MarsJupiter Daily News

The next project at MarsJupiter is due to attain "functioning" status is a day or two. Just what it does is still under wraps, but we think it has great potential.

Sometimes small is beautiful, and this project which should be completed in a total of weeks promises to be just that. This project marks an interesting trend in the scale of our projects.

UpFront - GUI for Ingres FRS - Man Decades in development.
Callisto - Bulleting Board Browser - Man Years in development.
Foboz - Meta Search Engine - Man Months in development.
New Project - Man Weeks in development.

Partially responsible for this trend is the fact the we are building on previous experience. But it is also the case that the market is getting that much more crowded and investing years of effort in projects is increasingly risky for small companies.

A few more tweaks continue to be made to the Foboz - Meta Search Engine toolbar, the signs are though that the basic toolbar is pretty solid.

The keyword there in many respects is "basic". This is a very useful toolbar which gives you simple and direct access to the powerful Foboz Search facilities and that is all it does.

A logical extension of these facilities would be the highlighting of search terms when you open search results and the extension of the Family Friendly features (if enabled) into web pages, providing a net nanny type feature.

Our current thinking is though that we have seen examples of toolbars from that introduce problems into Internet Explorer, especially when those toolbars hook into every web access you make. Before we move into this sort of area we want to be very sure that the toolbar as it stands is a solid trouble free peice of software.

The Foboz - Meta Search Engine toolbar, designed to integrated Foboz into Internet Explorer giving you easy access to the powerful search capabiity of Foboz directly within your web browser is now in the final stages of development.

There are a few wrinkles still to clear up and the installation code which has now been developed is scheduled for testing tomorrow, but there is no question that the core of the job is complete and working well.

The Toolbar will be released first for Alpha testing and then will be packaged into the first maintenance release of Foboz which will deal with some very trivial issues in Foboz itself. The release will of course be a free upgrade.

The development of Foboz - Meta Search Engine toolbar has now crossed that important dividing line and is now an actually usable and useful piece of code. Well just barely! It does have quite a few things remaining to be done.

However the old rule in software development that when you have 90% of the development done, you have another 90% of effort remaining, does not apply to a first activex based project. It is more like 90% of the effort to get anything up and running and more to the point understood.

we are looking forward to making a test release of the toolbar very soon now, as we anticipate things completing very rapidly.

We are very pleased to say we think an Alpha of the Foboz - Meta Search Engine toolbar is now in sight. The toolbar is finally producing search results into an internet explorer window, albeit with still several issues to be resolved.

But from a point of view of satisfaction, actually seeing any results at all is very good from our point of view. We may well want to find a few customers willing to be victims of a toolbar alpha quite soon, anyone willing to help should contact support. Actually victims is too strong a word, Internet Explorer integration is done purely via the system registry and therefore whilst it can temporarily make internet explorer crash if there are bugs present. The problems caused can always be fairly easily rectified.

It seems like we think it every day, but we think we have finally cracked the last major issues with the Foboz - Meta Search engine toolbar. More and more we can see the reasoning behind embracing the C# language, for which a lot of the code involved is inbuilt. Then again by sticking to C++ we can at least understand a lot more of how it all works.

The upshot of all the toolbar work has been to cause some temporary neglect to a few other projects, though we have found time to add a couple more Bulletin Board types to the Callisto - News Reader. Adding these was quickly done following a report in the forums, and we would remind Callisto users, that we are always keen to hear reports of any Bulletin Boards that do not currently work.

Work on the Foboz Meta Search engine toolbar continues with the restructuring of Foboz into components. This should separate the user interface, the toolbar and the actual search engine, making it possible to make automatic downloads of updated components practical. Note that search engine definitions which are the core of Foboz operation are already automatically downloaded.

We would still hesitate to put a time scale on the release of the toolbar. Currently we have a set of compiling and linking components that contain most of the functionality we require. But integrating it all and getting it working is another leap upwards on the learning curve of activex and shell extensions.

Possibly the main issue with a toolbar is what should it do apart from searching, we are certainly considering using our Family Filter technology to scan incoming web pages, and it is tempting to incorporate popup blocking. But the latter is done very well by other products, and doing something second best is not our philosophy.

Foboz toolbar progress

Today has seen the Foboz toolbar pick up a little more momentum. Though we cannot really say it is flying yet. Mostly the coding is a learning experience in just why so many people are switching to the c# language! We are sticking to c++ for the moment, but it does make life rather harder as we have to deal with what seems like converting between every way people have tried to contrive string variables since the dawn of time. c# we understand is written from the ground up with data types that are complient with the needs of COM/ActiveX.
Pragmatically though at least in C++ you are left a little closer to undertanding what is actually going on.
Coming from a background in coding that started off in assembly language, e.g. one stage above typing hexadecimal bytes into a machine manually, I have always had a desire to know when I code, just what is actually happening at the coal face.
This is often confused in my experience with the "not invented here" syndrome where programmers are supposedly prone to reject code they did not write themselves. I have never been one to believe many programmers are that prone to this anyway. Preferring to think that most programmers, say:

"I can write this myself in a week"

or I can spend:

"1 day trying to find the code elsewhere"
"1 day pursuading the company to pay for it"
"1 day getting the code"
"1 day learning it"
"1 day implementing it"
"1 month trying to get the originators to fix the bugs..."


I have seen many projects on the bleeding edge suffer this way. Though on the whole in areas where you would have been crazy to try a diy approach.
In our own projects we have examples of the diy approach. In the Callisto - Newsreader there are extensive "hashing" routines to speed up access to all the indexes. These have been through extensive revisions to be exactly opimised for what is needed in Callisto. We could have used existing hashing classes in MFC, but once you do that, the matter is effectively out of your hands. If it did not work fast enough there would be little milage in complaining to Microsoft!

Alexa ranking

In other news our Alexa ranking continues to move up and down like a yoyo, now showing a 400% improvement in our sites ranking over the last 3 months. But we would not expect solid and consistant results until our new look web site has been re-indexed by the major search engines.

Progress continues to be made on the Foboz toolbar edition, or to be more to the point progress has got a little more off the ground after a rocky start. By some quirk of fate our projects at MarsJupiter had not really involved much by way of windows shell programming and ActiveX and these technologies are not the easiest to master.
Since we are determined that what we create for the toolbar will be a valuable add on, it is vitally important that we get it right.
Thus whilst the toolbar work continues, we are also making amazon.com shares a good buy at the moment, by significantly boosting their quarterly profits by buying a trick load of programming guides!

If you are in search of something to lighten up the day, a quick joke, a funny anecdote, or a "true" story from the outer fringes of reality or sanity, then the Foboz - Meta Search Engine is the place to look for it.

Along with all our serious Search Categories, we have a "New of the Weird" and a dedicated "humour" category.

With the addition today of the incredibly funny "Darwin Awards" you have almost 20 Search Engine specially dedicated to your amusement.

In other news, we think our series of articles on the tricky issues surrounding SEO, Search Engine Optimisation are now a pretty good starting point for any webmaster looking for a reasonably concise place to start studying the subject.

For a Mambo site, things are even better as we have an excellent Mambo optimisation guide with information you simply will not find elsewhere.

All heads down here working on Foboz Toolbar coding.

It will be a good addition to Foboz from the completeness point of view, but we fall in the camp of preferring the search to be separate to the browser. We see to many browsers with too many unwieldy toolbars to have a great love of the things.

Time scale for this free upgrade is a little hard to predict as there are quite a few technologies involved.