R&M Software

I've been using Point as my DNS provider for some time now, but somewhat recently they were bought out by Copper.io.  I don't know anything about these guys, but I've been burned by being the client of a bought-out company before, so today I decided to proactively jump ship to another provider.  I wanted to stay with a free provider, and so after asking around I've decided to go with CloudFlare.

Already I can see an improvement, with DNS lookups taking anywhere from 1/2 to 1/3 as long as they used to (50-75ms with CloudFlare vs 140-150ms with Point).  Not that I expect that will really be noticeable, but hey faster is faster!

Anyway, since I changed DNS providers I've had to go and update PDDNS to support the new provider.  So if you've been looking for a decent dynamic dns updater to use with CloudFlare, give it a try!

I've just finished making the first (and most significant) changes to www.RandM.ca in quite some time:

First, and most noticeably, I've moved from a hand-coded site to a site powered by GetSimple CMS.  This should make it MUCH easier for me to keep things up to date around here!  If you check out the Products menu, you'll see a couple entries related to this CMS software (the changes I made to enable multisite management, and the theme I'm using on this site).  One of the bonuses of using this new CMS/theme is that it's VERY mobile friendly, so not that I expect many people will be loading this site on their phone, but if they do, it should hopefully display quite nicely.

Second, and hopefully not noticeably, I've moved to a new web host.  There was nothing wrong with my previous host, but it was about 5x as expensive as the one I'm now with so I figured it was worth the time/trouble to switch.

If you run into any problems with the new site, just let me know.

Apparently I've been ignoring my news page here! Since my last update, these new releases have taken place:

• Usurper v0.23a
• GameSrv v13.02.05
• fTelnet v12.08.29

In addition to those releases, I've created an account on GitHub and released the source to some R&M software, as well as ported some other DOS BBS related software to Windows:

• GameSrv -- A BBS door game server for Windows and Linux written in C#
• Gunshot -- 32bit port of Shotgun BBS Professional version 2 alpha 10
• PDDNS -- A dynamic DNS client supporting multiple service providers (DtDNS, Dyn, NoIP, Point)
• Renegade -- 32bit port of Renegade Y2Ka2. This is a port of the old Y2Ka2 version that Jeff Herrings released in 2005
• RG119SRC -- 32bit port of Renegade v1.19. This is a port of the newest version of Renegade still under development by T.J McMillen
• RMLib -- Nonvisual support classes used by multiple R&M Software programs
• RMLibUI -- Visual support classes/components used by multiple R&M Software programs
• Usurper -- 32bit port of Usurper BBS door game. The source for this used to be hosted on SourceForge, but I've now moved it to GitHub

I really need to implement a way to keep this site up to date when news releases are made on one of my other sites!

If you're reading this, the website migration has finally been completed! I got busy with a lot of other things, so this took way longer than expected. Everything should now be in place though, so if you notice any problems with the site, please let me know.

I'm currently in the process of switching webhosts. Currently I'm running on a pretty low end Linux VPS, where I hand code everything in PHP. Which sucks. So I now have a somewhat less low end VPS running Windows 2003 that I'll be transitioning to, which will allow me to rewrite everything in C# (I guess I could have used Mono to rewrite everything in C# while still staying with Linux, but I don't know how well it would have run with such a small amount of RAM available).

Anyway, hopefully the transition won't affect anything here, but I figured I'd mention it in case shit hits the fan in the coming days since you'll know why!

Don't know who, if anybody, would be interested in knowing what I'm working on, but I've added a new Roadmap page to the site that'll allow me to keep track of what I need to finish in order to make more timely releases.

I've just uploaded a new version of MannDoor, v6.06.15. It contains changes submitted by Michael Preslar as well as some fixes to enable FreePascal v2.0.0 compatability.

I also released a small utility the other day called R&M GetVersionEx(). It was just something I used to find out what the GetVersionEx() API function returned on various versions of Windows. Pretty useless, but it was written in Delphi without using the FORMS unit, so it may be a good example for other people who want to write a program this way. (Not using the FORMS unit means you interact with the Windows API directly. The benefit is that your compiled .EXE size is miniscule in comparison to the FORMS enabled version of the program, the drawback is that it's quite a bit more work. It's cool to try at least once though.)

And for those wondering, progress on GameSrv has been a lot better this past month or so. I'm moving in a few weeks so that'll interrupt things for a bit, but once we're settled hopefully I'll be able to keep up the progress and get something useable released!

Yep, I've changed the layout again. I stole this one from (you guessed it) OSWD. It'll need to be tweaked a little since it doesn't handle font size changes very well, but it's a great start.

In other news, I'm working on GameSrv again (yay!). The bad news is, I'm starting from scratch (again!). It's not because I've lost the source, which is the usual reason, but because I've decided I really don't like Borland C++ Builder very much afterall. So the new version is back in Borland Delphi, and it's looking great. I found some nice tutorials on building hybrid Normal + Interactive Service applications, so it'll run normally on Win9x systems, and as a system service on NT* systems (as any good server should).

I'm swamped with my new job (check out bmjupdates.mcmaster.ca to see one of the projects I work on - it's free to sign up, but probably only interesting to health professionals) and in the process of moving, so development is slow, but with any luck there will be an '05 release for sure! ;-)