Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

I completed work on the new release of Cee sometime during the middle of the week but couldn't release it due to the fact that my website files are on my home computer but I had to upload the Cee distributions from work due to the multiple uploads necessary. So I kept on putting off the announcing of the fact that Cee 2.0 was available even though the release files were on all the sites :-) This was however a good thing since I discovered a couple of bugs after I'd uploaded the initial Cee distro and then fix it and upload the files again - at least I think the files on the servers now are the correct build :p Anyway, here's the announcement finally of the release of Cee 2.0 and I've also added a new Cee page to the list of applications on the side bar so that you can read about it and see some screenshots before deciding if you want to download it.

I've also started work on another one of my forgotten projects during the last couple of days - Quester. For those who don't remember, Quester was a search toolbar that could be run from the Windows taskbar and it supported a host of different search engines and had the ability to support many more since the search engine definitions were stored in an XML file. I originally started work on Quester after reading about Dave's Quick Search Deskbar or DQSD for short. I really liked DQSD when I tried it but hated the fact that it wouldn't work with my default browser - Scope - but would instead insist on opening up search results in IE. Well, I developed Quester but ran into problems in distributing it: a) Dave wasn't so happy with Quester being closed source even though the XML file containing the search engine definitions (which was the only thing I borrowed from DQSD) was to be distributed along with Quester b) my initial implementation used the Borland MIDAS libary and that is pretty big and that defeated the purpose of having a small and quick utility. I just decided to go back to Quester this week and rewrote it and this time I parsed the XML by hand instead of using a MIDAS component to do it and so the final result was much smaller and more portable. I was really happy with how Quester turned out and began creating the documentation so that I could create a distribution file. While I was doing that, I went back to Dave's site and discovered that he'd been improving DQSD and that it now supported the ability to open up searches in the default browser! I decided that I had better junk Quester since Dave's implementation is smaller and is better supported since there's a whole slew of developers working on it :p I still am not sure whether the resource consumption of DQSD is lower than Quester or not since both run as deskbars and so it's harder to track their resource usage. If I do find somehow that Quester has a smaller memory footprint, I'll probably go back to using it and put out a distro too but for the time being, I'm using DQSD myself :-)

I'd been having some trouble with my computer for a while now because of an unsuccessful Visual Studio .NET uninstall. I'd had Visual Studio .NET Beta 2 installed on my machine for some months but decided to uninstall it once I got to Sri Lanka for two reasons: 1) I was running out of space 2) I was using the final release of the product at work and could always install that at home too if necessary. The problem was that the power went off while I was uninstalling Visual Studio .NET and the process took so long that even the battery was drained on my notebook. So I had to cut the uninstall short and ever since then, I could neither uninstall Visual Studio .NET or do any other install or uninstall which relied on the Windows Installer. I didn't really mind this for a long time but yesterday when I tried to uninstall Roxio EasyCD and couldn't due to the Windows installer problem, I decided enough was enough :p