roncli.com blog

So yesterday was the 10th anniversary of my 21st birthday, and I got quite an unusual birthday present.

Mind you, it wasn't intentionally a present, but Backup sold its first copy on roncli Productions. It was quite a mess. The PayPal return was hitting the wrong page, the website is full of bugs, and nothing seemed to work right. I spent an hour last night fixing everything, and there's probably a lot more work that needs to be done. I can only hope that the software actually works, and this guy isn't trying to use it on Vista.

Labels: Backup, Birthday, Life, roncli Productions

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Backup and Vista
Posted: 5:41:00 PM 0 comments

My FTP backup solution, aptly named Backup, stopped working properly when Kathy and I upgraded to Windows Vista. Unfortunately, there is no way for a Windows service to hook into mouse or keyboard messages for the desktop of the user logged in. This is a problem because now Backup can't tell how long the user has been idle, a key component in determining when to backup files. The .NET 2.0 framework did not provide a reasonable way for me to overcome this hurdle, so the project's sat in limbo for months.

Currently, Backup has 3 modules. First is the Setup module which allows the user to select which files they want to have backed up, and what server to back them up to. Easy enough. Second is the Service module that actually does the backing up. Third is the roncli Productions common module that handles things such as registration and about dialogs.

Since the Service module can no longer handle idle time detection, I have to split that piece out, yet somehow communicate back to the Service module when an application is idle. Windows Communication Foundation to the rescue.

With WCF in the .NET 3.0 (and now 3.5) framework, I am able to easily create messages to send from a client app to a server app. I simply alter the Setup piece to be always running in the background when the user logs on, and tells the Service when the user is idle. Of course, there can be multiple users, so all the users would have to be idle at once, which is no big deal to figure out.

This seems like an awful lot of work to get a service to know when its users are idle, but it'll get the job done, and Backup will finally be Vista-ready.

Labels: Backup, Coding

Monday, June 26, 2006

roncli Productions is live
Posted: 9:51:00 PM 0 comments

It's finally done! roncli Productions is complete and live. Backup and Due Process, two pieces of software I've been talking about for many months, are now available for download. I'm quite excited about it, and look forward to see how people use the software and what kind of suggestions they will come up with.

I've yet to submit the software to various download sites, but hopefully I'll be able to wrap that up tonight, so I can concentrate on other things, like providing a blow-by-blow account of Melbourne and Surfers, quote, "Paradise", unquote.

Enjoy the site.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process, roncli Productions

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Catching up is hard work
Posted: 12:05:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: roncli, The Nightstalker - Awakening (5:01)

I made the fatal mistake of not doing any projects this weekend - that's 12 blocks of 2 hours each that I had not completed. My reward for this was spending this entire week playing catch up.

As of this writing, I am still behind an estimated 16 hours, most of it residing in the PwnedCars category, although I did catch up a good 6 hours on one task today, designing a form I thought was going to be hell to design in a relatively short amount of time. I also ran into a stumbling block when working on the roncli Productions forums, not being able to use the DataGrid at a rate of speed I'm accustomed to with classic ASP. But fortunately most of that is out of the way, the only things I am behind on is making a search page for the support section (I'm having an issue with Google AdSense for Search on that one) and forum subscriptions, which I'm not terribly looking forward to.

The good news is that I went ahead and scheduled the rest of the week, leaving nothing but simple-to-accomplish tasks to do through Saturday. Hopefully this will string enough time together to get some of the major tasks I have out of the way. roncli Productions is almost done, although I am having trouble with the Backup software not deleting things again, so I may have to work on that before I officially open roncli Productions for business. Oh, and there's that PayPal thing I keep avoiding...

OSMusic.Net has actually had some excellent progress on the minor changes I've been wanting to make, and hopefully completing the next big thing won't be too far behind. Finally, I am hoping to give Outpost Music the forums that have been largely absent for a couple of months now sometime early next week.

Things are beginning to look up as various projects come to completion, and even though I am behind further than I'd like to be, progress is always a good thing, no matter how slow it may feel.

Labels: Backup, Coding, OSMusic.Net, Outpost Music, Projects, Pwned Cars, roncli Productions

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

The Long Weekend
Posted: 2:13:00 AM 0 comments

Well, the long Memorial Day weekend has come to a close, and to be honest, I have amazed myself with how much I got done. I found the bug with Backup that causes it to run at 100% CPU until you kill it and squished it. That allowed me to repackage and finalize the MSI that will be distributed once roncli Productions comes online. I've also found the bug in Due Process that causes it to tell Windows it didn't startup properly when, in fact, it did. I still have one more feature I want to add to Due Process before I finalize its MSI, which is the ability to never allow a process to run (&%*#% ctfmon.exe!). That shouldn't take terribly long.

On the website front, the forums are slowly moving along, I anticipate 12 hours worth of work remaining before they are online. However, once that's done, I have at least two sites I can port them to, including Outpost Music, something I plan on doing before I leave for vacation.

The problem is that Pwned Print is slipping further than I had wanted it to. I've been quite ignoring this big 8 hour task for the simple fact that it's... well, 8 hours. And overdue. I want to sit down and at least start it at some point, maybe I'll do it tomorrow after work or something.

Overall, I've managed to not slip further behind in my projects than I was a week ago this time, and I'm more optimistic than ever that I can follow these projects for some time to come.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process, Outpost Music, Projects, Pwned Print, roncli Productions

Monday, May 29, 2006

So Much To Do
Posted: 3:15:00 AM 0 comments

I did some research as to where I stand for four other projects today... holy crap, do I have a lot to do on so many things. I'm trying to take it one project at a time. I see the light on Backup and Due Process, as all that needs to be done for them is to fix bugs and make the final package. But the roncli Productions website is just going to take forever.

I got some good work done on the forums today, but I got a late start and didn't get as far as I had hoped. Most of that stems from the complexities that exist in my classic ASP forums code. Translating it over to ASP.Net 2.0 is going to be interesting.

I also decided to add the bug fixes necessary for OSMusic.Net into the projects, and hopefully I'll slowly get to those. I'm surprised, after 5 months of nothingness, 8 songs have been added to the site within the past two weeks. I don't know if it's going to become a more active site as a result, but the activity is quite welcome.

I took a good look at Outpost Music, and decided that, when the time comes, I'll simply copy the forum system from roncli Productions into Outpost. In the meantime, there's some additions I want to make to the site to make it more functional for me and the other members of the group.

Finally, I looked at The Nightstalker page, where my music is supposed to go. I decided that I'm going to add all of my current releases there, and eventually I'll go back and add my old tracked releases as well. Maybe some day I'll convert them to Reason, but each song is a project in and of itself - I can see that taking years.

There is no shortage of work for me to do, I have stuff planned out to July 1st, and some of that work is set aside to plan out future work. There's so much to do, and I wish I had more hours in the day to do it with.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process, OSMusic.Net, Outpost Music, Projects, roncli Productions, The Nightstalker

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Catching Up
Posted: 12:07:00 AM 0 comments

Well, on Sunday I managed to finish up the stuff I was working on for the upcoming roncli Productions website. I had a few frustrations with ASP.Net again (as usual), but got by them after a while. I look forward to designing the rest of the sight.

However, I got nothing else done on Sunday, as most of the day was dedicated to fixing my damn NAT. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, the ipfw.rules and natd.config look right, and most things work. However, I can't figure out how to open up ports like I was able to before I last formatted the machine. It will be an open issue for a while.

In the meantime, today I got quite a bit done, including specing out the rest of what will be needed for roncli Productions. I will be, for the second time, writing forums in ASP.Net. This time I won't be building the HTML as I go, I'll actually be using the contrals as they were meant to be used.

I also got two completed forms for Pwned Cars, speced out the rest of what's needed for Backup 2.0, and even got some time to play with BONIC on Linux, as I'm wanting to get SETI@Home running over there. What I had speced out to be 10 hours took me 4 at best.

All this while spending an hour playing tennis after work... and man am I sore. Good thing it's time to sleep, I need it.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Projects, Pwned Cars, roncli Productions, SETI@Home

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Due Process Close
Posted: 2:40:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Korn - Twisted Transistor (2:58)

Actually, Due Process is done! I have it happily running on my workstation and my computer with no problems. I am very pleased with how it turned out.

The reason you don't have a copy of it yet is because I'm working on the website that's going to promote this and other pieces of software I'll be spitting out over the course of time. Backup is going to be the next offering, which is a copy of my FTP file backup service. After that, I'm open to pretty much anything. Who knows, I might even get back to Cent.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process