Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

I got "Summoner" for the PS2 and "Chrono Cross" for PlayStation yesterday and I must say that I was very disappointed. I don't know if it is just the XBox spoiling me for any other console or I have high expectations now but both games failed to live up to my expectations. I played them for a little while last night and resolved to return them as soon as possible today. I did so but was disappointed to find that the game I wanted to get as a replacement "Night Caster" for the XBox was not yet out - though it was supposed to be out in December. Ah well ... Other good news on the gaming front was that I learnt that "Malice" for the XBox was still on, though it probably will not be out before the fall of 2002. Malice was supposed to be one of the launch titles for the XBox and the initial screenshots and demos impressed me highly. In fact, I probably would have been pretty gung-ho about the XBox at launch if Malice had been among the launch titles. Instead, it was said that Malice had been scrapped altogether, but now I hear that Sierra is working on it and that it will be released sometime in 2002- I can't wait :-)

Told my boss yesterday that I was planning to quit and that they'd better initiate things to find a replacement for me. Turns out that she is as tired of the company's policies as I am ... Further, it looks as if it might be a good idea to leave anyway because she told me that we are supposed to put in extra hours for a new project that "management" wants done fast (and that project actually got delayed by about a month in the first place because they came up with a few other things that they considered higher priority ...) *and* they are not going to pay us for the extra hours! I am so sick and tired of the clueless decisions made over here and then having to suffer for their mistakes - or having to come up with newer solutions (or worse, reverse solutions we'd put in place ...) to please their every whim and fancy. Ah well ... I guess things will get resolved in their own time ...

Well ... I didn't get to quit yesterday :p - couldn't get a chance to see my manager because of work and other stuff <vbg> So maybe today ... but I did get a chance to fix the problem with Quester :-) I managed to figure out the problem with XML Mapper - turns out that if a set of elements are to be treated as a client dataset (so that I could have a master-detail relationship), there must be more than one of that element in the first grouping of XML elements that qualifies as a record in database terms ... Not sure whether that made any sense :p but basically that was where the problem was - I finally figured it out by messing around with a sample file and changing different elements on it and loading it into the XML Mapper. Maybe that was mentioned somewhere in the docs but I have a bad habit of not wanting to wade through tons and tons of documentation <vbg>

I've decided to quit my job! Relax, I'm not nuts :p I've been here for over a year now and my review has been due for several months now but so far nothing - all I get are promises that it will be "any day now". To me this sounds as if the company doesn't really care about it's employees generally and that they aren't that appreciative of the work that I do specifically. So I've thought about this for a while and it occurred to me yesterday that if I continued to stay here, it would be an admission that the company's estimate of me is true. So I thought I'd talk to my boss today and tell her that I was quitting ...

On other news <g>, while Quester is generally working fine, I ran into a major stumbling block - I discovered that when a search engine has only one field to be filled in, it works fine but if there are multiple fields, I can't get it to work because the Delphi XML Mapper does not seem to pick up the extra input fields from the XML file. I was hoping that I might be able to do something like a master-detail relationship with two different XML definitions but it doesn't seem to work that way ... Or maybe it's just the fact that I am not all that conversant with the XML Mapper utility - guess I'll have to look into that some more today ... if I'm not out hunting for a new job that is :p

I sat down to work on the search bar I was talking of in my post yesterday and what do you know, by the end of the day I actually had a working version of the app! It's still a bit rough around the edges but it is basically a desktop toolbar (so it works with any version of IE with ActiveDesktop - I think ... but I don't think it works under NT 4.0 but maybe I'm wrong ...) so everybody might not be able to use it :-( Anyway, it's a toolbar which will sit on your taskbar and will simply provide you with a edit box into which you can type in search criteria and a shortcut which defines search engines like Google, IMDB etc. I'm calling the app Quester and it seems to be coming along pretty nicely but development is pain because it is an ActiveX server and once you load it, I can't seem to unload it unless you logout of the system - that means I have to log out each time I want to do a new build to fix a bug ... Oh well ..

Did quite a bit of work on Scope yesterday and I've discovered a new (and irritating) bug :p I did some code changes to the way keystrokes are handled in Scope because of the fact that the address bar would behave strangely if you had the dropdown dropped down and didn't type anything for a bit but somehow my changes seem to have introduced this extremely weird bug - when you type 'Y' in a web form, it gets duplicated! Just the 'Y', nothing else as far as I can see ... Guess I need to look into that but I still haven't got around to it because I've been busy doing a lot of other stuff ...

Such as adding the much requested feature to open new tabs in the background :-) I am not really satisfied with the implementation because there is a flash while a new tab is created and sent to the background (tabs are always created in the foreground and I can't seem to find a way to make them be created in the background ...) and I hate that quick flash. I have been trying a quite a few things and haven't still found a way to eliminate it. I also added tooltip hints to all the Option dialog items so that people won't have to try to figure out what each item is for :p Plus, for those who just won't read the documentation, I've added a Read Me item on the Help menu which will automatically open up the Scope.txt file in the default text editor - a la Blog.

My mind's been bubbling with ideas for both Scope and Blog and to top it all off, I've also got an idea for a new app :p Somebody requested some time back that I somehow make Scope compatible with the Google toolbar. Now that seems like a bit of tall order and I really wasn't sure that could be done but yesterday I ran across a new app named Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar and I really loved it because it's tiny, customizable and takes up so little space! The downside? It only seems to work with IE because basically it is an HTML page :-( I decided that I needed to code a new app which emulated the functionality and also provided the customizability by containing all the search engine info in an XML file just like Dave's Quick Search Deskbar does. So I guess that is another project to eat into my time ... I guess I could have somehow integrated this into Scope but then that would leave users of all other browsers out in the cold. So I am going to try to make it so that the app will basically call your default browser (or maybe even an option to call a specific browser of your choice ...) and that should keep everybody happy :-)

I watched "The Wild Bunch" yesterday on DVD - it was dark, gritty and grim ... not at all like the westerns of today. There were no good guys and bad guys and the people didn't look as if they'd stepped out of a catalog - they looked dirty, smelly and as if they'd been in the saddle for ages :-) But then again, the movie's pretty old - who remembers William Holden, Ernest Borgnine or for that matter, even Sam Peckinpah these days? I loved the opening sequence though in a way it revolted me too. The kids pushing scorpions into an ant's nest and seeing the scorpion's writhe in pain and laughing and later putting some dry brush on top of both the scorpions and the ants and setting fire to the brush was the kind of scene you don't seen in movies anymore. It tells you something about ourselves and makes you think. Yes, children sometimes aren't as pure and innocent as we'd like to think they are but at the same time, we adults are the one's who hurt and maim fellow human beings ... So who's more cruel and heartless? I don't know ...