2004 July | Martin Crockett

Miranda IM Vs. Trillian Pro

July 27, 2004 | In Tech Lifestyle

“Member Since: November 28, 2003″
“Your membership expiration date is set to Saturday, November 27, 2004 ”

Shall I shell out another $25 for 12 months usage of Trillian Pro? Let’s weigh up the options. I used Miranda IM back in early-2003. I loved it’s speed, low-overhead and ’small app’ appeal. I got hold of Trillian Pro on the advice/backing of some peers and was attracted by it’s popularity and user-friendly UI.

Lately, I’ve questioned this move. This was highlighted recently when I emailled support about a long-standing issue I had.

This is what level of support a Pro licence buys you:

Greetings,

This message has been automatically generated in response to the creation of a trouble ticket regarding:”Web Aware”, a summary of which appears below.

There is no need to reply to this message right now. Your ticket has been assigned an ID of [ceruleanstudios.com #00000].

Please include the string:

[ceruleanstudios.com #00000]

in the subject line of all future correspondence about this issue. To do so, you may reply to this message.

Thank you,
pro-support@ceruleanstudios.com

Dated Monday 5th July 2004

No replies so far!

Checking the support history returns the following error message on the page: “Couldn’t connect at this time. Please try later.”

Performance

Shall we mention memory consumption? Trillian Pro is a little bit of a heavyweight compared with Miranda IM. I took this screen capture of the task manager of the two applications running at the same time. Note: I wasn’t logged into Trillian per se. I just had it running in the background.

[See screenshot]

Plug-ins

Trillian Pro has plugins. Miranda IM has everything plus the kitchen sink as a plugin. It’s so much more extensible (extendable?).

Jabber

For a recent work project, I was introduced to Jabber. I signed up and got myself online with it. Can’t say I have any complaints so far. Just another protocol.

So, I’ve taken the jump back to Miranda IM. Will report as soon as I get further down the road with it.

Links:
Miranda IM
Trillian

.NET Framework SDK Version 1.1

July 19, 2004 | In Developer

While running through the examples in the Syngress C#.NET Web Developer’s Guide, I found it necessary to install the .NET SDK.
MSDN

It’s quite a monster download (108Mb) and slow installer.

Here’s my code:

using System;

namepsace FirstCSharpProgram
{
///

/// My first C# class. Contains the program entry point.
///

class FirstCSharpClass
{
static void Main ( string[] args )
{
try
{
/*
* Show when we wrote our first program on screen.
*/
DateTime today = DateTime.Now;
Console.WriteLine( “I wrote my first C# program at: ” + today.ToString();
if ( args.Length > 0 )
{
// Show an optional message on screen.
string msg = “You wanted to say: ” + args[0];
Console.WriteLine( exception.Message );
}
}
catch ( Exception exception )
{
// Display any errors on screen.
Console.WriteLine( exception.Message );
}
}
}
}

Wow!

PHP 4.3.8 Install

July 18, 2004 | In Developer

No sooner do I install 4.3.7 but .8 gets released - due to “several security issues that have been discovered”. I’ll get around to installing version 5 sometime soon.

I noticed PHP5 is going for Private and Protected Members, Methods etc. so it’s looking quite powerful.

Zend say: “The Zend Engine 2.0 introduces a new object model, more similar to Java, in the sense that variables now contain object handles, instead of the objects themselves. This means that moving around the object handle back and forth will no longer create replicas of the object, but just multiple references to the same object. In addition to a much more intuitive programming interface, the new object model allows for the implementation of destructors, improved dereferencing support (func()->method1()->method2()), and more.”.

Note the “more similar to Java” caveat. It looks like they’re knocking at the door but it’ll be probably not until PHP6 that they’ll go all out C++/Java OOP.