WinDirStat propaganda blog

Since we have some subscribers, I thought I’d let you know that the work has been resumed very officially and that first steps towards a version 1.3 are in full progress.

What I plan to introduce are …

Source code level:

• const-correctness
• Namespaces (new own namespaces and proper usage of existing ones)
• C++ typecasts where possible
• Moving #defines to real C++ constants where possible

New features:

• Update check that can be enabled by the user to receive notifications
• Better mouse navigation
• Save a scan and load it later
• Save report into file (perhaps different formats)
• Proper handling of WOW64 environments
• Explicit Windows Vista symlink handling
• Configuration from different sources (incl. .ini file)
• Native x64 version
• Update: A brand new logo that has been created for and donated to the project (I will likely post a preview soon)

Features that will be removed:

• Support for Windows 9x/ME will be dropped in this upcoming release. Affected users can use the last 1.2 version …
• Support for Windows NT 4.0 may get dropped
• The feedback (bug report) dialog will be replaced by a link to our website where you will be able to enter descriptions of undesired behavior or simple praise
• The send report by mail feature will be removed, instead you will be able to save reports to at least one computer-readable and at least one human-readable file format

// Oliver

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

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 item keeps us busy. Last week a user contacted us through the blog and later through email and chat as suggested.

As you know, the item just shows the discrepancies between the used disk space reported by Windows and the size of the sizes of files and folders found by WinDirStat. The biggest problem is that WinDirStat has to have access to the files and that these files have to be enumerated. So if the files are hidden from normal Windows file functions, there is no way for WinDirStat to detect them. This and the way some backup software seems to function was the problem on the machine of the user who contacted me.
Continue reading →

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

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 is below or equal to the amount you allowed for SRPs. If it is bigger and you skipped step 1, go back and perform step 1!
• 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

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 →