As I mentioned a month ago, due to recent changes to Yahoo Groups, I have decided to shut down my email mailing list for good. Future announcements will now be posted only to this blog.
As soon as Yahoo puts together all of the data I have posted to that group for me to download, I will delete the group permanently. I will archive any relevant data to this blog as time permits.
If you have not already done so, you can use your favorite RSS feed reader to subscribe to this blog.
Until next time…
Long time no write! Sorry about that. I’m still around. After my latest dead laptop, I have been using a loner laptop and have not been working on any of my projects for awhile.
Due to recent changes to Yahoo Groups, I’ve decided that after this upcoming new year, I’ll be shutting down my email mailing list for good. Future announcements will be posted only to this blog.
If you have not already done so, you can use your favorite RSS feed reader to subscribe to this blog.
Until next time…
A few months ago, GoDaddy discontinued its QuickBlogcast service, which was hosting my blog at the time. They did not notify me about the discontinuation, so I did not save my existing blog posts. Now I have to start over from scratch again.
Fortunately, Archive.org had copies of my old posts, which I have added to this new blog for historic purposes. Of course, all comment history has been lost, though.
My laptop died on me last week. Fortunately, no data loss this time,
the hard drive is intact, but the system just will not boot up at all.
I think the motherboard has seen its final days. So until I can buy a
new laptop (hopefully in a few weeks), I won’t be working on any
projects. I am using an old laptop for the moment, so I can get online
and check email, at least.
My LSFinance app for Blackberry is still in progress, albeit slowly.
Probably after the new year, it will be ready for initial beta testing.
A quick recap – 6 months ago, my laptop’s hard drive physically died unexpected, and my backup server got a bad firmware shortly afterwards that bricked the hardware permanantly and corrupted the hard drive partitions. I lost access to all of my data files, including source code and version control repository for all of my Lebeau Software projects.
To give you a status update, I have not been able to recover a SINGLE FILE yet! My laptop is functional again and I am able to work on new developments moving forward, but its previous hard drive is physically dead and unresponsive (and I don’t have the money to pay for that kind of professional recovery), and none of the downloadable recovery programs I have tried so far (and I have tried several) have been able to recover anything useful from the backup server’s corrupted hard drives. I ended up resorting to making my own recover program from scratch, but my efforts are slow going due to time restraints, but I am still working on it nonetheless.
Fortunately, I am very hopeful that I should be able to eventually recover most of my data from the backup server’s hard drives, as they are fully operational in general, and the level of corruption on them appears to be minimal, just effective enough to render then unusable in a normal fashion, but most of the data is intact. The backup server used a Linux OS and a Linux file system (XFS to be exact), so I am writing a program that can read the Linux XFS file system and make it accessible to Windows, then I should be able to copy most of my files like any other. And before anyone asks, yes I have tried to perform an XFS recovery from an actual Linux OS, without much success yet.
I will post again when I have some more news to share.
I’m writing with some bad news. Due to a recent hard drive failure followed by a corrupted backup server, most of my data files are now inaccessible to me, possibly even lost forever. This includes all of my Lebeau Software projects, except for one – my LSFinance for Blackberry app, which I started working on after the hard drive failed but before the backup was corrupted. Which means that unless I can recover at least a good portion of my source files, or start over from scratch, what is currently available on my website will likely be all that will be available for the forseeable future.
I am still working on data recovery, but it is slow due to budget and time constraints. I did get a few quotes from professional recovery services, like DriveSavers and OnTrack, but they want approx $800-$1000 for the job, which is a bit out of my price range right now.
I will let you know how things go
New discussion forums are now open! Check them out
Welcome all! I have created a new blog for publishing announcements and news about Lebeau Software development projects. I will start using this in addition to, and eventually in place of, the email mailing list that currently resides on Yahoo Groups.
For you Borland C++Builder developers out there, I’d just like to mention that my first-ever technical article has just been published in this month’s issue of C++ Builder Developers Journal. My article got the top slot in the issue, as well as the cover art, and I got some major praise from the journal’s editor:
Let me first say that your article was, hands down, one of the best we’ve had. It was *extremely* well-written, both grammatically and technically, and the demo application was just perfect (not too simple, but not too loaded with irrelevant features). You should take pride in your technical writing skills. I sincerely appreciate the time and effort you put into providing such a well-polished submission–thank you. And, I hope you will consider writing for us again.
Not too bad for a first-time writer, huh?
Ok, enough bragging for now. That made my day. Now on to other news.
With the recent announcement that Microsoft Agent has been updated in Windows Vista to finally support SAPI 5, I have begun updating my AgentCB application to support it as well. More on this to follow when a new version is ready for testing.
My Microsoft Agent processing/rendering engine is coming alone nicely. Being able to display and run ACS, ACF, and ACA files without using Microsoft’s products is quite refreshing, from a programmer’s standpoint. I recently updated my engine to use GDI+ on Windows systems. This will allow me to support transparent images, as well as resizing images (such as when the character window is stretched), much easier. I’m also working on incorporating the engine into a new application now (adding a Preview tab to the Properties dialog of ACS files) to help me iron out the interfaces better so that I can then start incorporating the engine into the other appications that I have planned (which are listed on my website).