Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

Linux has changed (and is still changing) dramatically in such a short time period! I first gave Linux a try with Linux Mandrake when it was at version 6.x and that was about a couple of years ago ... I was really impressed with Mandrake's distribution and was totally gung-ho about Linux for a while before going back to Windows because most of my favorite apps were still in Windows or I couldn't find alternatives under Linux ... and finally of course, I'm a Windows programmer <vbg>

I gave Mandrake a try again a few months back when Linux-Mandrake 7.2 was released and it was much more robust and much, much more improved with the inclusion of KDE 2.0 but at that time it really didn't fit in with my then computer set up where I had a Windows network at home with my desktop acting as a server for ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) and while Mandrake did have ICS at that point, it didn't seem to want to work with my set up.

Part three of this saga began yesterday when I burnt a couple of CD's with the ISO images for Mandrake 8.0 and let me tell you, I'm impressed! The setup was amazingly easy, I am in love with the GUI and ICS works like a charm! In fact, I think I'm going to run Mandrak 8.0 on my desktop as my main OS from now on since I use my desktop only to share the Net connection and to connect to work via Metaframe and there is a Linux version of the client so I'm all set there :p But will I do any Linux code? Probably not but then again since Kylix is there from Inprise and I am a rabid Delphi developer now, who knows what might happen? <vbg>
posted at 08:25:38 PM  link  comment

Received a couple of e-mails from two different people who had trouble getting Blog to work and that made me realize again what a shoddy job that I'd done on the Blog configuration dialogs :p Unfortunately, was so busy at work that I didn't have any time to post anything about it. Today wasn't any different but I'm finally home and am able to post to my heart's content. I've been working on both BOB and Blog and making a lot of changes based on excellent feedback from several different users among whom can be numbered my friends John and jugg as well as Hugh Myers and Jay Manley. Now I do have a dilemma though ...

The dilemma is whether to release BOB and Blog now since a lot of things have been improved upon or to wait till I can get all the extra stuff that I wanted to put into those two before the next release. I am tempted to do a release now but again, I feel as if that would be pointless since I'd probably get the rest of the features put in almost soon after and then would have to do another release ... Decisions, decisons! Guess, I'll wait and see whether I get any coding done this weekend ...
posted at 05:55:11 PM  link  comment

I guess the Gnomies are finally stopping :p Had some more traffic yesterday due to the LockerGnome digest issue but the traffic is again down to normal levels today - which is to say around 50 or 60 people for the whole day :-) Not that I think it's a bad thing since I do know that I have some die-hard users/readers who visit this journal everyday. So a big thank you to all of you - you know who you are :-)

On the coding front, not much done as far as big improvements go but I've been tinkering a bit with the standalone version of Blog and have been fixing quite a few minor GUI problems and little usage issues. For instance, I've been trying to get paragraphs to be automatically recognized by Blog and marked as such instead of the user having to specifically mark them with the paragraph tag and I finally figured out how to do it ... I think :p I'll know for certain when I publish this entry because this is going to be the first live test of that.

I also replaced the HTML component used to preview since the one I was using didn't recognize certain special character notations and the only reason I used that particular component was because I couldn't figure out how to use the default web browser component included with Delphi in this particular context. Finally figured that out too. Shows how inexperienced I was with Delphi when I first began on Blog <g> - then again, it's not surprising since Blog was my very first Delphi app :p
posted at 09:20:55 AM  link  comment

Had a pretty busy weekend since I replaced my notebook on a spur of the moment decision :-) My notebook is my main development machine since I carry it around almost everywhere and I'd kind of been thinking of going for a new machine since I wanted a few things that the newer machines had but I was more or less inclined to wait till Windows XP came out and then get a machine with XP pre-installed (of course, I would format the hard drive and install XP again but that way I wouldn't have to pay for XP <vbg>) But went to Circuit City on Saturday and saw this sweet Compaq Presario 1800 machine that I couldn't resist and so I decided to give it a try and see if it worked for me - if it didn't, I could always return it to the store ... ain't America great? :-)

To cut a long story short, I ended up spending the rest of the weekend transferring all my work and accumulated e-mails over to the new machine and also installing Windows 2000 and all the software that I use on a regular basis. Of course I haven't used this machine extensively for anything useful yet but so far the experience has been very positive :-) There are a few things that I do miss from my old machine - an IR port is the biggest thing since now I have to hook up the USB connection to sync my iPaq but then again, the USB connection wouldn't work at all under Win2k on the old one ... So I guess as always, it's a bit of good and bad but mostly the new machine has been good. Of course, all that work meant that I didn't do any useful coding :p