WhosOnline has been deprecated
WhosOnline was an application that would scour the offline buddies of an AIM screename and attempt to discover those which were invisible. This software is long since non-working.
WhosOnline used a simple bug in AIM that would allow the presence information of someone invisible to be available through their profile. Simply requesting the profile and examining the response would allow one to determine whether someone was invisible or offline.
AOL has long since patched this bug, and WhosOnline is no more. There is no available download–but it wouldn’t discover invisible buddies anyway. This website is linked to, and I receive many requests for this application, but it simply doesn’t exist anymore.
Digsby Widget
I’ve been using Digsby since it came out in February, and I’ve had the Widget attached to my Facebook profile, but I’ve added it here now.
The Digsby Widget is a little flash application that allows users on a website to directly contact you via Digsby. This is my widget for this site:
When a user clicks the object to enable it, they show up on my Digsby contact list.
Just type into the widget to send a message!
It’ll show up on my computer, just like a regular IM window:
I’ve never seen anything like this in any other IM client, and although it’s not really all that useful for many people, it’s certainly a cool feature. Feel free to strike up a conversation with me!
Digsby-ToGo current issues
This is a list of the current known issues with DTG:
- When there are not any IM windows open, the contact list will be blank and offer no indication that there are not any open windows.
- When a window is closed locally, the remote client does not remove the page. This functionality is expected, however the ability to Send still exists, even though is will fail.
- There is a case where a window cannot be located even when the window cache is built, I’m working to find this one.
- When another session is created, or the session is cleared, you may receive the You have been logged out. Message more than once.
- If there is an error contacting the web server (From the bridge), that message will be lost. I am working to build a queue so requests are never lost.
- There is no visual indication in the IM window that DTG is active. I’m working to build a solution that would show this visually without getting in the way.
- There is not any indication when a new IM comes in to the remote client. I’m looking for a solution to this.
- Internet Explorer is not supported by the remote client: This is expected, since the site is currently Gecko/WebKit specific. I will be building a desktop-browser solution soon. If anyone is willing to help with this (looking for someone experience in building pretty websites), let me know.
- The client constantly reconnects every X (likely 5 minutes) and checks for messages even though there isn’t any need – this is expected, but will be optimized to not do so soon.
- The bridge application opens slowly: this is due to connecting at startup, this will be fixed soon. My web server isn’t exactly speedy, and sometimes connect times are relatively high.
- There isn’t any way to see more than 20 (or so) lines on the remote client: This is expected, however I think I have found a solution which will allow the user to toggle between “functional” and “history” modes, viewing past lines.
- Emoticons are not supported: This will be coming soon, however I am not sure whether it would be best to convert to text, or convert to images, perhaps a setting.
- Login and registration pages don’t look good: They are temporary, I will replace them with iPhone/browser specific ones when I can.
- UAC does not prompt for elevation for the Skin Installer under Windows Vista: A fix is in the works for this.
- Requests often get queued up on top of each other, and messages are added to the same window twice: I need to figure out how that is possible before I fix it.
- Status messages and “day change” time stamps are displayed strangely – I’ll have a fix for this soon.
With all these changes, I will soon be implementing a version check–you will need to be using the latest build every time you restart the bridge.
If you find any other bugs, please email or IM them to me so I can be aware–and fix them, as fast as possible!
WMP11 Full screen “locking” – is that a joke?
A new (or the first I’ve seen it) feature in Windows Media Player 11 is the ability to “lock” the player in fullscreen mode. Sounds like a great idea, you want to allow the computer to be left unlocked so you can watch a movie–but also to keep it secure.
WMP allows you to enter a 4-digit PIN and disallow Full-Screen mode to be exited without unlocking with that PIN. This would be great.. if it worked. Just select Ctrl+Alt+Del -> Show Task Manager and the task manager window will appear. Select the window and WMP will forcefully exit full screen mode. How could this be overlooked?
Digsby ToGo, and Digsby URL resolution!
I’ve been too busy the last couple of days to update, but I would like to showcase two small projects I have been working on.
First, is Digsby ToGo:
Digsby ToGo is a remote access solution, similar to Trillian Anywhere. It allows you to access your current conversations from a web browser, and to interact exactly as how you would at the desktop. This solution is seemless to the chat partner.
And the other project, is to have Digsby resolve URL’s in conversations. So a link to youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgpzUo_kbFY – which carries no meaning, will replaced with the title of the page, far more descriptive. This all happens in the background.
More to come!
Windows XP SP3: Give Microsft a break!
I ran into this article today over at TechSpot, and became immediately annoyed at the way they are nitpicking at the decisions Microsoft made on the release of SP3.
I put SP3 on my laptop last week, it installed much the same way that XP SP1 and SP2 did, it took around 25 minutes to install, and everything feels the same as before the update. I have had problems in the past updating computers to SP2 and getting a blue-screen due to unexpected winlogon.exe termination. Perhaps it’s just that I do like Microsoft, and I cut them slack and don’t expect everything to be perfect, or perhaps it’s because I work in the industry and know how complicated it can be to push an update of this magnitude.
Windows is really complicated. It’s not as simple as it looks from a user perspective, there are very complex systems in Windows (this does apply to any operating system–OSX and Linux are just as complex), pushing an update can have an adverse affect on any one of those systems.
The Microsoft Windows operating system supports thousands of devices. More than 30,000 [as of October 2006] drivers have been released; more are introduced daily.
It is not a secret that the success of Windows in the recent years has been largely due to the massive hardware and software that are compatible with Windows, and only Windows. Microsoft has certainly put a substantial amount of effort into ensuring that more software and more hardware works with Windows than any other platform. When Apple releases an update to OSX, things break. Users expect software to break. Many applications weren’t compatible with 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard. Apple sees this as acceptable, and perhaps necessary to build a rock solid OS over time. I’m quite sure that the API for OSX has changed and evolved over the years, and is far cleaner and simple to use than Windows win32 API. This backwards compatibility–something that Microsoft often gets flack for, is one of their strongest selling points, and the track record of compatibility is one that businesses can depend on. Something written for Windows XP will still likely work on Windows 95, unless it is using advanced graphics, or has a dependency on the .NET CLR.
For these reaons, a service pack–or even an update can and eventually will break something. It’s a delicate system, if you want massive hardware and software support, you will need to deal with some of the shortcomings.
The aforementioned article also mentions how SP3 won’t be installed on any computer with IE8 Beta–and that if you install on a computer with IE7, it will no longer be able to roll back to IE6. This is because the components in IE (mainly the Trident Layout engine) are used in other parts of Windows. If the service pack allowed IE8b installed, or to roll back to a time before the service pack, file version inconsistencies would be created. There are many ways that this could happen, and it would have had to have been extensively tested. This costs more, and benefits very very few users. Most would not complain about the limitation.
Imagine RIT – Innovation + Creativity Festival
Today was the first annual Imagine RIT Festival, hosted at the RIT campus in Rochester, New York. RIT was expecting a maximum of 30,000 people to attend, and although the weather wasn’t favorable for the event, drizzling without much sun, more than 10,000 people came to the campus. There were more than 400 exhibits around the campus–not only in the academic buildings–but also in the quads and Field House. The Xerox ‘WOW’ center was setup much the same way our career fairs are setup. Some of the memorable exhibits included RIT EyeTracking, and Calling Earth to Second Life. I spent a few hours walking around the campus checking everything out, there was some seriously cool stuff. Digsby was also present, and I scored a t-shirt from Steve.
The purpose of Imagine RIT, aside from kicking off the Rochester Festival season is to promote the university as not only a steller teaching university, but also as one that is is an innovation university, with an emphasis on research and creativity. RIT is ranked highly for undergraduate education, and having one of the oldest co-op programs has earned it a reputation which attracts many of the best employers in the USA.