[NTLK] ATA Support delayed (was: Re: ATA demo expired!)

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Mon Nov 05 2001 - 18:05:52 EST


Hi all,

À (At) 11:41 +1300 6/11/01, Thomas Wernitz écrivait (wrote) :
>unfortunately the ATA demo has expired and there is no update available.
>Could you please post a new version?

Sorry, Thomas, I cannot. I'm exhausted beyond reasonable limits. Huge
stress, health problems (heavy migranes caused by stress), hardware
failures (my screen died on Monday, the VGA adapter that came with it
died on Friday -- I thought it was the built-in video card of the G3
-- my hard drive refused to mount on Friday evening so I spent Friday
night and all Saturday burning CDs) added to normal lack of time
doesn't permit me to release ATA Support 1.0b10 tonight. Well, I
could, but I would sleep less than 4 hours which I prefer to not do.
And I'm not even sure to be able to release it tomorrow as I have a
huge day (I have meetings I even haven't found the time yet to
prepare) and I take the GRE wednesday morning, so I'd better sleep.

When I released ATA Support 1.0b9, I wrote that a new version would
be available soon. It hasn't been the fact because of all these
factors and also because I've done deeper changes than I should have
(which lead last week to a speed increase of 10% and I have done
further optimizations since (probably less important, though)). The
current build doesn't work, it freezes the Newton and additionally,
it could corrupt data if the store gets full (well, actually, ATA
Support 1.0b9 also does, but this time I'm aware of the problem). And
I've partially only fixed the bug with cards that can't be
partitioned (in fact, which aren't properly written to).

I apologize for the trouble it creates.

If you use ATA cards for your data, you can fool the expiration date
mechanism the following way: set the date back before the expiration
date (Monday, 5th, 2359). Insert the ATA card. Set the date to its
normal value. The check is indeed only performed when you insert the
card and ATA Support is quite dumb for that expiration date (it's
just meant so (a) I release versions at regular periods and (b)
testers only report problems with the latest release).

Sorry all. I'm just so tired and stressed for personal reasons that I
sometimes feel going nuts.

Paul

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