QVCS and QVCS-Pro 3.10.10 Release Now Available

I just posted the 3.10.10 build.

This release is primarily a bug fix build, though it does have one minor new feature. Here's a list of fixes:

• I made some changes to the archive writing code so that it has a better chance of success when writing very large files to network shares. I've tested with files over 200 Megabyte in size, and things work as expected.
• File status is now refreshed automatically in the case where a user attempts to perform an operation that is not allowed. For example, suppose user A checks out a file, and then user B attempts to check out that same file. Ideally, before attempting the checkout, user B types F5 to refresh file status and the checkout attempt would have been prevented -- but in the common circumstance, that will not be the case, and user B's checkout request will fail. Before this fix, user B had to manually type the F5 key after the checkout failed in order to the file list panel would show that user A had checked out the file. After this fix, that refresh is done automatically.
• The status message area is now cleared after a 2 second delay.

The one new feature:

• You can now launch Windows Explorer from the file menu and the popup file menu. The copy of Explorer will open up to the directory containing the selected workfile, and that file will be selected. The menu option is only enabled if the workfile exists.

This is a free update for users who have purchased or renewed within the past year. Other users will have to update their license.

Keeping busy

Busy, busy, busy.

How many balls can you keep in the air at a time?

I'm writing this from my hotel room. I'm on a short term consulting gig for my former employer. I didn't burn any bridges there when I left to work on Quma full-time last year, and thought I could help them out. The consulting is interesting enough, but it's keeping me busy during the day -- so QVCS work slides back to the evenings where it lived for many, many years.

As a consequence of the consulting work, it looks like the release date for QVCS-Enterprise 2.0 will push off until late summer or early fall. As I've noted earlier, the big new feature in Enterprise 2.0 will be support for Microsoft's SCC IDE integration. I've made some good progress with it over the past several months, and have it far enough along that I can self-host its development: check-outs, check-ins, revision history, visual compare, and revision compare all work like they do in QVCS-Pro. I still have a few more functions to implement, and have to add PowerBuilder support (which should be pretty easy). I'm shooting to have an early beta ready in several weeks. This will be a beta without installer support -- you'll have to manually muck around in the registry to get things set up so an IDE will 'know' about QVCS-Enterprise, but ... the functionality is there, and I need to get some other folks working with it to identify areas that still need some polish, and to help find any bugs.

On the QVCS/QVCS-Pro front, I'll publish a bug-fix release at the end of this month. There are a few relatively minor bugs addressed in this next build. Chief among them is improved support for very large files. I had a user a while back who was having trouble getting QVCS to work with very large files (>50 Megabytes)... things would work fine if everything was done on one machine, but as soon as he tried to get things to work with a file server over the LAN, things would fall apart. More recently, another user has run into this same behavior, and this time, I've been able to duplicate the problem.... and fix it. The code change breaks up the writes into smaller chunks instead of attempting to write the entire gazillion bytes in a single write. I would have thought that the underlying runtime libraries would have handling this kind of chunking, but apparently not.

Echo chambers and the downside of virtual communities

I used to be interested in politics. I'm still interested in the topic in a more general way -- sort of a meta-politics, but these days, I'm not as easily distracted by the day-to-day hurly burly that the inside-the-beltway crowd thrives on. Part of the reason I'm less interested is that I'm now old enough to recognize that many of the strategems that are played by both sides are just a reprise (in some form or other) of the past. Also, neither major party is saying anything that is interesting. And finally, I've realized that there are so many more ways to spend my time than wandering in the ghetto that American politics has become.

Before the Republicans gained control of the House of Reps (1994), they were known as the 'Stupid' party, and the Democrats were known as the 'Evil' party. Now that the Republicans have been in power, the roles have reversed -- the Republicans are now the 'Evil' party, and the Democrats are the 'Stupid' party. This isn't to suggest that either side has the lock on stupidity or 'evil' behavior. There seems to be plenty of both in both parties. Neither party can truthfully claim some moral high ground -- they have both been corrupted by the power inherent to the offices they occupy.

This may sound like the observations of a cynic -- and I confess I'm sometimes comfortable with that label. But I also like to think that I have my eyes open, and am just trying to avoid making the same mistakes that I've already made.

On a separate, and only slightly related topic, there's another meta-type what-if that I recently thought of. In the so-called halcyon days of the 1950's- early 1960's we lived in an age that was unique in the sense that we had just a few major media outlets. As a result, the public dialog was defined and framed by the editors/producers of the major network evening news programs.

These days, the public dialog is no longer dominated by anyone -- whatever your viewpoint, you can find some media authority to supply verification of your own prejudices. The what-if part of this observation is this: isn't this more like what our country (and indeed the world) was like before we had mass communication? In those olden days (say the 1800's), a citizen's exposure to the wide world was limited. What you saw most closely was what was going on in your own community. Anything you learned about the wide world had a time delay built in, and was filtered and distorted by having traveled through many 'hands' before being consumed.

In today's media environment, you can safely 'live' in your own virtual community, and consume only the distorted and filtered view of the world that is supplied by your virtual community's echo chamber.

This analogy may not survive close scrutiny, but it has some merit, if only to make the observation that the Internet makes it much easier to find fellow-travelers. The downside of this is that most people prefer to stay in their own communities and in their own comfort zones, and so never really get to know the folks on the other side of some virtual divide. And just like in the olden days, where country bumpkins hadn't a clue about life outside their little world (and city slickers had no idea of what life was like on the farm), we're creating a world where it's becoming easier and easier to ignore viewpoints with which we disagree.

QVCS and QVCS-Pro 3.10.8 available

Over the weekend, I posted the 3.10.8 release. This is a bug-fix release only that addresses two problems:

• The rename bug noted earlier
• A problem with the qstamp command line utility: the -duplabel feature did not work correctly.

The duplicate label feature did work okay in the GUI -- it was only broken in the qstamp command line utility.

You can download the bits from the usual location.