I just released jsiPodFetch 8.05
I use an overridden button for the flat buttons in jsiPodFetch and I had forgotten to call InitializeComponent in the constructor that gets called by the designer. This has the nasty side effect of making the control disappear from the form.
The underlying error was corrected before I released 8.04 but I missed one form when I checked for missing buttons; The form to confirm a new feed.
Old users probably never noticed since they have their feeds configured already, but new users got a modal form without button or control box. Doh!
It is taken care of now and I hope I haven’t scared to many users away from it.
jsiPodFetch has a broken installer.
Update: Now there is a working installer.
The latest release of jsiPodFetch has a broken installer. I uploaded the previous version while I’m fixing the error.
I had forgotten to add some files to the install package. The application will load, but it will have a blank main window.
I am really sorry for any inconveniences this has brought you.
I will re-release 8.04 later today.
jsiSoft in Swedish
Today I launched the Swedish sister site of jsiSoft. It is at jsi.se and all of my software that is translated to Swedish will be published there.
At the moment the screenshots for jsiPodFetch are still in English but they will be replaced real soon.
Broken contact form
The contact form on jsiSoft.com has been broken for a while, but it should work now.
If you have tried to get in contact with me through the About / Contact page on jsisoft.com and I haven’t responded; please try again.
I usually reply to email within a day whether or not I know how to answer a particular question.
My apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
Download software from Softpedia
I’m actually quite impressed by Softpedia. They run a software download site that looks a little bit like every other one that exists out there. But if you take a closer look you can se by the screen shots that they actually take the time to install and do a basic run of submitted software.
I have three listings with them under the jsiSoft brand and there are probably more to come.
Turning down user expectations.
After some indications from a faithful (thanks Bill) user I found a perceived ‘hang’ in logview4net; If you load two large files (>500 lines) it will hide the progress bar for the second file. I have fixed that so now it doesn’t appear to hang while loading the files. It is still unusable until both files are loaded though.
I have to implement some kind of auto sizing of the buffer and then I’ll do a new release. Probably within a week.
The bigger performance issue is a little harder 
I have users that monitor the Windows Event Log and some log files on >50 servers and keep the app running all the time. If I stored all that data their workstations would be out of memory most of the time. So the conflict is between the style of usage where you want to see all data, as in loading a large file, and their style of usage where there is an infinite amount of data. The current solution is to load the large files into memory and just treat it as a large buffer, but it is painfully slow. I would rather just load the data needed on the screen at the moment.
I will keep on tuning it, but implementing a sliding window is almost a new application so it will probably not happen soon. I will keep large file loading in mind though so that it wont get worse. It is the multitude of listeners and the possibility to have more than one listener in a session that makes this hard to solve.
I have previously made the decision to evolve logview4net as a real time log monitor and not a log file parser so I will prioritize new listeners and actions before large file parsing performance.
The application that inspired me to make logview4net is Chainsaw. If logview4net doesn’t fulfill your needs maybe Chainsaw will. I didn’t want to install a Java runtime just to listen to a UDP port so I started writing my own app instead.
New license
I have changed the license for logview4net from BSD to Artistic License 2.0. As far as I understand these licenses this means that you previously could do just about whatever you wanted with the logview4net and now your freedom is limited to your own organization. That is: You may still freely distribute the unmodified binaries, but you are only allowed to distribute modifications within your organization.
The reason for this change is that I don’t want anyone to repackage my stuff and make a lot of money from it. I also want to have the same license for all my open source software and the BSD was a little bit to loose for my future needs.
If you are in need of any other type of licensing please contact me, I am open for suggestions.
New release of logview4net (8.02)
Wow, the releases are coming fast now.
Today I released a new version of logview4net:
CHANGELOG:
8.02
Request:Show short filename on prefix-filename
Fixed: It is not possible to change the buffersize in the viewer config window.
Fixed: HighlightMatch only formatted the first occurance of the pattern in a message.
Fixed: The textbox reverts to default format when enforcing the buffer size
Added a Play Sound action that will play a PCM Wave File on pattern match.
jsiServiceManager released
Today I released jsiServiceManager at jsiSoft.com. It is a free application that helps you manage Windows Services.
It allows you to Start/Stop/Pause/Restart Windows Services from a context menu that lives in the system tray.
You can group services and hide groups where all services doesn’t exist on the current computer. This allows you to manage several computers with the same configuration file.
The Microsoft .Net Framework 3.0 is required so the installer will direct you to its download page if it’s not installed already.
The application is translated to Swedish so if your Windows locale is Swedish it should translated by default.
Save your performance baseline
Here’s a one week old post I forgot to publish:
I did some performance testing and fixing in logview4net today, but I threw away the baseline performance report. I managed to shave some processing time, but I only kept the previous report so I am not certain how much I saved. It’s a stupid mistake but hopefully I’ll not make it again now that I’ve told you about it. Save your baseline for future comparison when doing performance optimizations.
Almost all processing time is spent on appending and sometimes formatting text to a RichTextBox. It is not as fast as I would like it to be. I could probably write something that does what I want myself, but I guess someone has already done that. All the functionality of the RichTextBox is not needed for logview4net. I only need to change the font and color properties of parts of the text. There are no editing, tables, bullets, images or anything else that I guess is complicated to do.
After some more communicating with a nice user it seems that the performance is mostly annoying when loading a large file. It is a scenario I didn’t build it for at all. It is build to show one message a time and hence has relatively much time to process it.
…anyway; A new release that works a little bit better in this scenario is on the way. I got the load time for this file down from more than one hour (I killed the process after that.) to less than 30 seconds.
