A new helpfile for the premier Amiga emulator out there has been released a few days ago. Please note that this is still heavily being worked on as far as the presentation is concerned, switching over to a more modern style. You can get the file in the Downloads -> Emulation section.
Yet another release of an old VB6-based project in new .NET glory! This little tool was inspired by a special friend of mine some time ago, so if you want to change your wallpapers periodically, give this little tool a try. As always, it can be found in our Downloads -> Miscellaneous section.
As a side note, the now obsolete tools have been moved to the Nostalgia section. This affects the legacy version of WallChanger, as well as the preliminary and now obsolete KeyLogger project. Both are now merely kept for reference, together with the GFA Basic projects.
Not only is spam omnipresent in everyone’s email inbox these days, even this very site is target of hundreds of spambots which try posting thousands of comments on our news entries. To prevent this, comments have been disabled for a while. Now, we are using Akismet in the hopes to get rid of spam, whilst allowing our users to comment on entries.
In modern computing, you are likely to be using GPL or MIT licensed programs, especially as a developer. While huge companies are propagating digital rights management, software patents, and are inforcing copyrights, free software represents the spirit of the early days in computing: sharing information free of charge and royalties.
Free Software gives everyone the right to look at program source code, to use and modify it, for as long as the “rights” are retained. It is an extremely intimidating concept, especially for developers wanting to add content to already available programs, without the need to request features and go through a long line of support lines. This enables hundreds of developers to work together, share and modify each others ideas, and create applications for all major operating systems.
Sounds like a coders’ dream come true. There is just one major drawback: ease of use. Not the ease of use for the end user, but of the development tools.
On Windows, Microsoft’s own Visual Studio is one of the major development platforms, or integrated development environments (IDE). Nowadays, C# or Visual Basic are available for rapid application development (RAD) with the .NET Framework. This is where Visual Studio truly lives up to the marketing fuzz: hardly any development environment is so comfortable to use and yet powerful in features. Dead easy visual designers for data sets and dialogs along with templates. Comfortable text editing, indenting and formatting inclusive. Even Stop-Edit-Run debugging in the case of Visual Basic, without the need to recompile the whole project. A invaluable time saver for the average developer.
The popular development environment for software created with “free” tools which are portable mostly consists of a whole bunch of tools: vi/vim/emacs for editing, gcc for compiling, gdb for debugging. This so called toolchain is then complemented by a host of libraries, such as zlib, and a toolkit such as GTK+, wxWidgets, etc. Each one of them is highly configurable and highly flexible, cross-compiling and other features not even mentioned. But they are incredibly difficult to get started with! vi probably has more keyboard commands and shortcuts than the average human brain can store, gcc compilers ship without any infrastructure to actually create a program (libraries, headers, examples), and gdb is very difficult to set up and use.
This is not to speak of the wealth of libraries and dependencies one needs to create something meaningful, all of which have to be gathered seperately. Different versions of libraries may not work with different versions of executables, patching headers to make specific versions work with new compilers or recent code bases is common practice.
In my humble opinion, a lot of users would love to support the Free Software movement. Everyone involved with this very project here at vware would love to give back to the community. If it was not for all the time you lose getting into it, where you could do something meaningful (like actually developing an application).
10 years ago, the first code I wrote on PCs was published on the Internet. Sadly moving away from the dead Amiga platform, GFA-BASIC helped to find the way to Windows 16/32 programming. Some geeks were just about starting with the internet about a year before that, and so was I, finding a small but very active and helpful community for GFA. What a nice time it was when companies such as Google were not yet founded and the term “spam” did not even exist. Nobody had to worry about DRM or other so-called improvements to using computers back then…
Long live the past, although we need to take care of the future… for now.
A new update 1.0.1 to NetInventory is now available on the NetInventory download page. This is mainly a bugfix and stability release, with the most changes shipping in the vware Libraries, which have undergone a lot of code hardening. Nevertheless, the database has seen a very slight modification, which will force you to refresh your database schema if you are running a database server backend instead of the supplied Access file.
NetInventory 1.0.1 Read More »
“One ought to look a good deal at oneself before thinking of condemning others.” – this quote of Molière may also apply to computer users. While NetInventory served people well in terms of auditing hundreds of machines and evaluating the results based on database queries, it is still rather inefficient for viewing details of one single machine.
The next major version of NetInventory will include Egoist, a new tool designed for querying and displaying information of a single machine in a more user friendly way than the database approach for large networks. While still in early stages, the basic design is now completed and development is shifting over to fine tuning and bug fixing, as well as improving the usability.
One of the features I always missed in VisualBasic was bitwise shifting. One of my most used features in earlier years, because it was especially useful for evaluating registers and masking out values. Since it was always rather easy to develop GUI applications with VB, I often hit the limits of it (as of version 6.0 and earlier).
The only way around it was to write a DLL in C and import it in VB to shift bits left and right. A lot of time has passed since then, and I did not need shifting as much anymore.
Yesterday, however, when working on ClanTools, I forgot the “” in MsgBox(“100>>25”). When the program hit this line, the message box showed “25”, which puzzled me at first, but then I realized that VB 2005 now actually supports bit-shifting! I wonder if I just overlooked it or Microsoft never actually announced it in a big way. They should have done so, it really adds to VisualBasic as a language.
Well, to be exact, the changelog for ClanTools is back. But that only happened for a good reason: about 2 years after the then-final release of ClanTools 2.0.4, new versions for IRCScore, NTPAlarm, PUTimer, and SFind are in development.
As announced earlier, IRCScore has received the most work so far, and is already quite usable, with all benefits that the switch to the .NET Framework brings with it. All tools are under heavy development at the moment, you can expect some of the tools to be released seperately in an alpha test.
ClanTools are back Read More »
The next version of FileIndexer is available now at the Miscellaneous downloads section. The program has been revamped completely, with the code converted to use the .NET Framework 2. This brings a few major additions and changes, as well as improvements to the overall performance. This is the second release from vware to use the vware Libraries, which have been further stabilized. The legacy VB6 version of FileIndexer is still available in the Nostalgia section.
