Apparently not happy with their usage monitoring portal (or due to technical inability), almost a year ago BSNL started redirecting new customers (with IPs in the range 117.*.*.*) to a new portal where they could check their usage - http://bbservice.bsnl.in

I updated DatatFox and released version 1.4 to take care of this, everything seemed to be working fine until around a month ago; when they released yet another portal.  Now 117.* users may (that’s right, may) be redirected to http://bbservice.bsnl.in/wps/portal automatically when they try to go to http://bbservice.bsnl.in; this is another completely different portal, one which DataFox cannot currently handle. One of my users reported that sometimes he is sent to the old new portal, and sometimes to the new new portal, WTF?

Whenever I try though, I do not get redirected, and have therefore been unable to take a crack at the new portal. I’m also very busy with work right now, so have had no time to look into this further. It will take me at least a couple of weeks to get back on this problem (along with an update for MTNL users). In the meanwhile, if you have any additional info on this subject, please leave a comment, email me or join the discussion here.

A couple of days ago I released Devabulator 1.4, you can get it here.

Changelog:

1. Fixed break caused by deviantART feed change. Devabulator would just say “loading deviations” and sit there doing nothing. Thanks to Micah from the deviantART team who helped me fix this.
2. Added dock support. The current deviation is now displayed in the dock, handy if you have Devabulator minimized.
3. Fixed ‘n’ & ‘p’ hotkeys. These were not working in Konfabulator version 4 and up, now fixed (and hopefully not broken for version 3…)

I found this news item explaining deviantART’s new search capabilities rather interesting, the cool part is that you can use most of these queries in Devabulator too (Devabulator uses the same feed to fetch deviations). For instance, have Devabulator show you today’s daily deviations by adding “special:dd” to the modifier list. The Devabulator page has a larger list of modifiers which you can use to really fine tune the results.

Also, I’m not really sure Konfabulator will last much longer, the forums seem to have disturbing news; so this may be the last Devabulator version, at least for Konfabulator. If you have another platform that you’d like to see Devabulator on (iPhone, Android, Vista Sidebar, etc.) please comment. In the meanwhile, enjoy!

DataFox is currently being updated to work for new MTNL Bombay users, those who have a ‘@’ in their username. A prototype is already working, but making sure it works well under all circumstances is the big time sink. Expect a release in the next week or two. In other DataFox news, a month ago, I released DataFox 1.5, which is a better Firefox citizen (I cleaned up a ton of global variables) and works for a bbservice.bsnl.in portal update. This version is also more efficient for users of this portal, as DataFox no longer needs to fetch and parse all your records before presenting usage statistics; it takes all it needs from the summary at the top of the sheet, saving both time and bandwidth.

Devabulator has been due an update for ages and I have been meaning to get to it for some time now, though I have been recently occupied with DataFox and FireBible development. Of course, the biggest time sink of all is MyEclipse DeviantART unknowingly forced the issue by drastically changing the feed Devabulator is built around, breaking Devabultor completely. It will attempt to get a list of deviations, but then hang, failing to display even a thumbnail. I spoke to them and they said they weren’t aware of anyone using the feed, so…

Again, I already have this mostly fixed, but need to make some changes to accommodate fundamental differences in the information received. Also taking the opportunity to run down some hairy bugs, if I manage to reproduce them.

May take just an hour to get something sorted out technically, but could take a few weeks before you work out all the details and iron out the bugs. It’s been months since the last release and I wanted to let users know that I am still working on FireBible and haven’t abandoned the project. I’m still working out the details, but I think I’m pretty close to a stopping point.

Here is a preview of the upcoming FireBible version, which will add support for General Books, Daily Devotionals, Dictionaries and maybe Commentaries too. This version will also work with the upcoming JSword 1.0.8 release, the existing version will only work with JSword 1.0.7.

I get a good amount of feedback from fellow Bible software developers on sword/jsword-devel at Crosswire but not much from general users, so if you use FireBible and have some suggestions, I’d love to hear from you. See the About page for contact details.