Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

I released Blog 6.0 yesterday :-) Of course, I just updated the sidebar and the download page and didn't make an announcement here since I was just saving it for today. So here's the announcement though I believe BetaNews beat me to it at their site :p One thing I realized later though was that the build I uploaded still has the version number as 5.93 - I guess I will have to re-upload a corrected build today but a few early birds might be left with a wrong versioned build ... but don't worry, other than for the version number, everything will be the same between both builds :-)

I went back to Amazon.com UK yesterday and realized that they now do indeed have a wish list option. So I started a new wish list on their site just for books. I was initially going to move over all the stuff from my Amazon US wish list and simply take that one out of the side bar but then I realized that I'd have to get UK DVD's then and UK DVD's always don't have the same features as the US ones :p So I decided to keep two wish lists on the sidebar - not that anybody (except of course for Nigel <g>) - has sent me anything from the wish lists but still, I like to have them there :-) Incidentally, I had thought I was missing only a couple of Feist's books but when I did a search on Amazon, I discovered that he's been creating a whole cottage industry around the land of Midkemia by collaborating with different authors! There are so many books which are slated to be published soon about Midkemia that it seemed impossible for one man to do all of that. Unfortunately, the bulk of the stuff is in hard cover and so my wish list stayed as brief as it currently is :p

Speaking of Nigel, he made the world's first (that we know of ...) phlog entry over at his site - I'd give the URL to the actual entry but I'm offline at the moment and so can't get to his site .. plus, it's an interesting site and it would do nobody any harm to browse through <vbg> In case you are wondering, a phlog is a phone blog - a blog maintained via an e-mail capable phone like the Ericsson T68. Since Blog in Server mode simply checks an e-mail account for e-mails with the proper subject line, you can basically send entries for your Blog from anywhere - as long as you know the proper format (and don't send any formatted e-mails or HTML e-mails ...) I really like the concept since that gives you a whole lot of freedom ...

I began reading Robert Heinlein's "Glory Road" yesterday. As some of you long-time readers may remember (are there any such? :p) I mentioned a while back that I got about forty odd Heinlein books in an eBay auction. I hadn't had the time to start reading those but I decided I might as well start now and see if I still had a taste for Heinlein. I'm into chapter two at the moment and I'm already beginning to see why they labeled a lot of his novels as "adolescent novels" <g> I've read more references to breasts, nipples etc. than I did in the whole Serpentwar saga from Feist! Yes, Feist mentions sex and relations between men and women but in a very discreet, subdued manner whereas Heinlein is very open and blatant about it all ... I'm not sure whether all the other books that I've read by Heinlein were the same since I don't recall anything like that but then again, the only books I can actually recall as far as actual content goes, are "Starship Troopers" and "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel".

I got an e-mail from Eddie over at BetaNews asking me whether I got hacked and pointing me to the Nortiq mirror - various scenarios flashed through my mind and I thought of all possible ways that the security on the site could have been compromised and somebody could have got in and defaced the site. But then I went over there and realized that I'd done the hacking myself :p I'd been testing changes to the sub-folder code that I'd made to Blog yesterday since the ability to specify relative paths didn't help those who had a different FTP root than a WWW root. This was because I'd assumed that though they had a different FTP root, they'd still be in the WWW root when they logged on via FTP and had done my code that way ... Turns out that was wrong and so I took out the relative path code and went back to using absolute paths but added code to give the image path as a relative path if it was a sub-folder of the journal directory.

Anyway, I did some testing of that code and the early attempts failed a couple of times to change directories properly. My testing was being done on the Nortiq server in a test folder but during one of the instances where the folder changing didn't work, I guess the root directory's default file got overwritten and had the test posts I'd made - which included a cartoon :p Hopefully, things should go back to normal when I upload this entry ...

I completed the last Raymond E. Feist book in my collection yesterday. I'd first started reading Feist in 1990 with his "Magician" and then had read "Silverthorn" in the same year or soon after. I had to wait a while to get my hands on "Darkness at Sethanon" but I believe I'd read his "Faerie Tale" in the meantime. I'd collected quite a few of his books over the years but hadn't read any more till this year. Since I came back, I've read his post-Riftwar books, his Serpentwar Saga as well as the Riftwar Legacy series. Most of the books are about the magical world of Midkemia and one thing to be said about Feist is that he writes extremely interesting characters and that he knows how to keep your attention (yes, I know, that's two things <g>) I've seen the world of Midkemia and its characters evolve and change through the books and do actually agree with how the conDoin family sort of degenerates through the generations to the level they are represented in the Serpentwar Saga (the Riftwar Legacy is set before even though it was published later ...) The conDoin family starts of as heroes, they become kings and the first generations we meet are extremely able, intelligent and heroic. The next generation (Arutha's sons Borric, Earland, Nicholoas etc.) are still responsible and heroic but not as capable as their fathers and the generation after (Patrick, Borric's son) is so used to the fact that he's royalty that he behaves like a perfect git and is usually prone to temper tantrums. I think that's a very realistic portrayal of the evolution of the conDoin family and now probably should talking about them since probably not more than one or two people realize what the heck I'm talking about :p

I've fixed both the bugs I talked about yesterday but the ability to use relative paths for the Full Path and Image Directory settings needs to be tested further since I don't have access to a machine where the FTP root is different from the WWW root. I just heard from David who had problems with Blog under a Spanish version of XP as well and it turns out the localization issue actually might have been a conversion/upgrade issue between Blog 6.0 Beta 2 which did not account for localization and Blog 6.0 Beta 3 which does. Hopefully, once I get all these things sorted out, I should be able to release Blog 6.0 final and then move on to other things ... Such as PostMan which has been neglected for a time due to work, gaming and coding on Blog :p

I watched "The Last Castle" yesterday. I've been meaning to watch the movie for a very long time - ever since I saw the previews and thought that Robert Redford and James Gandolfini looked excellent in it. But I couldn't find a DVD copy till yesterday and since I knew that I wanted to own the movie, I didn't want to compromise and rent it :p Anyway, the movie proved to be all that I'd hoped it would be - great acting, great story and lots of action! I guess the movie was about leadership and what makes a good leader but it was also about us, humans, and the choices that we make - and don't make. I especially loved the scenes where they take over the prison using basically ancient military techniques such as the shield wall and the catapult :p A good movie to watch for certain ...

Of course, besides watching movies and playing games, I haven't really done much this long weekend but I guess I'll have to get out of that rut today and get back to coding since Blog 6.0 needs to be released soon :-) There are two major problems - both of which I was aware of but was too lazy to fix <g> - that need to be attended to before the next release - as well as the continuing localization problems that seem to plague a Spanish user. The two problems? Well ... 1) Blog needs to be connected to the Net even to only publish to a local site 2) the image linking referral address is not correct when the FTP root is not the same as the WWW root for that particular site. I didn't correct the first since I thought I was the only user who used Blog strictly in local mode - and even then, I only use it in that mode for testing. The second was the main reason that I hadn't implemented the new image linking tag in the first place but then I thought not many people would run into this problem either. Guess I was wrong on both counts :p

I've been extremely busy the last couple of days but not coding :p I installed "Civilization III" on my computer a few days ago and since then have been bitten badly by the Civ bug! I don't know what it is about the game but once I sit down in front of the computer to play it, I just don't feel like getting up and going off - I just want to keep on playing, just one more turn, till the next invention, till the next wonder is made and so on and before I know it, I find that I've spent hours on it! Day before yesterday, I played till 2:30 am in the morning (of yesterday) since I wanted to build the flight to Alpha Centauri :p Of course, that meant that I was walking around like a zombie yesterday but hey, what's that compared to trying to get to Alpha Centauri? <vbg>

Of course, Civ III is not the only game that I've been playing recently. I also got "Warcraft III" a couple of days ago but couldn't get it to work on my machine since according to the game, my graphics card did not support DirectX! Turns out that the video drivers weren't right even though I was using the latest drivers - according to Microsoft. Got some drivers off the Net that was meant for a different notebook computer though the chipset was the same and suddenly the game started working! "Warcraft III" look gorgeous and the in-game movies are extremely well-done but I couldn't enjoy the game properly since even with a 1GHz Pentium III processor, 256 MB RAM and 8MB of video RAM, my machine was basically crawling when running the game :-( I believe that the problem might be at the video end of things - might be the drivers I have (it's an ATI Rage chipset based card ...) or I just might need more video memory. But the upshot is that I can somewhat play the game but even then the whole game will go crazy and the graphics become blocky, whitish things after about an hour of play - and that means I have to save frequently just in case that happens at an awkward moment. Not very enjoyable at all :-( I guess I should build my desktop (I need a motherboard, processor, case, keyboard and monitor - I've got the rest cannibalized from my computer from the US :p) but since that's going to cost about Rs. 20,000 I'm not sure that I'm ready to do that just to play Warcraft :p

One good thing about getting the newer video drivers is that I am now able to play another game that used to complain about my system not supporting DirectX. Not many people probably have heard of this one - it's called "Dark Orbit". It's developed using the WildTangent game SDK, which incidentally, is an amazing game development platform since it allows you to code a game using a variety of programming languages including VBScript or JavaScript! I had tried the demo of "Dark Orbit" a long time ago and liked it so much that I bought the full game either just before I left the US or just after. However, I've never been able to play the full game since it has always complained about DirectX on both my notebook and a couple of machines at work using Riva TNT cards. I thought there was a problem with the game itself but it works now after the video driver changes I made for Warcraft! So I've also been playing "Dark Orbit".