I’ve been kind of quiet this weekend since I was trying to stop myself from going into rant mode but I guess I’ve got to rant when I’ve got to rant – so here goes :p This guy had posted a review about Blog on BetaNews on the Blog page and he gave Blog as low a rating as he could because Blog had been identified by one of his apps as spy/nuisance ware. Now I was really mad at that time because I make all efforts to provide a good, bug free app and also try to provide good support – and all of this for free. So when my app gets called spyware, I have a tendency to go ballistic :p In hindsight, I realize I can’t blame the guy because he was going by his what his utility told him and for most users, I guess that would be enough – how can a computer program be wrong? :p I just wish he’d contacted me to clarify the matter instead of just slamming Blog.
Anyway, I tried out the utility he used – it’s called PestPatrol … sorry, don’t have a link since I’m at home and offline – and sure enough, it identifies the Blog directory as having malware that could install a Flash applet or something which displays an annoying message. The program it tags? The uninstall.exe from NullSoft! Now, I know tons of people use the NullSoft installer package and if that was malware, I’d think it would have been noticed y now. Plus, I’ve run both AdAware and SpyBot Search & Destroy on my machine many times and neither of them ever identified the uninstall.exe as malware. So I can only conclude that PestPatrol has a slightly faulty database or a faulty identification routine. I should probably write to them and point it out to them – perhaps when I’ve cooled down a bit :p
In other news, I haven’t really felt like testing out the web update component (I was lazy – or just too tired after all that coding) and so haven’t done much work on it since I got the code completed. But I’ve been working on something else. Yeah, another one of those ideas of mine :p Actually, the idea was already there but I just didn’t like the implementation <g>. There was this app called Visual CD which lets you store directory listings for your removable media as well as hard disk folders. It then lets you search these lists so that you can find where a specific file is without having to go through all your removable media one by one. I liked the app and the UI but I hated the fact that while Visual CD provided compressed archive file support so that you can browse an archive file’s contents if the removable media was in the drive, it would not store information about the contents of archives in its file list so that you can search for a file even inside the archives. I wrote to the developer and offered to help with the coding since s/he seemed not to have enough time to do so plus they’d mentioned that they used VB and Delphi for their apps and I was hoping that Visual CD would be done in Delphi. But I never heard back from the developer. So I decided that I would write my own version that had archive support as well :p
So far all I’ve done is to work out the file listing storage format and a method to compress the file listing file so that it would take less space. I still have to add support for adding compressed archive listings to the file listing set, to do the code so that I can access the contents of any folder or archive in the listings quickly to allows directory changes in the UI and then do the UI itself. It is another one of those interesting side projects which most people would have no use for but that I need badly since I have a lot of unlabeled CD’s that I have to sort through every time I need to find a specific file …
Hi Fahim! Can’t wait to give the new 8.0 betas a try! I think the auto update feature you are proposing is a wonderful idea. I’ll be ready to test things for you on both Win9x, and XP. I run a dual boot so I can easily test Blog 8.0 on both. FYI, I ran AdAware Pro with AD Watch feature running, and concurrently watched the install process for Blog 7.1 with a process monitor. I saw no indications whatsoever via AdAware, AdWatch, or the process monitor of any spyware or reg keys being loaded. Blog dropped into the directory that I specified, and the only place that was written to other than that was the backup location for my old Blog information which I also specified.
Take a peek at this off-line CD browser (ocdb) application – might have something you might whant to add.
http://hem.spray.se/anders.peterson/ocdb.html