Texture

A new background texture which is done by Noise + greyscale + invert, followed by blurring and embossing, and then tweaking the brightness and contrast to taste.

PassiveFTP 1.5

PassiveFTP 1.5 — PassiveFTP version 1.5.1667.19669 — minor bug-fix release — this fixes the 11-Jun-04 issue. This turned out to be GDI exhaustion by putting server-side icons in the client icon cache, and thus having to regenerate individual icons for each file on the server, each time the view changed!

Windows page, as usual

I like Metal

Rolled my own textures for the brushed metal look : light and dark brushed aluminium. The brushed metal trick is Noise + greyscale + invert + motion blur; then cut a chunk out the middle.

Fade to Black…

Fade To Black… — version 0.8 — dead simple image manipulation program in Java SDK 1.4. Run using

java -cp fadetoblack.zip com.ravnanadtines.FadeToBlack

(with jre, jrew or javaw instead of java as appropriate), where fadetoblack.zip is the download archive. I used it to do the fade on the top-left masthead image (of the Louvre pyramid, in Paris) on the linked sites.

On the Java page

Glitches -- PassiveFTP and Janus/.Net

With Passive FTP 1.4 I've encountered a number of occasions in live use — but not, alas when running in set-up tests, where it seems that operations on a large server-side directory and shuffling that around by adding or deleting files can cause some sort of fault in the icon rendering.

In Janus.Net 1.1, I have observed that null credentials (empty username and password) will suffice to perform NTLM authentication. A little digging suggests that this is a "feature" of the protocol. Note that IE prevents you giving an empty username+password in the login dialog box by keeping the OK button disabled under those circumstances.

Janus/.Net 1.1

Janus.Net 1.1 experimental — version 1.1.1569.19993 — contains experimental code to perform HTTP Basic and NTLMv2 authentication to HTTP based proxies. The only reliance on library code by the NTLM support is for the System.Security.Crypto.MD5 class — everything else for NTLM is in-line. The code is experimental in that I've tested the authentication code against a local copy of IIS, rather than against a real authenticating web proxy.

From the Windows page.

PassiveFTP 1.4

PassiveFTP 1.4 — PassiveFTP version 1.4.1560.16653 — minor bug-fix release — if a logon to a new server was abandoned by terminating the program, the current server would be set to the new one — but on restart this would cause an out-of-range error, as there would be no stored server details.