The complete source code of GreatNews is now available at GreatNews development board. The source code is released to open source community under GPL license. Hope we will have talent developers joining in to help improving GreatNews!

I have to say I haven’t spent a lot of time on GreatNews lately. Save the usual excuses, the most important thing is how to keep GreatNews updated regularly. I’m considering what’s the best way to release GreatNews source code. Most of the code base are safe to open, but there are small amount of code belong to other people that I have to either ask for permission, or compile into library. I will try to finalize this in the Christmas break. In the mean while, let me know your thoughts!

Thanks for your support of GreatNews. I hope you will continue enjoying it.

2008 is an eventful year for many people, me included. I hope everyone went through it unscathed just like me. 2009 is the year of Ox, which is spelled as ‘Niu’ in Chinese PinYin and pronounced as ‘New’. So it sounds like going to be a really wonderful year. I wish everyone a very happy Niu Year 2009!

If you are using build 383, and got prompted to get newer version, please download the release version from download page. The nightly debug build of 383 will display upgrade message, while official release build won’t. Sorry for the confusion.

I’m back from a great vacation!

And finally decided to upgrade to Vista on my machine.

Then found it’s not as easy as I thought…

After 2 days of struggle I finally figured out the root cause of the problem:

If you have a Dell Dimension 9200 / XPS 410, and got BSOD “worker_thread_returned_at_bad_irql” during setup, or you worked around the setup problem but your Vista pauses for 15 seconds every 5~10 minutes, here is how to fix it:

Open your dell machine case, check where the DVD/Burner are connected. Most likely you will find SATA0 is connected to the only hard disk, and SATA1/2 is connected to DVD/Burner. Disconnect DVD/Burner and reconnect to SATA4/5. Mission accomplished!

It seems Vista’s RAID driver has a hard time to figure out a DVD driver is very different from a hard disk…

I’m heading out for a vacation for several weeks. I will turn off comments at this blog temporarily to prevent spams.

Have fun everybody!

Over the weekend, GreatNews website has been migrated to a new hosting company with much greater bandwidth and storage. Hopefully this will address download problems some users reported. Here are top level domains collected at the new server. If you still see the “Moving Website” message at the front page, you are still accessing the old site. The DNS change can take 2~3 days to propagate.

Here’s the most detailed GreatNews tutorial I have seen on the web. Thank you!

Some users found a serious bug in build 381. If an article is updated, GreatNews will update unread count but fail to save updated content. This bug was fixed in build 382. Thanks everyone who helped!

It is the year of the Pig. Good luck, good fortune, and much happiness throughout the year!