Greetings,
It’s been some time since I made a major announcement, and I thought I’d give some insight into what’s been going on.

There’s a lot of JBidwatcher details, but the first and most important thing for me to note is this:

I’m having a son!
My wife is 21 weeks pregnant, and we just recently had the ultrasound where we determined the gender, and it’s a boy! The baby is due in early May, and I can tell you with some certainty that I’m not going to be updating JBidwatcher around then. :) More seriously, we’re incredibly excited, and a little scared!

Congratulation – that will defenitely make you the winner
Having a child is absolutely one of the biggest events in a lifetime.

Congratulations on the impending great news!

Congratulations Mr Schweers. Life changing indeed. :)

I hope all goes well.

Congratulations from me…

I am so happy for you. I truly want a baby myself, if only my wife would agree to it..
Congratulations again. You are a lucky man!

Congratulation!

Congratulations… We are due on March 6 (a girl). Good luck getting your programming done after your son is here!!

Will JBidwatcher 2 be portable? please :D

Greetings,
Hmmm… Define ‘portable’? You mean on a USB-drive?

I’ve poked at that problem a few times in the past. I believe it’s possible to set up a portable configuration with the current version, and I don’t believe anything I’ve done in JBidwatcher 2 will change that. (Well, it might on OS X, in retrospect.)

Describe what you want to do with it, and on what platform…?

— Morgan Schweers, Cyber*FOX*!

wow that was a fast response!
yep, by portable I simply mean run from a USB an not store anything locally or in the registry.
I didnt do a full sweep of the registry but I find jbid’s config file: C:\Documents and Settings\%user%\.jbidwatcher
If that could be stored in an ini it would be fantastic :)
platform=winXP

Thanks!

Greetings,
Well, everything JBidwatcher stores is located via the Java ‘user.home’ system property.

The most common way to run JBidwatcher out of a USB drive is to write a batch/command file which goes:

java -Duser.home=D:\ -Xmx512m JBidwatcher-{version}.exe

where D:\ is the path to your USB drive. If the USB drive has a different location all the time (probably true), it gets a little harder.

There’s only one place where ‘user.home’ is referenced, so I’ll see if it’s possible to pass a parameter which overrides that to be ‘the current directory’. There’s a bunch of questions in there, as to what will work, and how consistently, but it’s an approach that might work.

— Morgan Schweers, Cyber*FOX*!

Morgan,

Congratulations on the great news for you and your wife. Don’t forget to post photos of the little guy when he arrives.

Congratulations to both you and your wife, Morgan! My daughter & son-in-law are expecting their first next month also. Better get your sleep now… ;-)

Jim

I just read the news that there will soon be a new member of the Schweers family.
I wish you both and the new born son a good start and many nights of good sleep as well.

Paulh

..great, always a good sign for Erath when nice people come to grow children :)
Don’t be scared Morgan, it’s one of the best experiences human beings are capable of!
no case known that parents had to die of having no sleep :)
the rest is amazing and joyfull, adventurous and powerfull.
Once you are in it you won’t ever wish to get out.
Congratulations !!

So I wish you all the best and much patience for the next 20 years. Living with kids is cool.

But another Question: does your announcement mean, that for all other platforms except Mac OSX you need at least Java 1.5.

When this is the fact, than all OS/2-eCS-Users will be left outside in the cold.
We only have java 1.4.09 and there will be a long way to get java 1.6 sometimes. Is there a way to make this lovely little peace of software backward compatible…..? Maybe it is possible to get this OS X thing for us.

Greetings

AchimGI

Greetings,
No, it means all platforms need Java 1.5, including Mac OS X.

Java 1.5 was released in September of 2004, around three and a half years ago. It’s includes a pretty fundamental change to the language, and I struggled with the decision to upgrade. I’ve held it off until the 2.0 version, but I really can’t support 1.4.x anymore.

If you can find a developer who wants to put together a set of patches or build steps that will use Retroweaver or something like it to build a 1.4-compatible version, I’ll consider it.

— Morgan Schweers, Cyber*FOX*!

Congratulations, hope everything goes great! I won’t expect too many updates for the next 3-6 months :)

Lacoste

Very best of luck to you and your wife. Sleep deprivation really hurts, but hopefully only for six months, and then things will get better… Version 2 beta running fine so far – JBW has been invaluable here

—David

Congratulations from Ireland. I hope he grows up to be a great programmer – I can’t get either of my two interested in writing code, but I wish I’d started young myself.

..pete, they got their own way …. and it might be exactly what you wouldn’t do.
And that’s all the secret. If we live our own wishes ourselves, our children hopefully can learn to do the same …

Greetings,
Frank: That’s my take. My wife and I are bookworms, geeks, and homebodies. We figure our son will probably grow up to be a football player, or lawyer or something. I was given a gift that allowed me to follow my passions in life; I’ll wish no less on my son, whatever those passions are.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t be thrilled if he finds technology attractive…! :)

— Morgan Schweers, Cyber*FOX*!

Congratulations, Morgan, to you and your wife.
Is this your first child? If he is, it’s especially an incredibly treasured time for both of you. Although each baby is wonderful in the extreme. My wife and I have two sons.

Whatever my sons do for work or careers I, too, am happy with, as long as they are happy!

Frank F

Greetings,
Yep; Corwin’s our first, and we’re still finding him a joy to watch and be around. There are definitely sucky moments, but they are very few compared to the wonderful ones.

— Morgan Schweers, Cyber*FOX*!