I am sorry about the lack of updates but things have been kind of hectic in my personal life and so I really haven’t had much time for updates or for coding. In fact, at one point I was ready to chuck it all and go into retreat but that is another story :p Anyway, no progress at all on BlogMan I’m afraid since I still haven’t gotten around to finding a good proxy server which supports authentication as well (so that you have to give a username/password to access the Net) but then again, I really haven’t had much time to play with the ones I did download. So once I get that set up, maybe I will be able to figure out if things are working or not. Hmm .. I just had another idea which might work – guess I’ll give that a try too …

In the mean time, I have “officially” switched over to the forums provided so kindly by Jen – thanks Jen, I love you 🙂 The PHPBB forums offers a lot of options for customization of the forums and while the early registrants might not have seen any of this (since I didn’t set it up till yesterday), if you go in now under your Profile options, you will see that you can select from a variety of styles for the board so that it can have a look of your own instead of the rather bland default look :p Plus, I’ve added tons of avatars so that you can suit a picture to go with your entries – and to top it all off, I’ve added a ranking system based on how many posts you’ve made. And that is just the beginning since that’s what I was able to do in one day of customizations :p So I like the new forums – they give me a lot of stuff to play with and based on the participation level so far, I have a feeling that all of you like it too 🙂 So have fun – the forums are there for you to get support and for you to build a community that can help each other and help me develop better software for you 🙂

Nothing much at all in the way of coding I’m afraid. I wanted to do some further checking on the proxy problems with BlogMan yesterday with a different proxy server but all the free proxy servers out there seem to require the editing of a configuration file with a text editor whereas I’d rather tinker with a GUI – hmm, I guess Windows *has* spoilt me :p So I keep on looking around for other proxy servers to download and that’s about all I do. Plus, yesterday was a fairly busy day since I had quite a few other things going on so not much time to code 🙁

In other news however, I have set up another support forum since Jen was kind enough to let me have it at her domain 🙂 Why another forum you may ask? Because I have received complaints about the ezBoard forums being almost impossible to access/login to at certain times of the day. I would like it if people can test out the new forums and let me know if the access speeds are acceptable. I’m afraid that certain features like the poll forums and the chatting will not be available with the PHPBB forums but I think reliability and ease of access is the key thing and then if the other stuff is needed I might be able to add it in somehow. So go check out both the ezBoard forums and the forums at Jen’s domain and let me know what you think 🙂

I should also mention that I asked for somebody to host the forums for me and Collin was kind enough to step forward and offer to host them on his server. Thanks Collin!

Some of you who only visit www.farook.org or fahim.razorsys.com might have been surprised to find no new updates yesterday or to suddenly find a post for both today and yesterday when there was nothing yesterday :p What happened was that I did my e-mails and created my post for the day as usual before I left for work and then discovered that the RazorSys server was down and so I couldn’t update my blog nor retrieve/send my e-mail. So I updated the Nortiq mirror with my post but not RazorSys. Of course, I later revised the entry in the evening because I had forgotten to add something but that’s another story … Anyway, I updated in the evening when I got back from work and everything should be OK – unless, I can’t post again today :p

Most of yesterday’s coding time was spent struggling with BlogMan – as I mentioned yesterday, Greg found the solution to the proxy problem and I happily put it into effect thinking that I’d have a new build out within the hour but so much for the plans of mice and men :p The code revision would not work at all with my proxy server! The Indy HTTP component has a BasicAuthentication value in both the proxy parameters property and the request header property. I had thought (and so the documentation also seemed to imply) that the BasicAuthentication value on the request header referred to the actual server end of the transaction – whether to use authentication to process the request and not to verify whether to authentication on the proxy. But on my side of things at least, the proxy authentication would work only if I set the BasicAuthentication to true for the request property as well. This worked fine for a GET request, but a POST request was another matter …

I found that a POST request wouldn’t go through the proxy (the one I was using at least) with even the BasicAuthentication on the request property set. So then I set the user name and password for the request property to the proxy authentication user name and password and this got me through the proxy but the POST request failed at the server. This kind of confirms my fears because I had thought that the user name and password for the request property was again to be used only for authentication at the server end and not the proxy itself. So I’m left with three possibilities: 1) the proxy server that I use is buggy – which is possible since it’s a freeware one without much documentation or support 2) the Indy component has a bug – not quite so possible since it did seem to work for Greg 3) I don’t know what the heck I am doing and am botching a perfectly simple thing – which is absolutely possible :p Anyway, I am trying to find another free proxy server which supports authentication and is easy to use and configure so that I can test the BlogMan code again with it. I’ll keep you updated as to what happens …

First of all, here is the link to Ampersand’s blog called Alas, A Blog (sorry if I mangled the name, Ampersand :p) This was the cartoonist’s blog I was talking about yesterday but didn’t know the link to. I still haven’t e-mailed myself the link from work but Ampersand wrote to me today since I wrote to him yesterday in response to a comment about how he found it amusing that I used MT for my personal blog instead of Blog :p Now, I couldn’t let that pass, could I? <vbg>

Of course, that brings us to the reason for me using MT for Solipsistic Meanderings, BlogMan. I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out the reason why proxy support was not working in BlogMan. I installed FreeProxy (sorry forget the link), which is an excellent free proxy server, on my machine and tried to publish an entry to SM (which incidentally has still not been published) about the troubles that Jen’s been having recently but no go. The proxy server would refuse to authenticate BlogMan and it looked as if BlogMan was not sending the correct login name for the proxy. Since I am using a freeware XMLRPC client library, I took a look at the source and discovered that it was using the Indy HTTP component as I had suspected. I realized that the component automatically set the authentication to non-basic and so assumed (which is always a bad thing :p) that basic authentication did not take login/password and so spent most of the day trying to get digest authentication (another authentication scheme which Indy supports) working but had no luck.

While I had been engaged in my wild goose chase <g>, Greg had also downloaded a demo copy of Delphi 7.0 and had been checking out the Indy proxy authentication stuff. He wrote to me today (at least, I received the e-mail today) and said that when he set the HTTP component to use basic authentication and set a login and password, it connected fine! So there you have it :p That was the solution and it was right in front of me – color me chagrined :p Anyway, thanks to Greg (who has gone to lengths above and beyond those of a beta tester – thanks a bunch Greg!) I should be able to put out a new build of BlogMan today which actually works with proxies. So, onwards and upwards! 🙂

I also had another great adventure with Duane yesterday :p Remember the Blog comments problem that Duane had yesterday, well we set to try and discover the cause yesterday and after a flurry of e-mails back and forth it turns out that the problem appears only on Duane’s browser and mine is fine! I was dumbfounded at first because I had thought a browser faithfully reproduced the contents of an HTML file and did not do any insertions, additions of it’s own but in Duane’s case, it seemed to be doing so. He and I were both using IE 6.0 but he had SP1 installed whereas I didn’t. So it looks as if IE 6.0 SP1 might be the culprit but I’ve already heard a few stories about problems with SP1 and am wary of installing SP1 to see if it is indeed the culprit. If anybody is interested, you can go here and if you hover your mouse pointer over the comments link, the e-mail address to send the post to should appear as ABC<[email protected]> but if you have the problem that Duane is experiencing, it would look like AB><[email protected]> I don’t even know if that made any sense :p

It must have been the alignment of the planets, the position of the moon in the sky, the conjugation of the stars or something like that but yesterday was a really bad day for Blog :p People were having trouble all over the place and I had no idea what was causing these problems – OK, maybe I exaggerate … a bit :p There were only three people (that I know of) who had problems but each of their problems is weird and (so far) unexplainable. There was Jen who tried to publish and had Blog stop halfway and just stop responding each time she tried, there was Duane who had the built-in Blog comments link mysteriously drop a character on the subject filter but only when he published to an FTP site – local publishes were fine. And then there is Edward’s wife Trish (the newest member of the Blog family – welcome Trish!) who had unexplainable crashes with Blog under Windows XP whereas Blog has been rock solid for me under XP – and I’m still using 7.0 Beta 5 … hmm.. maybe that’s the problem? :p

In Jen’s case, deleting a couple of files off her FTP site seemed to fix the problems but I still have to find a solution for Duane’s problem – I even got him to send me his blog template and published from here but it works fine at this end. I am stumped. And in Trish’s case, unexplainable crashes are the worst since you really have no idea where to being to look for a cause. Edward and Trish are working on that though and have told me that they’ll get screenshots and detailed error messages the next time it happens. Maybe this is a sign that Blog has reached a certain stage in development and should not be bloated any further? :p I don’t know … but I am going to look into stability very hard now since I’d hate Blog to suddenly degrade into a feature-rich yet unstable product. I’d rather go back to Blog 6.0 if that were the case. However, I still suspect the snippets to be the cause because that code is rather unwieldy and probably buggy due to the convoluted way in which Borland has implemented action bars. I might have to go back and redo that bit and then find that everything works fine. We’ll see …

Speaking of new members to the Blog family, there is another new member that I actually wanted to highlight today since I enjoyed his site very much – but unfortunately, I didn’t e-mail myself his site link from work and so am left without a link. However, do not despair :p He has given the link to his site on the new RookSoft forums under the Blog section – so if you are interested, go there and take a look. He’s a cartoonist and his site is full of the funniest/cutest cartoons – I assume done by him. Plus, there is a hilarious (and yet true) cartoon about the ten best reasons that the US should attack Iraq – OK, let me not get into the politics of it here :p But go take a look … it’s an interesting site.

The new forums are open for business :p Of course, since I have used ezBoard to set it up, some of you may not like it <g> but it was the best customizable and free solution around and so I signed up and set it up. I am on a one month trial Gold membership – I have no idea what Gold membership gives you extra to what free members get but they forced the Gold membership on me and so there I am :p I set up separate discussion groups for all the apps that are available for download, a separate area for general discussions and a poll which is meant especially for DeViLbOi – you’ll see what I mean when you get there … How’s that for a teaser/hook? :p A link is still there on the sidebar to the old forums so that you can still refer to the old questions and answers and maybe find the solution to a problem you may have but I’d appreciate it if you use the new forums from now on for support questions since they provide a lot more functionality and are organized better to provide help for all of you. Plus, they are searchable and so you can find your answers faster – or at least, so I hope :p

I still need to work on BlogMan – I’m sorry Greg, just didn’t find the time yet and there probably is a pretty amateur mistake on the proxy support from what Greg tells me. I just need to sit down and take a look at it – and oh yeah, maybe install a proxy server so that I can see how the communication goes right on my machine :p Edward sat down with BlogMan, just clicked buttons (his words, not mine :p) and found a ton of bugs – I need to fix those too. Of course, I should apologize to everybody at this stage for the general shabbiness of the BlogMan release <g> The UI still is not finalized, there is no switching of certain blog utility specific values off when you are using a different utility and it is not completely tested. I think I did a Microsoft-style beta rather than the normal beta’s I release :p My only excuse is that I really liked to have the functionality and so hurried to complete it and then got busy with other stuff and so decided to release it as it was – which I shouldn’t have. Oh well, no use crying over spilt milk – or should that be split milk? :p

Eddie over at BetaNews has been kind enough to announce the release of BlogMan and the visits to the site sky-rocketed yesterday :p So far however, I’ve heard from only two BlogMan users – one is Greg (who was originally a Blog users, switched to B2 and has now kindly consented to beta test BlogMan) and the other is Josh, who I heard from today. Josh wanted to know where he could post bug reports since there was no BlogMan thread on the forums. That of course brings me back to the subject of forums. I’ve looked at the PHPBBS (I think that’s what it was called) forum and it looks nice and impressive. Of course, I need somewhere to put it up and so probably won’t go with that since it needs both PHP and mySQL. Instead, I think I’ll probably try to find a free remote solution provided by somebody – I just haven’t had much time recently and so never got around to doing any of this. Maybe today since I really would like a nice organized forum that people can search easily.

Not much else in the way of new code or projects – I expect DeViLbOi to spring up at this point and go “PostMan! PostMan!” :p Actually, I don’t know if I mentioned this but PostMan is half-way coded. It works, it can retrieve e-mail and it can display e-mails. I don’t know if I completed the e-mail composition bit but the main reason that I am so reluctant to work on it is the fact that it is so darn slow :p It is slow in retrieving e-mail, actually slower than Eudora and I don’t know why that should be since I’m simply using an Indy POP3 component to do the mail retrieval. Then, it is also slow to display HTML e-mails since I am using my own display engine and not IE (so as to not be prey to VBScript based viruses). The HTML component I use can display HTML text but it will not display images on it’s own. I have to fetch the images individually and then pass them back to the HTML component. This seems to work since I can display HTML e-mail but if you select an HTML e-mail, you have to wait a couple of seconds for the images to be fetched and till then the whole UI stops responding.

I know that most of the above problems can be sorted out by optimizing stuff but in the mean time, I just don’t feel like using PostMan because it is so slow and anything I don’t use, I don’t develop with that much alacrity since there isn’t the incentive for me to do so :p For me all my software starts as personal projects and they take on their own life only if they are released to the public. And they are are released to the public only if I use them and find them useful – if not, they just die a natural death … you should see my hard disk, there are plenty of half-completed projects which never took off because I lost interest or they weren’t that useful after all :p

Some interesting comments were given by Duane on the subject of support – he wondered why I/we didn’t set up a chat room for Blog for one thing. This is something that I would be glad to do on some IRC server or other but I have a feeling that most of the Blog users aren’t the usual habitue of chat rooms on IRC – of course, I could be wrong :p The other option is to use IM but I don’t want to do that except on an individual basis since it can quickly become overwhelming to have a bunch of people IMing you about how to set up Blog or any other application. I am tempted to use Human Click, which if I recall correctly allowed a user to contact a live person if there was somebody at the other end or if not, leave a message for somebody to respond to. I’m not sure if Human Click (if that is the name of the service) is still around since this was a couple of years ago, but I probably will look into that as well as setting up easier forums somewhere else. That’s the best I guess I can do at the moment – except to write better documentation and you know, I won’t do that :p OK, maybe not won’t … it’s just that I can’t …

Not much in the way of coding. Greg tells me that the proxy support in BlogMan does not work and he’s done some research into it and given me certain things to look into – thanks Greg! I believe proxy support will be very important in BlogMan and want to get it working exactly right. So I’ll probably be doing some testing today but it’s hard to test proxy support when I don’t have a proxy to work with :p

I worked a lot on Nailer yesterday with Jen – we put the second iteration of the program into action and found quite a few bugs that needed to be fixed. It finally did what we needed it to do and all was well … I think :p I still need to do a few visual changes and then write some documentation and then Nailer should be ready to go. Since I wrote it especially for Jen, she’s going to have to decide what to do with it :p She tells me that she’s going to put it up for download on her site and I’ll probably set up a page for Nailer here too so that people have the usual FAQ, support stuff. Of course, that reminds me that I need to setup pages for BlogMan as well as a few other apps too – I hate doing that since I have to write documentation and stuff but oh well, I guess it needs to be done …

I am going to whine today both here and on Solipsistic Meandering – but I hear you say “so what else is new?” :p But the whines are different – you can read what I whine about on SM over there but here my whine is about the fact that I am drowning in e-mail <g> There’s just too many things going on and there is all the support e-mail to respond to as well as try to do some coding. In addition to the support e-mails on the mailing list (to which nobody seems to respond except for a very few people :p) there are also the personal e-mails I receive from people. Jen believes that I should utilize the forums more to provide support and I agree with her but the problem is the same on the forums – not many people respond and it ends up being me who responds. I know that the current forums aren’t very usable and I am thinking of shifting them over to something which is at least searchable and which also has some other functionality which might help attract people and also let them find what they want quickly. Of course, this would mean I would have to dump the current forums and so lose all the archived answers there but since not many people seem to look at it, that might not be a big deal :p Or, I could link to the old forums from the new ones – wherever I set them up …

But enough of whining 🙂 I redid Nailer yesterday since I realized that the UI was a bit too crowded the way I did the first iteration, plus, I wanted to provide a bit more functionality than the first iteration provided for. So the new UI is very clean since it’s just a list of images and a preview pane underneath with some buttons above the image list to provide the functionality. When you want to create the thumbnails, you click the Process button and are provided with a wizard which walks you step by step through the rest of the process. It gives you several options for the thumbnails – you can specify an exact size, have the aspect ratio of the thumbnails remain unchanged or create thumbnails in proportion to the size of the original image. You can also create thumbnails in an image format other than the format used by the original image.

The next step in the wizard asks you if you want to upload the images via FTP or if you want to copy it locally. If it’s a local copy, you can simply have the thumbnails copied to a folder or additionally, you could also have the originals copied to the same folder or a different folder. If FTPing, the next step gives you the options to specify for your FTP server and again you can copy all the images to one location or copy the thumbnails and the originals to two different locations. I think this provides a lot more functionality than the first iteration. I still have to test it out and hopefully we’ll do that when we create thumbnails for some of the images Jen has and then I will try to get some documentation done and Nailer will go up for download 🙂 Incidentally, somebody asked if Nailer was command-line driven – unfortunately, it’s not 🙁 There are just too many options for me to try and accommodate them all via a command-line interface. It can be done, but I can’t be bothered unless there is a big demand for it from the users – I prefer the GUI :p

I am surrounded by so many kind and generous loved ones and friends that I sometimes wonder what I have done to deserve such goodness 🙂 Jen bought me the farook.org domain and then when I asked if anybody would like to help with the hosting, Edward tells me that he was planning to get me hosted as a Christmas gift! In the meantime, I had talked to my friend KuhnDog (who has been kindly hosting me at RazorSys for over a year now) about whether I was taking up too much of his bandwidth and he was like “Not at all! And if you want to redirect your domain over to the subdomain I gave you, that’s fine!” As I said, what have I done to deserve such kindness? Thank you all for being so generous to me and now I would like to announce that www.farook.org is open for business and from now onwards, that’s the place to go to get any of my software 🙂

Speaking of software, I did do a new build of BlogMan and uploaded it yesterday. It now works as it should and there is no versioning problems. I do need to get some screenshots and put up a page for it as well as for some other apps which are just there on the sidebar with no home page for them. Plus, there are several utilities that I have developed (WebPrint and Bandit come to mind) that some people are using but is not up for download at all. I need to do all this but there is so little time, darn it! :p

And speaking of so little time and new apps and stuff, guess what? I have another new app ready to go – I coded it yesterday :p Jen needed something which would create thumbnails of given images and upload both the image and the thumbnail to an FTP server. Now when I’ve needed to do this in the past, what I have done is use ACDSee’s HTML album feature to create the thumbnails, delete the generated index.html file and then fire up SmartFTP to upload the images and the thumbnails to my server after linking them all in the correct page. However, this takes way too many steps and if the images are in multiple directories, you have to do some of the steps multiple times. I took a look at PhotoMeister which is a complete image manipulation/retouching solution and it has an HTML album creation tool which also does FTP but my question was what if I don’t want to generate the HTML? What if I just want to create the thumbnails and optionally upload them – which I frequently do? So I created this new utility that I call Nailer :p

Nailer is simplicity itself since there is only one screen to the app and no menus at all 🙂 There is a list on the left hand side which shows the images to be processed, there are buttons over the list to add images to the list, to clear the list and to process the images in the list and there is a preview pane for a selected image as well as a processing options pane below that on the right hand side of the window. You simply add images to the list, set the processing options such as thumbnail size, prefix for thumbnails, whether to FTP the stuff or copy the thumbnails to a local directory and then finally click the Process button and you’re done! Of course, I just had another brainwave – to make the processing options wizard driven so that you are taken step by step through the processing options when you click the Process button and have better control over the final image creation process – such as whether to put the thumbnails in one folder and the actual images on another folder on the FTP server. But that can come later, for the moment Nailer is working and I’m happy about that 🙂