Byte Through

Small Firefox 3.6 Non Review

A couple days ago, after installing Firefox 3.6, i noticed it went from bad to worse on resource usage, at least on my test computer it seems to have gone really bad, why? take a look at this pic:

So what’s wrong here? i just had three open tabs, none of them on heavy flash or java sites,  just a couple simple forums and one blog,  my test machine is not a top model, but this is not what’s wrong, i have a test PC with a 2.8 Ghz processor, 2 GB of ram and a 500 GB SATA II drive, NVIDIA FX5500 video card with 256MB of video memory, Windows XP SP2, this should be more than enough for web browsing, specially when nothing else is open but Firefox, and yet the computer gets so slow that opening something like Windows Live Mail or Messenger took some minutes, and switching between both Firefox and Mail/Messenger took several seconds, there were drawing issues, eventually Firefox took about 94 % of the CPU, and memory usage went up to 1 GB, crashing the computer, i was not able to save a screen shot or do anything but to reset the machine, the thing is, i had an older Firefox version installed on this same hardware with no issues at all, well, not like these at least, and i had Chrome and other software like Visual Studio which still works at top speed, by this i mean, it works very well on this hardware, is usable, given that Firefox is not running of course..

Yesterday i went on the net and noticed a couple of very nice reviews:

Here’s one at ArsTechnica

And another one at TechRadar

I’ll quote from the last link (emphasis mine):

There’s a brand new Firefox in town: Firefox 3.6. It’s not a huge update, but it does offer improved performance and stability

I guess we all do live in different worlds, could it be maybe that what we have here is a classical example of developers forgetting about all of those who do not have/can’t afford top of the line hardware? and that they are developing this software on their high end computers, where they can’t see the end result as seen by people with old hardware, really, who cares about them, let them buy new modern hardware for once right? have we fallen into the ‘hardware is cheap/fast so don’t waste time optimizing and writing small/fast code” trap?

I’m a little saddened by this, since one of the top reasons to use open source used to be that open source software is smaller, faster, light, and a ton of other things, everything but bloated (as in MS software), but lately, seems they have fallen for the same mistakes we’ve been seeing for decades now in those MS-like companies (even them seem to be going small and fast, just look at the VS Express Editions and even Windows 7 against Vista), it could be interesting maybe to go look up who is working on Firefox right now, and see if the people who used to work on it a few years ago are still working on it today, i wonder about that..

(yeah, i know working on a software piece this big is no child play, but Mozilla used to have very good developers)

What happened?

No joy here, just complaining you know :P

xShots 1.3 has been released!

Today i have released a new version of xShots, this is release 1.3, there are several things that did not happen as planned, it was a very slow update cycle, i had expected to come out with tons of new stuff by now but due to complications of time and other reasons, this was not possible.

Following is a small list of things that didn’t make it on this release:

- Originally i had planned for this release to include the new XUI skin engine i have been working on, but due to some issues with a partnership and code ownership, i had to drop that and wait for a later release.

- There was a new component in the xshots installer, the ToolBox, which is a small utility that allows to customize the images taken by xShots, and allows batch modifications to those images, but this will also have to be included in a later release, because of dependencies on the same XUI library i can’t release right now.

For this release, there were a couple small changes and some bug fixes, i’ve fallen back to the 1.2 code, enabled FTP support on this release, and have fixed several small bugs that were found on the 1.2 release, this is a small update, but its worth the update trouble just because of the Ftp support.

The new release can be downloaded from the xShots project page.

External sites will probably be updated in a couple days,  meanwhile you can also get it directly from this link: xShots-v1.3.zip

Fun stories from my previous job. Part 1

There are times that things happen that can’t be forgotten, and they become part of what makes fun to remember those old days… specially when those are fun things that makes us remember how bad things were back then.

A couple stories that happened at my previous job…

RM = The project leader

RM: Dude, i was just looking at the code you uploaded yesterday, you need to fix this man.

ME: Is something wrong? can you show me the bug?

RM: You’re always returning an error on one of your new methods, you need to fix that.

ME: Returning an error? what do you mean?

RM: Here, look at this:

bool DoSomeStuff()
{
    bool bError = true; //wrong named variable

    if(doSomeOtherStuff() )
    {
        bError = IsStuffEnabled();
    }

    return bError;
}

RM: Do you see, why are you always returning an error? you need to change that variable, you can’t always return an error, how this code works?

ME: well that is not how it works :), that’s just the name of a variable and you need to look at the values at runtime.

RM: no man, this is wrong, you can’t return a value, you need to change the code otherwise the application will always fail on this method

ME: but that’s just the name of the variable, it has no real meaning outside of the editor..

RM: Man i get your point, but this is not working, just do as I’m telling you, i know how to program, you’re always returning an error on this method, it can’t work, change it please.

ME: :P ok

bool DoSomeStuff()
{
    bool bEnabled = true; //wrong named variable

    if(doSomeOtherStuff() )
    {
        bEnabled = IsStuffEnabled();
    }

    return bEnabled;
}

RM: thank you man, I know you are very good at this, but you have to learn to listen, we can always learn from everyone else, I was like you when i first started, but I’ve learned a lot of things since I started working here.

ME: yeah, no problem, talk to you later…

:P :P

——-

This happened to a friend of mine…

RM: man, why are you not cleaning this variable at the end of the function?

M: what?

RM: here man, this is wrong, change it please, clean up the variable.

M: what?

RM: look at this code:

void SomeFunction()
{
    bool bResult = false;

    string* str = new string("abdc");

    if(str)
    {
        bResult = DoSomeStuff(str);
        delete str;
    }

    return bResult;
}

M: yeah i see, what’s wrong?

RM: you are not cleaning the variable str, this can crash the application

M: it can’t! the function ends there, that’s just a temporary variable

RM: man, i get your point, but you need to clean that up, do something like str = null; just do what i’m telling you, i know this stuff

M: there’s no point in doing that, the variable will not exist anymore as soon as the function ends

RM: man, i have lots of years of programming experience, if I’m telling you this is wrong you need to listen, don’t behave as if you know everything i have more experience than you, do as i say

M: i don’t get it, ok, i will change it, but there’s no point

RM: why do you make things so hard? just change it, and we need to talk about your career on this company, there are a few things that we need to chat about…

M :|

And so it use to happen at my last job.

Be back soon with more fun anecdotes from old times (luckily) now gone by !

:P

Writing a COM tutorial ebook

Sometime last year i started to write a COM tutorial, after the first chapter, i did not had enough time to work on the rest of the chapters, i have started working on a full ebook about COM, following the same line as i did with the first part of my COM tutorial a year ago, i will be posting updates here as i finish each chapter of the book.

I don’t plan to sell this book, it will be free and probably under an open source license, maybe later on i will produce a bigger version, but for now this project i would like to keep it simple and free, i have noticed that a lot of the traffic i get is through searches for COM tutorials, so i feel there is need for a good COM introduction that people can use to go from the very basics until a professional level, and i would like to have something like that written.

So, for those looking for a COM tutorial, be sure to check back on my site or add my RSS feed to your readers, i will update soon with the first revised chapter and soon after with the second chapter, which i am currently writing.

Working on xShots 1.3

For the last couple weeks, i have been working on the new release of xShots, this will be version 1.3, for this version i have completed all the skin, so now all dialogs will be sharing the main window design, i also wanted this version to include a new tool i have been working on, but it seems i will have to wait until next version after this for that tool to be released.

After having a couple weeks off, i have noticed someone out there is stil claiming i stole xShots, i wonder how someone can keep lying so much, that ends up believing his own lies, this is a very sad situation, so much to be lost because of him not wanting to accept i have my own ideas and can do my own thing, hey dude, if you wanted to own my ideas, you could always hire me as a software designer and sign an exclusivity agreement, etc, oh yeah, and send a very big fat check every month :)

Because, you know, sometimes ideas are worth a lot :)
But anyway, as days go by, i continue to move on, and at the same time, i can see that site out there where someone is trying to discredit me, wanting to punish me for having my own ideas and following my own ideals and dreams, i guess you can’t make everyone happy…

I had to disable posting of comments on this site, due to someone coming and placing some spam and rather low comments about me and my company, i have noticed some people would like to comment here, sorry about that, i hope soon i will be able to restore comments.

I have completed the first phase of my skin library, XUI, which hopefully will be released with the next version of xShots and will be seen also on a couple other projects i am planning to release this month.

I am thinking about releasing the library as a separate project so that anyone can use it on their own projects, but i realize XUI needs to be polished more before that happens, anyway, time will tell.

If you like xShots and would like to see it improve and live a long life, please help out by promoting this site and getting out the truth about how it came to be, i will be working on a separate site for xShots soon!

Back to work now :) …

Dealing with the wrong feelings

I’ve been thinking about this issue with xShots, after yesterday and seeing how he is still making false claims on that site, i decided i will not follow this anymore.

I will keep working as i have done since the past 11 years, always trying to do my best, always with honesty and being true to everyone but first to myself.

I feel sad, and to be honest, i feel sorry for you, because even after i explained several times to you how i wrote this app and how the ideas came from somewhere else, you still decided to continue with your attempts at doing harm to my business and my person, i will not follow you down through this path, i will remain free of any low feelings and i repent from insulting you by calling you immature and other things like that, sorry, you really got me angry there, but not anymore.

I would advice you to move on, don’t stand for too long on the sand or you may sink, my advice to you is, don’t hate someone else because he has his own ideas and follows his dreams, i know you are very upset because i came up with a screen capture app, but i never intended this app to become a competitor of the software you have, and i never copied anything from it, i never took your code and called it mine, and i never, ever, lied to you while working on your project.

All the claims you have on that site are untrue, and you know it, it is up to you to do the right thing, you asked me to remove the app and you said it was the right thing to do, but it is not, i will not kill my ideas because someone else comes and says i must do, if you feel my ideas are in some way lowering the value of your software, well, you need to come up with ways to improve your software, and not to use this scare tactics to prevent someone else from becoming succesful.

Is not for you to question what i do with my life, with my free time, and with my skills and knowledge, it is a matter of each one of us to do our best on this life, and you should be following this path, instead of sending treatening mails and creating sites whose only purpose is to cause harm to someone that never has made any harm to you, in any way.

Again, i apologize because i insulted you in several ways, but none of them came out of the blue, you put me through hell for more than a month, you denied me the right to speak about what was going on, you acted without thinking and assuming what you thought was true, without even giving a chance to explain, and this resulted in you hurting my well being, and as i have told you like a hundred times before, you harmed directly my family, how would you explain my situation?

How would you explain why i lost so much time and effort with your project only to receive agressions and being treated as a robber? i did not take anything from you, i did all the work you hired me to do, and i delivered as you requested, nothing less than that.

If you decide to continue with your site and still trying to harm me, well, i only can wish you well, since you have decided by yourself to follow that path, and nobody will be able to help you but yourself, are you sure you want to lie and to harm someone who you perfectly know by now, has never taken anything from you?

xShots is my idea, my ideas on the work, i decided to implement this app because i had a need for an application like this, which i could not find anywhere, and you know your app is nothing at all like xShots, you know this because you hired me to do your app, and i did it, following your specs very closely, now you said xShots was your idea and your design, why are you lying? what is the purpose of these lies? to eventually make everyone believe you own xShots?

Whatever your final goal is, i can say for sure, you will not get it, because you have no right.

You still owe me for the work i did for you, and i still have the code i refused to deliver to you because of your behavior, if that is what you feel wrong about, i have said this several times before, complete our agreement as it should have been done almost two months ago, and i will honor our agreement, i will send you all the code you need, because i am not looking to get anything for free, i have done the work, and you know it, you have the betas and were able to test them.

Leave my xShots project out of this, it doesn’t have anything to do with the problem, focus on the issue, which is, you breached our contract, you refused to pay me for work i had already done and had already delivered, and that is a very unprofessional and unethical thing to do, so please, restore my trust in you, follow up with our agreement, stop trying to harm me, what will you gain by doing that? you still will need to hire someone to finish your apps, i won’t be available for you anymore, you will spend more than if you had sent the money you owed me at first, it will be worse for you, i will have to speak up and prove i did not steal anything from you, and i will do that by making public your requirement list, your emails and chats, and what will you gain by me doing that? nothing at all, because you know those mails and chats can show very easily the real nature of the project i did for you, and they can be used to prove none of the features you specified for your project are contained on xShots, so at the end, you will only end being discredited by your own actions, will you still try to do this?

To prove i do not want to harm you, i will not release anything that may compromise your project, i will hold all the information i have until you decide what to do, and i will remove my post where i insult you, because i wrote that post angry at you after looking at the site you put up about me where you make false claims about my work for you, you need understand that the damage you made to me and my sister, my mother, my brother and even my girfriend by refusing to pay me and still holding me for almost two months is not reversible, it has caused a lot of problems for all of us, we depend on my work, i need my medical treatment, you know because i have told you in the past, how i need medical treatment because i had a very hard motorcycle accident a couple years ago and it was really bad, i still can’t recover and the medical costs are too high, that’s why i can’t keep up if things get delayed without any reason and for so much time, you knew this already, you knew that if you held back my payments, it would result in a crisis for me, and you even made fun of that, by saying that you didn’t wanted to hear about my problems, well, i did not had any problems until you requested my work and then refused to pay for it, that’s how things happened, or not?

The next step will be yours to take, either for good or for bad, it is up to you, i will not get my hands dirty with this absurd issue that will not hold and is based on nothing but your willingess to harm me.

So farewell, and i hope you can give up on those feelings you have deep inside you, i wish you that because if you don’t do it, you will spend the rest of your life feeling bitter and angry at all of those who are able to follow their dreams, just don’t do that. Or you will destroy yourself.

xShots version 1.2 released!

NOTICE: Due to someone claiming i stole his code, because of some similarities between xShots and an application he has that is still can’t be found on the net, and due to me not wanting to deal with this absurd problem, i have removed Ftp support from xShots, however, i will add support for different web storage services in the future.

Changes for version 1.2

- Added tooltips to the UI buttons

- Changed the layout of the xShots Settings, the Shot Settings, and the Default Shot Settings dialogs

- Removed the ssl libraries which were needed to store ftp encrypted data

- Removed Ftp support, files can be saved only on the local drive

- Changed shots and settings file format to reflect the missing ftp support, your settings will be updated automatically

It will take a while for version 1.2 to be available from other sites, so please use the following download link:

Download from RoxxSoft’s server: xShots-v1.2.zip

It is really a shame that i had to cripple the application, but i want this person to stop lying about me and my business, so i have come to this in the hope that he will go away, i will not stop working on this app just because someone how has fallen into corruption as a means to improve his business sends is trying to scare me with a site and hate emails.

I’ve been very angry about this, i have sent several emails insulting him in his professional conduct, his child-like behavior about business competition, and his lack of honesty and maturity to handle this, he has not given up, so here i will continue working on xShots, i will not be afraid, i may not have a lot of money to fund a hate campain as he does and will do, but i will remain true and honest, whatever he does in trying to harm me, i will resits and will not give up.

Another attempt at harming my business

It has come to my attention that someone who just can’t learn to accept reality is accusing me on a web site of stealing his software, he claims he hired me to do xShots, that he made the design, and paid for the work done, which is completely untrue, dishonest and low to say the least.

As i have explained in a previous post, i came with the xShots idea by not being able to do my work with the screen capture app i had at the time, which is X-Shot 2002, and i have explained very well how it came to be.

I have asked this person to remove the lies he has placed on that site, but if he refuses, i will have no option but to make public the work he hired me to do, including a little dirty secret he has about that project, i will provide screens of the dialogs, feature listings and more, just to prove i did not in any way copied or used his code for xShots.

There are people who should not be allowed to be in management positions, specially those who just simply go on the net, copy some other software features and design, and then claim it as their own, something like this has happened with the project i am talking about, but i will remain silent unless that site is not removed, because i don’t have anything to hide, as some other people do.

I will quote here what he says on that site:

”

We’ve given RoxxSoft 24 hours to ‘come clean’ and stop giving away the product we created and paid him to code, which he named ‘xShot’.

If he has morals, integrity and is worthy of you doing business with, then you won’t see this page on Monday September 28.

If indeed we have to continue with this, then we’ll be backing up everything we claim with our project management logs, emails to him (‘Kai’, ‘Kaifan’, whose real name is Juan Mosqueda), with project details, feature request, etc..

All which you will see is exactly what this ‘xShots’ is all about.

And prior to meeting us, Juan didn’t have this ‘xShots’ in his bag of tricks.

What you’ll really see is a simple case of dishonesty and theft. But we’ll let you decide come Monday.”

Non of that is true, i was hired to copy another software, which is not similar to xShots at all, and i have all the required documentation, emails, chats transcripts, images, feature requests etc, but let’s see where this person wants to go with this, it is a shame that someone who calls himself project manager and professional, behaves like a spoiled child just because he realizes someone else came with a better idea and he has no means to acquire that idea for him alone, and instead of doing his best and improve his app, is trying to kill mine, and upon realizing he can’t, then he goes out and starts writing lies about me, trying to harm my business and my person, he even has my name on that page, he is trying to harm me directly, he has no shame.

I have explained too many times how i came to create xShots, and how i had no app a year ago, and how i had a few snippets of GDI+ code that allowed to save a screen shot to disk, but nothing else, and he will just go on LA-LA land and won’t listen, so i guess it is up to him to either change or be put to shame.

I’m sorry for him, once the truth comes out, this will be very bad, i hope he realizes he is doing wrong and removes all those false claims, i really do hope so, for his own good, nobody wants to be labeled as a lier the rest of this life, and i certainly don’t wish him bad, but i think he actually wishes the worst for me, he is greedy maybe, i don’t know, i will probably never know..

How xShots Came To Be

Where the idea came from

A couple months ago, while working on the help file for a project i was doing, i needed to add a few screen shots of the application dialogs, toolbars and some context menus, while doing this, it occured to me that it was a lot of work having to capture the entire window, then having to edit the image on some image editor, select and cut the required section, then save it as another file, and finally, add it to the help file.

I went on the next searching for some utility that would allow to save only one section of the window, to avoid all that long process of editing the images, i found a project named X-Shot 2002, which is made or was made by Nico S. Beck, a developer in Germany, it can be found on www.nsbnet.de, it worked as i needed, at least partially, it allowed me to draw a rectangle over the area i wanted to save, this was good since i didn’t need to edit the image anymore, only the section i had covered under the rectangle was saved to the image, but it has a very big limitation for me, it only supports to save one section of the screen at any time, if i want to save a different section, i have to go through the process again, draw a rectangle over the new area i want to save, then save the settings and click “Screenshot!” on the main window, and the old settings i had are lost after i save the new rectangle settings, this was not very good since i wanted to have several parts of each windows saved, at the end this only moved the problem from one place to another, i still needed to process each image separately.

Although i found the X-Shot 2002’s approach good, it was not enough for me, so i gave it a little thought for a week and then came with the idea for xShots, which main feature, basically, is to be able to save each shot settings under a name and reuse them as much as i want, any time i need them, X-Shot 2002 has a timer feature that allows to save a screen capture at regular intervals, it allows to set hour, minute and second for the shot, it allows the timer to loop, so a set of images will be saved until the timer is stopped, it also has a few default time options to select from, i wanted to have something similar, but for now, since i needed the app really soon, i just added a simple option to set the time in seconds, so that each time the seconds interval i set has elapsed, a new shot is taken, eventually i plan to follow the same approach as X-Shot 2002, but for now it was enough to me.

After quickly writing down my specs, i started to write the app by the end of August 2009, about three and a half weeks later, by September 14, i had a first beta ready, fully functional, and i uploaded it to several sites as well as my home page and blog, a couple days later, it was being noticed by a few bloggers here and there, nothing really to get too optimistic about, but i didn’t really care since it was a personal project with no other purpose but to help me do my work, i just thought that maybe someone else would find it useful, and so it seems a few people have found it interesting, i hope it of some use to them.

I have always thought of sofware as a piece of art, which is built by a developer as if he was adding a piece of his soul to each application he makes, good software must be unique, must provide a different, new, approach to an existing problem, or simply a good and correct approach to solve a new problem, that’s why good software will always remain in the memory of those who used it, and nobody will remember those who just copied somebody else’s work, just like a painting, nobody will remember those who just copy the mona lista, but everyone knows who came up with it first…

xShots to be released as open source

About a year ago, i was hired to write a screen capture application for windows, after the project was done, i was asked to write a similar application for Mac systems, which i did recently, after a few issues with payments, that project ended not very well, and now i have been attacked with claims that xShots is based or is the same code as the one i made for that client.

I will not get into a low level fight and will not insult or lie to prove my point, i will just state this here, xShots was made using GDI+ and WinINET, while my client’s app was made with libcurl and ximage for windows, and libcurl and cocoa apis in Mac OS, the code i had previously to working for that client eventually became xShots, which is in no way related to my client’s code or features in the application.

Since i am not planning on ever selling xShots, it is a free app and it will remain like that, i will open source it, i will give copyright ownership to the Free Software Foundation, by doing this i hope i can prove this code is not stolen from anyone as it has been claimed in the past days, once the code is public for any one to see, there will be no doubts about that.

The work i did on that other application was as a freelancer, it took me about a month to complete, i did use several c++ classes i had already from my own projects, and the client was aware of that, but now it seems he has forgotten everything i said and it is claiming i stole the app he hired me to do, which i didn’t because the code bases are completely different and xShots is targeted at a completely different user base.

I am not sure about the reasons he has reacted like this, even have put up a domain where he will be trying to hurt my company, how? i don’t know, but i will not get into a low fight like that one, i will remain silent because i don’t feel having an argument about this is good, let the code speak for itself ;-P

I will make an announcement in the following weeks about the process of open sourcing xShots, which i am not very sure how to do since i have made GPL apps, but i want the FSF to have the copyright for this app, which is a different story than just distributing some app with the GPL license.

Whatever the differences we had, i don’t think this behavior of insulting and hurting someone else’s business without any proof is a good thing to do, and two wrongs don’t and will never make one right. It sadness me that things have come to this, when all i did was try to do my best for him, in all the years i have working on the computer industry, this never happened to me before, and i sure hope it will never happen again.

To him i just can say, i whish you good, i don’t understand why you decided to do all this wrong things, but they are done, and i think it is best to move on, both you and i, and let things go, its for the better.