Good news first. Development on WinDirStat has officially resumed.
Now the question. I know as a matter of fact that there is demand for a 64bit version of WinDirStat. However, since 64bit implies Unicode, there is no need to handle this specifically as long as the compatibility requirements ar Windows 2000 and above. Nevertheless, as you know we actually do have an ANSI version. My proposal would be the following:
- I’ll try to keep compatibility as much as possible, even for Windows 9x/ME.
- Emphasis will be put on Windows 2000 and above - meaning it will be native Unicode.
- The versions offered will stretch 32bit (x86) and 64bit (x64) with Unicode. ANSI may be made available separately.
- New features will only be available in the Unicode versions, but bugs will be fixed in the old one and selected features may be migrated back.
I’ll add a poll soon at this place (possibly as a new post, so people who subscribe to the RSS feed get to see it).
// Oliver
PS: Feel free to comment on this post.
The company behind STOPzilla doesn’t seem to deem it necessary to react on a false positive report from someone who hasn’t bought their software. This means it could be that their software still detects WinDirStat and since I am not able and/or willing to check it on a regular basis, I can only recommend that none of our users use this software for their protection.
Should something get moving, I’ll keep you updated here on the blog.
// Oliver
STOPzilla, an antispyware is catching the most current WDS installation package as Zlob.YU. While one should never take this too light-hearted, the first reaction of the user who contacted me was of course rather in the direction of an accusation. Nothing wrong with that, if it would have turned out to be true. Not at last I am an AV researcher and developer. Although probably SF.net would be to blame if something like this happened, because all downloads run via them, this would be horrible for my reputation as well.
So, what now? First of all I want to reassure everyone, that the two download samples from different SF.net mirrors that I have taken are not infected, but still reported as Zlob.YU by STOPzilla. Since all mirrors are supposed to be in sync and I got the first report two days back, all mirrors should have the infected file version by now - if there ever was any threat. Instead the fact that only STOPzilla finds it, points to a false positive and I am going to contact the vendor about it.
Second, you need not trust me on that, instead I suggest to visit Jotti and VirusTotal, although these are also not 100% reliable in the end, the heuristics and signatures of different AV scanners are used to examine your file, which gives you a fairly good hint as to whether the file is infected or not.
// Oliver
I re-released version 1.1.2 with two additional languages earlier today.
Please note that I aim for a release with functional updates between around end of this year and beginning of the next year.
The short answer is: yes.
The long one is: there is no reason why WDS wouldn’t be Vista compatible. However, depending on how you start it (elevated or not) you will not be able to see certain parts of the file system (which is just the point with the elevation model). Naturally WDS, running under your credentials will have the very same problem, so you should expect to find a - potentially large - chunk called
Please search this blog for further information on the
// Oliver
I have to confess, I fell in love recently. Sounds weird? Right, it gets even more weird if I tell you that I fell in love with a file manager. The file manager is called Speed Commander (SC) and I am truly sorry to not have found it years ago. The respective project exists already for more than a decade.
So what’s so cool with it you ask? SC is shareware. This means you can try before you decide whether to buy it. Although I am developer of more than one OpenSource (and therefore also free - as in “free beer”) software, I usually try to balance between the effort required to write it myself and the time it would spare me to use such a program instead of the one I am using at the moment. The predecessor of SC on my machine was Turbo Navigator. Since it was written in Delphi or Borland C++ Builder, its Unicode support was non-existent. However, it was free (as in “free beer”) but not OpenSource. Neither is SC, in fact SC is commercial and ClosedSource. Nevertheless it rocks. This file manager is a joy to use. The only things that really distract me at the moment are the new program icons, the rest is better and some stuff I have to get used to.
Give it a try. In fact I think about porting the treemap code into an ActiveX and write a plugin for SC to show treemaps directly there. Of course such an ActiveX (COM) control would be accessible from any other application as well. The idea is to make WDS more modular and allow to share the code-base for the treemap between WDS and this ActiveX.
// Oliver
Several users had contacted us and claimed that WDS caused their systems to show the dreaded BSOD. As a driver developer I know that this is impossible since no user mode program can crash the system with BSOD unless some driver or other kernel mode component fails to check its parameters or whatever else.
Anyhow, one of the users sent me a minidump. This is the only way to find out who’s the culprit after a BSOD. In fact a full dump does as well, but a full dump has the size of the RAM on the user’s machine which is not usually practical (given sizes of 1 GiB and more).
The minidump showed that the fault had occured in a component of the Novell Client software. Although this justifies a strong suspicion, it is not a guarantee, since the respective bugcheck code occurs if some kernel mode component has corrupted the memory of the driver shown as faulty. My only recipe was to update the client software, if possible. There is no other way than this or uninstalling it completely (which usually isn’t an option at all ;)).
// Oliver
As before, the
As you know, the
Continue reading ‘<Unknown> keeping us busy’
Thanks to the ever-increasing amount and frequency of spam-comments, I removed the option for comments for now. However, I’ll attempt to work out a fix (possibly similar to the fix I use in the UVNC forum) and then enable it again.
Sorry for the annoyance :-[
// Oliver
A user sent us the following registry script via the feedback mailing list. Thanks!
Copy and paste it into a text file and save the text file with the file extension “.reg“. Make sure to modify the path in case you have a non-english system or in case you installed WDS into a different folder. Also make sure to use double-backslashes within the double-quotes.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\WinDirStat Here]
@="Win Dir Stat (Graphical)"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\WinDirStat Here\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\WinDirStat\\windirstat.exe\" %1"
// Oliver
Regarding the topic that is being asked for most often. Use the following approaches:
- Run a file system check on the file system (read: drive/partition) in question. E.g.
chkdsk /f X:. You’ll have to have admin privileges and if this is the system partition you will have to reboot.
- Check whether you have System Restore Points (SRPs) enabled. If so, check whether the size reported for
- If you have any special software installed that manages its own recycle bin or allows to restore old states of the system this software could use the same facility as the SRPs. Therefore the data may just be hidden/inaccessible to WDS. Nothing to worry if the previous steps didn’t give a reson to worry.
// Oliver
PS: I am about to create a Wiki where users can maintain a FAQ and so on (and possibly translate the help).
If the comment-spam is an indicator for the popularity of this blog, then this blog is extra-ordinarily popular. 
… via the feedback mailing list:
Good Day!
I found it interesting and decided to contact you for a business transaction. Be so kind to contact me at your earliest convenience for a possible business deal involving money transfer of about [$152,000.000 USD]
I am Dr.Smith Stone, the Auditor General of Standard Bank Of South Africa,during the course of our auditing,I discovered a floating fund in an account opened in the bank in 1990 and since 1993 nobody has operated on this account again.
Well Dr. Smith Stone, which features do you want to see? For this money I’d work two to three years fulltime on WDS 
… guess the other users would appreciate that as well 
// Oliver
A happy new year to everyone. May it be peaceful and full of health, fun and love for you and yours.
Thanks to those users sending a personal mail with best wishes.
// Oliver
Today I got a complaint email, so I thought no problem, answer it friendly and things will somehow be solved. The email contained the following text:
I was told to go to Source Forge to download the WinDirStat program. Fortunately I found this website by myself via Google because when I went to SourceForge.net I was never able to find the program even after I paid my son (who is 32 years old) to find it. After about 3 hours he gave up also. But he did find some interesting programs and games NONE OF WHICH we were able to download or purchase.
In conclusion, your source forge website is to darn difficult to find anything on. And when you go to download, he takes you to multiple screens — but none do the download. I wanted to emial you at Source Forge, but can’t complain there either. Does anything work at that website. You could not pay me to go back.
Continue reading ‘Anonymous letter … download problems?!’
Hi,
the WDS feedback mailing list is going to be moderated from now on. This decision was made since we finally get more spam than useful messages on this mailing list. Not moderating it means positive, rather than negative, feedback to the spammers which will send increasingly more messages …
I’ll of course attempt to approve legit messages as prompt as possible to me. I live in time zone GMT/UTC, just for everyone to know when to expect a moderation and when not.
Sorry,
// Oliver
I have a request to the developers among our users. If you would write a plugin for WDS, which functionality would you like to provide to the users? …this question aims to find out which hooks to provide. Also if you have special requests what functionality of WDS should be publicly available to a plugin, your feedback is needed.
Planned are the following callbacks/hooks: in the report system (on every item by its full name), cleanup menu items (e.g. a plugin could come with some extra application and instead of actually deleting files it could output some kind of script), retrieval of command line options, colors of the treemap items according to whatever property of the item (which the plugin has to manage! - ownership, file extension or file category such as multimedia file have been suggested!). The following functionality is planned to be public: menu items in a new main menu item “Plugins” (mainly to allow the plugins to have a GUI for config purposes), retrieval of some context data inside the above hooks. Maybe some kind of re-branding (probably adding a new tab in the about box) will be allowed. Continue reading ‘@Developers: Your feedback needed’
Hi,
some people may have noticed that I moved to Iceland. This means big changes in my personal life, so that the beta test can not commence in November. I aim for end of January but I am not sure whether this will work. Continue reading ‘Betatest postponed’
Today WinDirStat was featured on the Japanese website “Windows Forest” today. Although I don’t know any Japanese it looks as if they like it
In case one of you is Japanese and you want a Japanese translation in long-term, please talk to me. I cannot support you with it right now, though - and also Finnish and Estonian are still in the queue.
// Oliver
Occasionally people install (or run) WDS from a network drive/share. The HTML help file viewer of Windows, however, is configured so that it restricts all HTML content over the network, including these types of resources. Consequently the viewer will show a help file window with some weired error message that depends on your system language.
To fix this issue, the only known method is to move the help file (and hence the program) to a non-network location.
// Oliver