Category: News

While tracking down some issues in some of the cmdlets, I came to the conclusion that it may be a good idea to rebuild all the scripts prior to a release. There’s a lot of missing bits and pieces in various cmdlets, which came about due to the nature of the project. Initially, a cmdlet was going to be very simple, but over time, the template became 8kb in size. From here on out, I can either keep the 8kb template and rebuild each script, or extract the necessary bits from each script and strip all comments out so each script is only the necessary bits to grab that particular set of files. In any case, one of these will be needed in order to complete the current release.

There’s also the boot functionality that needs to be fully implemented and utilized.

For the time being, BootZilla is in a ‘refactoring’ period of development. A final build is likely to be out by April 2015.

While doing some mandatory domain updates, it was decided to invest in an SSL/TLS certificate for the site, for both security and peace of mind. I’ll be changing to few minor things in the next release to utilize https for downloads from the site. Additional work is being done to make logging more useful, and will likely include the use of Awk in the next release to parse logs for errors, which will in turn give better reasons to users as to why a download may have failed or why an extraction may have ended badly (corrupt archive, for instance).

The deadline I set for myself has been over for over 8 days. I haven’t had a chance to work on BZ for a while, with work and health taking precedence over this side project.

As such, there’s really no way to set a deadline, from there on out, so the ‘latest’ version will be done when it’s done. I’m taking a page out of Gabe Newell’s book, and 3DRealms – don’t rush it. It could take a while, but the final product will be great and a joy to use.

Besides, I make no money from this… No one has ever donated to the project, in the past 10 years of its existence. I continue work on it just to make my life as an IT guy a little easier – instead of having to hunt down the tools I need, I manage a nice little package of up-to-date download scripts, for my personal peace of mind – then release it for the rest of the IT world to use, or grow on.

I still plan on finishing the new version this weekend, with a final release ready for use by December 1st. What time on December 1st, I do not know. It’s likely to be later in the day (for US users, anyway. It’ll likely be December 2nd for the rest of the world).

Final bits and pieces needed:

•  Boot CD functionality builder
• USB Boot Image Builder (may be added later on)

fix some of the logging in the cmdlets

Work will continue. As an aside, here’s some demographics of the site’s current traffic –

Most traffic comes from Italian users! The USA is second to Italy in viewers of the site. This tells me that in the future, an Italian translation would be beneficial – the good news is, most applications included are already multilingual – just the instructions need a proper translation. I’d like to reach out to my Italian users for this. If you can help with this small side project, get in touch with me!

 

For the time being, I’m slowly adding a handful of new programs in the form of cmdlets. Since I’d rather not bother with releasing minor versions of the beta, I’m just using Google Drive to synchronize some of these new scripts. They may have issues that I haven’t ironed out yet, but if you want to test them, it would be of great help to me. Simply drop each cmdlet into the cmdlets directory, and either run them directly or from BZBuilder.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_DC7Oz95HMLZy1aUkhWVFRXQjg&usp;=sharing

I’m going to have to rewrite a bit of the code I had set aside for the BootCD functionality, as I made the mistake of eliminating the boot cmdlet I had created in a previous, unreleased alpha build. As such, expect to see some Boot functionality begin making its way into the next 2-3 beta builds.

Over the past weekend, the overall structure of a cmdlet was cleaned up, but in turn, it opened up a lot of new bugs in the logic that I had not forseen. I could just drop all this cleanup, and drop support for proxy servers, but that’s not ideal. I’d like to make sure all people can access the toolkit.

As of today, I’m going to re-write the template I base each cmdlet off of, then re-implement each tool in the new template structure.

Features I plan to include are:

• Proxy Server Support
• Backup Download Links
• Locally hosted files on BootZilla.org (for some apps that would otherwise eat the individual authors’ bandwidth)
• Clear instructions on how to use the template file

If I have enough time, I’m also going to build a script that will auto-generate a cmdlet, which will simplify the creation of these scripts, and reduce the amount of re-work I have to perform between releases and test versions of the toolkit.

What this means to the end user: Easier to manage and create your own scripted downloads, as well as a more proper download function that has logic to reduce bandwidth use in the long run.

Boot CD/USB functionality will also be added in to this new revision of the scripts. Currently, a very small bit of code for this exists in the ‘alpha4’ BZBuilder, which needs to be expanded on in order to be made useful. The only functions currently in are the search for, and execution for any cmdlet in the boot directory. The next bits include integration of iso-regeneration and usb-bootable image creation. These last bits will likely make an appearance later on in either an alpha5 or beta 1 release.

One last thing – SyMenu will be the official launcher app for BootZilla. Once the scripting is completed, work will begin on integration of SyMenu into the toolkit. It’s a very useful tool that will make using BootZilla very intuitive for both Techs and end-users alike.