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To all of you out there, Happy Thanksgiving from Sue, Laila and I:)

It's been a long time since I blogged! It took much longer for us to settle in than we had expected. Partially because Sue was managing the ISV conference, which was held in Reno in the end of September. She was gone for over a week to get that done. While she was gone, her college classes started so when she came home it took her over a month, just to get caught up and she ended up dropping one class of four that she had planned to take. After a lot of contemplating she decided to stretch her study out for one more year, giving her time to get caught up next year. She is only taking one class next quarter.

All this didn't give me much time other than to work on the client projects I have, which are all very long term. That said, I have managed to kick out a few new builds with some minor updates.

Build Automator
I have made good progress on Build Automator. A new build, the first in over two years, will be out in the second week of December. Most of the work has been in the IDE. There were areas of instability which I had put considerably work into fixing back in 2011. In January 2012 I ran into problems with my development machine and ended up having to use System Restore to get it back up and running. Unfortunately I did not realize the effects it had on my Clarion projects:( I lost over two months worth of work in Build Automator, which set me completely off course.

The new version has full support for the new Clarion IDE (Clarion 7 - 9) via the MS-Build action. The older IDE (Clarion 6 and older) action has been made a bit more robust, but I will probably not put much more work into it unless bugs are discovered.

Problems with duplicate, variables, copy/paste were all related to the same problem which has been fixed. Support for Setup Builder 8, which was added with an updated DLL in February 2013 is now of course included. A problem with Software Passport Version 9 has also been resolved. The new update will be available both as a download and also as a web-update.

Icetips Utilities
I will have a new build ready sometime in December, probably close to the end, with documentation updates and a few updates and fixes. The next build of the Utilities after this will introduce some changes. It will include a run-time library with additional functions that are written in C++ and .NET. The library DLLs will need to be distributed with your binary code, but only if you use any of the methods that call the run-time library. The DLLs will only be dynamically loaded, so there are no lib files to worry about. The Icetips run-time library (ITRTL) will be included with a new product that I have had in the pipeline for a while and never got around to fix it. I'm hoping I can kick it out in December, but January for sure!

I have a collection of SQL and related classes that I have graciously been allowed to add to the Utilities by my client who I developed those classes and methods for. This includes for example methods to build WHERE filters, build ORDER BY clause based on a key, use aggregate functions, use double quote (") instead of single quote in queries, prevent SQL injection, log SQL to file or DebugView, build queries based on entry field data (i.e. create query form) and more.

For now, I'm concentrating on getting Build Automator ready and out the door:)

Happy Thanksgiving

Arnor Baldvinsson

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I'm afraid that the post below about our move would have to be considered extraordinarily optimistic, border-lining on pure madness!;) It took us a full WEEK to get out of the house, which we finally did last Tuesday, September 3rd. The office has been a real challenge to set up and I'm not yet done with setting it up, but I'm getting very close. I will be up and running Monday, September 9th and should have the computers up and running tomorrow, Saturday.

If you see people looking for me please let them know that I'm still here, but suffered from clinical optimism when I expected to only take two days to get my office back up! Fortunately we do not expect to move for many years to come - not sure I can go through this again;)

Arnor Baldvinsson

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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