July 25, 2001

I am not entirely sure that this release is ready for release but here goes … Scope 2.0 final is out 🙂 I have fixed all the reported bugs but have been very sparse in feature additions since I don’t want to add new features and then have to go through a further bug-testing cycle. Hopefully, this release is bug free though I can’t be completely sure since I had to do some extensive code changes in order to fix some of the bugs. The next release will probably be Scope 3.0 (to coincide with the version number for Blog <g>) and will contain customizable toolbars, hopefully John’s new Favorites and quite a few other things. For the moment, get Scope 2.0 …

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Posted by Fahim at 2:02 pm  |  No Comments

Went back to working on Scope yesterday 🙂 I managed to resolve quite a few minor bugs and annoyances in Scope. Most of them had to do with the Mozilla engine and interaction with it. In the process, I finally came to the realization that I cannot take a common approach for both the IE and Mozilla engines even though I would like the functionality to be similar for both. So I have started diverging a bit in how I code for each engine but am still trying to maintain the same functionality for both engines as much as possible. One thing that I had to drop though was download and security options for the Mozilla engine – not that I ever knew whether they worked or not in the first place :p

One major thing that I did fix was not being able to use the ENTER key in web forms though the fix itself has resulted in a curious problem with Mozilla but I’m not going to worry about it for the moment unless I can find a quick fix for it today. In my effort to discover what was going wrong, I actually created a test application with two browser windows on it – one a component that I’d dropped on the form and the other a browser object that I’d created on the fly at run time (as I do in Scope). I discovered that the browser created as a component at design-time worked fine when it came to using the ENTER key in web forms, it was just on-the-fly created browsers that had problems with the ENTER key – go figure. I tried a lot of things like comparing the runtime properties of both browsers and trying to duplicate the properties of the design-time created browser in the runtime one etc. but nothing worked. I finally figured out the solution and it basically involved creating a message handler routine for the main Scope window and passing any key presses to the active browser object. Of course, now Mozilla thinks that you are trying to print or fax when you press ENTER in a web form for some weird reason … I have no solution for that at the moment.

I’ve been thinking about Blog and what I need to do for the next release while working on Scope – it never stops, does it? :p I want to implement linking to older posts but that is going to have a few problems unless I also add a daily auto-archive facility which will archive the previous day’s entries. I think what I’ll end up doing is have the auto-archiving facility but give an option to turn it off so that you can archive things manually but that would mean your links to older posts might not always work – depending on whether the posts had been archived or not. Hey, you sometimes have to make compromises 🙂

Speaking of compromises, John asked me a couple of days ago whehter I had had to resign from my company and then I realized that I hadn’t written about the aftermath of the whole tie incident from last Friday (now here’s a place where linking to older posts would have been handy <g>). And no, I didn’t compromise as the above segue might suggest :p It just turned out to be much-ado-about-nothing since I didn’t wear a tie but didn’t get pulled up either since I guess they either assumed that everybody would automatically comply or decided not to enforce the rule 🙂 Of course, John seems to think that I might have compromised because he wrote to me today and asked me whether it was a tie that he saw around my neck in the webcam <vbg> Nope, that’s just my holster :p And no, that’s not for a gun – just my iPaq :p

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Posted by Fahim at 8:02 am  |  No Comments

July 24, 2001

I am feeling a little tired and achy today but not so much as yesterday 🙂 I have this water purifier which needs salt to operate and due to my extreme reluctance to do anything which needs doing when it needs doing <vbg> I let the salt levels on the purifier drop to almost nothing before I decided to spring into action. I got about 500 pounds of salt on Sunday (no, I’m not exaggerating – it was 480 lbs to be exact :p) and since I am not exactly Charles Atlas – more like the original 98 pound weakling <g> – all that lifting and carrying has left me kind of tired 🙂 Incidentally, I just realized that my references (especially the one about Charles Atlas) might be a bit dated – ah well, if you didn’t read comics as a kid, that’s your loss since they used to have advertisements about Charles Atlas and his body-building course in the comics all the time .. in the old days, of course :p

Either somebody doesn’t like me much or the Sircam worm is really widespread over the Net. I have never ever got any of the variants of the famous (or infamous) virii in my personal e-mail till now. I got a copy of Sircam over the weekend from an address that I didn’t recognize and then today when I checked my mail, I found five copies of the virus from four different people (it was sent twice from one of the addresses) and I don’t know any of these people! I thought that Sircam was supposed to send out mails to people on the addressbooks of infected machines – so either my e-mail address is on the addressbooks of a lot of people that I don’t know or somebody doesn’t like me <vbg> I am beginning to think that it’s time that I took down my e-mail address from my site :p Ah, what the heck, it’s better that people have easy access to me … I sent out e-mails to the people from whom I received the virus warning them to clean their machines but at least one of them didn’t even have the senders address since it was pointing to the Prodigy mail server I believe but I wasn’t interested enough to go to the trouble of figuring it all out 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 8:07 am  |  No Comments

July 23, 2001

Ok, I did manage to find the time to get Blog 2.5 out. Existing Blog users should be aware of the fact that there has been a change made to the internal Blog storage format due to the inclusion of the new tag to uniquely identify all Blog entries. So, the first thing you should do if you want to keep your existing Blog entries is to download the Blog Data Conversion Utility (which I’m also releasing) and convert your existing data. The Conversion Utility comes packaged as a self-extracting archive but there is no documentation. Simply extract the contents of the archive, copy the Convert.Exe file over to where you have Blog installed and run it to have your data converted. Then download the new Blog archive and copy over just the Blog executable and you should be ready to go! (Of course you might want to backup your Blog directory just in case … :p) The download links are in the side-bar as usual. Enjoy!!

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Posted by Fahim at 12:23 pm  |  No Comments

I think I wrote last week about Tyran Ormond’s suggestions for Blog. Well, Tyran and I have been communicating back and forth and I actually did a new build of Blog which contains a unique identification number for each Blog entry so that you can use a comments system with Blog. I was hoping to release the new build sometime over the weekend as Blog 2.5 final but never got around to it due to a variety of reasons. However, I sent Tyran a private copy and he used it to set up the best looking site that use Blog I’ve seen, for his wife. The site, What Do I Know?, is so good looking that I actually feel justified in having created Blog :p

I should be releasing Blog 2.5 final sometime today but since the addition of a unique ID meant changes to the database format used by Blog, I had to create a conversion utility to make the transition easier for those people who are using Blog already. So I’ll have to do packaging, docs etc and what it will come down to is how much time I will have during lunch <g>

The webcam is umm … working … I guess 🙂 It wasn’t on full time yesterday since I am on a dial-up connection from home and am not always online but today it’ll be on more but since it’s pointed more at my notebook and I switch between two computers at work, it might not always have anybody in the pic … That might actually be a blessing :p Still looking out for some good webcam software though … I am really not happy with the one I’m using currently but haven’t had the time to look around for something else yet. Maybe soon …

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Posted by Fahim at 8:15 am  |  No Comments

July 22, 2001

I watched “Snatch” today – pretty good movie. Initially the conglomeration of accents, the confusing jumping back and forth in the story and the weird camera angles and editing tends to be a bit intimidating but after a while the movie really gets you hooked. The separate but connected storylines can be confusing but at the same time it keeps you interested. The soundtrack is upbeat and in tempo with the story and the plot has more twists than a corkscrew caught in a four-way car wreck :p I especially loved some of the symbolic stuff like the coursing scene where two dogs chase a rabbit and the scene switches back and forth between that and two hoods chasing a guy they’re after 🙂 I loved how the different plot elements kept on piling one on top of the other like cars on a freeway on the first snowy day of winter <g> I haven’t seen any of Guy Ritchie’s other work – especially the much talked about “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” – but I think his work is definitely worth a look.

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Posted by Fahim at 2:43 pm  |  No Comments

Watched “Miss Congeniality” yesterday. I laughed out loud at several scenes, enjoyed the movie immensely and yet can’t but help have some critiques :p The only thing that I didn’t like about the movie was that it had sort of a farcial quality to it – Sandra Bullock is tougher than tough, her character is not feminine at all and I find that hard to believe. I find it harder to believe that she goes through life believing that she’s not attractive at all and has to go through an ugly-duckling to swan transformation to finally realize that she looks good. If you don’t mind that sort of inconsistentcy (and to be honest, while I did notice the stuff, it still didn’t stop me from enjoying the movie …), it’s a great movie and I really liked the sound-track – must see about getting it on CD 🙂

As I mentioned a few days ago, I wanted to set up a webcam for the journal. Now, why would I want to show my ugly mug off to the whole world you may ask? I ask myself the same question :p I guess the short answer is to give the journal a more personal touch … I like to be able to visualize the person I’m talking to and since I am basically carrying on a dialog (albeit a one-sided one <g>) with whoever is reading this page, I decided a webcam might help. Plus, somebody who read my journal once commented that they really liked my site because it had a sort of a community feeling to it – so I’m trying to totally destroy it by scaring off everybody who sees my face <vbg> Anyway, I got a Video Blaster WebCam Go from Best Buy yesterday and am about to do my first trial-runs with it … Let’s see how it goes …

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Posted by Fahim at 11:16 am  |  No Comments

July 21, 2001

Eddie Elmore over at BetaNews has been corresponding back and forth with me for a while now about my submissions of new releases of Blog and was kind enough to suggest that they would mirror a Blog download from BetaNews. So I’ve added a special BetaNews Blog mirror link on the side-bar.

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Posted by Fahim at 8:06 am  |  No Comments

I watched “Nurse Betty” yesterday. The movie began really well – the nice, low key yet somehow persistent theme that set the tone, Morgan Freeman – that voice which sounds like thick syrup oozing down and need I even mention his acting? -, Chris Rock being his usual, brash and loud self and of course, Rene Zellweger being so wholly natural and sweet 🙂 It was a really great beginning for a movie … then it becomes like what Sam Weller in “The Pickwick Papers” says about the parson’s egg – good in places <g> Rene Zellweger was great as Betty – she was sweet, gentle, sometimes confused but always determined … in fact, Betty to a T 🙂 But while I think Morgan Freeman is a great actor and loved most of his moments with others in the movie, almost all of his scenes with Chris Rock grated on me. While the two were needed to move the plot along, I almost wished that the scenes with the two of them had not been there since they seemed to interrupt the flow of the movie as a whole. In fact, when Chris Rock’s character gets killed towards the end of the movie, I was ecstatic :p Overall, it was a great movie – none of the bodily function, sexual innuendo stuff that insults the viewer’s intelligence or reflects the writer’s lack thereof. A good, straight story that you can enjoy!

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Posted by Fahim at 7:53 am  |  No Comments

July 20, 2001

I’ve been doing some looking around and though I didn’t find an exact forum/message board system that I wanted (I wanted the ability to create a new discussion or thread simply via a hyperlink), I decided to go with the system provided by World Crossing for the moment till I can find a better alternative. So now you have both discussion forums and a chat option – link’s on the side bar … So talk back and let me know what you think :p

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Posted by Fahim at 9:20 am  |  No Comments

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