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• Notes (weeks 33-35) - Break
• Notes (week 32) - SVN Snapshot
• Notes (week 31) - Ubuntu in use
• Notes (week 30) - 0.90 RC 3
• Notes (week 29) - SVN Snapshot
• Notes (week 28) - 0.90 RC 2
• Notes (week 26-27) - Vacation
• Notes (week 25) - Happy Midsummer!
• Notes (week 24) - New Office
• Notes (week 23) - Back to work

Holiday is over. Haven’t done any work so no real news. I was planning to code the SVN snapshot uploader, but was too lazy. Anyway, looking forward to start working again tomorrow. It’s going to be an interesting year. CE should reach 1.0 status before summer. Also I’m hoping to launch at least one other program. Although last year was a disappointment because of the slow progress speed, I did learn a lot about project management which has been problematic for me. There’s still a lot to learn but I think I’m on the right road.

This year I’m hoping to make the work more structured and routine like. I’m also going to build a new office which should help in creating more structured work environment. And maybe if I can save some money, I’ll buy new work computer. My hard drive is dying so I’ll need to at least replace that.

Anyway, I’m going to implement the new settings engine and dialog to CE next week.

It’s been fairly productive week. I managed to design half of the settings scheme. The other half is the harder one so we’re not out of the woods yet. Also I did more work on CE’s UI to make it function well with the new SpTBX. I still have to do some work with breadcrumb and address bars, maybe even rewrite them. Anyway, here’s a SVN snapshot of CE:

CubicExplorer SVN (0.81.0.953)

Installer 2,0MB:
http://www.cubicreality.com/downloads/cubicexplorer/CubicExplorer_SVN_Setup.exe

Zip 1,9MB:
http://www.cubicreality.com/downloads/cubicexplorer/CubicExplorer_SVN.zip

Note, this version is probably not stable so you might want to use it only for previewing the new skin support. I’m working on a script that will automatically upload this type of SVN snapshots every day or at least few times a week. But more about that once it’s finished.

Have a nice holiday everyone

No big news. I’ve been working this week with the options dialog for CE and now have a working base. As I was designing it, I decided to rewrite the whole settings scheme of CE. Currently it’s a bit messy and I’ve never been happy with it. Since there aren’t that many settings used in CE yet, changing the settings scheme shouldn’t be a major issue. The biggest problem is to come up with a design that can scale well for many type of features.

The options dialog is very basic with left side (tree) navigation. There’s going to be two modes in it, basic and advanced. Here’s a screenshot of a prototype:

I was meaning to release a SVN snapshot of CE last week, but because I started to work with the bug tracker there were no time to make CE work properly with the new version of SpTBX. I’ll see if I can cook up something for next Friday.

It’s been busy week. I spent pretty much the whole week hacking SMF (forum) and Flyspray (bug tracker). The goal was to make those two software somehow work together. After some hard studying I was able to write a mod to SMF. The mod adds new section to the forum called My Reports.

I think that the forum is the most pleasant way of reporting bugs. Only problem is that those reports should somehow find their way to a tracking system, otherwise they get forgotten fast. So I created a function that works similarly as the quote works when you write reply posts. Basically I can now mark post as a bug/todo item and move it into the tracking system with a single click .
The user can see all his/her reports in My Reports section.

The system is up and running now but there might be some bugs left so if you see any, let me know.

I opened the todo/bug tracker…finally! I decided to use Flyspray for tracking items. The original plan was to write my own software to do that but at the moment I just don’t have time to do it. I checked what the flyspray guys had made since the last time I used it and there was some cool improvements so I thought to go with it.

The tracker is read only at the moment and there aren’t many items yet. I’m still working with it so there might be some weird things happening but if you feel like it, check it out.

Flyspray
http://flyspray.org/

I’ve been working this week with the new version of SpTBX library. It’s a set of controls that I use in CE (menu,toolbars,buttons etc.). Thanks to Robert Lee’s great work, the new version now supports skinning. I had to do quite a lot modifications to CE to make the new version work correctly but it’s mostly up and running now.

There’s few cool new themes available but some old themes are missing, like Aluminum.

I wrote a simple skin editor that makes it easier to create your own skins.

SpSkin Editor, source + exe (852KB)
http://cubicreality.pp.fi/files/misc/SpSkinEditor.zip

I’m still not sure when the next release date is. I’ve done some work on the options dialog and have pretty good idea on how it will look and feel.

I spent last week on hacking the LSLive NAS box. It’s now up and running. I’ve already moved CE’s sources to it. I’m using svnserve as the SVN server. The CE repository is automatically copied every night to a net drive that I’m subscribing. I’ll still have to do some plans on how I’ll backup my other important files but at least CE is now safe.

Anyway, I’m down with the flu now . Tried to do some work yesterday but can’t really concentrate at this condition. I decided to change the strategy as a result of the writers block. I’m now working on version 0.90. It means that the next release of CE will have some sort of options dialog (or at least a skeleton of it).

Well, I’m feeling better and ready to start work tomorrow. I’m still not sure how effective I can be but the new work schedule is helping a lot. Once I’ll get used to it, I’m sure these type of blocks can be avoided. Last week I was working with CubicViewer but didn’t get much done. Although, I was able to design the base structure of it’s plug-in engine, so it wasn’t complete waste of time. There’s still a lot to do and because CV is not on top of the priority list, it’s going to be some time before there’s anything to show.

Buffalo LinkStation Live (HS-DH500GL v2)

I bought Buffalo’s NAS device last week. I’ve been meaning to build a file server from my old 800Mhz machine but never got around on building the case for it. Also regular computer use quite a lot of power, so running it 24/7 shows on the electric bill. This NAS device is like a mini computer. It has 400Mhz Arm processor and 128Mb of RAM. The operating system is Linux. It’s power consumption is about 21 watts so it’s not going to be as big of an issue.

By default it only supports the basic NAS functionality of being a simple file storage. However I have some more advanced features in mind like SVN server and BitTorrent client. To make those features available you have to do a bit of hacking. I installed FreeLink which is a custom firmware containing the latest stable Debian build. After that you can install pretty much anything on the box.

SSH connection to the box after FreeLink upgrade:

Here’s a very good site that is dedicated on hacking Buffalo’s NAS devices. You can find FreeLink and many step by step instructions there.

NAS-Central
http://nas-central.org/

Well, I’m stuck with the CE development. I’ve been suffering from a writers block about 2 weeks. It’s probably caused by the 16 hour work days that I’ve done 7 days a week for few months now. I’m going to lessen the work load and add more structure in the days. Also I’ll try to not work on weekends. Hopefully those actions will bring us back to the track.

Anyway, I’m now starting a side project that will also be part of CubicExplorer. It’s called CubicViewer and it’s main function is to display files, mainly images and video. It will replace the QuickView in CE but also it will be available as a separate application. Working with this new project should give me some distance on CE and hopefully will help in breaking the block.

Well I finally updated this site. I’m fairly happy with the graphics. The original plan was to have the sidebar menu visible also in the forum (that’s why I made this site wider), however it was too confusing for the eyes so I ended up hiding it. I’ll have to play around some more with the forum layout but for now it’s going to stay like it is, only some polishing will be done.

I updated the forum (SMF) to version 1.1.4 and switched the main site engine from Drupal to WordPress. I only need a simple engine that can handle blog posts and pages, WordPress does that very nicely. The biggest reason why I switched to WP was it’s ease of use. It’s very easy and comfortable to create new themes and plug-ins to it. Also WP is supported by Windows Live Writer which makes updating the content a lot easier.

If you have any thoughts or ideas for this site, let me know