The World of Computer Software/The World of Computer Software.iso/cscls120.zip/HISTORY.CSC

Text File | 1993-01-06 | 9KB | 206 lines

History of Changes made to CSCALLS
in reverse order;


January 6, 1993 Ver 1.20

■ Skipped 2 versions for internal use.

■ Corrected an error that caused the program to not accept anymore entries
after December 31, 1992.. Messed up the logic.

■ Finally corrected that sort routine so that it correctly sorts in either
ASCENDING or DESCENDING order according to the date and time the user was on
the system.

December 18, 1992 Ver 1.17

■ It's been a while since I did any work on this program... I am working
on tweaking the sort routine, which is still not exact. One thing thtat
seems to improve the sort is moving the date and time to the first
positions in the list, so I think I'll leave it that way. Doesn't look
bad that way either. I may in the near future modify the program so that
you can lay it out the way you want it... I have to think about that
strategy. Anyway, if you decide to use this version, you'll need to
delete your previous blt, and the .bak file, and let it start anew.

August 21, 1992 Ver 1.16

■ Made an adjustment to one statement in the program where the screen
displays the programs information while running, to try to pin point an
error being received by a user in a strange situation. Will let you all
know if anything comes of it.

June 24, 1992 Ver 1.15 *** Config File Change *****

■ Added the ability for the SysOp to add his/her own headers to the
CALLS bulletin. All PCBoard Macros are supported in the header including
colors. This header file is to be entered into your configuration file
on line 4, directly after the name and location of the usersfile on line
3. If you do not want to use a header file, then line 4 should be blank,
and the program will run just as it always has, creating the header for
you.

■ I got some help from Turbopower Software on the midnight rollover
calculation routine, and that is now fixed. It should now correctly
calculate time used if the users session spans across midnight! If you
notice anything strange with this, please let me know.

■ Registered versions of CSCALLS can turn off the tagline at the bottom
of the bulletin by including the switch NOTAG when calling the program.
Example; cscalls cscalls.cnf NOTAG.

June 19, 1992 Ver 1.13

■ I had a report that the time used was not being calculated correctly.
I thought that my routine was taking into account the midnight rollover,
but alas! Until I can find a reliable routine or formula I will just use
the Minutes_Used variable from the users file. The reason I did not use
this in the first place is because it's a cumulative number for a 24
hour period. In other words, if I log on at 24:00 and off at 00:30,
thats 30 minutes for the day used so far, then I log in again at 13:00
and off at 13:30 the total for the day is incremented by 30 minutes, and
this time it says that I was on for 1 hour in this session. The time
resets of course after midnight again, so it would not be bad if the user
only logged on once a day, but thats not the real world!

If anyone has the formula to calculate a midnight rollover I would
appreciate it!

June 13, 1992 Ver 1.12

■ Ok... I found the other bug that was driving everyone crazy.. some
faulty logic was not adding new callers to the list if you were not at
your maximum size from the config. It looks like I got it this time.

In reference to the sort, a couple of folks spotted wrong ordering in
the sorted list. When I do the sort of the list, the program is looking
at the positions that contain the date and time, and it's being sorted
by the value of the TEXT and not numerically.. trying to do a numeric
sort meant converting the elements from text to numbers for the sort
then back again, which would have been a real pain. The sort is close
enough for all intents and purposes, but I suppose if it REALLY meant
that much to someone I might consider fixing it for a fee <g>!

June 3, 1992 Ver 1.11     VIOLA!!!

■ I think I located the problem which was causing a lock-up on some
systems... It seems that a minor logic error was putting the program
into an endless loop if you did not have a blt file in use previously,
or if it was zero bytes long. The program is supposed to create the BLT
file for you, but once it got stuck in the loop, there was only one way
out! CTRL-ALT-DEL!. Anyway, that seems to have fixed that problem..
please let me know if you have any other troubles.

I previously turned off the xxx86 code generation... Turned it back on.

If all is well in the next few days, I will remove the debug code to
shorten up the program....

May 31, 1992 Ver 1.10

■ I added some serious debug code to the program so I can figure out
where it's locking up. Please run the program with "DEBUG" on the
command line after the name of the config file. This will create a file
called CSCALLS.DBF, which will list the procedures that the program has
run, as it goes along. If it locks up on you, please upload the dbf file
to me for review.

May 29, 1992 Ver 1.9

■ I think this problem may have something to do with the way Lantastic
handles file locks.. the program was developed on a 386sx connected to a
Novell 3.11 token ring server, and of course transfered to my 286
running the BBS, without a hitch I might add! I changed the routines
that read and write the files to be SHARE compatible... Let's see if
that gets us anywhere!

May 28, 1992 Ver 1.8

■ I guess I am getting closer... I added some more error checking in to
the code, and also set filemodes on every file opening, so that if
there is a network sharing problem, this should take care of it. If the
program exits with any message that a DOS ERRORCODE was returned from the
program, please make a note of it, and let me know what the code was,
and the file that it occurred on. I think I have covered every
read/write operation in the program with error checking, so if there is
a lock on a file somewhere, we'll find it (I hope!).

May 27, 1992 Ver 1.7

■ I am trying to solve a problem with the program locking up in some
unknown circumstance when trying to run. I suspect that it has something
to do with file locking going on by PCBoard, so I added so code to open
the files in a read only mode, which seems to be cooperating on this
end. Let my know what it does. I also added some error checking to the
code if it cannot open the files successfully.

May 25, 1992 Ver 1.6

■ Made a quick code change to the EXE program to default to a descending
sort of the list. Previously, if it was missing, there was not default
which could conceivably cause a lockup.

I also updated the documentation to reflect the sort options, which did
not appear previously (I forgot! :-> ).

May 24, 1992 Ver 1.5

■ I added some error checking in to the code to help handle improper
configurations. Some users are not following the example files that I
supplied in the setup, which can cause the program to lockup.
I will continue to add this as the need arises.

An important note is that you must copy pcboard.sys to another name when
the user gets online. If you try to use PCBoard.sys, you will find the
file is locked by PCBoard, and no other program can read from it. This
is why we use a copy of that file named something other than
pcboard.sys. The example I provided uses cscalls.sys which is only a
copy of pcboard.sys named something else. This allows CSCALLS to read
the file without the lock. If CSCALLS tries to read the pcboard.sys file
it will lock up until PCBoard releases the lock, which is not likely.

May 9, 1992  Ver 1.4

■ I noticed on my own system that the program was sometimes not putting
some callers into the BLT even though they qualified. Looking at the
logic I noticed that I needed more code to handle the change in sort
orders, and I did not account for that previously.

May 3, 1992  Ver 1.3

■ I response to requests, you can now specify the order in which the
entries appear in your list. I added another line to the configuration
file that will allow you to specify "AS" for an ascending sort, or "DS"
for a descending sort. I also tightened up one of the routines to make
it run a little quicker.

■ In messing with my copy I noticed that if I changed the number of
lines to display after filling it up, the tagline was not going to the
proper place... fixed.

I made a mistake in the keyfile checking routine of this program and had
to correct it. If your key file is no longer valid, please call my BBS
and I'll fix you up another one.

April 18, 1992 Ver 1.2

■ Did some spell checking on the program just to correct typo's! What a
mess!

April 3, 1992 Ver 1.1

■ I found that if a user logged on before midnight, and logged off after
midnight, the field that I was using in PCBoard was no longer valid, and
therefore would show a value of zero for time used. I just added a
couple of lines to do the calculation of time used myself, taking into
account the midnight rollover.. I also discovered while I was at it that
the last date logged didn't match what I was looking for either. If a
user logged on on 1/1/92 at 22:55, and logged off at 00:15 on 1/2/92 it
was showing his date that he logged off, rather than the date logged on.
Again a couple of lines of code corrected this.

April 1, 1992  Ver 1.0

■ Initial release of CSCALLS (here we go again!)