Blog
It's been a fantastic week at Memecode headquarters...
Date: 12/6/2015
Tags: windows
I bought a cheap new Win8.1 tablet. Which was amazing for about 24 hours until I decided that I didn't want the 5gb restore partition and tried to remove it and resize the C: to fill the available space. Yeah that didn't go so well and I think I've bricked it.
  • Said restore partition doesn't have any trouble shooting or repair tools (I did copy it to USB first).
  • I found the BIOS but it won't read an external OS on USB if I set that to the first boot device.
  • The partitioning software crashes at boot on the main C: partition install of Windows.


To add insult to injury my main Windows 7 install on the desktop PC died tonight. It boots to a blank black screen. Safe mode hangs with lots of disk activity. It got stuck on the Paragon HFS+ driver, so I booted into Mac and removed that (copied elsewhere). And I'm trying to fix the disks one at a time with Disk Manager. Currently it's in some sort of infinite loop verifying my Win7 NTFS partition. Sigh.

Seems like all my PCs hate me at the moment.

One thing to be happy about is the fixes to HTML table layout I implemented today. There were some bugs related to table layout for spanned cells that have non-dynamic width specifications that are larger than the available space. And also an off by one error in the block element flow code. Slowly that HTML control is getting quite solid.
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SourceForge to Github Migration
Date: 4/6/2015
Tags: open-source
You may or may not already be aware of this but SourceForge has started taking control of popular apps that have abandoned their SourceForge project and moved elsewhere for the purpose of injecting adware into the installer for said products. The Gimp and nmap are some high profile examples.

This of course goes directly against my principles. And I can't in good conscience continue to use SourceForge to host any of my Open Source apps or libraries. So as of today Lgi, i.Ftp, i.Mage and i.Hex are all hosted on Github.

I need some experience using git anyway.

My main concern is that I can't actually delete the projects on SourceForge, and they may decide to take them over and zombify them in the same manner as the Gimp. There is very little I can do about that unfortunately. Personally I will consider SourceForge as a point of last resort when getting software.
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Supporting Work
Date: 1/6/2015
Tags: scribe
It seems that a few things have gradually become a problem. Firstly customers with accents in their name are getting bad key's generated off the InScribe purchase page that they land on after buying the software. This is caused by less than stella coding on my part. But something that I'm trying to fix. The issue is that the data coming from PayPal is URL encoded and is in an unknown Charset. I've implemented some PHP in the purchase page to find the charset in the headers and do all the conversion for the $name. However in trying to test it I ran into a fairly annoying PayPal sand box bug.

The PayPal Sand Box Bug

If you go to create a new test user with an accent in their name you'll get a field validation error along the lines of "Only use letters". Which makes it hard to test purchase scripts with non-latin characters in the buyers name. I did however find a way around this, and that is to use the bulk upload tool to create the users. You can download a .tsv template direct from the PayPal sand box site on the "Create New User" page. From that fill out the details, and supply whatever name you want. Because the file is saved in unicode it bypasses the broken field validation stuff. Then upload that and you got a test user with accents. (Haven't tried Asian characters yet, but I will at some point). My new problem is that even after doing that and putting a sandbox button on my site the purchase script gets an empty response from PayPal when it checks the transaction. Fun times.

The Installer/Uninstaller

Everyone knows that the official way to uninstall a Windows application is to use the Control Panel uninstall page. It had completely escaped my attention until now that Scribe provides no such uninstaller entry in that list (Thank you dear user for reminding me). So I've gone and added the right registry entries to list the uninstaller, with help / support links, and the current version. The version is read straight from the .exe during installer compile time so it's always correct. Also the installer has been refactored to have a Desktop/Portable switch baked right in. Huzzah.

The Help

Also the help files shipping with Scribe have drifted from reality. So I'm in the process of reading through everything and updated all the parts that aren't correct anymore. Some areas might need fleshing out as well.

OAUTH2 Support

An initial draft implementation of OAUTH2 support for Gmail IMAP was shipped in the most recent build of Scribe. I'm quite keen to get feedback about it. So if you have tried to get it working and either succeeded or failed. Let me know.
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