Mobility

Got back yesterday from a weekend trip to Winston-Salem, NC for our 30th college reunion/homecoming. In preparation for the trip, I had dumped my DSL account with Verizon, and signed up for the Verizon Wireless 'all you can eat' wireless data plan. The idea being that I'd be Internet connected, even if our hotel was not.

It worked out pretty well. The hotel (which was nice enough), claimed to have both Wi-Fi and hardline Ethernet connections. Neither worked, so I fell back to using my new WAN wireless card. The card is an AudioVox 5740. While the speed was not anywhere as fast as the cable modem that we have here at the office, it worked well enough. On the drive back to Baltimore, I tried out true mobility by trying to connect to the Internet while the car was traveling at highway speeds. It worked well, providing better speed than I saw from the hotel. Pretty cool. Now the 'office' is where ever I take the laptop.

Laptop recovery

My laptop hard drive died yesterday. RIP. This Toshiba 5205-S503 laptop has otherwise been pretty reliable.

I replaced it with an 80 gig drive (it was a 40 gig drive), and have been spending the better part of a day and a half piecing things back together so that I can take Quma 'on the road' when I want.

About the only thing good to say about a hard drive failure is that it allows you to get rid of cruft that you genuinely don't need.

My laptop is now faster than it's been for quite awhile. Who can say what was slowing it down, but whatever it was is now encased in a useless 2 1/2 inch hard drive that is sitting on my desk, waiting for a more permanent disposal location.

Patching things back together also helps inform me about the utility and completeness of my backup strategies. Nothing important was lost -- all source code, all customer database info, all e-mail, etc. survived through luck and process.

Of the software I had to put back together, most was relatively painless. Installing Windows XP from the recovery CD's was an interesting and lengthy exercise. After it reformatted the entire drive, the install went smoothly. It then took 2 or 3 'fetch updates/reboot' cycles to get all the latest patches from the Microsoft site. Reinstalling Norton Anti-Virus was not so easy. Symantec's purchase process has always sucked, and their download recovery process sucks as well. I continue to use their products because I'm familiar and comfortable with them. I've also use MacAfee, and found that it sucked even more that NAV. In contrast, Zone Alarm was a piece of cake.

In any case, things are close to back to normal. I don't think I lost anything, but if you had sent me e-mail recently and didn't receive a reply, then the disk crash is the likely reason -- that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

QVCS 3.9 Now Available

I just posted the 3.9 release. You can download it here. It's identical to the release candidate beta (3.9.18).

I've spent the past several days getting the web site updated for the release, as well as updating the user manual so it's up to date as well.

Let me know if you run into any issues.

QVCS/QVCS-Pro 3.9.18 beta now available

I posted the 3.8.18 build earlier today. It's a possible release candidate -- meaning if no bugs turn up in the next week or so, I'll 'promote' it to the actual 'official' 3.9 release.

The only known problem that I'm not going to fix is a problem I ran across when testing the SCC integration with Whidbey Beta 2. Turns out Microsoft is actually getting serious about security, which is a good thing. In Whidbey (aka Visual Studio 2005), they don't allow an SCC provider's DLL to be located anywhere except on the local machine -- at least that's the conclusion I reached as a result of a semi-confusing error message and further testing.

IDE integration with Whidbey works okay, it's just not going to be useful in a team environment, since Whidbey requires that you use a local install of QVCS-Pro. The local install means that QVCS-Pro will put the cache lock files on your local disk also -- not very useful in a team environment. The fix is easy enough, and I'll get to it by November, which is the official launch date for Whidbey. On the QVCS-Pro side of the fix, it will mean adding a layer that allows the program to use the .ini files that are located in a different directory than the executables (this is a change that some users have asked for in the past). The change is not particularly difficult, but it does require more testing than I've got time for right now. I don't want to hold up the release of 3.9 just for this problem.

LinkedIn.com - an interesting site

I just joined LinkedIn.com. It's a sort of high tech approach to manage and encourage networking.... as in the people kind of networking. It's an opt-in, kind of service that has several different levels of service. I joined at the invitation of Gregg Smith, a former boss at TeleCommunications Systems  (where I used to work before going at Quma full-time). The concept is interesting, and definitely attractive to the business development (BD) type folks, and it's painless enough even for geeks like me to use it. The web site is like an actual implementation of the 6-degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon  meme, where the site shows you how many different people are networked to you by virtue of the immediate connections that you personally have. Because Gregg is a very successful BD kinda guy, I've got over 900 people (out to 3 degrees of separation) that I can get to. The site provides for search and introduction services. I'm not sure whether anything will come of my connections, but its fun to see how many people I could get to know by virtue of the people that I know.

QVCS/QVCS-Pro 3.8.23 build now available

I just posted the 3.8.23 build of QVCS/QVCS-Pro. This is a bug-fix release only, as it cleans up a few bugs present in earlier 3.8 releases. See this list for more details of the fixes.

Probably, the most important fix in the 3.8.23 build is one for a bug that has been around for a long time: occasionally QVCS would wipe user .ini and the qwin.ini files, making it so you had to redifine all your users and projects. The workaround had been to make backup copies of the .ini files (which is still a good idea!), or to use Windows to change the permissions on those files so that no one could write to them. 3.8.23 fixes this.

For these kinds of bugs, it really helps to first report it, and second, to reproduce it. Often, I'll try to reproduce a bug here, and fail because I don't use the product in the way that's required to expose the problem. I've had a few reports of the .ini file problem for the past several years, but was only able to fix it easily as a result of a user who took the time to provide a very specific test case that would cause the problem to happen every single time.

If you have a bug, please take the time to let me know about it. If I don't know about the problem, it won't get fixed.