I’m sorry about the total silence here on The Developer’s Corner (though I have been continuing to write on my other blog) but there really hasn’t been much to write about. Sinsolis did a fantastic set of icons for the new toolbar items in Blog and I should thank him for being so kind all the time but I haven’t even had the time to use them yet in Blog since I’ve been so busy with other things. At the same time, development was stuck anyway for a while now because I’ve run into certain problems with the WPTools component. It does a fantastic job of being a WYSIWYG HTML editor component but has problems with certain things like inserting hyperlinks or images – it does those well enough but doesn’t leave room for customization. For instance, I want to let the user specify a target for a hyperlink but the method provided by WPTools to insert a hyperlink does not allow this. So I’m trying to find a workaround but being short of time means that I’m not making much progress. I’m sure I’ll get to it eventually but till then, I can only ask for your patience …

Sinesolis was kind enough to write to me as soon as he’d seen yesterday’s post and offer to do more icons – he’s always been a great guy like that and I really am thankful to know that there are such nice people like him out there 🙂 Thanks again Sinesolis! I did do all the icons on my own in Axialis Icon Workshop as an interim measure and have the new UI mostly working. The edit toolbar has grown enormously and now actually takes up two rows. It looks a bit cluttered to me honestly and I’m beginning to wonder if it indeed is too busy – I guess I’ll have to post a screenshot for you to actually see what I’m talking about. I’ll probably do that tomorrow if I can get the new build upto the level of posting an entry with a link since then I can do all that from the new build itself and so test out the publishing part of it too :p

So far, the text formatting stuff in the WYSIWYG editor works fine and I’ve also added an HTML view where you can still see the text in all it’s HTML tagged glory and since I’m still using the PlusMemo component for the HTML view, you still get all the colour coded HTML tags. However, the formatting toolbars become disabled in the HTML view and so you’ll either have to depend on custom code snippets or code it in by hand :p I did add a new option where you can specify what the default view should be – so those who like HTML can always start off in HTML. I should warn here that while tables are supported in WYSIWYG view, WPTools does not support embedding tables within tables (or maybe that’s just for HTML files) and so you might not be able to do a lot of stuff with tables, but table support is there in WYSIWYG mode.

There are problems however – the first one I came across was the fact that adding hyperlinks in WYSIWYG mode is kind of oversimplified. To add a hyperlink, you have to (in the code of course) use a function which inserts the URL and the text for the link. Now I wanted more control such as to be able to specify the target etc. I don’t know if that is possible with the hyperlink insertion function since I haven’t worked with WPTools too much before this. Guess I’ll have to start doing some experimenting. Hopefully, it’ll work because if not, I’m going to have to either find a workaround or talk to the WPTools developer and that’ll mean time wasted and I hate that …

First of all, I’d like to thank James O’Donnell for sending me “The Thomas Crown Affair” off my wishlist – it’s the original version of the movie and something that I’ve been looking forward to watching for a long time. Thanks a bunch Jim 🙂

I started work on the next release – whatever it is going to be yesterday again. I had gone back to the original 7.1 codebase – the one without the WPTools WYSIWYG entry field – for the 7.11 and now I merged back the 7.11 changes to the WPTools version. I’m still not sure if I will release 7.11 or complete integrating WPTools and release the whole thing as 7.5. At the moment, I’m leaning towards the latter idea since I’ve just realized that the planned feature list is going to be huge and that there are going to be some major changes – so that would mean a long beta cycle or releasing all the features in bits and pieces in incremental versions till we hit 8.0 and that looks to be a better idea at the moment to me.

However as it may be, since the new entry field is going to be WYSIWYG, I had to add a lot of new toolbar buttons for text formatting but I couldn’t get these buttons to work properly till yesterday. I finally figured out what was wrong and had the bold and italics options working. This incidentally will invalidate the built-in custom snippets bold and italic functions. I am not sure how I’m going to handle this but I have a feeling that it will somehow tie into what I’m going to talk about next – the plain HTML editing option. I was going to include an HTML editing option anyway, but I was going to make the WYSIWYG editing the default. However, talking to Jordan made me realize that some people might actually prefer to edit in HTML without all the spiffy WYSIWYG goodness <g> – so now I’m thinking of how I could set it up so that people can choose what their default editing option in Blog is to be – for the moment this is not going to be a major problem with the UI but it will become a bit more complicated when I merge in BlogMan. Guess I’ll just have to look at the UI a lot more closely :p

Another problem (albeit a minor one) is doing nice icons for all the new toolbar options 🙂 Sinesolis did such a great job with the spiffy, true-colour icons for Blog that I feel ashamed to include drab monotonous icons for underline, ordered list, unordered list etc. along with the existing icons. I might try to see if I can do something using Axialis Icon Workshop but if not, I’ll simply not bother with it for the moment and go with whatever icons I can get and figure out what to do once I actually have a release going :p

Blog 7.11 is in the works – the main defects to be fixed were external Blog tags not being parsed for the archive table of contents and cut and paste via keyboard shortcuts behaving weirdly due to the fact that I had bound CTRL+C and CTRL+V to the entry component and so it was overriding the general cut and paste functionality. I fixed all that and as a good measure threw in a feature that a user requested – the ability to define the maximum number of posts on the main page up to a maximum of 9999 instead of the current value of a maximum of 99. Now I’d never thought of having more than 10-20 posts on the main page due to the load time problems but if you do only one or two lines of entries per day, I guess 99 entries might not be that big. Anyway, if somebody wants it and it doesn’t create a problem for the other users, then my policy is to add the feature in 🙂

I was about ready to do a release when I decided to hold the release till I can figure out whether adding support for the MS Media Player 9.0 blogging add-in was going to be too hard. However, I never got around to checking into that completely since I got side-tracked by another issue – that of adding support for other language fonts, those using unicode. I’d done bits and pieces of stuff to add other language support at different times but never had somebody to test it out and let me know if it all worked when it was implemented since the person who had requested the feature was long gone by then. This time I had Daijoubu, who was willing to help me with getting Japanese font support working with Blog. I thought it might be fairly simple, switched the PlusMemo component to a unicode one and sent off a new build to Daijoubu. While that build was fine for making entries, they still weren’t being saved as unicode and I realized that all the internal string manipulation functions were ANSI and that they would have to be changed to unicode as well before true unicode support was possible.

Since this seems like a fairly big job, I am kind of inclined to go with an interim 7.11 build and then go for 8.0 for the unicode support or to do a 7.5 build which would have the WYSIWYG entry box and unicode support before going onto the full 8.0 release. I don’t know which route I’ll take but I am certainly back to coding Blog – at least in a hesitant kind of way :p

Things have been rather chaotic, hectic and a bit confused as you might find from some of my entries on SM and I’ve sort of fallen out of the habit of making my daily entries here – especially given that I didn’t have much in the way of tech stuff to talk about. I haven’t really felt like coding and so have been taking it easy, dabbling in video, audio and most recently Flash. I’ve always felt ambivalent about Flash since while it did look nifty, I just couldn’t seem to accept as part of “pure” web design. So, while I’d think of using Flash, in the end I’d steer clear of it. However, a friend needed to work with Flash recently and so I got involved and in the process I actually came to do a bit of work with Flash, though it was not Macromedia’s product that I used but rather Swish. It’s a neat product and pretty easy to use and while I don’t think I’d still be tempted to use Flash since my taste in web design runs towards the KISS principle, I can at least pretend to myself that I know something about Flash now :p

I’ve also been contemplating getting back into coding but wasn’t sure what project to take up – I know that Blog 8.0 needs to be worked on but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to get back to Blog immediately and so was actually contemplating the often mentioned PostMan, which is actually an e-mail client. The greatest problem that I’d had with PostMan had been the slow HTML rendering but now I thought I had a solution which might overcome that problem. But I was debating whether to try that or get back into Blog and so did neither till one of the Blog users, Lena, decided the matter by reporting a problem with archive table of contents templates. I started looking into the problem and discovered that there was a bug in the code that needed to be fixed. I fixed that but since I was already on a roll, I decided to fix a few more issues.

A couple of bug fixes later, I had a release that I was beginning to name Blog 7.11 when I received an e-mail from Collin where he mentioned that it would be pretty nifty if Blog could support the new Windows Media Player 9.0 option to display it’s playlist in blogs. I had seen the blogging add-in for Media Player 9.0 mentioned on the MS site but had not given much attention till now but now I went over there and downloaded Media Player 9.0 and the blogging add-in. However, I got no chance to look into it any further since I was distracted by other stuff but if it looks as if it’s a simple thing to implement, I’ll probably add that feature to Blog 7.11 before I release it 🙂

It’s been a while again since I’ve posted here but most of what I’ve had to say the last few days has been more for SM than for here :p I’ve not been doing much coding but a lot of tinkering around – with the hardware on my desktop, with video codecs in order to figure out the best conversion formats and with quite a bit of audio and video software in order to figure out about a few edits I was planning. I’ve not had much time to mess around with my site in the middle of all this but I saw this neat script to add collapsible lists to your site while trying to do something for a friend. I like the concept and while I am not sure how well it will work with non-IE browsers, decided to give it a go on the sidebar since I do have a lot of stuff on the sidebar and it looks a bit untidy <g> So here goes .. if things break, I’ll probably fix it in a day or two when I get around to it :p

I’ve been silent for a while now … partially because of reasons that I’ve cited over at SM but also because I’d lost all track of time :p Wow!! I had no idea that it’s been a week since my last post … But I’ve been busy. Even more busier than usual actually :p I started work on this video edit last weekend which kind of grew into a many headed monster like the mythical hydra <g>

When I originally started the edit, I was simply going to splice a few video clips together just to test out the new desktop machine and also to sort of re-familiarize myself with Adobe Premiere. But I had so much fun with the job that I decided to go further. I added music and then wanted a music editing program to do a better job. So I got CoolEdit (but I still haven’t used it actually for reasons that will be made clear as we go on …) Then I wanted to do a title sequence and so I loaded up 3D Studio Max 5.0 since I knew exactly how I wanted to do the title sequence. By this time, my hard disks were groaning since I had only two – a 5GB and a 4GB and I’d already installed a couple of games (Neverwinter Nights and WarCraft III) which had taken a hefty chunk out of the 4GB drive.

By this time, I put off the editing and stuff and had decided to get a new hard disk :p This took a while while I did the necessary research and stuff and along the way, I decided to get a new burner as well since the burner on my Notebook is only 32x4x8 and I could get a Sony 48x24x48 (which could be firmware updated to 52x24x52 if I really needed all that speed) for pretty cheap. The CD-ROM I had on the desktop is an old one and it wouldn’t recognize certain CD’s I’d burnt. So a new CD-ROM really was needed unless I wanted to access all the one’s that wouldn’t work, through the network by putting them in the CD drive on the notebook :p Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I got an 80GB hard disk and the CD burner and then began the whole saga of swapping out the old and putting in the new etc.

I decided to keep my old 5GB drive so that it could serve as a scratch disk for all the vide editing software etc. The 5GB had my XP installation and since I really didn’t feel like doing another installation of XP, I was going to keep XP on it but uninstall and reinstall all the apps to the new hard disk but then I discovered that I couldn’t move the Documents and Settings Folder to the new drive as well since it was a system folder – bummer! I knew that if I left the Documents and Settings folder on the 5GB drive, it probably would fill up pretty soon and be useless as a scratch disk. Plus, I like things neat and orderly anyway and having the OS on one drive and the apps on another somehow grated against my sensibilities – don’t mind me, I’m weird :p So I partitioned my 80GB into two 40GB drives, backed up some of the stuff I wanted into one of the new partitions and started reinstalling XP.

Here comes the bit where I always mess up :p XP, warned me that it couldn’t recognize the partition on the 80GB drive and offered to delete the partition and recreate it and I, not reading what the message said properly, assumed it was talking about *one* of the 40GB partitions, told it to go ahead. I realized a split second after I pressed the ENTER key, that I’d just deleted *both* partitions on the 80GB drive and so had lost my backup data! Ah well … Anyway, the XP installation was faster than ever and took only about 17 minutes :p I spent yesterday reinstalling all my apps and putting in all the new Premiere helper apps and plug-ins and transitions and stuff that I wanted to work with and got my desktop somewhat back to a workable state. I’m still working on that …

Oh yeah, had an interesting problem along the way – I had my documents folder on the original installation set to be accessible only by my login and I couldn’t access it at all after I reinstalled XP ;p Not even after I’d reset the security settings. Fortunately, I had the original installation of XP on the other hard disk and was able to boot into that installation, copy over the contents of the my documents folder and then boot back into the new installation of XP and access the stuff. Makes your head hurt doesn’t it? :p

I’d had some troubles connecting to an Oracle 9i database from Delphi the last time I tried to do some coding for the company using Delphi and Oracle but this time I first looked over at torry.net and discovered several freeware components that connected directly with Oracle databases and one of them was updated to include Oracle 9i access – some of the others might have worked as well but I went with the first one that worked and was really comprehensive and had the source included :p Anyway, the database access part has been as smooth as can be but I decided to make things more interesting by going with the DeveloperExpress ExpressWebFramework for doing the actual GUI <g>

While the ExpressWebFramework looks great, there really isn’t much documentation for it except for the help files and some FAQ’s on their site and the included demos. So I’m kind of struggling with how to do certain things and with some of the errors as well but I seem to be making progress as well. I’ve got the login screen done and have the main interface kind of in place too but then hit another one of those undocumented/unidentified errors. The problem is aggravated by the fact that I use Opera as my browser and it seems to have this weird caching system where it displays a page it fetched before even when that page has changed. It’s been irritating me a lot since I’d be faced with an error message when the page is actually working and Opera was actually displaying an older page and sometimes I’d be looking for the error for a while before I remembered to refresh the page in Opera. Ah well, I’ll get there eventually … Actually, once I sort out this one particular problem in the main interface, I should be almost there since the rest will be just designing different pages to display or edit the data but you never know :p

Well, QDesigner was almost exactly what I was looking for as far as a visual database designer went and I was able to diagram the Blog data structures successfully using it. However, before I could begin work on designing the database structures for the new version of Blog, I got landed with a new job at work – or rather, an old job that needed to be done again :p I’d done this internal system for managing the archival footage used by our company (which is a television production firm) which used Visual Studio .NET for the frontend and Oracle 9i for the backend. I’d done the system close to a year ago but they hadn’t been using it much but suddenly they wanted to use it again. However, in the meantime my machine had been raided for hardware and one of my hard disk’s removed – the one which contained the Oracle database that I used for development work :p

The production Oracle server is supposedly there but that had gone through several formats and OS reinstalls and so the Oracle database is supposed to be on backup. But for the moment, there is no production instance nor my original development database available. However, I’d done database structure exports a while back and so I decided to set up Oracle on my machine again and while I’m at it, re-develop the system using Delphi since I’d been having problems with Visual Studio .NET. I hate having to deploy anything with Visual Studio .NET because it seems to involve such a lot of effort and sometimes things seem to work for no apparent reason. For instance, I would have a connection to the Oracle database from inside the Visual Studio .NET environment but when I deployed the application, I’d find that there was no database connection! I’m tired of trying to debug this kind of problem and so think Delphi is the better way to go. Plus, Delphi now offers some really nifty web frontend development tools and I want to get to grips with those. So it looks as if I’m going to be busy with that for the next few days …

There have been no responses at all to Geek for Hire – no that’s not true there was *one* response but that’s a strange story in itself :p Or maybe it’s not such a strange story but pointless action always mystifies me. Anyway, the way the consultancy page at Geek for Hire is set up, is as three steps – OK, actually two but it sounds better to say it’s a three step process <g> The first step is to pay the consultation fee via PayPal and then the next step is to send in the consultation information. However, since the process is forms based and I didn’t want to actually do a lot of coding to ensure that the first step had been followed before allowing the second step, you can skip the first step and go straight to the second step and that’s what the person who sent me the single consultation seems to have done <g> I got a query about doing some WSH-base scripting and I replied to the person and told him that I’d be happy to do so as soon as he paid the consultation fee but never heard from him again. I guess maybe he thought that he’d see if I’d respond or something, or maybe he had nothing better to do at the moment … just seemed a pointless thing to do to me that’s all …

In the mean time, I decided to get back to Blog re-coding yesterday. So I wanted to first come up with the new database design for the unified Blog/BlogMan architecture :p Of course, this led to me thinking that it was about time that I documented all the database structures and did a visual design and that got me looking into visual database design tools and the rest of the day passed by in me looking at various tools and downloading the ones I thought might actually be useful 🙂 I found three that looked to be good – VisualCASE (I forget the URL), DeZign and QDesigner from Quest.

I didn’t like VisualCASE since it was Java based (I find Java based tools slow to run and hate having to have the JRE installed for them to work – just a quirk on my part so don’t go telling me all about how great Java is since I do know … I code in Java :p) and I did download the trial of DeZign and got it to work but didn’t really like the way it let you do a visual design – such as how it defines relationships between tables. QDesigner still hadn’t completed downloading when I left work (it was 70+ MB and we have a very slow connection during the daytime since everybody is on …) and so I’m hoping to try it out today. Maybe that will be the tool that I’m looking for. If not, anybody got any other suggestions? Incidentally, I’m trying to visually represent the existing Blog data structures before I do a redesign – don’t know if I mentioned that or not.