Blog

As mentioned in the new site announcement, there were some compatibility issues with MSIE6. Mainly these were due to the new CSS for the site making heavy use of + (adjacent sibling), > (child) and li:hover selectors, which are not supported by MSIE6 and resulted in some things looking like a Salvador Dali painting and drop-down menus not… dropping down. The known issues should now be resolved, after some unfortunate (but necessary) liberal use of additional tag attributes and a little bit of javascript to activate the drop-downs under MSIE versions earlier than 7.

I had hoped to avoid such workarounds for broken browsers: I was happy to finally drop workarounds for Netscape 4 that were in the previous site design! Plus, there were no machines here still running MSIE6 anymore, and I’d imagine you can’t have MSIE6 and MSIE7 running on the same machine. VMware Workstation, which I use for building and testing MIB Smithy and other Muonics products under multiple platforms from a single machine, came to the rescue here.

After deploying the site, however, I heard some reports and checked our site statistics, where I saw that about 30% of visitors are still using MSIE6–surprisingly high for such a broken browser, but I understand some people may not meet the minimum OS version requirements of MSIE7 yet. For what it’s worth, the site was tested with current versions of MSIE, FireFox and Opera browsers, all of which have sufficient standards support for the earlier CSS to work, and even Lynx to make sure it’s usable (even if it could still stand some improvement for accessibility).

If you notice any other issues, do let me know and I’ll get them fixed them ASAP. Otherwise, I believe there’s just minor nit-picky adjustments to be made, and parts of the redesign that are still under way (such as some new features). Thanks!

Michael Kirkham, President & CEO

If you’ve been here before, chances are you notice the Muonics web site has just gone through a major face lift, which I’ve been working on for several weeks. There are still a few CSS issues to take care of (mostly IE6’s bugs to workaround), but much of the site is now generated XHTML with all “appearance” stuff (of which there was still some in the old HTML) moved to CSS (most pages should pass as XHTML 1.1 Strict). If you see any problems, do please let me know either by posting a comment or sending email to support.

The new design and implementation will allow for a number of future improvements that are planned, as well as improving accessibility, manageability, and improve communication.

You’ll notice that this announcement appears in a new blog, and all of the prior news items have been migrated into the blog system. One of the problems with the old systems was they were somewhat thrown together years ago and never really finished to make submissions easy (many announcements were entered directly into the database, if you can believe it), or adapted to new technologies like RSS feeds. Consequently, it was a pain to (for example) announce new releases, and most of the release notes had to be converted from RTF before manually posting to a product’s “What’s New” page. Due to the pain and time constraints, and need to announce in several places, sometimes releases would only be quietly announced, if at all.

I’ll be moving release notes from all of the releases into the blog, so don’t be surprised if you start seeing announcements back-dated into the past. In the future, release notices will be posted to the blog.

There are three feeds available:

• News includes all items under the “News” category. General announcements, notices, press releases, and the like.
• Articles includes everything not under the “News” category. At the moment, this is empty, but I plan to start posting tips, tutorials, and other information about using Muonics products and related technologies (I might even blog a bit about how this new site was constructed).
• News & Articles is a combined feed including both of the above (in other words, all categories).

I hope you like the new site, and I look forward to feedback!

Michael Kirkham, President & CEO

Error ‘can’t read “shortName”: no such variable’ would occur in the Table View when trying to view a table where columns did not share a common prefix (e.g. due to indexes from other tables). The error occurred where MIB Views removes redundant prefixes from the column labels to save horizontal space, and has been corrected in this patch release.

Minor Changes

• Documentation should now conform to XHTML 1.0 Strict rather than just HTML 4.0.1 Transitional.
• SEQUENCE definitions for tables are now output where they usually appear in standard MIB modules, rather than at the top of the module with other type assignments.

Bug Fixes

• Error “bad window path name” could occur when closing and re-opening SNMP Tools.
• In the Syntax property window, selecting class filter “All” and module filter “– All –” did not show derived types in the “Primary Type” combobox.
• Error ‘can’t read “shortName”: no such variable’ would occur in the Table View when trying to view a table where columns did not share a common prefix (e.g. due to indexes from other tables).

NOTE: Earlier versions of the Windows builds of our software products were built using MSVC6 and we have switched over to MSVC8 for improved C++ standards and STL support necessary for new features that are under development. Unfortunately the installer project files are not compatible between MSVC6 and MSVC8, requiring them to be recreated from scratch, and were issues with the automatic conversion of the other project files.

As a result, there was a problem with the initial Windows build for MIB Smithy Evaluation and MIB Smithy Standard (MIB Smithy Professional was unaffected), so if you had problems running 4.0.4, such as an error regarding the “smilib” package not being found, this should be fixed in the 4.0.4 build posted March 19th.

We’ve occasionally received inquiries from users wishing to purchase our software online, but did not have a Visa or MasterCard available to them–only American Express. In the past, we were unfortunately not able to take their orders online, and requested that they submit purchase orders instead.

We’re pleased to announce that we are now able to accept American Express, in addition to Visa or MasterCard, for orders placed using our online store. Customers who use purchase orders can also make payments using Visa, MasterCard, American Express, check, or wire transfer.