Lebeau Software

Status update

Remy Lebeau — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 18:12:10 GMT

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.

LSFinance for Blackberry screenshots posted

Remy Lebeau — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:22:00 GMT

I have posted a few preliminary screenshots of my new LSFinance for Blackberry app that is currently in the works. I am estimating that I will likely not be able to release a public version of it until sometime in 2011, due to lack of free time to work on it, but I am working on it nontheless.

Status Update

Remy Lebeau — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 19:41:00 GMT

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 retraints, 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.

Loss of data!

Remy Lebeau — Tue, 25 May 2010 00:34:00 GMT

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 TMSAgent beta released

Remy Lebeau — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:48:00 GMT

The new v2.2 beta of my TMSAgent VCL component is now available for download on my website:

http://msagent.lebeausoftware.org/

This release includes new package files for C++Builder 2010. Sorry, no package files are available for C++Builder 2009 yet, as my 2009 setup was lost awhile back ago and I have not had a chance to reinstall it yet.

New Product, and upcoming TMSAgent VCL Beta

Remy Lebeau — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 10:43:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce that I am beginning development of a new software application - LSFinance for Blackberry. This is a personal finance program targeted exclusively for the Blackberry smartphone platform. The first release of LSFinance will support importing/exporting financial data from AceMoney, a popular personal finance program developed by MechCAD Software LLC. Later releases will support popular open formats, such as QIF and OFX.

For those of you using my TMSAgent VCL component, I am working on a new v2.2 beta. In this release, I am making changes to how TMSAgent handles errors internally. The OnError event still exists, but now TMSAgent will throw exceptions into your code after firing that event, rather than returning error codes, NULL pointers, etc. This should help reduce unwanted side-effects in your code (access violations, etc). Also, I will add install files for C++Builder 2009 and 2010.

I will post again when these products are ready.

New discussion forums!

Remy Lebeau — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:22:00 GMT

New discussion forums are now open! Check them out

Website maintenance

Remy Lebeau — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:41:00 GMT

I am currently in the process of implementing back-end upgrades to my website, so some functionality may not work correctly during the next few days. I should have everything working properly soon.

New MSAgent data spec released!

Remy Lebeau — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:39:00 GMT

Microsoft has recently announceed that is is discontinuing development of its MSAgent technology (http://www.microsoft.com/msagent). In light of that news, I have decided to release my latest MSAgent data spec sheet, which I have been holding on to for several years, as it now includes full details about MSAgent's compression algorithm, as well as adds new information about the ACF and ACA file formats. I was not sure how Microsoft would react to the compression information being released publically. However, since they are not developing MSAgent any further, I figure it should be safe now. Other people are already starting to implement their own MSAgent replacement engines, so my latest spec can be helpful for them. I am still planning on working on my own MSAgent-related projects, as described in earlier mailings and on my website. It is just a matter of having enough free time to do so.

New TMSAgent VCL beta

Remy Lebeau — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 06:31:00 GMT

For those of you using my TMSAgent VCL component, I have just posted a new v2.1 beta for download. This release adds install files for C++Builder 2007. Sorry, no C++Builder 2006 support is available yet - C++Builder 2007 messed up my BDS 2006 installation and I haven't fixed it yet.

New blog created!

Remy Lebeau — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 08:07:00 GMT

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.

New ICQLaunch version released

Remy Lebeau — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:04:00 GMT

I just released a small update to ICQLaunch. It contains a bug fix for the Shortcut Wizard that was causing it to fail on some sytems when the "QuickLaunch Bar" option was used. The location of the QuickLaunch settings calculated by the Wizard would end up missing a backslash in the middle of the path, thus the Wizard couldn't create any shortcut files for the QuickLaunch bar correctly. This has been fixed.

As always, ICQLaunch is available from http://icqlaunch.da.ru or http://icqlaunch.lebeausoftware.org.

New SourceView beta is now available

Remy Lebeau — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 05:16:00 GMT

For those of you who have been trying out the beta version of my source code editor/viewer, SourceView, v1.0.0.17 is now available for download. I have recompiled the program to use the latest version of the editor control, and have thus also added syntax highlighting support for several additional programming languages:

C#, CSS, HTML, Javascript, VBScript, VB, Ruby, Python

In other news:

- Last night, I just started experimenting with incorporating AJAX into my website. So over the coming weeks/months, you'll start to notice some changes in the look-and-feel of the website.

- This past week, I've been working on my MSAgent character processing/rendering engine again. It is coming along quite nicely. It is still primarily tied to Windows for right now, but I'm working on cleaning it up and generalizing its interfaces so I can plug in other platform support later on. I'm hopeful that I can start incorporating this engine into my projects in the near future.

I'm published!

Remy Lebeau — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 10:27:00 GMT

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).

Version Control

Remy Lebeau — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:29:00 GMT

I have begun using Version Control software to keep track of changes to my source code. As a result of that, I can now begin publishing more detailed reports about what is changed from one version to the next. I am now
working to add "Project Release Report" links on all of the download pages for my website. This will be a running log of all reported issues and implemented features for each product.

Right now, only my AgentCB product has this report implemented. You can view it online now. I will continue working to add similar reports to my other products.

TMSAgent VCL Beta

Remy Lebeau — Fri, 20 May 2005 17:18:00 GMT

For those of you using my TMSAgent VCL component, the v2.0 beta is now publically downloadable. The source code includes packages for BCB 3-6 (yes 6!).

For those of you already using the beta, the public version that is available for download is the latest source code as of today. I have made some changes to it over the past few days to fix some bugs that were reported.

Still Alive and Programming

Remy Lebeau — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 17:18:00 GMT

Yes, I know, I've been silent for a long time. Too long, and for that I apologize. But I am still around, still programming away at several projects when I have time to do so (which is not as much as I would like sometimes). Which brings me to today's many announcements.

MSAgent WebRing Membership
I have been supporting the MSAgent technology for over 6 years now. Lebeau Software is now a proud member of the the MSAgent WebRing. I should have joined this group years ago. Well, no time like the present, right?

Upcoming Software Releases!

AgentCB v1.2
AgentCB v1.2 will now allow the user to choose their desired spoken Language and TTS engine. This has been requested from non-English users of AgentCB for awhile now, so I finally got it into AgentCB. Previous versions were locked into using Enligh only. MSAgent, which AgentCB uses to read the clipboard verbally, has always had the ability to generate spoken output in many foreign languages (provided the necessary support files are installed ahead of time). AgentCB will now be able to utilize this capability.

In addition, this version includes enhancements to the underlying MSAgent support (for those of you familiar with my TMSAgent VCL component, this version of AgentCB will be using the beta of the upcoming version of TMSAgent), and users will also now be able to choose to use MSAgent character files that are not installed in the default "MSAgent\Chars" folder of the OS.

If anyone is interested in beta testing the new version before I release it publically, feel free to contact me.

ICQLaunch v1.0.1.22
ICQLaunch v1.0.1.22 adds support for the recently-released ICQ v5. Supporting ICQ v5 required several changes to ICQLaunch's internals. Amongst the changes, however, allowed for the ability to support ICQ v5's new Custom Status feature. ICQ is no longer locked into hard-coded statuses like, "Away", "DND", etc. Users can now specify their own custom status messages. The new version of ICQLaunch will support this feature, in addition to supporting ICQ v5 in general like it as with previous versions of ICQ.

If anyone is interested in beta testing the new version before I release it publically, feel free to contact me.

TMSAgent VCL v2.0
The upcoming release of AgentCB is using the beta of the upcoming version of TMSAgent as its MSAgent implementation. TMSAgent v2.0 is a major redesign over the current version v1.5. Once AgentCB has been tested, and no problems occur with the TMSAgent beta, I can then release v2.0 of TMSAgent. And yes, this version will included native Borland C++ Builder 6 support - a feature that is LONG overdue!

MSAgent ACS File Format Documentation
For the past 2 years, I have been working on gaining an understanding of, and documenting, the data format for MSAgent's ACS files. The ACS File Format documentation has been available for download for some time now. I will be releasing a major update to that documentation later this year. Many data fields that were unknown to me a year ago have now been identified. The documentation is nearly complete now, describing the entire ACS format in full now. The only thing still eluding me is the algorithm for parsing the raw image data for individual animation frames (although I can now identify everything else about the frames), and a few minor miscellaneous fields. Other than that, the rest of the data is fully documented now, and I have already begun writing code to utilize this information.

New MSAgent Products in Planning Stages!

ACS File Viewer
Using the knowledge I have gained by writing the ACS File Format documentation, the first product that I will be releasing will be an ACS File Viewer. This product will be a test bed for me to solidify my general coding for processing ACS data. Unlike other viewers already available, this program will not be using Microsoft's own MSAgent engine at all. I will be reading and displaying the ACS file data directly. This will mean that performance of processing the ACS information will be faster and better optimized, and will not require commonly used "hacks" to make the MSAgent engine do things that it was not originally designed for (re-parenting character windows without messing up the OS, multiple instancing, etc). Also, ACS characters that are loaded into the MSAgent engine by multiple processes at the same time, whether by applications or by web pages, share a common instance of the character onscreen. The viewer will bypass this, being a completely self-contained application, one which can even run on machines that do not have MSAgent installed at all.

ACS-to-ACD Recovery Tool
After the ACD File Viewer is written, it will be a small jump to produce the next product, an ACS Recovery Tool. The Agent Character Editor (ACE) that is provided by Microsoft is currently the only software publically available that is capable of producing compiled ACS files. ACE uses ACD project files to organize the bitmaps, icons, sounds, and layout information that character authors define when creating their custom ACS files. This convertor will be able to reverse that process - extracting and generating the original ACD, bitmap, icon, and sound files from ACS files for use with ACE. This product is meant to be used by character authors who have lost their ACD project files and need to restore them from the compiled ACS files.

I do realize that an ACS recovery tool presents possible copyright infrigement issues. Which is why the convertor will be the very first shareware product offered by Lebeau Software. The evaluation version will not support extracting the images and sounds from ACS files. These are the key pieces of an ACS file's copyrighted intellectual material. Authors will have to prove that they actually own the characters they wish to convert, and will have to purchase the full version and licensing to allow their ACS files to be converted to ACD. The licenses will encrypted and tied to both the specific character being converted as well as to the character's owner (and maybe also to machine hardware), and may also require online validation. This is so that licenses cannot easily be distributed or hacked by software pirates, or falsified to allow converting of characters by people who do not actually own them.

Also, neither the evalutation nor full version will allow loading or processing Microsoft's own characters (Merlin, Genie, Robby, and Peedy) under any circumstances.

MSAgent Browser Plugins
After the ACS Recovery Tool is written, the next project will be to revive my old browser plugin for supporting MSAgent in Netscape. I will update it to support Opera and Firefox, as well as give it a generic interface so that Internet Explorer can use it as well. This way, a single plugin can cater to multiple browsers without requiring separate specialized versions for each browser, or different scripting for different browsers, etc. Also, using my ACS File Format documentation to design my own rendering engine will eliminate the dependancy on Microsoft's MSAgent engine, thus allowing the plugin to also be ported to non-Microsoft platforms (Linux, Mac, etc). This will introduce MSAgent to new marketplaces that have been previously unexplored.

ACE Replacement
I wish to produce an application that will do everything that ACE can do, and then some! ACE only supports 256-color bitmaps, icons, and WAV audio files. I want to support importing of PNG and MP3 files as well, and maybe also importing and real-time rendering of common 3D file formats (3DS, 3DX, Lightwave, Wavefront, X3D, etc) directly. Many MSAgent characters currently available have images produced by 3D rendering software (3D Studio Max, Hash Animation Master, Truespace, Xara 3D, etc), so it would be beneficial to have an ACE-style editor that can render the wireframes in the same software that compiles the final ACS file.

New ICQLaunch Version Released

Remy Lebeau — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:04:00 GMT

I have just released a new version of ICQLaunch. This version fixes a bug in status switching for ICQ2003a, and includes new support for the recently released ICQ2003b.

New ICQ Chat Player Released

Remy Lebeau — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 18:52:00 GMT

I know, I know, I haven't written in a long time. What can I say? Development on my own projects has been slow lately. Fortunately, it is not at a dead stop.

I have just released new versions of both my ICQ Chat Player and my ICQ Chat File Specification. The Player has been updated to support exporting chats to text files, a feature that has been requested by many for a long time, so I finally got it in there. Right now, only plain text is supported, but eventually I would like to support exporting to RTF and HTML as well. The spec has been updated with additional notes to help better support older ICQ Chat versions.

Upcoming New Version of TRegExtension

Remy Lebeau — Wed, 22 Jan 2003 20:57:00 GMT

Happy New Year!

I just wanted to let you all know that the new version of my TRegExtension VCL component for Borland C++Builder has begin its first rounds of beta testing. For those of you not familiar with this component, it allows applications written with Borland C++Builder to create and manage file extension registrations on MS Windows systems.

This new version is a re-design of the previous version. The internal architecture has been changed around a bit, as well as expanded to support the lates file extension features in newest Windows OS versions, as well as expanded to support greater design-time features and configuration via C++Builder's Object Inspector. This means that less run-time code is needed now in order to create and register new extensions or update existing ones.

If anyone is interested in helping me test this new version, feel free to contact me and I'll get you a copy of the files. I'm still working on updating the documentation for it, that may still take a little while. But the majority of the code is functional now, pending testing that is.