Category: Icetips Blog

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Last week brought some challenges - as always.

I have been working mostly on customer support for the past week. Had some backlog that I had to deal with and got some additions to it. Fortunately some of them sorted themselves out by updating software and the customer realizing that there were issues with his server. But the rest is high priority stuff so I have had to hold off work on the new releases for the most part.

Customer support comes in waves. There can be a month without a single email, then I get 10 in one day and they just keep coming and then they are gone again. It's hardly ever related to new releases (mine or others) they just pop up out of the blue. Often the issues sort themselves out as the customer realizes something is missing or a mistake was made, which is always good. Then there are those pesky problems, that make no sense and take up a lot of time to dig into and try to find a solution - I have 3 of those right now. It would probably be worthy of some research, but nobody's paying me for it, so I will not be the one doing it;)

This coming week I will keep working on getting the Clarion 9 compatible installs out and hopefully I will make a big dent into it before the end of this week:)

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

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For the past 2 weeks I have been working on getting out new releases that are compatible with Clarion 9.

There are currently three new builds available, Icetips Utilities, Icetips Previewer and Icetips PowerToolbar. There are minimal updates to those products and as far as I have tested they seem to work fine with Clarion 9.The only major change in PowerToolbar is that the install now includes the required files from XPTheme to support additional themes in PowerToolbar.

For the past week I have been working on Outlookbar. I had started work on it in January before the car accident so I decided to finish it. The main new features are a wizard to create the Outlookbar side window and a global class that controls the height. Another feature is the ability to set font information for both headers and tasks. that includes font, font size, font color and font style.

In addition to this I'm also working on technology to use external theme files for Outlookbar, Taskpanel and PowerToolbar. This will make it possible to create and distribute themes with programs and full control over the visual presentation. The idea is to create a theme designer where you (or your users) can create their own themes or modify existing themes.

I had originally planned to have all my installs done today, but that is not going to happen because of the extra work on Outlookbar. Right now I'm aiming for next Friday, the 31st.

Finally I want to mention our Icetips support portal where you can post support requests and check our Tips and Tricks forum, which has some interesting articles about our products, Windows and SQL.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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This morning I was rebooting both of my work computers and decided to run a benchmark test on them, since they were both clean and fresh. I decided to share this with my readers, just for fun. It's very interesting to see how the benchmarks come out on different computers.

I used PassMark's PerformanceTest 8.0 for the testing. It is free to evaluate and you can run your benchmark tests even if it has expired, just don't have access to some advanced options. I use their site cpubenchmark.com for CPU comparison so I figured their benchmark software would give me the best comparison with what I know.

I use two computers, "HP Pavilion" and "Snow" and I built both of them. One of them I built from scratch from a bare bone kit that I bought from TigerDirect. The other one was a "fixer-upper" from my 2008 HP Pavillion computer. It died in January 2012 and I ended up replacing everything in the case except the DVD drive and the front panel;)

HP Pavilion (I call it that even though it's only the case and the DVD drive that are left of it;) I use for day to day stuff. That includes work in MS Office, Adobe software - mostly Photoshop, Dreamveawer, Lightroom and less in the other tools offered via Adobe Creative Cloud. I also run email on it, many of the in-house programs to maintain my business etc. This machine is based on an Intel i5-2500K CPU on an ASUS P8P67-M Pro motherboard. It has 16GB of memory, Radeon HD 5400 Series video card and a 1TB Seagate SATA2 drive. On this machine I have a 26" Samsung T260 monitor and a 25" Hanns-G HH251 monitor.

PassMark Rating

Snow is a dedicated development machine and my work horse. Since the box is white I named it Snow;) I also use it as a host for virtual machines to do work in Clarion 6 and also for testing purposes. This machine is based on an Intel i7-3770K CPU on a P8Z77-V LX motherboard. It has 32GB of memory, 1TB Seagate SATA3 boot-up drive and 2TB Seagate SATA3 driver where I run my virtual machines. I'm contemplating adding a 240GB SSD drive to run the operating system and some of my programs on to add to the speed. I can easily run 3 virtual machines, each with Windows 7 Pro 32bit installed with 4GB of memory each and there is no slowdown at all. I have run 5 similar virtual machines on it and it performed without a hitch. The CPU has hyper-threading so software like VMWare effectively sees 8 cores. I can easily set each Virtual machine to use 2 cores and the CPU rarely goes above 20% usage! On this machine I just use the on-board graphic controller and don't have a dedicated video card. It's OK, but is not going to win any awards for speed;) I have two Samsung Syncmaster SA350 27" monitors on this system. One is hooked up directly via HDMI and the other one is hooked up to the DVI outlet via HDMI and a HDMI->DVI converter plug. This results in a very slight hue difference, barely noticeable but that's ok, since I use the other computer for photo work.

PassMark Rating

Click on the images to get a slightly more detailed information about the benchmark results.

I have 3 other computers in my office, a file server that I also rebuilt last year that is not anywhere close to powerful (uses i3) but it has something like 5TB of drives hooked up to it, mostly for backups but I also keep all my documents on this machine. I also keep my website code, apache web server, in-house software and version control files on that machine. A 6 year old laptop and a 10 year old development machine make up for the rest of the machines I have.

Hope this is interesting to some people:) I like messing with hardware and I enjoy building machines. If you are comfortable with it, it only takes between half an hour and an hour to put it together if everything fits. Re-using some components can take longer. For example in the HP box I had to rewire the front panel because the front panel plugs that HP uses don't match industry standards. So I had to carefully pull the wires out of the HP plug and plug each of them directly into the motherboard.

The HP was also a long and painful process. It had started to fail with hard disk errors so I backed up the drive and replaced it. Then the machine just died. Wouldn't turn on and it was just completely dead. So I replaced the motherboard and memory. Didn't help. So I replace the video card - which was a $300 NVIDIA card less than 6 months old, that was another painful and costly endeavor to try to reduce the flicker in the Clarion 8 IDE, which didn't help at all. Lo and behold, things started working again. Turned out that the drive seemed to be fine. It looks like it might have been a problem between the NVIDIA chips on the video card and the NVIDIA hard drive controller on the mother board. But I got a nice machine out of it:) I'm still using the original drive over a year later and it's working fine. I swore that NVIDIA chips would not be used in my computers again. Ever! 😉

Arnor Baldvinsson

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This year has been a bit challenging for me so far.

In early January I went through an allergy test that showed that I was dairy intolerant. I spent a good chunk of January on liquid diet, which was challenging to say the least, but ultimately good for me:)

In the second weekend in February we spent a day in Seattle and on the way home we were rear-ended. To make things even worse, the person that hit us left the scene in a big hurry! It wasn't a big impact, but enough to rattle my already bad back and caused a problem in my right shoulder - yep, my mouse arm;)

With the help of a good chiropractor my back is getting better every day, but unfortunately my shoulder is not. I'm scheduled for a MRI of the shoulder tomorrow and hopefully it will show what is going on. This has really affected my productivity and the darn shoulder gets really sore and stiff when working on the computer.

Despite this I have made progress on product releases, just not as much as I had planned so I'm a bit behind schedule. I have spent some time on cleaning up several products and worked on demos and documentation. I have also added some articles to the Tips and Tricks section on our Zendesk forum

I'm not going to promise anything about releases, but if nothing else happens (knock on wood:) releases will start to pop out in the next couple of weeks.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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One of the forums on our Zendesk portal is "Tips and Tricks"

I have posted two short posts there about hiding DOS/console program windows when using ITRun, ITRunFile and ITRunWait from the Shell Class and one about getting table information from MSSQL database.

I will be posting more short tips and tricks there so check it out from time to time:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Support to my customers is one of the things that I have always wanted to make sure that I did to my best ability.

As our customer base has grown over the years this task has become more difficult. Since the support team is just I, myself and me it sometimes becomes a daunting task to keep track of emails and requests. Interestingly, customer support comes in waves. I may not get a single email for a week and then I get 10 in one day for as many products.

Having a good system in place has become one of my highest priorities in the past few months. Many developers feel that they have to design and write such systems themselves to make sure they work. I definitely used to be one of them, but I have started to learn that sometimes it's easier - and a whole lot cheaper - to use one of the many services out there rather than do it yourself.

Couple of months ago I mentioned this to Sue and she happened to have been reading some posts on her forums about options in customer support. One of them was Zendesk and after taking a good look at it I decided to try to use their service. But I got sidetracked by school and didn't get back to it until this week. I expect to have it completely set up sometime next week and once I'm done with that, emails will go out to all my customers about this new service and how to use it. Following that, subscribers will be added to the Zendesk account so they will have direct access. If people who are not my customers want to post question all you need to do is sign up and post. It's completely free and only takes a few seconds.

To access the Icetips portal at Zendesk, please go to http://icetips.zendesk.com I have not completely set up the end user portal yet as I have been working on the administration setup. Over the next week or so this page will change, but the support is fully functional by now. Over the next week I will send out emails to my customers with instructions and information about how to submit support requests.

I hope that with this new system in place I can keep a much better track of support requests and my customers can keep better track of what is going on.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Since System Restore was introduced in Windows XP it has saved my behind on a number of occasions. But it has also messed things up for me because .app files are part of the restore cycle and apparently - at least in Windows 7 - so are .CLW files!

It doesn't happen often that I have to use System Restore to restore to an earlier restore point, but it has happened. Last time it happened on a virtual machine that had a Blue Screen of Death all of a sudden in the middle of a development project. It wouldn't come back up and I was in a hurry and used the "System check - recover" option or whatever it is called on the windows startup screen. It didn't indicate system restore so I let it run. Once it was done and Win7 was back up and running there was a message stating something to the effect that the computer had been rolled back to the last restore point - which was from the night before.

I checked my apps and lo and behold, they were all from the night before. So were a couple of external .clw files. Fortunately I had just placed the project into version control and even later, uploaded it to my client's FTP server so I had a copy from about an hour before the BSoD happened.

I decided to take a good look at how to prevent this from ever happening again. I have all my projects backed up and also in version control (which is also backed up) so I'm not at much risk of losing work (I HATE losing work, so I do my best never to have that happen to me!) After snooping around on the web I found several references and they all pointed in the same direction.

In the registry there are two keys that control the System Restore:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToBackup
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToSnapshot

The first one affects backup and the second one affects the Volume Shadow Services (VSS), which is the technology that System Restore uses to create the snapshots, i.e. the restore points. To be on the safe side, I have modified both of them to exclude my development folders and also specifically the .app and .clw files.

Here is what I use right now:

C:\dev\* /s
C:\*.app /s
C:\*.clw /s
C:\Clarion\* /s

I create a multi-string value in those two keys, call the value "Clarion" and put those lines into the value data text box. If you want to include a folder you use the path and then \* If you want it to be recursive and contain sub-folders you add the /s switch to it. You can exclude files and folders and groom this as you like. Basically this works like the good old DIR command in DOS, for those of you old enough to remember DOS;) For those of you who don't, run cmd.exe and try dir /? in the root of your C drive and then play with it. I think the only switch available to the exclusions is the /s switch.

All my current development is in the C:\dev folder. But I also have a lot of older apps and stuff in my C:\Clarion folder so I want to exclude both of those. I also set the *.app and *.clw to be excluded anywhere on the C: drive.

If you have a second drive for your development you can simply turn System Restore off for the drive, but if you have it on the C: drive, then you need to prevent System Restore from messing with your files! I'm always running out of drives - I have 5 drives currently hooked up to my development machine, with a total of 6 Terabytes of storage! If you are like me and you use virtual machines a lot for development, remember that they also have system restore active and you need to take care of those machines as well, just like any other physical machine.

There is nothing like having to use System Restore to recover from a botched Windows update (has happened to me 2 or 3 times in the past) and then realize weeks later that bugs you had fixed have crept back in! Backups and rigorous version control are the only things that can save you from things like that! And make sure that your version control folders and files are not included in system restore backup on the version control server or you may be in for a nasty surprise if System Restore decides to restore it to what it was 6 months ago!!!

Hopefully this will help some of you to avoid disasters. If you have additional information, please comment or let me know directly:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

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We have made Icetips Utilities build 1.2.2408 available for download This Utilties build includes quite a bit of documentation (about 50 pages total). The Page of Pages class has been documented and we added a control template to the Utilities so it is easy to add to your applications. Both the class and the template are fully documented. We also added a global template that allows the Utilities to be used in Legacy applications. I made some modifications to the String Class that affects the SplitString method. Note that our online (HTML) documentation for our products contains comment options using Facebook. This allows you to comment on any page in the documentation if you want to add examples or comments about specific methods or templates. We will be adding this to our HTML pages as we release new builds. Both the Utilities help and the PowerToolbar help now have Facebook comments at the bottom of every single page. For more detailed information about the updates and fixes please see the online documentation at http://www.icetips.com/manuals/utilities/version_history_2012.htm Documentation was completed for:

  • List procedures with Windows without HLP attribute.
  • Limit Program Instance template.
  • All Utilities templates.
  • Write Version info to INI file template.
  • Add Header Sort to Queue template.
  • Bind/Unbind local variables template.
  • Icetips Browse Checkbox update template.
  • Icetips ShowFileRecord wizard.
  • All Code templates.
  • Documentation reorganized so work better with both printed (PDF) and online (HTML) formats.
  • Every page in the online (HTML) documentation now has Facebook like and comment option at the bottom of the page.

Fixes:

  • ShowProgress in Progress class applied "vista fix" on XP also which could cause weird jumping in the progress bar.
  • SplitString could fail with last item in the item array.
  • Limit Program Instance template didn't preserve variables for entries (i.e. !Glo:VarName)
  • GetThemePanelFEQ returned the wrong FEQ.
  • ThemeAPanel didn't work in C8 and required XPTheme.

To download the latest build please go to http://www.icetips.com/downloadfile.php?FileID=192 You need to be logged on to download. Note that the installation keycode is displayed on the page and is also sent to you via email once you start the download. You can review the updates in the documentation at http://www.icetips.com/manuals/utilities/version_history_2012.htm