunt around from date to date. I think that about completes the work on Blog 6.1 and I should be able to make a release today. As long as I don’t get bogged down at work – guess we’ll see.

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Posted by Fahim at 6:43 am  |  No Comments