I'm involved in a lot of virtual communities on-line.  And one of the trends I see regularly is, if someone knows what you do for a living, inevitably they'll twist what you say to fit some sort of stereotype of the evil capitalist.

For instance, if I'm on a skin site and I say "I like your Litestep theme" it's only a matter of time before someone says "Oh you're just trying to trick him into letting you make a WindowBlinds version! Can't you ever stop trying to sell your stuff?"  Because yea, at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon that's what I'm doing, I'm scouring through websites trying to corrupt the youth to make a little extra money so that I can pay for my private yet. Sheesh.

Sometimes I'd like to give them a taste of their own medicine. Find out what they do for a living.."So, you work at a book store eh? So when you posted how you liked that new Star Wars game you were really just trying to suck us into your lame book store to buys some crummy Star Wars books! Can't you give it a rest! Everyone knows that fan fiction is better anyway and it's free! Die capitalist pig!"

Few times is this trend brought into relief more than what I saw today.  On a website discussing whether it's "legal" to create and use msstyles (an unsupported Microsoft skin format) I wrote:

MSStyles aren't illegal IMO.

However, they ARE derivatives of Luna.msstyles which is a copyrighted file.

So if I took, for instance, the Windows XP kernal, changed some bits and re-distributed it, is that legal? I'm not sure. That's how a lot of boot screens ARE distributed btw.

But the whole premise of this topic I think is problematic - is it illegal? Who's to say. Microsoft has had 3 years to weigh in. We do know they don't approve of msstyles being used by third parties but that's a far cry from them going after third parties who use them or create software that use them.

My personal opinion is that what you do on your own computer is your business.

Amazingly, someone read this and responded with the following (and bear in mind that this is on the same page as my response):

Frogboy... ,you shouldn't try to take an underground comunity like this as professional as you wanted, if everything was right, and about legal stuff like some foreigners see the US when a kid sues for a mosquito that was copyrighted and bit an apple in his backyard, maybe you wouldnt even have born.

When stuff like this happens on Capitalism Societies, it makes me wonder why doesnt the "Benefit for yourself without hurting" and the "Bigger Animal Dominates" societies persisted

And it so lame how even FROGBOY ported a inspirat skin that was an "illegal file" at first to windowblinds, and submitted by himself to a monopolized website full of old people ;[

And I dont hate frogboy itself, I hate the way he thinks about stuff sometimes to "conquer" the world

So apparently, when I say that I don't think msstyles are illegal what I'm really saying that they ARE illegal and that you should go out and buy WindowBlinds right now. And when I say what people do on their own computers is their own business what I really mean is that I want to control what you do on your computer as part of my latest Pinky & the Brain style world conquest strategy.

And sadly, this happens regularly.  As soon as someone figures out that I write software for a living, it's almost inevitable that everything I say will get warped by someone into some 2D characterture of what they imagine some evil capitalist is saying.  My words end up being like adult-speak on a Charlie Brown cartoon and replaced with lots of evil laughter and hand rubbing.

I guess I should be thankful that I didn't put a Donate to Tsunami victims post up somewhere lest someone accuse me of wanting to harvest the organs of Tsunami victims or something!

So how are we doing? Let's take a look at the new WinCustomize and the old WinCustomize side by side. here's what they looked like to the typical user.

The new site doesn't have the theme system in yet (allowing users to customize the look and feel of the site). It's in the work queue but it won't be ready for a bit. Lots of little features and bugs and glitches to work out first. So what I'm looking at is how much information is conveyed in both while at the same time how complicated or how simple are these designs?

Let's put them directly side by side:

On the new site, you can see about half of the skin galleries.  On the old site, you could only see the top 4.  On the new site, you can see the top 5 skins. On the old site, you could see the top 9 without scrolling.  On the new site the featured skin and screenshot are together in one area.  On the old site they were separated.  On both sides you can see the featured premium suite but the new site also lets you see the featured articles on the page.  Both have a banner ad at the top if you're not logged in and both have a randomly selected item from the store.  The new site doesn't have a sponsor button at the top - it's been moved to the bottom.

I personally preferred the old logo. I think we'll have to find a way to work that one back into the site. If anyone wants to volunteer to try to put together the old logo feel free. I think there's a version of it in the shirts area of the graphics gallery here.

What we have tried to do is have a site that is much cleaner and more easily understandable by new users while at the same time vastly increasing the amount of "stuff" that one might get to. The tabs are a big part of that and having a lot of the key data available on the home page without having to scroll down.

So what do you think? Do you like the direction the new launch has taken so far?

In the good old days we used Hitbox to measure WinCustomize.com's traffic. And it was good. But then one day they stopped providing it for free and in fact made it bloody difficult to even pay for the service.  Which is ironic because we would be willing to pay for a reliable, accurate and reasonably detailed site traffic monitoring service (withing reason).

But everyone we try out seems insist on us contacting some sales guy. Um no, I want to enter in a company credit card number, enter the monthly service plan choice and have some HTML provided to put it on the site. But oh well. So we found Site Meter.

Site Meter gives us results that we like but we're not sure how accurate they are. Hitbox used to report that we got around 70,000 unique visitors per day and that came out to being around 1 point something million per month when they discontinued the service over a year ago. Siter Meter, by contrast, claims we get around 500,000 visitors per day.  But that's not "unique" visitors. 

And that's okay. All we're interested in knowing is whether overall traffic is good or bad on a given day relative to other days.  Which is where Sitemeter has been giving us problems this week.  Our peek hours are between 9am and 4pm EST.  But in the past 3 days, according to SiteMeter, traffic just collapses between those hours and then picks up later in the day (if you're looking at the graph, the part of the day we haven't been to is 0, just know that hours 9 through 16 should be the peek hours). 

It's as if the system freaks out at having that many hits and shuts down or something.  Which is annoying.  We noticed that the page hits it records stays the same and what it instead says is that the average visit time on WC is 20 minutes which is absurd. It's more like 5 minutes for the average user (yes, plenty of people spend hours on the site but that's not the norm when you're talking about tens of thousands of people on in a given hour).  So during our peek hours, our hourly visitor level according to SiteMeter drops from 25,000 visitors at 8am to under 9,000 by 2pm).  That makes no sense at all.

Our first concern was that maybe WinCustomize basically crashes for most people when the site gets really busy.  That it gets overloaded and nobody is actually able to do anything and so the hit counter isn't being accessed.  But on our IRC channel (irc.stardock.com #stardock) I asked there and no one had any problems at all. So that's not it.

Late this afternoon we took the Sitemeter counter off one of the servers to see what affect that would have.  None. Which makes us more suspicious that perhaps WC's traffic reaches a level that Sitemeter can't handle it.  I'm not aware of any sites as popular as WC that uses Site Meter. The only site I know of that's quite popular that uses it is Instapundit which isn't anywhere near the same level (very popular for a blog site of course). 

My personal theory is that maybe Site Meter gets overflow errors if the page view count exceeds 32,535.  I say that because even as traffic plummets during the day (according to the graph) the page view counter seems to max out at around 32,500. And when the peek time passes, the page views stays still very high but miraculously, the visitors per hour jumps back up (18,000 last hour and that's with the site meter button only on one server).

Anywya, I wonder if anyone else has run into this sort of thing?

You can now purchase and download The Political Machine from Stardock! 

We are also working on version 1.1 of The Political Machine with updates to various campaign issues, new candidates, and more! We expect to have that out in the next couple of weeks. It will be a free update for all players of The Political Machine.

To purchase and download the game immediate go here: https://www.politicalmachine.com/purchase.asp

Check out this demo of Avalon and XAML working together. Avalon in a technology that will be in the next version of Windows but will also be back ported to Windows XP. It let's users create all kinds of visually enticing interfaces using scripts and able to access 3D graphics hardware.

DesktopX will eventually make use of XAML & Avalon under the covers to make doing this stuff even easier.

Over as CES Linksys will be announcing a new series of 802.11g products that integrate SRX, a new speed boosting feature.

Currently, 802.11g networks have a range of between 120 and 160 feet and a transfer at 54mbps.

Linksys claims that the SRX enabled 802.11g products can provide 3 times the range (450 feet) and is 8 times faster (i.e. nearly USB 2 speed wireless).

It's completely compatible with other 802.11g and 802.11b networks.

The wireless router is expected to sell for $199 and each card around $129 and should be available at stores shortly.

Amazon.com is running a donation system on its home page to provide aid to tsunami victims. Since it has pages in different countries, you can see how well it does per country.

USA: http://www.amazon.com/

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/PX3BEL97U9A4I/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $13,910,657.00

Number of donations: 171,710

Population of USA: 293,027,571

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0475

Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/

http://s1.amazon.com/paypage/P1K4EVLBRBZ771/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $62,579.82

Number of donations: 1,023

Population of Canada: 32,507,874

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0019

United Kingdom: http://www.amazon.co.uk/

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/P3RDR40PV9HS5E/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $391,910.39

Number of donations: 7,611

Population of United Kingdom: 60,270,708

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0065

Germany: http://www.amazon.de/

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/P3USRMAJ8GVL0F/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $170,477.00

Number of donations: 3,427

Population of Germany: 82,424,609

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0021

France: http://www.amazon.fr/

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/PMS8ISE6626LD/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $29,161.50

Number of donations: 795

Population of France: 60,424,213

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0005

Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/P3C9345RXUJQOM/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $87,818.00

Number of donations: 2,488

Population of Japan: 127,333,002

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0007

I don't find the numbers as compelling as you might think. For instance, perhaps people from Germany or France go to amazon.com instead? Or perhaps the number of Internet accounts in those countries is fewer? We don't know. 

What we can, however, conclude is that anyone harping on how much GOVERNMENTS are providing to aid other countries is only part of the story.

The US government may have "only" provided $350M (so far) to help victims of the tsunami, that's a drop in the bucket compared to private organizations.

A more fair measurement of how "stingy" different countries are would be to look at their GDP and then look at what % of the GDP the government confiscates for itself.  The US government confiscates something like 25% of the GDP of its citizens compared to twice or more in some European countries.

Then add the cost of military expenses in here.  Sweden, for instance, is giving a lot of money for its size. Great for them. However, how is that aid actually getting there? At the end of the day, someone actually has to take that money, buy supplies with it, transport it to the region and deliver it to people. And guess how that's being done? The US military.

People were wrong about the US being the world's police. It's also the world's fire department.

After months of work, the next significant version of WindowBlinds is nearly ready for release - version 4.5 which has a host of cool new features that should make skinners and users alike pleased.

Check out the full article to get a fairly detailed wrap up and a quick demo of some of the new features in action.

Ah customization of Windows. It's a gradual process.  Using the popular voice over IP chat program, Ventrilo, let's take that journey with WindowBlinds 4.5.

...In the beginning there was Windows classic. And it was good. Simple, fast clean.  Then Windows XP came and it came with a skin (known as "visual styles" when you're "skinning" the entire GUI).

And so the title bars and borders were changed. And it was still good. But not complete. For only theme-aware applications can be skinned by Microsoft's msstyles run through Windows XP.

But there was Stardock, who had been skinning the GUI of operating systems for many years. They had WindowBlinds.

WindowBlinds could skin even non-theme aware programs (i.e. most programs aren't theme aware). And so it was better.  But skinning more elements of the GUI also came at a performance cost that some noticed. 

So then Stardock came out with WindowBlinds 4.x. culminating with WindowBlinds 4.4 released in 2004. And its use of hardware acceleration and other features exclusive to Windows XP make WindowBlinds not just faster than the default Windows XP style (so fast that the high performance PC company, Alienware chose to bundle WindowBlinds with their computers) but on part with the original classic Windows interface.  Users could have their cake and eat it too.

And soon WindowBlinds 4.5 will be here. It has some very key features:

Hue/Saturation colorization. WindowBlinds had colorizing before but not like this. Before, you could apply a color to an entire skin. This worked on some skins quite well but on many skins not so well. Why? Because if you take a blue and yellow skin (For instance) and apply red to the whole thing, the entire thing looks..well washed out.

Hue shifting is different. You shift the colors of the skins rather than apply a color mask to them. This has the effect making skins look a lot more normal and interesting.

So a skin like VectorCell might look like this normally and we'll load up the Setup dialog of that Ventrilo program so you can see the dialog of a pretty busy looking window:

But with Hue and saturation shifting it could then be made to look like this:

Notice how natural it looks? It doesn't looked washed out. Even if you would never want a purple skin on your desktop, it now looks like it designed with purple in mind.

Or how about if you wanted to have it be a more vibrant blue?

You can have that too.  Or any other color you can think of. All looking as if the skin was always meant to have that.

But let's go with something harder. Something more challenging. How about some skin that has lots of colors?

Here's Faux-Toon. It has many colors. You could not colorize this with the old system because it would look very muddied with a single color grafted onto everything.

Not that we'd recommend this color combination but rather just as a demonstration of the difference between hue-shifting (a WindowBlinds 4.5 feature) and what you can imagine applying some arbitrary color to the entire thing.

Plus you have the fact that there's thousands of WindowBlinds skins out there:

And once last look at this dialog using the default Windows XP msstyle:

So in other words, if you want Windows XP to look like Windows XP consistently you will want WindowBlinds.

The Second new feature of WindowBlinds 4.5 is the ability for WindowBlinds visual styles to now include special styles just for the frames of Internet Explorer / Explorer browser windows. We don't have any examples done yet so we'll have to wait to show some screenshots. But you can probably imagine what skin authors will be able to do with this.  We may expand this further so that in a given skin, skin authors can define specific frames for specific programs within a single skin if they choose.

The Third new major feature of WindowBlinds 4.5 is the ability to have per-pixel alpha channels on the Start menu itself. Those of you who like very nice Start menus can imagine the cool stuff that can be done with this.  We don't have any skins done yet that show this off (we're working on them now).

The Fourth major change in WindowBlinds 4.5 which may get into 4.5 or have to wait until a minor update is the ability to have per-pixel alpha on menus.  Many skinners have requested this for years.

The Fifth major addition to WindowBlinds 4.5 (or it may get into a subsequent update depending on time) is support for the 64bit version of Windows.

Plus, there are tons of small tweaks and changes here and there to improve performance, fix bugs found/reported, etc.

So there you have it, WindowBlinds 4.5. It should be out in the next couple of weeks.  If you have Object Desktop you'll get this automatically.  You can purchase WindowBlinds or Object Desktop here.

You know how people are always putting together various funny lists from the previous years? Feel free to add in the comments area:

Top 100 things we didn't know a year ago.

The Knucklehead awards

Funiest political quotes

Top 50 Search terms of 2004

Top 20 gaming lows of last year

2004's dumbest criminals

Weirdest stories of 2004

2004 Darwin Awards

Worst Reporting awards

Have fun!