Forgot to mention a couple of things earlier today – there’s a site named WebAttack which seems to have featured Blog 🙂 They gave Blog a five-star rating and are sending quite a few people my way and so I thought I’d mention it – their site reminds me of some other site or maybe I’ve been there before … not sure but after a while being on the web it sort of all blends together anyway :p

Somebody named Coolgui actually put the Forums to good use by starting a Scope bug reports discussion but I get the feeling not many people visit the forums I’ve set up since there have been only three messages since it was started :p If more people start using it, it might be a good place to get support for all the software that I code …

I just read with great sadness that Poul Anderson passed away last night. For those who don’t know (are there any such?) – Poul was one of the Science Fiction greats from when Science Fiction could really be written with upper-case letters, when it used to be about great and wonderous things that evoked a sense of wonder and made us dream of places far away and beings strange. In the past few years we’ve lost so many of the greats of SF – Isaac Asimov, Gordon R. Dickson, Douglas Adams and now Poul Anderson. I’m not even sure that there are many of the greats left from the days when SF really flourished … 🙁

Where do I start today? 🙂 Jason (FreakHo) gave me such a lot of great feedback that I had to put aside work on NewsHoard to do some tinkering with Blog <g> I added the option to archive either weekly or monthly, added a new Blog tag which allows you to display the link in the archives for the current entry and formatting options for the time of the entry. In the process I also streamlined a few areas of code and fixed a couple of other bugs. I didn’t really want to release this build since there have been way too many releases of Blog recently :p so I gave a private build to Jason and he’s got a few more suggestions and bugs that I probably will be fixing soon <vbg> After that, I probably will be doing another release – unfortunately, some of the enhancements I’m planning include another database change 🙁 Ah well …

I got NewsHoard connecting to the news server and downloading news groups and also got the news group subscribing working – though somewhat imperfectly at the moment. The next step is to actually download the headers for a particular news group and then the actual post itself. I am not planning on including the binary harvesting functionality for this preliminary version. The release when it comes will be more a proof-of-concept than an actual app since it will be missing a lot of features and won’t have a nice GUI – the last is largely due to the fact that I haven’t been able to get in touch with sinesolis to bug him for more icons :p But it should get the ball rolling and then I know I can always depend on the users to suggest features that they’d like to see in the app.

I got an e-mail from my friend WareWolf – turns out that he’s out of work at the moment 🙁 Sometimes we lose sight of the fact how much the current downturn in the economy is affecting some of those around us because we ourselves are employed. Having been unemployed for a while myself, I know exactly how WareWolf must be feeling. He’s opened up an online store in the hopes I assume of trying everything possible. If any of you have any hardware needs and are shopping online please visit his store – you might find something that you need and you’ll also be helping out somebody …