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Not much reaction to the Blog 5.0 Beta 1 release yesterday or the TechTV review - this has been the first fairly low-key Blog release I guess. Ah well ... I suddenly noticed today that the requests for my Morpheus Mentor story had somehow sky rocketed from around 20+ hits the last time I looked at it (which might have been a few days ago ... I forget ...) to 80+! I don't know where the hits are coming from but I guess it's high time I continued the story since it's been neglected for a pretty long time. I intended to keep on writing when I first started but I do need some peace and quiet to concentrate on the story and that's been something that's been sorely lacking of late. But today I think I can get another installment in ... lord knows that I've been planning the next installment in my head for long enough :p

Well the TechTV review of Blog ran - not that I saw it or even had my PVR (the piece of junk it is ...) record it but because somebody who'd seen the TechTV demo and then downloaded Blog 4.0 wrote to me. They had a curious story since they tell me that their antivirus software (InnoculateIt) tagged Blog 4.0 as a trojan! I was pretty surprised since I have Norton AntiVirus installed on my machine and so far it has not raised any alarms about any of my files. All I can think of is that InnoculateIt detected what it thought was a viral signature in the Blog executable or the self-extracting distro (the person who wrote to me didn't tell me which exe they were talking about ...). While it is understandable, it also makes me mad because I don't know how may people might have been turned off of Blog because of that warning :p

OK, I am ready to release Blog 5.0 Beta 1 (I decided to call it a beta after all instead of a pre-release because I am not happy about the amount of testing that I've done :p) and the Cee 1.0 Beta 1 :-) A few words of warning though - the Blog distro is pretty huge at around 1.7MB (as compared to the 4.0 distro of around 670k) but that's mostly because of the dictionary and thesaurus files that have been added. This release will not have separate downloads for upgrade and full-installs but I will be doing that from the next release onwards so that you don't have to do huge downloads.

If you want to use the <$BlogCookie> tag in Blog, you will need to download Cee. If you don't want fortune cookies in your journal, then don't bother with downloading Cee. And don't expect a really user friendly GUI (or much user-friendliness at all <vbg>) from Cee. It is basically a rough prototype done to see how much user interest there is in this particular functionality. If only a few users want it, I won't do much work on Cee but otherwise Cee will evolve into something much better looking with a lot more functionality on it's own - such as being a sig generator for e-mail apps. There is no docs for Cee at the moment either but there is only a few buttons and only one screen to work with so you should be fine ... I hope :p And before anybody asks, the Options ... button on Cee does nothing <vbg>

Still no easing of the pressure at work but I did manage to get my Indy installation back to the status it was in before I switched computers and Blog 5.0 compiles fine once again ... yay!! So I'll try to get a distro ready today (even if it is a bit light on documentation and stuff :p) and upload it to the servers since I can do it faster from work than from home :p Stay tuned ...

I've been talking to Ray Weigel from TechTV who tells me that they are going to do a review of Blog on Friday on Tech Live! I'm kinda excited about that :-) As some of you know, TechTV is a staple of my evening TV viewing and it is nice to be picked by them to be reviewed. This is going to be the first media review of any of my apps apart from reviews on the Net - that I know of, at least. There was of course that one time a guy from Wired interviewed me over the phone about DarkStep but it turned out that he was actually doing an article on skinning and DarkStep got mentioned in one line - and I didn't get mentioned at all :p Of course, having worked in media I knew that might be how things might turn out and so kept my mouth shut on that instance but I guess I'll let the cat out of the bag this time since some of you might actually want to watch the review and unlike print media, with television there is no point in telling you after the fact <vbg>

OK where do I start? :-) I know I've not updated the journal for a pretty long time (for me that is :p) and there is a good reason - first of all, over the long weekend I had to switch computers since I got a new notebook and that meant that I had to reinstall Win2k Pro and then reinstall all of my software on the new machine and then transfer over all of the stuff from my old machine. That took about a day and during that time, I was basically offline. Once I got things set up, I got online but had only about two hours of access before my ISP - Prodigy - suddenly stopped working! I spent the rest of the day hoping that they would get things working but nothing! So I went to bed with the hope that it would be fixed in the morning but still nothing when I got up!!

Now I was getting really antsy since I needed my online fix <vbg> and so I signed up with a new ISP from Michigan so that they'd at least have fast response in case they went down too and would you know it, an hour after I signed up with them, my Net access went off again mysteriously :p I talked to the ISP and the problem didn't seem to be at their end since they said there was nothing wrong over there but DNS resolution for me seemed to be messed up since I could ping servers by IP but not by their URL and since I just knew a couple of servers by IP and none of them were websites, I couldn't really test whether browsing worked. I spent a couple of hours with the ISP tech support to no avail and even tried a different machine to see if it was my new machine but I had the same problems on the other machine. Then suddenly my Net access was back and I still have no idea what happened!

It was Monday evening by then and I was just too tired to even get on the web - which is unusual for me :p So I played a bit of "Final Fantasy IX" and read a little and so went that day. Then I got into work yesterday and since my new notebook was not part of the domain at work and the company machines all have to go through a firewall to connect to the Net, I had further problems. I had to figure out what I'd done with my earlier machine to get through the firewall all over again and I had forgotten all the details :p Added to that, there was a lot of accumulated work from the long weekend - guess people had time to think up stuff while they were relaxing at home <vbg> Anyway, I finally figured out the firewall stuff a couple of hours later but work was getting really hectic by then and so the update had to wait till now :-)