Larry’s Personal & Tech ramblings

Each year that passes brings newer and better technology to the computer industry.  Some things get smaller while others get bigger.  Hard drives seem to be the only technology that is simultaneously getting better and worse at the same time.  Each successive generation of hard drives is faster and higher capacity than the previous, but what is suffering is reliability.   The corresponding problem is that as capacities grow, it becomes more and more challenging to backup the huge quantity of data.  How can 1TB of data be backed up by the average user?  I know some computer users who are still using 10-15 year old, low capacity hard drives on a daily basis; they just work the way they’re supposed to.  I’ve had 3 modern hard drives fail on me in the last few months.  This trend must reverse; as more and more people rely on their computers to organize their lives, we can’t tolerate catastrophic loss of our data.  It’s not fair to put the burden of constant data backup and yearly hardware replacement on the average user.  RAID configurations are just a band-aid over the problem.  I’ve had to invest money in a mirrored arrangement of drives with an external controller box.  Hard drive manufacturers (listen up Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi): I would pay more for a 120GB drive which will last for 10 years than a 500GB drive while is guaranteed to break in 1 year.

“Micro_View” is a product I created several years ago for a client.  It’s a simple imaging library for Win32 and WinCE which allows you to load BMP, GIF and JPEG images into a HBITMAP or it can display them in a window.  The code is fast and small (the Win32 lib file is 96K).  I created a stand-alone command-line driven executable which displays an image in a borderless window and a link library which has 3 functions defined:

int APIENTRY MicroView(TCHAR *filename, int iOptions);
int APIENTRY MVLoadBitmap(TCHAR *filename, HBITMAP *, HPALETTE *);
int APIENTRY MVLoadResource(HINSTANCE hInst, TCHAR *rname, HBITMAP *pBitmap, HPALETTE *pPalette);

If you need to add simple image handling to your application, it doesn’t get much easier than this.  This is something that’s been collecting dust on my harddrive for quite a while, but would probably make a pretty good retail product.  I will see if I can package this up into a reasonably priced product in the next few days.  Please email me (bitbank@pobox.com) if you’re in need of such a library.

It’s taken a lot longer than expected to release the latest version of my image viewer. Many other projects have gotten in the way, but I’ve finally wrapped up version 4 of PQV. The sales pages on Handango and PocketGear are not quite working yet, but the PayPal link works. The $14.99 license is per user, not device. A single license allows you to use the viewer on all your Windows Mobile devices and Windows Desktop. Here’s the new product page:

PQV 4.0

When you install the Pocket PC or SmartPhone versions, the Desktop PC version also gets installed.