A Debugger that Doesn’t Debug

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Despite all of InstallAware‘s claims of superiority, ease-of-use, and drop-dead simple compatibility and scripting capabilities compared to the competition in the market; it’s driving us crazy.

The biggest problem is the “debugger.” It’s in quotes for a reason. Take the world’s most powerful debugger, and try to debug an application that’s one big, huge “TRY” block – you’ll never get anywhere because you get a pretty error message instead. Except in our case, the message says “error,” and it leaves us to guess just where in the several hundred lines of badly-implemented scripting “MSIcode” the error is.

Even worse, if at all possible, are the breakpoints. By “break” they mean that the installer will “pause” right there – but you can’t really do anything with that pause – you can’t even access the IDE! It’s just like hitting the freeze-frame button on your Cable Box – it’s worthless.

InstallAware has a colorful history from stealing website designs to abusing the freeware communities – and you can always spot their CEO in the comments section claiming “that’s OK” because they have better products anyway. Well, it seems they don’t have even that…

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Ask: The Algorithm Sucks

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
12

Aks.com, the “new” (reborn) search engine poised to take over the world. Champions of personal privacy. Protectors data. Finders of answers, and the future of the web. Or at least, that’s what they’d have you believe. But don’t buy it, it’s all crap.

Ask.com always sucked. From when Jeeves the butler was still young and had a spring to his step, their results were never on-par with MSN, Yahoo, or fledgeling Google. They preyed on the new-comers to the web, giving them a corny man in a pinstriped suit and coattails bobbing on their screen, pointing them in the direction all the time. Ask claims their new algorithm is awesome – God only knows how much money went into the advertisement campaign alone.

We’re sorry to break it to you though: Ask.com’s search results are just as terrible – if not worse – than they ever were.

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“Spare Cycles” or Selfless Souls?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine, The Long Tail) posted an interesting article yesterday, comparing bored humans to spare CPU cycles – and more importantly, just how much they can accomplish. But while the article – as a whole – was really interesting and scientific and is a topic that has been discussed in scientific forums, dozens of publications, and is the basis for a lot of research, there was one paragraph that stood out:

Who knew there was so much untapped energy all around us, just waiting for a catalyst to become productive? But of course there was. People are bored, and they’d rather not be. [……]

That sheriff is watching a movie because he has spare cycles. Spare cycles are the most powerful fuel on the planet.  It’s what Web 2.0 is made up of. User generated content? Spare cycles. Open source? Spare cycles.1 MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life? Spare cycles. They’re the Soylent Green of the web.

While we’re sure that Chris probably didn’t mean anything by it and it was just a passing reference made without much thought, it does beg the question: do people actually believe that open source exists only because we [the developers, the contributors, the testers, the documenters, and just about everyone else involved in the process] are too bored and have nothing better to be doing?!

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  1. Emphasis added. ↩

EasyBCD 1.6 Completed!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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This just in from the up-all-night department: EasyBCD 1.6 has been completed!

EasyBCD is now 100% bug-free and all features have been wrapped-up and are more than ready to go. The 3 remaining bugs are in the installer, and that’s what the team is working on now. EasyBCD 1.6 is being shipped as we speak to the AAA review and distribution teams around the web – and EasyBCD 1.6 will be available to the general public sometime seen in the next few days. Stay tuned!

Recovering Corrupted Downloads the Right Way

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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You don’t have an OC-48 or even T3 in your home. It takes you 24 hours+ to download the latest DVD image of Ubuntu or Windows Vista. Or maybe it “only” takes you 12 hours+. Either way, you’ve just finished your download to realize that its corrupt: the crc32 and md5 hashes just don’t add up. You burn it any way, only to find that it crashes randomly at some point of the install – or if you’re really unlucky, once it boots and seems to be working fine.

It’ll take you an entire extra day (and night) to re-download that copy.. and this time you’ll want to make doubly-sure you don’t disconnect in the middle or hit the power-switch by accident. Then you stumble upon this article, and realize you’ve been going about this the wrong way. Because the answer isn’t to download it again, but to only download the parts that are corrupt, the parts that you need – and nothing more.

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{smartassembly} reviewed

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Programs. They start off in the IDE as nothing more than a blank page, then (with the blood, sweat, and toil of programmers and many sleepless nights) they turn into volumes of monospaced text, a standing testament to the dedication of programmers and the way they work. Then from the myriads of the source code and the magic of the compiler comes the executable file, the fruit of all the efforts. No one really sees the actual work that went into it: all they see is a file that runs and a program that works.

Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to go. But with Java and .NET, it doesn’t really work that way. These frameworks/virtual-machines rely on the concept of virtual machines, compiling to Byte Code (Java) or MSIL (.NET). What looks like an executable file is actually source code being passed on to the framework for translation and execution. So your source code is never safe, and it’s never really compiled.

We’ve been using .NET for our programs at NeoSmart Technologies for years now, and we’ve never really come across this as a problem, simply because our software’s always been and always will be freeware. However, in recent months we’ve seen some of our more popular programs like EasyBCD being decompiled and its source-code stolen left and right by those that don’t know any better. So we set off looking for the best obfuscation tool for the job, and found much more than what we were looking for.

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EasyBCD Bug-Bash Countdown!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Stop the emails already! EasyBCD 1.6 is nearly finished, and the EasyBCD 1.6 bug-bash count-down has begun!

At NeoSmart Technologies, we operate a tight ship. EasyBCD will come soon, but not before it’s 100% clean, bug-free, tested all over the place, and on-par with the quality releases you’ve come to expect from NeoSmart Technologies!

To quell these increasingly impatient emails, instant messages, private messages, and what-not, we’ve decided to try something new: you can now check how many bugs are left for EasyBCD 1.6! Don’t let the numbers fool you though, they go up and down depending on what new features we choose to add, what new bugs are discovered, and other unexpected things along the way. But here’s a little secret: EasyBCD 1.6 is very close. That number “11” there right now will probably go down and stay down! :)

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Windows Longhorn Server Beta 3 Public Downloads!

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Microsoft has just released the public downloads for Windows Longhorn Server Beta 3, not even a month after the April CTP!

Even more exciting, it’s a public download! Now anyone who wants to test out Longhorn can do so, with LHS Beta 3. It’s basically a beta-quality version of the April CTP, not too many more features; but supposedly faster (due to compilation optimizations), and more reliable. But we haven’t tested it yet, so don’t take this to the bank for fear of an overdraft.

In our opinion, Windows Longhorn Server and Windows Vista are entire opposites. If you’ve been holding out on the LHS-love because of lack-luster Vista performance, bugs, and instability: don’t worry, LHS isn’t like that – even now in the Beta stage. 

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WYSIWYG Linux Blogging Clients?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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It’s amazing: Linux, with all its millions of tiny freebie programs, FOSS applications, and even SourceForge and all its glory doesn’t have a single decent WYSIWYG blogging client. Not one!?

That’s what Google says anyway. There’s “xfy Blog Editor” for Mac OS X and Linux – except it’s a 32MB download of a trial version for a paid program that’s bloated, slow, and unintuitive. There’s Bleezer, a free Java-based blogging client (so it’s supposed to work everywhere), but it’s even worse. It’s ugly, refuses to connect to WordPress, out of date, and very buggy. Plus, it’s Java. And of course, everyone’s favorite: ScribeFire (aka Performancing). Except we’re talking Linux, not JavaScript; and we’re looking for more than a pretty face and a couple of options.

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Please Microsoft, Stop Holding .NET Back!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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As dedicated developers, end-users, and champions of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, we’re making a final plea to Microsoft and the .NET Framework team to save .NET and make it a real multi-platform framework. Please!

Sun could (and did) do it with Java, so why can’t Microsoft just swallow the pill already and provide real support for the .NET Framework on all operating systems? Yes, that includes Linux and Mac too. It’s ironic, because the .NET Framework has so much potential as a platform with its unique multi-language structure, nifty features, excellent libraries, (relatively) well-performing output, and darn-good innovative technologies like LINQ coming-up and XAML already here. Yet Microsoft just doesn’t realize that if they truly want .NET to succeed, they’ll have to bite the bullet and stop pretending that only officially supporting Windows won’t make users leave Linux/Mac/BSD/Whatever and buy licenses for Windows instead.

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