WinDirStat weblog

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

More FOSS-like release-cycle

Oliver — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:49:41 +0000

When the project was still under Bernhard’s rule, he was always going to release only versions that had passed his test plan. I hope to break this tradition soon and release more often and release earlier. My goal is to put all of the code-base under a testing harness that will allow me to verify and validate much of the functionality without too much manual interaction required. This means you will see unstable versions tagged as “alpha”, “beta” or “RC” (release candidate) as well as stable releases. It is on you to decide whether you want to contribute to the development by testing any of the unstable versions, or whether you want to stick with the stable releases only.

Please note that I will follow these guidelines:

alpha (may become a weekly or nightly build) is a very early version of a future release. Neither is it guaranteed to work properly, nor at all on your machine. Also, new features in such a version may be unstable. As an example, a saved scan may not be loadable in a “beta” or a stable release of this version.
beta means that the version is reasonably stable. Features available in a beta may disappear in the stable release, or change considerably.
release candidate (RC) is a version of the software that has the full set of features (”feature-frozen”) of the anticipated next stable release. One of the RCs will eventually become the actual stable release if no bugs/issues have been reported within a certain time frame.
stable releases are what you already know from WinDirStat.

// Oliver

PS: Once I am done with the migration of the translations to XML (see previous post), I will release a first alpha version that has the multi-selection feature activated. It will also have an optional online update-check. Before a beta I want to include an improved mouse-navigation as well as a save/load feature to save time and not having to re-scan a directory structure every time. I personally also liked the proposed ignore feature.

Translations in XML

Oliver — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:48:11 +0000

Hi,

just wanted to let everyone know that I am currently working out a format for what’s now the resource scripts in XML. You can find a first draft version in revision 174 in the Subversion repository. As you can see, you will have the translations “side-by-side”, which should also make the job of translators easier. Since the encoding of the XML files will be UTF-8, all languages should be just fine, as all natural languages and several artificial languages (such as Klingon) are covered by the Unicode standard of which UTF-8 is one incarnation.

If any of you has ideas for how to improve the current XML format (more additions will follow throughout the next few days), please let me know here in the comment section, via our contact form on the website or in a tracker or the discussion forum at SF.net.

Rationale: it has been increasingly difficult to manage the translations (be it new translations, edits of existing ones by native speakers or changes in the GUI by me). Therefore I was for a while now looking into moving to a more manageable solution that will not require the translator to contact the developer, let alone have the developer “compile” the translation. Of course even with the new system it will be necessary that I include a new language in a future release, but there will be more flexible means of updating languages via the internet and translators will be able to contribute in a very flexible fashion as well.

// Oliver

PS: The XML parser (TinyXML with TinyXPath) will also be used to save/load a scan.