Erika recently introduced me to the xkcd forum. I had known about the comic from slashdot article, but it didn't occur to me to join the forum. I sort of figured it would be pretty exclusively about the comic. It isn't. Its very general, and generally fun.

Well, Erika and I just came back from an exciting trip to Chicago, where we installed, migrated, and debugged a large Sesame installation. The trip got extended by a couple of days. The work was hard, but generally fun. It reminded me of the old days, before I had Erika to insulate me from the real world - exciting and scary.

We came back to a huge amount of work getting ready for the release of Sesame 1.1.5 and Sesame 2.0, the big user's conference in Baltimore in two weeks, Sesame training classes in one week, and general windstorm of activity. We are both tired, but in a good way.

As some of you may know, Sesame is listed on CNet's "download.com" directory. For months we have had 4.5 stars. We didn't have five stars because one disgruntled user decided to provide a negative and very misleading review and rating. We know, of course, who this user is, and we are very disappointed that they can't manage to be, at the very minimum, honest. At the very least, it would be only reasonable that they stand up and identify themselves, rather than anonymously smear a product that they have taken advantage of happily, and decided to harass for completely unrelated personal petty reasons.

But that's okay. 4.5 star of 5 is okay. The real problem is that a user, posting their real name, address, and phone number, posted a good review, and a reply to the anonymous troll, It was well written and took the troll's criticisms into account, defeating them handily. The troll took exception to being so soundly defeated, and took the opportunity, the very next day, to anonymously, and without a supporting review to give us a slug (1 or fewer stars). We only have 11 ratings and 10 reviews in 5 months of being on CNet. To get slugged right after a response to our only negative review seems a strong indication as to who did it.

CNet, strangely, decided that that one rating, anonymous, with no review, a "drive-by", needed to be "weighted" much more than all of the ratings we had previously received. Rather than lower our score by a little less than 0.5 points - as an "average" would dictate, they lowered our "average" by more than a full point!

It does cause one to wonder if what the anonymity, the dishonesty, or simply the mean spiritedness that cause CNet to regard that one plug so highly.

Go figure.

My partner, Erika, got the bad news that one of the other members of the team wasn't going to make the beta documentation deadline. So, she put her head down and cranked through the entire SBasic programming manual in the space of a day. It was amazing to watch. She really is a remarkable person. I am very proud that I work for a company she pretty much defines.

Been working on fixed point math routines for the monetary type in Sesame 2.0. Lots of small changes everywhere.

Merry Christmas! I spent my merry Christmas with my family. For once, I didn't even look at work. It was nice, sleeping in, presents, good food.

With work on Sesame 2.0 winding down, been thinking a bit about what I want to do with Sesame 3.0. Been reading (and rereading) some of the experts in user interface design. So much I want to try!

It always bugged me that search for duplicates was too slow in Sesame 1.x.x. So after I tuned it up for Sesame 2.0, and got it to go pretty fast, it started to bug me that there was no way for the user to tell Sesame what they considered a duplicate record to be. So, last week I added a duplicates spec to Sesame 2.0. Its role in search mode is to let the user retrieve either all of the duplicate records, or all but one of each set of duplicates. Just like a regular search, the user is then placed in update mode with the appropriate result set, letting them perform any of Sesame's commands on the duplicate records. The spec in update mode allows the user set the meaning of duplicate for the delete duplicates command and the remove duplicates command.

I was worried that the other Lanticans would be upset that I broke the development freeze. But, it seems that they also wanted this feature - so they didn't mind too much.

Lately we've been fighting the spammers on our forum. They use a human to get past the captia. Then a robot comes by and posts spam to the forum. We've pretty much caught them during the interval inbetween, deleting the user before the robot shows up. What a pain for so little gain. I can't believe that it is worth the bother for the spammers.

A week of miscellaneous work. Some documentation for 2.0. Some form printing. Lots of this and that.

One of the areas in Q&A translation that is most difficult is the report format. Q&A reports are command based and written in a cryptic micro-language. Sesame's reports are based on objects or blocks based in a freeform grid, as are almost all modern report systems. There's a reason, a good reason, folks gave up on cryptic codes. Anyways - going from a command based system to an object based system is non-trivial to say the least. After working through some of these issues three or four times over the last five years, when the latest crop appeared I was at wit's end.

Fortunately, my partner at Hammer, Erika, stepped up to the plate (though not without trepidation). And now, after a day and half of plowing through some of the most complicated code in Sesame, she seems to have made it through to the "other side" with a fistful of hard won translated report features, Its not as hard as trying to do algebra in your head while walking a tightrope as you juggle angry monkeys and recite Dickins in Turkish. But still really hard to do.

I'm glad I didn't have to look at it again. They don't make aspirin that big.

Thank you Erika!

Over the last couple of days, Erika has been working very hard getting the documentation organized, setting up assignments, and documenting parts of Sesame 2.0. Its a lot of work, but it feels fantastic. Her energy alone really makes me feel like there's some real momentum towards releasing Sesame 2.0. Basically spent the weekend grinding through some of the more technical parts of the Sesame 2.0 documentation, and while there's still a lot to do, we both (especially Erika) got a lot done. Feels good. I hope having Erika taking care of some of this will free up some of Bill's time to do more live demos of Sesame, which have been very successful, and to keep selling to the big customers, where he has also been very successful.

That was a long difficult week. Erika was pretty sick with a bad cold. I don't feel very well. Ellen Popellen (my wonderful wife) has it now. There was and is a lot of hard work to do, including three classes. To elebrate making it to the weekend, Erika took me out for a wonderful meal at her favorite restaurant - Japanese food served by Kawaii-chan! Now if I can just survive MJ's party tomorrow night, bound to be a loud but brief event.

Last week one of our best customers asked for a feature to be added into Sesame 2.0, he wants to be able to save a "spec" from the SBasic programming language. I gave it some thought and decided that the best course of action would be to write a single command that allows several operations, save, load, set, run, on any the spec types, retrieve, sort, table, copy, mass update, quick report, import, and export.

Now if someone would just ask for a "duplicates" spec...

Erika, in spite of her cold, has three days of classes to give. She gave the first class today and did a great job. It was impossible to tell she wasn't feeling well.

I spent the day working on embedded mode in Sesame 2.0. In embedded mode, dialog boxes don't popup outside of the frame of the main window. Instead, they are embedded in the main window. I've been working the last few days to make it more consistent and get more of the popups to come up embedded.

In one of their strangest moves yet, in order to protect you from evil, MS has decided that you need to be warned when viewing web pages on your local harddrive. It seems that some of the evildoers have managed to get their evil onto your computer, and because MS uses an ill conceived plan to keep you safe based on "zones", wherein your local computer was once considered the safest zone, the evil pages were much more capable of doing harm by being in the "safest zone".

But, rather than preventing your browser from being able to do your system harm, no matter what "zone" it is "in", they have decided to make viewing a local HTML file intolerably difficult.

Odd.

Some advice: Scrap "ActiveX" now. Separate the OS from the user interface. Partition OS from applications. It only seems reasonable that you should be able to install and run just about any application without having to be logged in as administrator. Give us real user accounts. The list goes on and on. All concepts that were well established and well implemented well before MS was founded.

...since my last post. With only a few exceptions the development freeze is holding and I spend much of my time finding and fixing the alpha bugs. Most of these are coming in from a single tester and are, thereby, themed.

Erika is teaching a class tomorrow and the new furnace the lawyers office is due to be installed at the same time. It'll be a busy day.

I spend most of today working to "normalize" Sesame's use of fonts. Yawn.

One more day till all Sesame 2.0 feature development will cease. Then we go full on into testing and documenting and debugging and packaging and so forth. Should be fun!

I wrote a small program that scans our forums "live log" file and in a nice little window displayed who was logged in. The version I kept for myself also displayed their IP address and real identity, as opposed to their "screen name". I eventually gave this handy little utility away - of course that was a "sanitized" addition, that only showed the "screen name" of the people logged into the forum and the word "guest" for those people lurking on the forum, but not logged in.

Soon after I made this available, we upgraded the forum to the newest edition of the forum software, and my utility, which depended on changes to forum software's source code in perl, ceased working.

So, today, I rewrote the utility. This time no changes to the perl source needed. I also upgraded my private copy so it shows the actual resolved address of each of the visitors, as well as the time they last accessed (clicked on) the forum. I suppose I should resanitize it and release it back into the wild again.

One of the interesting things I've seen monitoring the forum in real time - MS spiders our site relentlessly. Google comes often, but they don't stay long, and seem to only come around when there have been changes. MS, one the other hand, seems to send multiple spiders at once, they stay for several minutes, go away, and then come right back. This is repeated for hours. They seem to examine the same information over and over again, even if nothing changes. Strange. I wonder how much bandwidth they are wasting worldwide.

The title pretty much says it all. I just finished keyword reports and an option so that a value in a column does not repeat. Great fun. C|Net has listed Sesame on its download.com site and many of our users left some really good reviews. you can see the download.com page here: http://www.download.com/Sesame-Database-Manager/3000-2065_4-10588098.html?tag=ls t-0-5