Topic: [Important] Status Update

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, CyberFOX!

Topic: [Important] Status Update

..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 …

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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.

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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

Lacoste

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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, CyberFOX!

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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

Topic: [Important] Status Update

..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 !!

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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

Topic: [Important] Status Update

Morgan,

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

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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, CyberFOX!

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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!

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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, CyberFOX!

Topic: [Important] Status Update

Will JBidwatcher 2 be portable? please :D

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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

Topic: [Important] Status Update

Congratulation!

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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!

Topic: [Important] Status Update

Congratulations Mr Schweers. Life changing indeed. :)

I hope all goes well.

Topic: [Important] Status Update

Congratulations on the impending great news!

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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

Topic: [Important] Status Update

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!

I have a new version I’ve been working on. I bought a few icons to improve the toolbar, I’ve refactored the source to packages and improved it substantially, I’ve added a database for better performance and future extensibility, and a scripting system using JRuby.

I’m working on setting up an event-based scripting system (using JRuby), so anyone can add before and after filters to build custom behavior into the system. (Custom sniping rules, custom scripted columns, custom per-tab behavior, etc…)

There’s also a few interesting features I’m working on, to provide multi-JBidwatcher synchronization, a backup method of identifying bid results (the most common problem these days) by asking an ‘oracle’, and other features which will be available to those who donate and want to use them. (Yes, I’m trying to build a model that will encourage folks to donate. Having a kid on the way changes my priorities a bit. I certainly want to keep the program free and basically open source, but I also want to provide some extra capabilities for folks who are willing to donate and interested.)

I have a license for Warehouse to provide users better browsing of the source and subversion history, since I’m not using Sourceforge’s SVN servers anymore.

I’m considering using the Lighthouse app for bug and feature tracking, but I need to figure out how to import the existing bugs and features first.

There are a lot of bug fixes in the new code (including an attempt to fix focus on dialogs), a thumbnail column, faster startup, and a new packaging system that allows me to include arbitrary libraries into the distribution.

The latest version requires Java 1.5, which I feel comfortable requiring now that 1.6 is out, and available on all platforms.

I’m willing to share the current betas with people who are really interested in running seriously untested code, but a lot of what I want to build into it isn’t done yet, and the database side of things still has a few issues. It’s also a LOT bigger than it used to be, mostly because of the scripting and database libraries.

I hope this information lets everyone know where things stand right now. But really I just wanted to crow about my upcoming fatherhood. :)

Thanks very much for the patience everyone has shown, and the help everyone is giving to each other.

Happy New Year all, and welcome to 2008!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: [Release] JBidwatcher 1.0.2 is now available!

and the oldest vesrion not snipe… 5 second and 3000 second….
the message is the follow
Listing is ended. Events
Mon Dec 10 08:57:59 CET 2007: Communications failure talking to the server. (1) Mon Dec 10 08:57:59 CET 2007: Failed to load from server! (1) Mon Dec 10 20:10:57 CET 2007: Preparing snipe. (1) Mon Dec 10 20:13:05 CET 2007: Cancelling snipe, auction is reported as ended. (1) Mon Dec 10 20:13:05 CET 2007: Cancelling snipe. (1)

config IMAC C2Core system 10.5 leopard…..

mike

Topic: [Release] JBidwatcher 1.0.2 is now available!

Morgan,

Thank you for the reply to my inquiry. I used 1.03pre1 a bit earlier and it successfully sniped with 4 seconds left on the bid.

Franko

Topic: [Release] JBidwatcher 1.0.2 is now available!

Greetings,

Pretty much…

Work’s been kicking my butt lately, I’m afraid. I did a major architectural upgrade of one of our infrastructure libraries, and have been spending most of the past several weeks getting it ready for prime-time, and then last week we deployed it live. A few hitches, and everything seems to be working pretty well, so maybe things’ll die down to a dull roar for a bit and I can catch some programming time at home.

I’m working on the next version of JBidwatcher, and one of my problems right now is merging the bunch of changes that were made to fix up JBidwatcher between 1.0 (when the code forked for the ‘Next’ version) and 1.03pre1 into the ‘next gen’ JBidwatcher codebase. I made a lot of architectural changes to JBidwatcher, to better match what I’ve learned in the roughly 7 years I’ve been developing Java now. While those change’s have made the code LOTS better, unfortunately they make it a little hard to integrate changes from the 1.0 version in. :(

I’d rather get the new version to a stable point and let people start using it, then make more changes in the 1.0.x codebase, as long as 1.0.x is still basically working.

So those two things are the core reason for my long silence here. My day job, and trying to make the new version a better program.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

p.s. Reposting in Development.