It was hard to decide what subject to put on this as there are a lot of
things in recent postings that might be worth responding to. So there are a
list of unrelated issues in here. I start with the easy thing: my email at
w5xd@writelog.com is working again. (The www.writelog.com
<http://www.writelog.com/> site has found a couple of issues recently as
well-both are due to our previous ISP going out of business). It may be this
weekend before everything with the email and website is back in order.
And then a reminder of some things about how WriteLog is managed. Nobody has
ever "sent Wayne $30.00" for WriteLog. The money goes to Ron, K5DJ, who is
also responsible for tech support. The authors (and there are plural) are
paid some royalties, but they don't amount to $30.00/copy. The tone of the
post about the $30 indicated they thought the price was too high. Sorry
about that-I don't believe anybody put a gun to your head demanding you pay.
The same posting indicated a large number of things one didn't like about
WriteLog. Sorry about that, too. The authors do look at worthwhile postings
for how to best spend the time that they have available to work on WriteLog.
All of us have day jobs, however, so the posting that thought that 24 hours
was too long to get an answer from "the programmer" is going to be
disappointed with WriteLog. Positings containing "get it done dammit" and
other such useful stuff are normally deleted without any further action.
I freely admit the WriteLog help file (writelog.chm) is not professionally
written or particularly well organized. I intend to work on it again when I
get a chance. I do believe it is reasonably close to being complete w.r.t.
ini options-there are pages and pages in there of what the ini options are
and what they do. There is also a search facility in the help that people
seem to be unaware of or unwilling to use. (The search engine is not unique
to WriteLog).
The installer has some issues and the old one does leave a few things on the
disk at uninstall time. It is in a transition this year. By October of this
year (or November-I am not looking at my notes) all new versions of writelog
full and upgrade download kits will use only the MSI ("Microsoft Installer")
technology for installation. That technology is quite good at cleaning up at
uninstall time. Starting October of last year, all full installs use the MSI
installer and there should not be much-if anything-left of WriteLog on your
disk after de-install (except for those files that I have decided should not
be deinstalled-like your .wl files, .wav files, etc.) The reason for the
transition is that I decided to keep the basic design for the registration
code handling and full/upgrade installation, and that, in turn, required a
year-long transition phase from the old InstallShield stuff to msi. That
means that this year not everyone has exactly the same thing. However, my
standard procedure for dealing with installation problems is for Ron to
direct people with problems to the current FULL install-regardless of what
month they are in the registration code cycle. The full install moves you to
the new install technology and puts you in sync with the way I test. (The
posting that concluded that the only upgrade installs are working didn't
come with any evidence that makes me believe that conclusion-I believe that
any installation problems can be fixed by installing the full version).
There is a technical issue regarding downloading zip files for the installer
that trips up more users in the .msi version than it did before, and I am
planning changes to make it fool-proof. People with WinZip installed won't
know there is a problem at all because it automatically knows what to do
with a .zip file that in turn contains setup.exe and cab files, etc. But if
you don't have WinZip, then you have to know that the simple thing presented
you by Windows Explorer won't work-it will display a window with the
setup.exe from inside the zip file and invite you to open it. Doing so will
only get you messages about missing DLL's or CAB files depending on exactly
what version of Windows you have. The user must instead unzip all the files
(or "extract all files" in the language of Windows Explorer) and later open
the setup.exe. I haven't figured out a way to make it impossible for the
user to mess this up.
Out of all the recent postings, I have gleaned only a short list of things
that need priority.
Wayne, W5XD
_______________________________________________
WriteLog mailing list
WriteLog@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/writelog
WriteLog on the web: http://www.writelog.com/
|