The dope on DOpus

I first discussed Windows Explorer replacements a while back right here on this blog. Chris who read the entry and who was doing an article on Explorer replacements contacted me after reading that entry because he wanted to ask me about PowerDesk and Explorer Plus. (Incidentally, Novatix, the company who released Explorer Plus, seems to have removed all traces of the product from their site and seem to be positioning themselves as a security company now – weird :p)

Anyway, by the time Chris contacted me, I had switched over from both PowerDesk and Explorer Plus to what in my opinion is the new champ amongst explorer replacements – Directory Opus. I told Chris that I was now using and after some discussion back and forth about it, Chris tried it out and he seems to be impressed by it as well 🙂 In fact, he went so far as to write to the folks over at GPSoftware, the developers of Directory Opus, and tell them that it was my blog entry which got him on to DOpus. However, at that point I realized that I didn’t really have a blog entry about DOpus :p All the praise that heaped on DOpus had been via e-mail. I decided to rectify this omission with this new blog entry 🙂

The problem with PowerDesk (and Explorer Plus) had always been the fact that the software was prone to inexplicable glitches. Sometimes, the scrollbar on the directory treeview would become huge (about 10 times the normal size) and you would not be able to scroll anything. The only solution was to restart the application. At other times, one or other directory pane would not refresh and the app would just sit there. Since PowerDesk and Explorer Plus shared the same code base, both apps appeared to have the same issues. So in came Directory Opus and I must confess, that I have not had any issues at all with DOpus.

DOpus is at once more powerful than PowerDesk and more configurable. DOpus seems to be built upon the idea of building blocks. If you are of a technical bent, the app has certain basic commands which can be chained together to perform more complex tasks. If you are not technically oriented, then you can simply use it as is and still reap the benefits of a superior explorer replacement. The split views, the tabbed displays which allow you to have many differing views of the same data, the regular expression based renaming facility, the plugins which enhance the functionality of the app – these are just a few of my favourite things about DOpus.

About the only complaint that I have about this marvel of an app is the price. Where most shareware apps seem to be in the $25 – $50 range, currently DOpus comes in at about $60 (I thought I paid about $70 when I bought it but I might be mistaken). But buy it I did even at that price because after looking high and low, I have not been able to find another Explorer replacement which has the stability and the functionality of Directory Opus 🙂

On the track of a submission

First of all, before I forget, if anybody needs an invite to Windows Live Messenger beta, I’ve got a few invites. So let me know 🙂 I kinda, sorta like it and the winks are amusing and since Microsoft has seen fit to give me a few beta invites, I might as well pass it along.

I submitted a short story to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. I first learnt of ASIM through Simon Hayne’s site. I came across Simon’s site while doing a web search for something else. Given that he is a humorous science fiction author, I tarried a while on his site. (Actually, I’d been to his site several times before but each time, I’d been there to look at one or other piece of his software and never noticed that he was a writer but once I did find out that he was a writer, I stayed longer :p) In his own way, Simon have been inspirational for me 🙂 I came across Simon’s site at a time when I had been querying agents about my novel for a while and had got nothing but rejections – on query. When I read Simon’s story and his long struggle to get published (before finally succeeding), I realized that perhaps I too could become published and that I had to learn to be patient …

Anyway, at that point I noticed that Simon was involved with ASIM but didn’t think anything more of it since I didn’t have any short stories for publication. Now that I’ve started doing short stories, I decided that I should give ASIM a try. I sent in one of my short stories at the beginning of the week and was told that it had passed the initial reading and is now in their submission queue. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed :p

The interesting thing about ASIM is their submission tracking system. One of the most agonizing things about submitting any work is the long wait involved – and the uncertainty. Sometimes, you don’t even know if they received your submission and you certainly don’t know what is happening with your submission. You know that you have to wait a month, or two, or three but beyond that, it’s all darkness. At ASIM, they make the wait easier for you 🙂 You get assigned a submission number and then you can keep track of where you submission is in the submission process. I really like that 🙂

In fact, I like how ASIM works so much that I think I’ll try submitting my novel to them next to see if they are interested in serializing it … or not 🙂

One-trick ponies and one-horse races

At one time, Microsoft used to be a one-trick pony. So did Google 🙂 For the longest time, even after they had started diversifying, Microsoft used to do mostly software. Sure they had Hotmail, but that seemed to be almost an afterthought more than anything else. Then came the revolution when they started getting into anything and everything – handhelds, mobile devices, pocket PC, smart phones. Of course, it was always mostly in terms of developing the OS for the devices and setting up the specs for each device rather than actually getting into marketing a device under their brand name. That too changed with the X-Box. That is where Microsoft stands today.

Google was slightly different (but then again perhaps not :p) They started off (at least appeared to but perceptions can be deceiving …) much more slowly but have suddenly branched out in so many bewildering directions at once. You had Google Desktop Search being added to the web search and then you had Picasa coming in to the mix. The next thing you know, wham! You had a whole bunch of Google services and downloads – Google Earth, Google Talk, Blogger, GMail, Froogle, Google Base and a host of others. This is in addition to the other stuff which is only hinted at or have not been completely rolled out yet – GDrive, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Writely etc.

If you look at how the two companies have been progressing – MS has been building on their OS market and slowly expanding into new areas while Google has been building on their web presence and search engine superiority and have been moving in ever widening circles. It is inevitable that these two giants both end up in the same arena sooner or later. (And yes, everybody has been talking about this for ages and I’m not saying anything new here :p) Looks as if MS is finally ready to do something about the threat from Google though since they have come up with a whole series of "Live" services and tools which are web based.

There’s Windows Live Search – another attempt by MS to try to horn in on Google’s territory :p They tried it earlier with MSN Search but that didn’t seem to get them anywhere. This is supposed to be faster and better but I have no idea how since it’s just another search engine :p There’s also Live Mail, OneCare Live, Live Safety Center, Office Live and so on. Basically, MS seems to be going "web" full on. Of course, not having tested most of this stuff, I can’t really comment on it. One thing that I have tested though is Windows Live Messenger (WLM) and I must say that I kind of like it 🙂

I signed up for the beta because of the shared folder feature. Laurie and I send a lot of files back and forth – she edits my stories and I edit hers (mostly it’s the first :p) It’s a pain to have to open Explorer, find the file share, go to the right folder and then drop the file in and tell Laurie it’s there. I’d rather have the file automatically synchronized with her machine when I make any changes. This is what I thought the shared folder feature did. Unfortunately, it hasn’t turned out to be quite that :p When you add a file to a shared folder, WLM actually makes a copy of the original and places it in your WLM shared folder. So, after the first instance, if you change the original, nothing is synchronized with the other person you’re sharing the document with. I haven’t tried modifying the document in the shared folder itself but I have a feeling that the changes will synchronize then but that defeats the whole purpose of having documents in an ordered folder structure :p So not quite there yet …

The other annoying thing about shared folders is that if you enable shared folders – all your file transfers are done via shared folders. You can’t do an instant send the old way which is never updated again and do a shared folder approach only when you need it. It’s all or nothing. Other than that though, I kind of like WLM and it has performed without any issues on my machine so far. In fact, I’ve actually gone back to WLM and stopped connecting to the Messenger network via Trillian. Given that Trillian development seems to be stagnating, I might actually go back to individual IM apps again :p

So much software …

Who would have thunk there was so much software out there? I’ve been setting up a server for my friend and it’s been one stream of software joy :p First, I had to decide on Apache and figured I might as well go with Apache 2.2 since that was the latest. Then of course, there was the decision as to PHP – I decided to go with 5.1.2 since I wanted to be able to use some of the latest PHP features. Then, there are all the libraries that you need to get PHP installed. So it was a fun bout of software installing.

Once all that was done, I learn that one of the sites to be put on that server needs Apache 1.3 and that 2.2 would not do :p So, it was back to downloading and installing Apache 1.3.34. Now, it feels to me as if PHP 5.x is a bit more slower than the 4.x variety when I actually try using it and so, I find myself wondering if I should perhaps switch to PHP 4.x instead … Not sure if I really want to do that yet though. Sometimes there can just be too much software to deal with :p

In other news, over the last couple of days we’ve been catching a few movies when we had the time. We watched "Aeon Flux" and I’m still not sure what to say about the movie :p They had some really stupid (from a logical perspective) stuff in the movie – like an assassin who goes out on a mission at night wearing all white :p I guess from a stylistic perspective it made sense since she wore white and all the guys she went against wore black but do you honestly think any assassin or thief worth their salt would wear white at night? 🙂 The story itself was OK but I was mostly left questioning the weird stuff in the movie – such as a pool which is supposed to be their monitoring system and another assassin who has hands on her feet (yes, I kid you not) … But given that there appear to be slim pickings for science fiction movies these days, I guess I can’t really complain :p

Time to write again …

I’ve gone through all three of my currently active software projects and done releases for all of them, I’ve also got a software project on back burner which I won’t be able to totally test till Office 2007 comes out :p (No, it’s not Office 2007 specific but it’s a Word add-in and I might as well make sure that it works with the latest release of Office since it’s just around the corner – at least the public beta … or so they say :p)

Be that as may be, I think I’ve done enough coding for a while. Now it’s time to get back to the writing. The problem, as always, is lethargy. I seem to need to build momentum to get going on any project. I procrastinated on the next release of Blog for the longest time because I just couldn’t build up the enthusiasm to get started on coding again. Once I got going, I couldn’t stop :p Now that I’m in full-blown coding mode, I find myself unable to put aside coding and go back to writing. But I must. Otherwise, the writing will just atrophy till I get back into it months from now and I don’t want that to happen.

The issue is always getting started. Once things get going – it’s all downhill from that point on. I know what I want to write next. I have a story (or at least a world) in my head. This one is rather a vibrant world as well – I keep getting images about the world, the society that I want to write about. But I keep putting it off, thinking that I should wait for word on the last short story that I submitted or that I should try to get some more submissions going or something. If I would actually do something writing related – even as simple as submitting stuff to agents or publishers – I think it would be fine. It’s this sitting around and waiting that I just can’t abide …

Tags, categories and changes

After getting the latest builds of Blog to work, I have decided to remove Ultimate Tag Warrior from the mix here on SM. This is not due to any issues with UTW itself – it’s a great plugin and does the job well – but due to me realizing that UTW was overkill and that for what I was doing, it introduced overhead that wasn’t needed 🙂

Basically, I post all my entries from Blog. I never use the WP admin interface much except to remove spam. I do all my editing, posting and other entry management stuff via Blog itself. The only reason I was looking for a tag cloud mechanism was so that I could show a visual representation of the various topics covered on this site and let somebody interested drill down easily to only the posts that interested them. UTW allows you to do all that but in my case, I was simply converting categories to tags to do this. Since the categories are a built-in feature of WordPress, it occurred to me that I didn’t need the overhead of UTW (which would slow down XMLRPC to an extent) if I had a plugin which displayed a tag cloud based on my categories.

Enter the WordPress Heat Map plugin which does exactly that 🙂 After a brief search of the Net, I actually found a couple of different alternatives. The other one was the Weighted Categories plugin, which apparently inspired the author of the Heat Map Plugin. However, the Heat Map plugin appeared to be better maintained and supported and so, I went with that :p Incidentally, the author of the Weighted Categories plugin is apparently working on a way to make his plugin work with keywords instead of categories. I would be interested in that if it didn’t create too much overhead and worked without any issues with XMLRPC-based posting. But I doubt it … There is another plugin which supports keywords – the Keywords plugin, and the author is apparently working on tag cloud kind of support. Unfortunately, it works basically the same as UTW (just not as well :p) and so, I don’t see the point to pursuing that one either :p

Basically, what I’d like from a keyword tagging plugin for WP, is for the plugin to examine each new post, identify the keywords automatically and then add them as tags. Of course, at the moment, that appears to be too much to ask for :p The biggest problem appears to be identifying the keywords. Yahoo Content Analysis doesn’t do too great a job of it as I’ve mentioned before and while Tagyu does do a much better job, it is abominably slow and tends to end up in my XMLRCP session timing out before the analysis is done :p The best solution would be something that the plugin can do itself instead of contacting an external server but the implementation is the key ….

Midnight fires in the coding forges …

It’s more Blog news again I’m afraid since I haven’t been doing much else :p (Incidentally, I really should get the Blog page re-designed so that it is more consistent with the look of the new site … you know how it goes, so many things to do ..) Anyway, getting back to Blog coding, after doing some extensive coding and light testing, the category feature in Blog works fully and it even publishes via XMLRPC to WordPress :p I was really happy to get that bit working finally since I’ve been working non-stop at that functionality since I got back to working on Blog.

Now that that is done, I have a few more things to fix up in Blog before I can do a release. The internal release versions have been jumping around quite a bit since the last beta release due to the fact that I’ve been sending private builds to a few people who asked 🙂 I need to keep the newer builds compatible with the older builds and so I’m now up to 8.0 beta 5 at the moment. I’m hoping that I can do a public release of beta 5 but I do need to get a few more things fixed up first.

One thing that I have fixed since the category stuff was done was the find feature. It has been broken since at least beta 3 and I finally got around to fixing it :p At the same time, I want to add the option to be able to search the current entry for some given text as well as searching the current blog and all blogs under Blog. I even managed to fix up the search results dialog so that it shows the new WYSIWYG view as well as the old HTML view. However, I just discovered that the HTMLEdit component that I use might not be able to do search and replace of text. This is going to be a bit of an issue with the find feature and the new replace feature that I intend to implement … bummer 🙁 Hopefully, I can find a workaround … There are also the pages of bug reports on the 8.0 betas at the forums that I need to attend to … Work, work, work :p

Back to Blog

Boy, this whole tag cloud thing is conjuring up a cloud of its own :p Yesterday, I got the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin but it turns out that I have to specify the tags for the plugin in WP for it to work 🙁 Sure, as Lorelle pointed out in the comments yesterday, I can always set the plugin to use categories as tags and that should solve the issue right? Except that I post to my WP installation via Blog and Blog currently has no support for categories 🙁

OK, that’s not entirely true. Blog has some great category support (though Laurie will tell you it is broken in the current betas :p) but those categories don’t transfer over when publishing to WP via XMLRPC. So, I decided to get back to Blog and fix that. Of course, me being me, I can’t work on one particular issue only – I had to go redo a whole lot of other things :p There was one outstanding issue from the early days of Blog – how I handled database tables internally. The way I was doing it was not quite efficient and rather clumsy because that’s how I had started all that time ago in the early days of Blog. Blog was my first Delphi app and it shows. However, I have not fixed this all this time since Blog has gotten increasingly more complicated over the years and fixing the way data tables were linked was a rather cumbersome task.

I began fixing that yesterday :p Yeah, I’m a glutton for punishment. I also added in support via the XMLRPC interface for working with categories. That part at least works now but I realized then that due to the way Blog works, categories were going to be a major pain! Blog can publish to multiple destinations and this means that conceivably, somebody can publish the same blog to two different WP installations. This would mean that each installation would have its own list of categories and Blog would have a third list of categories internally. How do you keep all these different categories distinct. How do you make sure that Blog marks the correct categories on each WP installation? This is going to require a whole new set of tables and logic 🙂 Ah well, the joys of coding …

Coding, Testing, Writing – Life goes on …

I finally finished editing my new short story, "The Wyrm’s Lair" and sent it out. I haven’t really tried submitting short stories anywhere before (heck, I only started submitting my novel less than a year ago :p) and so am not sure how it will go – keep good thoughts in mind for it 🙂 Of course, I’m not totally accurate in saying I haven’t submitted any short stories before – I have submitted two stories before. One, a long time ago to an e-mag and they didn’t like it and the other one was just before I started work on the short story that I sent out today. The second one was rejected as well but I’m not totally surprised about that one since that didn’t have too much action – it was more of a character/mood piece. This one, I really like and it sort of came together much better even than the first draft once I’d edited it. However, it might not be everybody’s cup of tea :p So now that that’s done, I have to consider what I start working on next. Probably editing "Honest" …

I’m also beta testing AstroSynthesis. AS is probably one of the best space mapping software out there 🙂 I love it because it helps me to map out the universe that I’m writing about. It fleshes things out and helps me keep track of what world is where and how far away each world is and so on. Now if I could take it a step further and I could also map out each planet as far as the land masses and stuff goes, it would be perfect. Actually AS has a sister product, Fractal Mapper which does help you do this but it takes quite a bit of work to create a good looking Fractal Mapper map and I just don’t have the patience :p Besides, I already have enough projects without taking any more on. But back to topic, I am beta testing AS 2.0 and I was really thrilled to be picked to beta test since besides my own apps, I haven’t beta tested anything much. Of course, what with all the other stuff going on, I haven’t been able to do as thorough a beta test as I would have liked and I feel a bit guilty about this since the developer is sort of getting cheated by having me beta test. Hopefully, I can make up for it in the future beta releases.

Now that WriteTrack is out, I have started work on another project – a Word add-in to highlight often used (and misused) words in a document. I’ve already written most of the code for this as a macro and so the logic isn’t too difficult but there is a UI to the add-in and that’s where I’m struggling at the moment. I hope to have the add-in done within a week and then I hope to keep adding more functionality to it as I go on, creating a suite of little utilities that will be helpful to writers. That’s something I see a great need for with Word – it’s not too shabby a word processor but most of the available tools are just as overpriced as Word is :p We need more free stuff so that us poor writers can actually afford to have them 🙂

Releases, bugs and other stuff ….

I released the next beta of WriteTrack yesterday. I’d been working to get the features sorted out for the last couple of days and I was finally satisfied enough with it to do a release. There was one major feature outstanding when I did the last beta – the ability to track income and expenses on your writing projects. I got that sorted out and I also fixed a lot of minor usability issues since I’ve been actively using it during the last couple of days to transfer over all my old tracked submissions from the Excel spreadsheet I was using into WriteTrack. It’s only when you use something that you figure out what doesn’t work and what can be improved 🙂 I still want a few minor features added to the app but I think it is more or less ready for a 1.0 release as long as nobody finds any major bugs in this beta.

Speaking of bugs, there has been a bug which has been irritating me in a major way and unfortunately, it’s not something that I can fix. The bug is with my banking system :p My bank is HSBC and they are probably one of the bigger banks in Sri Lanka, what with being an international bank and all. They have an Internet banking service where I can check balances, do transfers, pay bills etc and I find this very useful since I don’t leave the house much. I usually pay my rent via the Internet banking system but at the end of last month when I tried to make my usual transfer (the same transfer that I’d done for six months before) I was presented with an error message.

I call their customer support service and a Customer Support Rep (CSR) takes down the details of the issue and promises that they’ll call back the next day to let me know the resolution. The next day comes and goes, no call. I try the system again, it still doesn’t work. So I call them again. The same CSR takes the call, says that she’ll talk to the relevant people and they’ll get back to me and the next day comes, nothing again and the system still does not work. I call again. A different CSR this time and she says that the Internet banking department looked at it, that the problem wasn’t in their department and that it has been escalated to networking and that they’d "definitely" get back to me the next day.

We were out most of the day the next day but I didn’t get a call on my mobile nor were there any messages on the answering machine when we got back. It was too late to call by then and it being Friday, I couldn’t do anything over the weekend either. I call on Monday and get another CSR, I tell her the issue and tell her that I had not heard anything from them after repeated promises of calls. She escalates it to a "senior colleague" who is courteous and says she understands and that the matter will be dealt with and that I’d hear from them before 5 o’clock. True to her word, she does call back around 3 o’clock and says that it looks like a technical issue at their end and that it has been escalated to IT and that I’ll hear from them by the next day, which was yesterday.

End of day yesterday, still nothing from HSBC. I try the system again in the hope that they fixed it but didn’t call me. It still doesn’t work. So I call their support line and ask for a manager. I get to a manager explain the situation to her and tell her that I find this rather unacceptable. She makes soothing noises, says that she understands and that I’ll hear back from them the next day – today. I’m hoping that they’ll prove me wrong and fix the issue and call me to say that they did it. But given the track record so far, I’m not taking any bets on it.

I do have two questions though – is it so hard to keep a customer informed if you are taking a long time to resolve the issue? I work in customer support, I know it’s not easy for the CSRs to do this and I don’t expect them to. But if the issue is escalated, shouldn’t whoever it was escalated to take the time to let the customer know? My second question is, what the heck is their IT department doing? It shouldn’t take them over a week to fix a simple issue like this, should it? Come on, even without knowing anything about their system, I think I can fix it within a day :p Ah well, such is life in Sri Lanka …