All → Software → Miscellaneous

Rediscovered one of my software projects from the space-year 2011: Is Locked

It's a little program that allows you to drag and drop files into it and it'll tell you if those files are currently locked (either by another program or Windows itself). I made this for myself as I wanted to quickly know which of the multitude of files I was transferring via FTP were complete.

Any unlocked files can be copied or moved to the clipboard (via a true FileDrop drag operation; not just a textual representation of their filenames) ready to be pasted into an Explorer or whatever window.

Needs a little bit more polishing and then I'll kick it out there; I managed to resist redoing the GUI to be a more modern flat-style, otherwise it may not get released again.

There's so many projects that are on the verge of completion but I just haven't bothered sorting out that last couple of percent.

All → Software → Miscellaneous

Speaking of unexpected happenings, I got contacted a couple of days ago by someone asking me if the Visual Basic 6 Runtimes Pack was free for enterprise use (spoiler: it is).

The pack doesn't require me having to recompile anything using the Visual Basic 6 IDE, as I haven't had that thing installed in well over a decade, so I thought I'd repackage it in an updated installer.

Running the original VB Pack installer itself shows that it was littered with errors. Not errors in the files it was installing (well, maybe a couple - but more on that later), but in the instructions and license.

As with all of my software installers, there are three text documents the installer shows to the user.

There's the License that is shown at the very start which contains the licensing terms that must be agreed to before the installer will do its thing.

Second is the Before, which contains general information. In this case, it outlines what the pack is and what it'll install. Also included is the pack version and its release date, just like the other two docs.

Thirdly, and lastly, is the After. This is just a quick message letting the user know that everything is installed.

The problems are down to the site each document points to: they're wrong. As this pack was originally released way back in 2002, the URLs are pointing to my old site www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk as opposed to here.

Another problem is the release date. Each of the three documents mentioned above have entirely different dates! No idea how that happened.

Oh, the file errors that I alluded to above. There was a note in the Before text saying that any .dll registration errors that occur can safely be ignored. While setting other properties within the installer, I noticed there was a flag for ignoring any errors that are thrown during the regsvr process. Now that flag is enabled so the errors are no longer shown, if they indeed occur at all this time around.

As well as general quality control, I wanted to get this site properly advertised in there as there is a huge amount of downloads of that pack. It seems people and companies just tell their customers to download the installer from my site. I might as well get a little bit of advertisement from it as it's not exactly like I'm gaining anything.

All → Software → Miscellaneous

It feels like I should be writing another post as it's been a few days. While that's technically true, there's been posts every day now but they were actually written earlier in the week and published once per day with the new timed publish update.

So I'll write a quick post about documentation. Specifically, the FileSieve documentation.

I haven't done any programming for the past couple of days and so thought I should at least do something, and that something was some FileSieve docs. I remembered a thing: a couple of days ago I looked at the Analytics for the FS documentation and it appears hardly anyone even looks at it.

So, really; am I just wasting my time with it? Honestly... yes, I think I am. I started reworking the single Automation page into an entire section before this realisation and now I'm starting to wonder if there's any point? Unlike a lot of the rest of the application, automation requires documentation.

Maybe I should just shove out the required info (and not bother polishing it all up) and be done with it and spend any other FileSieve time on the application itself.