MarsJupiter - Family shareware

Welcome to MarsJupiter.com

Marsjupiter.com produce a range of applications, with an emphasis on making internet applications that have family friendly modes.

We also develop for the Mambo content management system, and we offer web site design services

Wednesday, 08 October 2008

The Daily Blat

With the company and the web site developing all the time, it does mean that loads of things happen each day, but probably most days there is not something happening that makes the front page of the site, and one thing we hate is that impression it can leave that not a lot is going on.

Daily Blat for Thursday 18th March 2004

We are very pleased to say we think an Alpha of the Foboz - Meta Search Engine toolbar is now in sight. The toolbar is finally producing search results into an internet explorer window, albeit with still several issues to be resolved.

But from a point of view of satisfaction, actually seeing any results at all is very good from our point of view.

We may well want to find a few customers willing to be victims of a toolbar alpha quite soon, anyone willing to help should contact support. Actually victims is too strong a word, Internet Explorer integration is done purely via the system registry and therefore whilst it can temporarily make internet explorer crash if there are bugs present. The problems caused can always be fairly easily rectified.

Daily Blat for Wednesay 17th March 2004

It seems like we think it every day, but we think we have finally cracked the last major issues with the Foboz - Meta Search engine toolbar. More and more we can see the reasoning behind embracing the C# language, for which a lot of the code involved is inbuilt. Then again by sticking to C++ we can at least understand a lot more of how it all works. The upshot of all the toolbar work has been to cause some temporary neglect to a few other projects, though we have found time to add a couple more Bulletin Board types to the Callisto - News Reader. Adding these was quickly done following a report in the forums, and we would remind Callisto users, that we are always keen to hear reports of any Bulletin Boards that do not currently work.

Daily Blat for Friday 12th March 2004

Work on the Foboz Meta Search engine toolbar continues with the restructuring of Foboz into components. This should separate the user interface, the toolbar and the actual search engine, making it possible to make automatic downloads of updated components practical. Note that search engine definitions which are the core of Foboz operation are already automatically downloaded.

We would still hesitate to put a time scale on the release of the toolbar. Currently we have a set of compiling and linking components that contain most of the functionality we require. But integrating it all and getting it working is another leap upwards on the learning curve of activex and shell extensions.

Possibly the main issue with a toolbar is what should it do apart from searching, we are certainly considering using our Family Filter technology to scan incoming web pages, and it is tempting to incorporate popup blocking. But the latter is done very well by other products, and doing something second best is not our philosophy.

Daily Blat for Tuesday 9th March 2004

Foboz toolbar progress

Today has seen the Foboz toolbar pick up a little more momentum. Though we cannot really say it is flying yet. Mostly the coding is a learning experience in just why so many people are switching to the c# language!

We are sticking to c++ for the moment, but it does make life rather harder as we have to deal with what seems like converting between every way people have tried to contrive string variables since the dawn of time.

c# we understand is written from the ground up with data types that are complient with the needs of COM/ActiveX. Pragmatically though at least in C++ you are left a little closer to undertanding what is actually going on.

Coming from a background in coding that started off in assembly language, e.g. one stage above typing hexadecimal bytes into a machine manually, I have always had a desire to know when I code, just what is actually happening at the coal face.

This is often confused in my experience with the "not invented here" syndrome where programmers are supposedly prone to reject code they did not write themselves. I have never been one to believe many programmers are that prone to this anyway. Preferring to think that most programmers, say:

"I can write this myself in a week"

or I can spend:

"1 day trying to find the code elsewhere"
"1 day pursuading the company to pay for it"
"1 day getting the code"
"1 day learning it" "1 day implementing it"
"1 month trying to get the originators to fix the bugs..."

I have seen many projects on the bleeding edge suffer this way. Though on the whole in areas where you would have been crazy to try a diy approach.

In our own projects we have examples of the diy approach. In the Callisto - Newsreader there are extensive "hashing" routines to speed up access to all the indexes. These have been through extensive revisions to be exactly opimised for what is needed in Callisto. We could have used existing hashing classes in MFC, but once you do that, the matter is effectively out of your hands. If it did not work fast enough there would be little milage in complaining to Microsoft!

Alexa ranking

In other news our Alexa ranking continues to move up and down like a yoyo, now showing a 400% improvement in our sites ranking over the last 3 months. But we would not expect solid and consistant results until our new look web site has been re-indexed by the major search engines.

Daily Blat for Monday March 8th 2004

Progress continues to be made on the Foboz toolbar edition (which will be a free update), or to be more to the point progress has got a little more off the ground after a rocky start. By some quirk of fate our projects at MarsJupiter had not really involved much by way of windows shell programming and ActiveX and these technologies are not the easiest to master.

Since we are determined that what we create for the toolbar will be a valuable add on, it is vitally important that we get it right.

Thus whilst the toolbar work continues, we are also making amazon.com shares a good buy at the moment, by significantly boosting their quarterly profits by buying a trick load of programming guides!

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