Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

The Razor Systems mirror is down because the weirdest thing has happened ... My friend KuhnDog who was kind enough to lend me space on his server for one of the mirror sites had his personal directory deleted yesterday - and the account responsible seems to be mine! I'm as mystified by this whole incident as KuhnDog is and the weirdest thing is that the times I logged in yesterday and the IP address, correspond exactly to the times I did *actually* log in yesterday and my IP address from work!! So it doesn't look as if somebody else logged in under my ID ... So what the heck happened? Am I have periodic blackouts in which I do weird and crazy stuff? (That was a joke ... not to be taken seriously :p) I really don't know what caused it but KuhnDog does tell me that my account got bumped up to administrator level somehow at his ISP and I have a feeling that that has something to do with it ... I am waiting to see what transpires next since KuhnDog should be getting the FTP logs today and then we can see what really caused his personal directroy to be deleted - whether it was a direct delete command or whether it was something else which triggered the action due to my higher security permissions ... though I really can't think of anything that would cause a simple FTP transaction to delete a directory ...
posted at 08:06:57 AM  link  comment

Yesterday on Big Thinkers on TechTV they featured physicist Michio Kaku who said something along the lines of "There is a personal God and a God of physics - one who is responsible for everything being so ordered and not chaotic". Now what Michio Kaku said may not matter to you at all and you may be here just to find out what's happening with my software (in which case just jump down a pargraph or two - depending on how verbose I get ...) but I was kind of prompted into thought by his statement. I personally don't subscribe to his idea because I believe that the two Gods he's talking about are one and the same - there is one God who is our personal God as well as being the one who keeps the world on an even keel. Now your religious persuasions (or lack thereof <g>) might be different but it really bugs me when people try to make things even more complicated by adding their own stuff to things :p Why does there have to be a *separate* God for the physical stuff? You mean that the physical and the metaphysical have to be separated so as to keep them pure? (Why the heck am I going on this rant anyway? <vbg>)

On the Scope development front, all of you need to say a big thank you to jugg :-) I was going to release the first beta for Scope 2.0 yesterday and he went through it and found more bugs than you can find at the insect section at the zoo (or should that be a suite of MS apps? :p)!! I have fixed all of them and have added a few more things that were missing from the feature set last evening (yes, another evening of hectic coding :p) but I realized that it would be misnomer if I was to call this a beta. Usually my betas are feature complete but I hadn't had the time (or was too lazy ...) to thoroughly test the app before release. This release is by no means feature complete since some of the Scope options and many of the menu options (as well as a couple of toolbar buttons) don't work yet. So I am calling this an Alpha release :-) The only reason that I'm releasing this at the moment is because I am very excited about Scope 2.0 and want those of you who want to be on the cutting edge to share the excitement with me :-) I won't even put up a link in the side-bar since this is too early in development but you can get it here. Enjoy but don't send me bug reports yet :p

posted at 07:53:11 AM  link  comment

I sometimes wonder about where I'm going and what I really want to do ... (Yes, this is going to be one of my introspective bits where I think aloud <g> If you want coding news, just skip to the next paragraph :p) I love coding and I enjoy it a lot but I sometimes get tired of coding for a living ... especially when it's monotonous stuff like fixing data or migrating code or advicing other people on what they need to do ... I have been a journalist for a while, I wrote, produced and directed a weekly TV show for about a year and I've been a coder for more years than I care to remember ... I sometimes wonder whether it's time for another career change ... I guess what's holding me back is what holds most of us back from going ahead and doing what we always wanted to do - fear of failure or the fear that we'd find that what we wanted wasn't what we wanted after all ... Ah well, someday ... :p

I didn't release a beta of Scope 2.0 yesterday as I'd planned because there was one important piece of functionality that I was missing - the ability to open links in new windows. Scope 2.0 would open up new windows alright ... but in IE (or your default browser I guess ...) not in Scope itself! I didn't have any time to look into it last evening since I had to do some code deployment for work from home. But I guess the time away from Scope code was good because just before going to bed I realized the solution to the problem :-) So I will hopefully implement it today and then you should be able to play with Scope 2.0!
posted at 07:55:54 AM  link  comment

Switched to Scope 2.0 as my default browser since the functionality is up to handling my normal browsing activities and this is about the best way to test the code since it will go through the rough and tumble of a day's browsing :p I was greeted with a slew of errors as soon as I opened my default LinkGroup vbg but the sites opened nevertheless. I will probably be posting the first beta for Scope 2.0 sometime today if I do manage to look into the code sometime in the evening ...
posted at 07:55:52 AM  link  comment

Discovered another site that uses Blog by way of referrals to my page :-) So that brings the total of sites (that I know of) that use Blog up to three (when you include mine as well <g>) I decided it was time to add a list of sites that use Blog somewhere and so I set that up here on the Blog page. Let me know if there are other sites that I don't know of and I will add them to the list as well ...

Scope is coming along fabulously! In fact, I gave jugg a pre-Alpha release yesterday and one of his comments was "I'm glad that you decided to switch to Delphi" :-) I was pleased at his reaction since I knew then that I wasn't the only one who was excited about the new Scope :p I coded most of last evening and managed to get a lot of the functionality into place - checking if Scope's the default browser, setting Scope as the default browser, LinkGroup stuff ... I have to get a few more things done such as a dialog asking whether to set Scope as the default browser and actually putting the menu entries into the LinkGroup menu and I should be ready for the first beta release ... Of course, there's still a lot to be done such as on-the-fly security management like Scope 1.0 had and implementing all the features from Scope 1.0 but I'm very pleased with the current speed of development :-)
posted at 08:07:47 AM  link  comment

Ugh ... it was such a horrendously busy day at work that I couldn't find any time to do an update till lunch and even now, I'm sort of multi-tasking as I do this since we did some changes to the systems at work yesterday and very bad things resulted :p Anyway, as far as Scope goes, the move to Delphi has been a real boon to Scope development :-) In fact, release 2.0 is actually shaping out to be a real 2.0 release instead of a move to a new development language because a lot of little features are coming in which make Scope work much better than 1.0 ...

I should say however that none of this is due to any coding genius on my part - rather, it is due to the coding abilities of much more talented individuals who have created a lot of Delphi components that provide browser support. The Delphi IE page provides a whole slew of components which can be of immense help to somebody who is doing browser related development and I am using almost all of these components in the new release of Scope. And believe me, it is already showing in the added functionality :-)

I know that some of you might be itching to try out the new release after reading all of this but please be patient for a little while longer so that I can get the code upto a point where I can do a beta release :-) At the moment, I basically have a mish-mash of stuff that works but doesn't work perfectly together and still has quite a few holes in functionality. Once I get things working a bit more cohesively, I will certainly do a beta release.
posted at 01:09:11 PM  link  comment