chriskarcher.net

Version 1.1 of myDesktop Online is available here .

Changelog:
* - Added “-autostart” command line switch. When passed, program
will minimize to system tray and start monitoring automatically
upon load.
* - Enabled automatic startup when Windows starts
* - Added “Continue on error” option which forces the program to keep
monitoring after an error (e.g. FTP timeout) has occurred.
* - User can now specify keywords and phrases of window names which
will prevent the program from capturing the desktop
* - File extension is now automatically appended to file name
* - Animated system tray icon when uploading
* - Status text shows time until next upload

I’ve been really lacking in the updates lately, I know =/. Once school starts and I resume seeing thousands of people on a daily basis, I hope I’ll be able to find some interesting things to talk about. Instead of working 9-5 at my internship today, the company I work for took everyone out on a party barge at Lake Travis. There were only about 15 of us out there (small company), but we definitely made the most of it. There was tons of food, beer, and sun, so I was content the entire day. Several people got the chance to go on some dives in the lake, something I had really wanted to do. I didn’t have the time to get my diving certification beforehand though, so I just watched. One would think that it wouldn’t be much fun diving in a murky lake, but they said it was plenty fun.

If you don’t look around the rest of the site very often, you wouldn’t have noticed the release of myDesktop v1.1! This version implements some asked for features including window capture protection and the ability to suppress and ignore connection errors. Even if you have no need/interest for this program, at least click the download button a couple times to make me think people are using it.

Tomorrow is Friday and it couldn’t come soon enough. I didn’t really over-extend myself this week or anything, but I’m still feeling pretty burnt out. I guess I’m not getting enough sleep or something. I took Maggie to the vet yesterday afternoon for what was supposed just be a simple check-up. This “simple” check-up ended up running $150! Turns out that she’s growing yeast in her ears. Yea, it looks as gross as it sounds. After all her shots, cleaning, and medication it ended up costing a pretty penny. My Mom sent me a care package earlier this week with some scratch off lottery tickets and I won $20! Guess that’s going straight to the vet bill. My Mom also has some uncanny sixth sense, because right before the package arrived, I was on my last pair of socks. Lo-and-behold, I open the package and the first thing that falls out are socks. Thanks Mom!

All the major features of the next version of myDesktop Online are completed, but that doesn’t make me any closer to releasing it. Just like before the first release, the program is randomly (well, “random” to me at least) throwing exceptions causing weird things to happen. I know the problems are threading related, but can’t consistently reproduce the conditions which cause it to crash. The only thing I can be sure of is that if I start the program before I go to sleep, it will have died by the morning. I then search through the logs looking for some hint of what happened and why. I’ve been making tweaks here and there and slowly but surely the reliability is improving. I wish I had known something about Windows threading before this program, but I’ve got to start somewhere.

I’ve heard we throw good parties. I couldn’t really tell you for sure though, my memories always have huge holes in them. If you were there, I hope you had a good time. By the way, has anyone seen our trampoline? We seemed to have misplaced it…