Windows 7 RC, upcoming articles, and CMag beta news

These are busy times.

I've got a couple of articles in preview at the moment, on by Tony York on passing groups, and another by Dr. Parker on the status of his much-desired fixes to the previewer and MASK in C7.1. And I've got an excellent two-parter by Philip Prohm on converting your apps to C7.1, the first part of which should be online by the end of this week.

Like a lot of other people, I installed the Windows 7 release candidate on my development machine sometime last year, fully intending to upgrade to the RTM when it came out. But I never got around to it. And last week I became aware that the deadline was March 1, as of which time I could expect my Windows 7 RC install to start shutting down abruptly every two hours. So last week I bit the bullet and did a fresh install.

Years ago I started keeping a document with the exact steps needed to get everything up and running on a new install. Even with that the process takes more than a day, and there's always some app or configuration that I added since the last time but forgot to document. I have around fifty different applications/utilities I use on a regular basis, so I really need that doc.

I started the install last weekend, and although I had my core configuration in place by Monday morning and the majority of apps installed by the afternoon, I'm still doing a certain amount of fixup and cleanup each day. And of course there were various glitches, such as when I installed the latest PostgreSQL 8.4 release. And found out when it came time to update the ClarionMag beta database that I was running 8.3 on the server. And I had problems importing the new database. And and and ... well, just another day at the office.

The new ClarionMag beta site is coming along nicely. You can have a look at beta.clarionmag.com. In particular check out the My ClarionMag page. As you'll notice on the latter page the login system is different on the new site. We're switching to forms-based authentication, with a "remember me" option that keeps you logged in. If you've been relying on your browser's memory to log you in to the current site you may have forgotten your password entirely. There are a couple of ways to retrieve it.

One way is to get it from your browser - FireFox will let you view stored passwords, and I imagine most other browsers will as well.

The other is to get your password emailed to you by ClarionMag. But please make sure we have your current email address - you can update that (as well as your mailing list preferences) here.

And please do verify your email address. We do at times sends out special offers by email only, and if we don't have a current email address, or you've declined to be on our mailing lists (which are double-opt-in) you're unlikely to hear about those offers.

There's a lot of cool stuff happening on the beta site - I'll have more to say in upcoming articles. Really, go check out My ClarionMag. You'll find some nifty new ways to manage your own view of ClarionMag, including lists of favorite and "read later" articles.

Oh yes, I had someone ask me about the .NET site. That's still in development, but as it uses the same server code base as the new ClarionMag site you can expect to see it online in the near future.

If you're on Twitter, you can follow the beta progress and other ClarionMag news and notes on the ClarionMag Twittwer feed.

Posted: February 24 2010