Archive for December, 2003

Downtime over Christmas

Tuesday, December 30th, 2003

I’m not sure what it is with me and intermittent Internet connectivity failures, but now with my DSL service that I’ve been quite happy with, I occasionally lose connection.  It seems to me that the modem is defective, and I’ve convinced my provider of that so they swapped it for another.   The modem froze […]

CVS for SourceSafe users

Monday, December 22nd, 2003

I used SourceSafe for probably 8 years as a revision control system with Microsoft Visual Studio.  I didn’t switch to CVS by choice – I started working for a company where most of the other developers came from a Unix background, and they’d been using CVS for years, even to store their Windows-only projects.   […]

A Blog is just a forum only one person can post to.

Saturday, December 20th, 2003

So I set up a forum.. rather than using the generally crummy comments tracking that pretty much every blogging tool implements, why not discuss things in an actual forum.   It’s over here:  http://www.stevex.org/forums   The forums package I’m using is http://www.yetanotherforum.net, which I think is a pretty good name.  It seemed to be in […]

A Simple Picture Viewer

Saturday, December 20th, 2003

I’ve been using an old shareware app to look through photos on my computer and I wanted something a little newer.. didn’t find anything I really liked so I started my own.  It’s still pretty basic, but here’s a link to an MSI installer:   Download the Picture Viewer installer file.  It requires the .NET […]

SMS and RSS

Tuesday, December 16th, 2003

BTW, a little known feature of ZIM SMS Chat is that it supports RSS!  You can subscribe to an RSS feed, and have new items posted to the feed automatically sent to your cell phone when you’re not at your computer.   SMS messages are limited to 160 characters, so if the RSS item is […]

ZIM SMS Chat Released

Monday, December 15th, 2003

Cool, we released it :)  The first public release of ZIM SMS Chat is now available.  You can download it and use it to send free SMS messages to any cell phone in Canada, or use the 300 credits you get to send messages to any mobile user anywhere.    

A Comment on Dave’s Rant

Tuesday, December 9th, 2003

A comment I posted to the comments link that Dave provided (slightly edited):   Saying that the only way to get content is to have aggregators pulling it is missing a whole other way of doing it, that’s proven itself as scalable and resilient over the years:  NNTP   I’m not talking about using NNTP […]

Marc Source Release

Monday, December 8th, 2003

I posted about Marc on my old blog, and kinda promised that I’d release it someday, but never did.   Marc is my Music Archive Manager.  It’s a program for managing a collection of songs.  Here’s some of what makes it unique: It’s multi-user.  The database knows about users, knows which users own which songs, […]

“Every apparently non-polling technology is built on polling”?

Monday, December 8th, 2003

Dave Winer is wrong on this one.  He’s saying there’s no way to do what RSS is doing without polling.   RSS is based on an aggregator connecting to every server that the reader is subscribed to every half hour or so and getting a fresh copy of the RSS feed.  This is wasteful, and […]

New ZIM SMS Chat Build Available

Thursday, December 4th, 2003

A new pre-release test version of ZIM SMS Chat is available, here:       http://download.zimsms.com/zimchat/zim/zimsmschat.exe   This is the app I posted about previously.  I’ve fixed a number of bugs, and enabled a feature that I don’t think was enabled last time:  Peer to peer message forwarding.  If I send an SMS message to your […]