yWriter 3 and FCharts updates

yWriter 3 is coming along nicely - I used it to write my 50,000 word NanoWrimo 'half' novel in November, without any problems. I'm happy to report that yWriter2 made it onto the Pricelessware 2007 list of best software.

The latest FCharts test version includes a new zoom method (click and drag a ruler over the bars you want to see in the zoomed chart), and this is proving much easier than the old cntrl+shift+click twice method. As a bonus I'll shortly be including this zoom in the SE version.

yMail has a new, completely rewritten SMTP sending routine which is up to 100 times faster than before. It also works simultaneously with receiving, which is nice. This feature will be in the next release - I'd upload it now but I still have some testing to do with SMTP AUTH sessions.

yWriter nominated for an award

yWriter has been nominated for the PricelessWare best free software award. Anyone with a Google login can vote here

If you've never heard of my yWriter software, see here for details.

Out of action - 24 hours

Some time last night one of the three hard drives in my web server gave up the ghost. (Naturally, it was the one with the most files on. 80 gigs with 2% free space.)

I got up at 7am, took the kids to school, and then worked on the server from 9am until ... well, I'm still going at 11:20pm

This server runs the customer forum, downloads for issues of ASIM, all my email and various other bits and bobs, so it's been an awfully peaceful day.

In the end I put a 120gb drive in, partitioned it up and restored backups from internal and external drives. There was a 40 gig in the server with a noisy bearing so I pulled that while I was at it. Friday I'll bung in a new 160gb which will be a mirror for the others. Next time a drive fails I want to swap them over and reboot.

Throughout today I did run a temporary server, which was a linux setup running inside VMWare on Windows XP. Over the next few days I'll keep configuring it, because it makes a nice easy alternative for the next time things Go Wrong.

Second Post

This is the second post to the Spacejock Software blog.

Just testing.

First Post

I've set up the Spacejock Software blog to post announcements about my free software.

Cheers
Simon