XrX Portable Apps Info

Rumors of my demise have been grossly exaggerated.

I got snowed under at work, between people on holidays and people off sick (myself included) it’s been a crazy 5 weeks.

September is always fun, most the clients are all back from holidays, all of a sudden machines that have been ignored over the summer need to be running properly (the kids are back in school) so we are hopping, this is a good thing, but the hours can be a killer.

I hope to actually do some work on the menu this coming weekend, I’ll be taking a look at the latest PAM and going to go through a number of suggestions I’ve gotten as well as a couple bugs found by a local user (she’s good at discovering obscure bugs, how she does it I don’t know but when her email points out that if you click such and such 7 times then try to exit such and such happens it makes you wonder)

Slow progress to be sure, but progress just the same.

I haven’t given up on the mod, but have been run off my feet at work with new programs, people on holidays, new clients, designing a new logo, and clients starting to arrive back from holidays, it’s been a bit nuts.   (Whats a holiday?)

I’m working on a properties dialog where you can

• Change the icon for an app
• Change the popup hint for an app
• Change the same stuff you can now (autorun, hide, caption)
• Set exec on close advanced options
  • Run an alternate exe on close
  • Provide command line arguments to close program
  • Only run the exec on close exe IF the menu item has been run this session
• Add miscellaneous notes about an app

I’m also looking at adding the following features

• Run As… Right click option
• Run All Option for a Category (I have a category with apps that are just for working with client sites, and all of them are usually up at the same time so I could just right click on the ‘Client’ category and select Run All

And then there are some items I’m experimenting with just for fits and giggles

• More themable menu buttons.
• A no theme option (I hate to say it but I’d really prefer if the thing looked just like a regular window)
• Syncing
• Profiles (ie: one menu for work and one for play, just pick the profile under options and the menu changes)
• Remote app, I’d like to load a data file off my home server from wherever I am using ssh before running an app, and save it back when I’m done, this is for two reasons, first syncing the data, and second the data isn’t on the USB key if it’s lost, I suppose I could use truecrypt to the same end, but it’s an experiment. This isn’t really a menu item, just something I’ve been playing with in conjunction with the menu.

I run the Turbo Delphi Explorer Edition in a virtual machine hosted on a server running Gentoo Linux (the laptop I tried it on first was just too slow.) But anyway earlier today while I was working on the menu program the RAID controller in the server died, no warning it just died.

The VM stopped responding and I was unable to log into the server. With the server not responding I went to the bigger hammer approach and rebooted it, no joy in mudville, the system locked up about the time I would normally see a raid array status message, disconnected all the drives and moved the controller off to another machine and it locks up at the same point, can’t even get into the controllers setup utility. The original server less the controller will boot (the root drive wasn’t in the raid) but I am without my data partitions (they were on the raid) I guess I’m picking up a new controller in the morning, assuming I can find the same controller I’m hoping I can just connect the drives and go, but it’s never that easy, and who knows what state the VM disk image is in having been running when things crashed.

Checked my backups and discovered that my working source directory on the VM had been backed up only 3 hours before the crash so the worst case scenario is I’ve lost 3 hours of programming. The rest of the data on the server wont have changed appreciably since it’s last backup so I think I’m in good shape.

Every now and then paranoia pays off. But I’m now taking a forced break from programming.

Update: Finally got a controller (Late Wednesday) and the array is rebuilding, I did a bit of work on the menu while waiting, but not much.

I ran into some issues with how I was storing data internally, and had to go back to the drawing board.

And I got very little done this weekend. Blame my significant other (she hates that term) and Ms. Rowling. The last Potter is an excellent book by the way, for once an author gives you a glimpse into the future of their characters. I’d always wished that Dick Francis would have done so with some of his characters. I guess thats the problem when an author writes so well that you really care about the characters in the book.