From time to time I receive sad/angry/informative messages from users that some antivirus scanner is reporting my programs as virus or trojan or suspicious file. Obviously those are “false positives” (the AV vendors are using this euphemism to replace “lies”). I have no idea why that happens. In the past I was publishing unsigned setup files, which could be part of the problem. But now everything is signed with my digital signature. The only reason for this to happen is the paranoid nature of some antivirus programs. Yesterday I had to deal with disappointed user who purchased my program just to see Nor**n saying it’s a virus and to stop the tool from working. I refunded the money, but no one could remove the bad taste feeling can’t be cured neither for me nor the user. According to nor**n, this tool is “suspicious” because is not very popular. Boy! I am writing niche software, I never intended to be popular with these tools. DrW*b directly says (lies) there is a virus in other of the tools I am publishing. Why? What virus? Kas***sky isn’t right now reporting any of my tools as virus, but it did that several times in the past… What is this? Why are antivirus programs lying about my programs?

They don’t care about me. They just want to prove to the end-users they are doing their job. Paranoid algorithm? OK, but why on my back? They don’t know my product (because my products aren’t so popular) and it is quite easy to say I am a bad guy, just in case. But what about me? What about my feelings? Seems that antivirus vendors are OK with destroying other people’s reputation (and building their reputation on my back). Well, how they will feel if I put a site online where developers like me to vote about the most stupid antivirus scanner? What if I publish a chart with the “most stupid antivirus” or “biggest lier” heading on top? It will be good way to educate end users what these “false positives” are (lies) and why those antivirus scanners are alarming people with false alarms (paranoid and/or stupid algorithms)… And I may claim (as the antivirus vendors are claiming) that I am making everything to increase people’s security (by informing them about unfair practices of antivirus vendors). And adding one “disclaimer” here and there will do the trick. Everybody’s happy… Except the end user (who doesn’t benefit of that) and software vendors (because to call you liar is the same as calling you virus maker).

The very existence of such situations is very ugly thing. And it comes back every now and then in my life. The “black” version of the Myth of the Eternal Return…

Finally, let me say it in plain text: I am software developer, not a virus maker. I don’t have viruses in my computers and I don’t distribute viruses. I am signing my products with my name (unlike antivirus software that uses soulless algorithms) and I really don’t know what more to do in order to prove my innocence. But as a victim I will continue trying to fight for my reputation and to see the justice to prevail.

The very first thing you should do after installing the program is to calibrate the tool to work with your screens. Here is a quick guided tour:

Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, after a long day of testing the new version of Screen Ruler is now available for download. All Windows users: please, upgrade to get some broken shortcuts fixed. Also — there is one new feature added (go to “View” menu and look for “Bottom-Left Labels” item. This will put the ruler width/height at the bottom-right corner so you can hide all other readings (including the info panel) and work with clean rectangle (feature added on user request).

A question arrived today on how to install Screen Ruler. I never realized that such info could be useful in some cases, but now I wrote 2 step-by-step guides on this and they are available in the help pages for Screen Ruler Professional:

Installing Screen Ruler on Mac OS X

Installing Screen Ruler on Windows Computer

As you saw in the last weeks, I was transferring the site from the old design to the new one. It looks I can’t resist the temptation to change the look’n'feel of this site every year (I think this is the 4th design for less than 5 years) but well, we are web-masters at the end of the day…) Anyway, I finished the last sections (the blog) and even added some of these “follow me” buttons on all pages (just FB and Twitter so far but it should be enough for start). Now I will need to remember to update these profiles, but that’s another story. Thank you for your patianse in the last days (if you saw some strange behavior here or there, you know now what’s the reason)…

Yes, that toy got it’s 3rd release, and this time everything should be fixed (and I believe there will be no new bug-fix release soon)

• In this version you can work with very large files (for example, I tested with images instead of texts)
• Unicode is now fully supported
• Clipboard functionality added (paste, copy) for those who want that

And starting with this release, I am signing the setup files (someone pointed me that this is good for some users). On setup windows may now say the program is issued by “Melanto”. For those of you who are curious — “Melanto Ltd.” is my company (it is still me, but company namehttp://wonderwebware.com/duplicatefinder/seems to be more useful when one sign setup files)…

[ Download Duplicates Finder ]

From time to time users are asking my why IE7/8/9 doesn’t show the popup menu on hover. And often the reason is bad !DOCTYPE of the html page.

For some reason IE is sensitive to these. For example, IE7 may not support the menu popup feature if your document starts with this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

And if you put the right code everything will start to work:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>

In this case IE just wants to see the exact full definition for HTML 4.1 or else it doesn’t render the page as expected.

If there is no !DOCTYPE definition, add it.

If it is not the right one, replace it with the proper version.

Here are the most common:

HTML 4.01 Transitional:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
<html>

HTML 4.01 Strict

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>
<html>

XHTML 1.0 Transitional:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>

XHTML 1.0 Strict:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>

Most other modern browsers will be able to work even if the doctype isn’t in it’s full version, but IE is (as always) a special case…

In the last 10 years I am dealing a lot with download sites. Each title must be submitted to hundreds and even thousands sites. sometimes they are accepting my submissions, sometimes they are rejecting, but the people behind one site managed to surprise me. I never expected someone to contact me via email and ask for additional info. That means that someone is actually careful whit this site. They are checking what to list, contacting the developer. And this is the link if you are curious which one this site is: LifetimeUpgrades.com

I just wrote one additional help page for my CSS Menu Generator for those who are not sure what to do with the generated code:

[ Adding CSS menu to your page ]

You changed my life.

And you’ll never be forgotten.

http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/