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Well finally some LS related news :-) I got to work on quite a few stuff that had been on the back burner and was able to get all of them done, committed to CVS and so now have a new source and binary download as well. So those of you who are impatient, can just run on to the download page immediately :-)

Those who didn't, might ask - "So what has changed?" Well for starters, as I mentioned sometime back, I had an MSVC 5.0 project file for the hook.dll from Amirul Shukry Kadri and I put that in for those of you who use VC++ 5.0 and couldn't get the hook.dll compiled. Amirul also sent me a little code change which allows those of you who'd like your systray to be positioned away from the edge of the screen to finally be able to do so provided that you aren't useing the taskbar (of course <g>). You just have to use the new Step.Rc value called SystrayOffset to specify the number of pixels away from the particular edge that you'd like the systray to appear.

Amir Kamal wrote to me asking me to increase the size allocated for a hotkey command internally as he had a series of bangs aliased to a variable and hotkey would crash when he tried to call the variable from a hotkey because a hotkey command was limited to 256 characters whereas the variable he was using would expand to somewhere around 300 characters. So I changed the command and parameter values in the Hotkey structure to be 512 characters long. Those of you who use a lot of hotkey assignments may want to check memory usage before and after the change and let me know whether the change had a big effect on memory usage.

Amir Kamal also wanted to know about the change I'd introduced sometime back when I said Murphy had added the ability to use environmental variables as LS e-variables because supposedly the ability was there before Murphy's code was added in. Actually, I didn't know whether the feature was there eariler, (I still don't know) but added the code in because Murphy told me that it was an improvement. Can anybody who might have one of the really old builds confirm/deny this?

I've been saving the best news for last :-) As some of you may know, Killarny has stopped work on LiteStep stuff as he is too busy with Icesphere. He had proclaimed his willingness to release the source code for sysVWM as he wasn't working on it any longer. I ran into him on IRC yesterday and we had a talk and I told him that I was willing to merge his sources into the CVS as he wouldn't be continuing development on sysVWM and I wanted to see work continue on the module and he agreed! So you now have two options as far as a VWM goes - the lsVWM or the sysVWM. Killarny tells me that his code was actually based on the original lsVWM and that if you didn't use any options, sysVWM would behave exactly like the core VWM. So I'm actually wondering whether I should just replace the lsVWM with sysVWM but haven't done so yet as I'd like to talk to the rest of the Dev team before I do so. But for the moment, you'll have both the dlls in my binary zip and the next CVS feed should also have the sysVWM stuff. So enjoy!!

As you all are probably aware by now from seeing the banner ad at the top <g> the results from all your feedback was very postive. Many of you said that you understood my currrent situation and that you were willing to put up with the slowness and I appreciate all of your consideration and support very much! Things are moving on the employment front but as things stand at the moment, I won't know anything more till Monday which is going to be the next crucial day. I will keep all of you informed ...

I had been talking to somebody on Usenet about some problems I had with coding the bitmap painting function for Popups and yesterday, I heard from him via e-mail and imagine my surprise when I discovered that the guy, Chris Becke, was a good friend of Peter Edwards of the Dev team and what's more that they worked together! Even more surprising was the fact that Chris's page is one of the sites that I use as a Win32 primer - and I didn't know that when I got in touch with him on Usenet! Boy, it sure is getting to be a very small world :-)

Chris has been trying to help me out with the painting code and he pointed out a new way to do the code that might plug a memory leak that I was originally trying to fix. I will probably get around to doing some work on LiteStep after a long break today after I get through updating this page ....

I read about Mind-it from NetMind on ZDNet today. As Mind-it allows people to be notified when a web page changes, I decided to subscribe so that all the people who daily check LSDJ could be spared the pain :-) All you have to do is use the submission form at the bottom. On a related note, I have been thinking of adding a banner ad to this page because at the current moment any money coming in would be a good thing :-) Only thing is, I don't know whether Tripod allows that (have to check into that) and I don't know how the readers of this page would feel about it as they are already burdened by the popups from Tripod itself (of course, if you use NetCaptor as your browser - like I do - it automatically kills all popups <g>). So let me know how you'd feel about a banner ad and I'll abide by the majority consensus, OK? (There, never let it be said that I wasn't democratic <vbg>)

Man it has been a very long time since I last updated! And the bad part is, there isn't much today either :-)

I was kept fairly busy with lots of personal stuff over the weekend and I didn't even get around to doing any work on LiteStep coding. In fact, I think I even booted on to Explorer (gasp! horrors!! <g>) most of the time because LiteStep kept on crashing sporadically when I loaded quite a few programs like I normally do - I usually have Eudora, the GoToWorld browser, PowerDesk Explorer and sometimes even pIRCh and Gravity NewsReader open. And on top of it all, I got involved in a search for a good journal program because I keep a written journal of daily events and had decided to transfer my event tracking to the electronic format because I type faster than I write :-) Needless to say that all of this resulted in taking time away from LiteStep coding.

I did receive a new MSVC 5.0 format project file for hook.dll from Amirul Shukry Kadri but I haven't had the time to update the CVS with the stuff as I have been too busy with all the personal stuff. I also haven't had much time to attend to any of the numerous suggestions, bug reports and e-mail inquiries sent to me. I hope all of you who read this page will understand and let me catch up :-)

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