So, I finally got new hard drive (sweet!). It’s a 320GB Seagate (7200.10 – ST3320620AS). I chose this drive because I’ve heard good things about Seagate’s reliability. The manufacturer seems confident also since it came with 5 years warranty. It’s pretty quite, much quieter than my old Maxtor, also it’s faster. My motherboard (NF7-S) only supports SATA/150 so I’m not getting it’s full speed though.

Because of the new extra space, I installed Linux also. I’m using Ubuntu for now but will probably switch to Debian at some point. My goal is to eventually move completely to Linux and run Windows virtually. But that won’t happen until I get a new PC. This old Athlon 2600 is just too slow. Here’s the drive and image of the partition scheme I’m using:

On other news, I registered new address for CE (www.cubicexplorer.com). At the moment it just redirects to this site but that will change at some point. There has been no progress on the development of CE. The whole week has gone in reinstalling Windows and all the software. I had forgot how much work it actually is to reinstall everything. It took almost a day just to set up the environment where I’m building CE. Anyway, everything is now in place and the work can continue.

This week I’ve been cleaning CE’s source from all the old settings stuff. Next task is to make everything work with the new settings engine. It’s quite a mess so we’ll have to see if it works. I’ve also been doing backups of all my files. I ordered new hard drive yesterday so next week I’ll be moving to new home (yay!).

About FeedDemon, I’m not going to use it. It’s a nice program but it didn’t “feel” right. It felt kind of awkward to use, probably because I’m so used to NewsFox. However, yesterday I found Snarfer which feels more like home. Snarfer is a freeware but there is Pageflakes tab that can’t be closed. It remains to be seen whether I’m going to switch back to NewsFox or not.

Snarfer
http://www.snarfware.com/

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).