Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2005 12:13 am

I won't be reading these forums or doing much email for the next week. I got called in for Jury Duty today and got selected for a week-long trial. I'll be home at night but have to many other things to do other than watching the forums. Chiara will be doing her normal support email, but I won't be answering the technical questions for the next week or so. And we'll be away from the computers this weekend (it's the long July 4th holiday weekend in the U.S.).

When I'm done with Jury Duty I'll be frantically preparing for the Shareware conference on July 13th-16th. Fortunately I got the CDROM and White Paper done before today, so they will be ready in time for the conference.

Adept Joined: 01 Mar 2005 Posts: 277

Zugg, before you go I thought I'd share with you some info. I was nearing the completion of my web site and an individual approached me to develop a custom application for them. Of course it fit the zApp bill absolutely perfectly, so I blurted out "Hey, I can do that in zApp and it will work great with the plug-in architecture." Of course I got a deer in the headlights look. Laughing

So I am putting my web site on hold for a week or so. I will have the honor of being the first developer to have utilitized zApp for making a professional custom application. Razz

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 698

Heh, jury-duty! I'll give three-to-one odds that sitting in a courtroom for a week will produce more new ideas and 'features' for zApp than laying sick in bed ever did for zMud, no matter how interesting the trial is and how much effort Zugg puts into paying attention. Any suc..uh takers? Twisted Evil

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

Judge: "The defendant is on trial for software piracy of a number of titles including, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Microsoft Office XP 2003, zMud--"
Zugg: "This jury member has come to a verdict your honor."

=)

Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2005 12:50 am

ROFL. Thanks for making me laugh slicertool...I needed it.

Mr_Kent, unfortunately I don't forsee that happening. It is *so* stressful staying completely alert for 8 hours sitting in one place and trying to listen intently to everything being said (much of which can be very depressing) is just completely draining. We can't talk to each other (fellow jurors) yet and I can't talk to anyone else, including Chiara, about the details. So it's causing me to be very stressed, and *very* tired each night.

Unfortunately, work like zApp is totally out of my mind during this experience. I'm hoping we will be done tomorrow and I'll have the long weekend for a good break, but it's possible we will have to go back again on Tuesday, in which case I'll then need to take a couple of days off after it's over.

It's much more likely that I'll come away from the Shareware Conference itself with lots of energy and ideas. That's what happened to zMUD several years ago when I attended this same conference held in Tampa FL. So I probably won't be doing much before the conference (except for various prep work) with the expectation that after the conference I'll be excited to get back to work on zApp and especially on eMobius.

theNerd, I'm excited to hear about your application. I got a bit of taste of that too. When I was putting together the CDROM for zApp, I was first going to do just a set of web pages and have Internet Explorer autostart with the CD. Then I thought about zApp and I ended up writing a quick custom application, with the IE WebBrowser ActiveX control as a main component. But I added some events to handle direct execution of the various installers and demo programs and it ended up being a very nice customized CD autostart program. I actually included the Autostart demo on the zApp CD and you'll see at least the source code for it over in the zApp Demos area.

But it was a great test. It was a *lot* faster than developing an Autostart program using anything else including Delphi and was a nice confirmation to me that zApp was stable and very useful. I used zAppPro to encrypt the Autostart app and linked it into a standalone EXE file. The main changes to zApp in v2.3.1 were in regard to running zApp programs from a readonly media like a CD. Otherwise everything else that I needed worked great!

Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2005 10:34 pm

Yeah! I'm Free! (and the defendant is not)

Got done with the trial this morning. I ended up replaying various testimonies in my mind all throughout the 3-day weekend, so it wasn't very relaxing. My guess is that I'll take the next couple of days to relax a bit, maybe go see a movie or something. I finally was able to sit and talk to Chiara and tell her all about the trial, and that should help reduce the stress of it all.

It was a very educational experience, but I wouldn't want to go through it again. A total of five days at that kind of concentration level was really draining. I have a *lot* of respect for people like the court reporter who have to sit through that day after day...I don't know how they do it. Fortunately, I think I'm now exempt from Jury service for at least 3 years here in Colorado.

I'll be back to thinking about zApp and eMobius by the end of the week and doing last minute work for the Shareware conference that is next week. I also have a *lot* of email to go through in the next couple of days.

Adept Joined: 01 Mar 2005 Posts: 277

Come on! We need details!! Razz

Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2005 3:31 am

Too depressing to put much into print. I'll just say that it was an "Attempted Murder", Domestic violence strangulation case. We did not find him guilty of attempted murder, but did find him guilty of 2nd degree assault with a deadly weapon (one of six charges we had to deliberate). Neither side was completely innocent, and we all agreed that both sides lied a lot in their various inconsistent stories, even when under oath. In general, just a very sad tale of how screwed up some people in this world really are.

Adept Joined: 01 Mar 2005 Posts: 277

Helps us appreciate what we have, huh? Some people lead very sad lives.