News - Aug 24, 2008
After a couple of years, new version 0.65b of Vaisnava Reminder is available for your update. The project is developing rather slow, since I cannot afford to give it much of my time. Still, somehow I managed to make several useful features available in new version:
So that was about changes in Vaisnava Reminder v0.65b. About my personal life - I've changed a job for a better one, now working for Canadian outsourcing company in my city in Ukraine, as a remote system administrator. During this time I passed few certifications - got Cisco CCNA, Juniper JNCIA-ER and Microsoft MCP. Also got a Computer Sciences bachelor diploma with honours, and working on completion of my education in university. The life is somewhat difficult to do all roles simultaneusly - be a dad, be a student, be an IT professional and be at some level of Krishna followers servant. Not everything I do well and perfectly. But that's definitely better than having no aim. :) So thank you for giving me some level of motivation. Some devotees wanted to donate to the project but the money tranfer was not obvious enough. I'm checking iKobo service - it should be as easy as Paypal, if you still wish to gift a small donation, write me, I'll keep you updated. But in any case I still need your blessings and good wishes. Hare Krishna and happy Janmastami.Revision of calendar code. Though old version was pretty stable, there were few mistakes in dates calculatiom, concerning Govardhava Puja and a couple of other vaisnava events. Now it's much more accurate - for several months I've not find any bug yet, so it's highly advicable to make update to the new version.
Updates of DST changes. Several countries on the Earth - including USA and Canada has changes the rules on how the Daylight Savings Time is calculated each year, so I've updated the rules for them accordingly. Also fixed a bug which caused incorrect break fast time values in several cases. For this reason, again, I would highly recommend to switch to new version.
Removed Time Synchronization feature. It proved to be too unstable and unnecessary, as internet time synchronization is embedded in all new versions of Windows.
Added choice of Muhurta time calculation method. One devotee send me a link on very interesting discussion on how muhurta is calculated in VCAL. Shyamasundara Prabhu, the author of VCAL calendaric calculations, insisted that the program containes a big flaw due to muhurta was considered a variable value instead of fixed. I'll not give here much details on this - you can read about this controvercy in web forums. But Syamasundara Prabhu's arguments were sound highly reasonable for me, so I added it as an option for calculations. The default value is still variable muhurta (for compatibility with VCAL), but I personally started to use fixed muhurta, so it's up to you what to choose.
Added silent alerts. That's for those devotees, who need only visual notification. Check it in Options page. By the way, I swapped some sounds for alerts, I hope you don't mind. If you want, you can customize sound on for your own, just need to replace wav files in "sounds" directory.
New Events set for BTI. Several months ago devotees from Srila Narayana Maharaja's Math wrote me that they needed a set of events different from that one which is produced by VCAL for ISKCON. I tried to make it - so please evaluate and check if it ok. You can select it in Options page - click on BTI (Bhaktivedanta Trust International).
Export to iCalendar format. This is new neat feature, which helps you to export to this popular inter-application format, so you may import it to your groupware or calendar program. It's somewhat experimental, but it worked for me to import calendar to Microsoft Outlook and Evolution. I hope it will be compatible with other applications too, and will wait for your feedback.
Improved compatibility. I checked the program to be compatible with Vista 32-bit. It worked fine as for me, no difference with XP. Possibly you'll need to update security permissions for program folder if you're using non-admin account. Also, I compiled a special version for running in Linux with Wine. Works pretty good, maybe I'll post a screenshot of that :) And it may even work on MacOS.
Other minor changes. Most of them are minor cosmetic changes in the interface. You'll barely notice them, I just tried to improve the design slightely. No skin support yet, sorry. Hopefully the program will grow to this stage. :)