I've taken the right side bar off on the message boards so that there is more room to view messages and such. What do you think?

USA Today reviewed WindowBlinds 4 and it definitely made my day. Reviews usually make me cringe. That's because often times, when you're a small company, the reviewer cranks through the product in 10 minutes and whips up a review. Even when the review is favorable, it's often full of errors.

But USA Today really nailed it. It was true vindication.

You see, the problem with tech software is that people often don't realize just how dramatically it can improve over time. We still get people who talk about how "buggy" WindowBlinds is even though the last time they tried it was in beta back in 1999.

And for most of its history, WindowBlinds has had to do all kinds of clever tricks to work on OSes such as Windows 98 and ME.  The lowest common denominator (those two OSes) locked us into having to make trade offs to maximize compatibility and stability but would zap us in other areas such as performance and sometimes flakey behavior on weird applications.

But WindowBlinds 4 was created we decided to just focus on Windows XP as our target and then see what could and couldn't be done on other OSes. We knew our target audience would mostly have Windows XP. And Windows XP is a developer's dream. It is very customizable yet is truly an industrial strength OS. As a result, we didn't have to make trade offs, we could work with the theme system built into Windows XP. Plus we had a lot of help from Microsoft to make sure our work played "by the rules".

Despite all that, you still will see users on-line say "WindowBlinds sucks, it's slow and flakey" even though they never tried WindowBlinds 4.

The USA Today review deals with that right away by talking about the previous version of WindowBlinds (v3) and talks about how it was good but very imperfect an dhow much better WindowBlinds 4 is:

Stardock Software's WindowBlinds 3, a nifty Windows-skinner that allowed you to customize the Windows operating system graphical interface, was good, but it was far from perfect. Not every skin worked correctly and the WindowsBlinds 3 could leave your PC and some applications less than stable, forcing some users to remove it after the novelty wore off and headaches began.

WindowsBlinds is back with version 4, and it's a five-star product that you won't want to uninstall anytime soon.

It was pretty clear that he knew the product and truly gave previous versions a shot. A very refreshing review and as a developer at a small company, very gratifying. Kudos to USA Today! Totally made my day.

WindowBlinds 4's new configuration dialog.

My home page is getting a major overhaul. It's still a work in progrss and when it's done we hope to open it up so that everyone can have their own blog on the site with their own sub-domain.

Anyway, here's the link if you want to check out what mischief I've been up to!

https://www.joeuser.com

 

https://www.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=65

What exactly is crime? In the United States, what is considered "stealing" is amazingly narrowly focused.  I wrote this article (Draginol is the other handle I use and one I hope to eventually migrate to -- FROGboy? Ack, anyway..) that talks a bit on this subject.

Steven Den Beste, who I've known since "the OS/2 days" took a short sebatical to gather his thoughts and has returned to blogging:

http://denbeste.nu/

He has an interesting article this week about relative crime rates:

I ran into this post over the weekend which talks about crime rates in the US. It talks about trends over time, and compares American crime rates to those reported from Europe. He is dealing with two basic issues: the belief held by many in Europe that the US has far more crime than in Europe, and the fact that when it comes to certain kinds of violent crime there are certain groups which are disproportionately likely to be involved both as perpetrators and as victims.

 

Specifically, young black men who live in the inner city are far more likely to commit murder by gunfire, and far more likely to be victims of murder by gunfire. The overall murder rate for the US is somewhat higher than in Europe, but that's being skewed by this particular group. Calculated without them, it turns out that our murder rate is not really much different than in Europe, and in most other kinds of crime (e.g. armed robbery, burglary, rape) it seems our crime rate is much lower.

After having read that article, I spotted this one. The latest report on American crime rates has just been issued, and the crime rate has dropped even further.

 

Nonetheless, it leaves open the question of why it is that inner city blacks are so much more at risk, and whether anything can be done to help them. There have been many attempts to do so, and they're something of a cause célèbre in certain circles. Their apparent failure is used by many as evidence that there are still lingering effects of slavery and discrimination, even after all this time.

I have a problem, in general, with how we define "crime". First off, for whatever reason African Americans do commit a disproportionately greater percentage of violent crime. But whites commit a disproportional percentage of unreported crime. Crime that in actuality that is never enforced because it falls under "civil" laws.

Let me give you an example:

If I walk into a store and steal a candy bar, that counts as a crime.

But if I am a store and don't pay my distributor for that candy bar, it's not a crime. It's a civil action that can only be dealt with by the courts.

The former counts as a crime statistic, the latter does not.

In my brief 10 year career as a business owner, I've eaten around $720,000 in bad debt. That's right, $720,000 was effectively "stolen". But none of that has counted in any criminal report. It all falls under civil. To me, it's the same thing. Someone else took money that was owed us and put it in their own pockets.

The original OS/2 version of Galactic Civilizations, for instance, was published by a company called "Advanced Idea Machines". They never paid a cent in royalties on the released game. Hundreds of thousands of royalties were pocketed by the unscrupulous owner. My first thought was to call the police. This was a cut and dry issue. He was stealing. Nope, the only recourse was a civil lawsuit. I was a college student then, I couldn't afford a lawyer and because the publisher resided in another state, suing would be an expensive ugly mess and no attorney I did talk to was willing to do it on contingency, especially since the publisher appeared to be a master at shell games.

So then I learned my lesson and decided to publish Galactic Civilizations II directly via Stardock. And the game did really well at retail selling tens of thousands of copies. Unfortunately, we only got paid a fraction of what we were owed. Why? Well even though we published the game, we still had to sell to distributors who in turn sell to the retailers. Our main distributor, Blue Orchards, took the hundreds of thousands of dollars they collected, paid themselves, and filed for bankruptcy.

Between that time and very recently, Stardock switched to selling via its own website. Now the money goes directly from the customer to us. But our most recent game, once again, Galactic Civilizations but this time for Windows, is published by Strategy First. A reputable publisher as far as we know. The game has done very well at retail and has won numerous awards. Our first royalty check is actually due this week and we have high hopes that we'll actually get paid this time around.

But the point is, I am not sure that the discrepancy between white crime and black crime is as large as people think. It's just that crimes committed by non white collar people tend to count in these statistics yet stealing by white collared people tends to count as a "civil issue". To me, stealing is stealing. But when it comes to crime statistics, it seems to be dependent on how rich you are.

WinStyles 1.5 has been released.

WinStyles is the program pretty much everyone uses to put together "suites" of skins, themes, icons, walls, etc.

It lets you create and apply entire suites in the click of a button. It's been used by companies including Nintendo, Microsoft, nVidia, ATI, Touchstone, Warner Bros, Pixtudio, The Skins Factory, and others to create their suites.

A suite might contain a visual style, an icon package, a media player skin, a wallpaper, and a cursor pack (for example.

Version 1.5 has a much streamlined interface. You can now make .suite files that contain files that are both local and on the Internet. For example, if you wanted to create a theme with your own DesktopX theme but used a particular WindowBlinds visual style from WinCustomize, you could have the DX theme packaged and have the .suite include a link to the WB visual style. When a user applied it, it would download the parts it needs and then apply them along with the parts that are part of the suite locally.

WinStyles can be downloaded at www.winstyles.com

Screenshot: https://www.stardock.com/products/winstyles/ws-aug03.jpg

WinStyles is part of Stardock's Object Desktop suite of desktop enhancements that includes WindowBlinds, IconPackager, DesktopX, ObjectBar, and much more.

Ever wondered just how bad various movies are at physics, check this site out for reviews on popular movies from the physics point of view.

My diabolical friend Norm lent me a series of comics called "Rising Stars". It's created by the same guy who made Babylon 5. On the NGs, we always refer to him as JMS.

It's a fantastic series of comic books. In a nutshell, what happens is that in a small Illinois town, a flash of light occurs one evening. All the women in that town who were pregnant at the time (around 115) gave birth to children who would have super powers of various kinds.

The series goes through their lives as children and young adults and how the world deals with having super kids in their midst. In their early adulthood, some of them discover something -- the energy that gives them these power is finite and shared by all of them. When one of them dies, that energy is redistributed making the survivors more powerful. It doesn't take long for all hell to break loose then.

The series isn't done yet. Unfortunately JMS has stopped working on it for now due to some vague dispute over the script being written for a movie adaptation of the series. Which is a real shame because it is an incredibly compelling story. It would make a really good mini-series. The stories are very solid and compelling. It's not a matter of some of these guys are good guys and some are bad guys. The characters are much more complex than that, much more realistic. It reads more like a Stephen King novel than a comic book.

If JMS ever finishes the series, it's something I would highly recommend. Though for now you may want to stay back since it does suck you into it and it can get frustrating having the end of the series just out of reach.

Here are some good websites I found for it:

• http://www.jmscomics.com/rsrc/
• http://hometown.aol.com/Apocky/RISINGSTARS/index.htm
• http://risingstars.8m.com
• http://www.visi.com/~wildfoto/risingstars1.html

 

Stardock has released an update to its popular freeware dock program -- ObjectDock.

ObjectDock 0.99 (still in beta) is a program that combines task managing and program launching into a single "dock" that can be placed anywhere on the screen and customized to look and feel very differently from system to system.

Docks are a powerful UI convention made popular first on NeXTStep and later found on other OSes such as OS/2 and more recently MacOS X.

ObjectDock 0.99 is a significant departure from past versions as Stardock has begun to try to take the dock on its own path.  Apple recently shut down development of a popular dock program called y'Z dock which closely emulated the MacOS X "Aqua" dock.  Stardock intends ObjectDock to stand on its own with the goal of being the most versatile and customizeable dock available to meet a wide variety of user goals.

New in version 0.99 is:

+ Docklets. Users can now create their own docklets to put on the dock. Docklets are basically plugins that can display informatiom (weather, time, disk space, RSS feeds, etc.).

+ Dock item backgrounds. You can now control what the background of a dock item looks like.

+ A host of new effects for the attention animation (i.e. say an instant message has arrived, the IM icon can bounce or spin or rock).

+ Suport for attention items. When a running task is on, a graphic shows up under the icon letting you know it's in use.

+ Control of whether a new instance or existing instance of a program should be launched when a program is clicked on.

+ Lots of polish and performance tweaks to make it faster and easier to use.

+ Reduced memory usage

Stardock expects to release ObjectDock 1.0 in September as a freeware program. Stardock also makes the popular desktop extension suite, Object Desktop which can be found here: (www.objectdesktop.com).

You can download ObjectDock at www.objectdock.com.

There is an article that is making its rounds on the net today from CDFreaks.com that has some discouraging news:

CDRs have a relatively short lifespan. It appears that within 2 years of their making, most CDRs become unreadable.

One has to wonder what that means for DVDs as people start putting their home videos onto DVD-R or DVD+Rs.