Monday, February 28, 2005 - Mon, 28 Feb 2005

Yesterday, Manitoba’s Curling Team won the Canadian Women’s Curling Championship with a spectacular shot on the final rock of the final end.

I wanted to follow that up with the initial delivery of Behold … but in my case, I came up a little bit short. After working hard all Sunday and Monday, I just ran into an unforeseen problem that I could not easily find a solution for. My download page needed to send the user the registration code, which is based on the user’s name. I have a program to generate the registration code, and I already set that up so that Plimus can access it for purchases. But in order to send an e-mail out, I needed an ASP script. And to get the registration code I needed an executable program. But an ASP script cannot call an executable program and pass a parameter to it - so I found out after 6 hours of hard labour.

But I ended up today with a solution - not pretty, but it will work. I call an ASP program to write the parameter to a file. The executable reads the file and writes the registration code to another file. A second ASP program reads the registration code and sends out the e-mail. These are all then enveloped in a web page enabled for server side includes (my .shtml files).

Needless to say, I did get a huge amount done this weekend. The initial Help files and help file structure is now set up, except for finishing the Quick Start guide. The program is primed and just about ready to go, with a few last minute checks necessary. Just need to implement that download page and then give everything a thorough testing over. Hopefully by the end of next weekend.

Sorry about the delay. My first real deadline I set for myself was getting out this Alpha Version sometime in February, and I’m very disappointed to be missing that. I’ll need to catch up on my sleep for a couple of nights, and then back to it hard. (HARD!! - that’s a curling term! Heard it a lot by our province’s victorious women yesterday. Go Manitoba!)