WinDirStat weblog

Another logo proposal

Oliver — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:57:46 +0000

Hi folks,

here is another logo proposal from Venezuela. Frankly, I find it more original than the logo suggested by Storm!. In a strange way it condenses the meaning of what WinDirStat does into a symbol. However, I found there were some demeaning comments about Storm! who also put his time and work into creating his logo. Perhaps you folks could consider that all of this is done in our spare time and in all these years there was only one patch sent to us from outside the team. So please: keep it real

Anyhow, here are the logos and icons as suggested by tuqueque (click for full resolution):

The logos scale neatly as they are in a vector-format.

Please comment. It seems it was put under Creative Commons Attribution, but since there exist variants of that license, I’m going to check back. Until then, for your consideration.

Logo design by Robin “tuqueque” Marín

// Oliver

PS: Given that the MFT parser I’ve been working on requires admin privileges, I was considering to use the different icon colors as indicator as to what mode it is running in (e.g. with admin privileges or not). I’ll have to test it in Vista and 7 to check the feasibility, though.
PPS: Yes, I heard you. I am working on an alpha release that will have some of the new functionality (and a x64 version) so people who have been yearning for updates will have something to check out and provide us with feedbacks. Sorry for the long silence.

Splash screen and logo

Oliver — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:41:25 +0000

Hi everyone,

Storm! has joined the team and provided us with a new logo and splash screen. Have a look. And please comment:

// Oliver

New project member

Oliver — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:49:43 +0000

Please welcome our new project member Juan (aka neglox)

// Oliver

Need feedback

Oliver — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:40:08 +0000

So far WDS has proven to be fairly stable, but there are people who claim to have seen mysterious crashes every now and then. Now my question: if I was to implement a method in WDS that allows me to get a crash dump (or call it “snapshot”) of WDS at the moment of the crash, would the users be willing to send that information or not?

Yes, there may be sensitive information included in that it might also contains file or folder names. Otherwise no sensitive data will be transmitted. Windows Error Reporting (WER), which is part of Windows at least since XP does the same in a semi-transparent way to Microsoft (and commercial third-party vendors through Microsoft’s WinQual).

I want your thoughts.

Thanks,

// Oliver

MFT again

Oliver — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:36:14 +0000

In order to implement this feature, there is a clear tradeoff: memory. The memory usage will, at least temporarily, spike more than it currently does. However, given that Microsoft surely has put a lot of thought into the structure of the MFT we can at least assume that the respective data is stored efficiently.

// Oliver

MFT woes …

Oliver — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:08:38 +0000

Just a few comments on my progress. As it appears there is no way to get access to a volume unless one has administrator rights (or - presumably - the volume ACL was changed?). That, of course, creates the problem that the speedup is only available to admins.

However, I think that WinDirStat is mostly used for administrative purposes anyway, thus it will be fine to limit the speedup to this part. Please note that this does not mean that running it as unprivileged user wouldn’t work anymore, but even now this yields biased results …

BTW: the speedup is quite astonishing in my experiments so far.

// Oliver

PS: Yes, I’m talking about read-only access to the volume …

C’mon, keep it real guys

Oliver — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:17:03 +0000

Recently I got an email asking for a trimmed down English-only version of WinDirStat. To be honest I was quite flabbergasted and upset. After all both developers involved in WinDirStat are native Germans, so why not make it a light version that is German-only? I think everyone knows and accepts that English is the lingua franca of the modern world, but by the number of speakers you shouldn’t underestimate Mandarine either. The author of said mail had an English name so we can safely assume he was a native speaker of English. But why the assumption that a light version (he was referring to PortableApps as well) has to be English?

In fact besides the issue the translations were the next biggest issue for me. Why? Because the current system doesn’t allow users to translate themselves and maintain those translations independently from a developer who will have to link the resource DLL for that language. This is something that needs fixing, not the availability of those languages in the installations.

So, sorry. For the moment I’m not up for such an English-only light version. But after all it’s OpenSource … patches are welcome. But then there are these more pressing issues which really ask for patches …

// Oliver

Exploring …

Oliver — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:55:22 +0000

After a user has provided feedback with a potential way of increasing the speed of a scan manifold, I’m currently exploring the USN journal as well as using the MFT (on NTFS drives only) in order to enumerate the contents of a drive or subfolders on it.

// Oliver

Will resume development now

Oliver — Sat, 30 May 2009 15:11:37 +0000

Although I’m not fully back to normal, I’ll start development again and hope to have a version ready around September.

// Oliver

Forced technical break

Oliver — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:57:18 +0000

I dislocated my right shoulder a few days ago and will therefore not reply to emails or work on WDS in the next three weeks - minimum.

Update: I’ll undergo orthopedic surgery on 27th of April, which will most likely prolong the break.

// Oliver