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.

A crash could occur when using the $session walk command synchronously (no callback) and the request timed out. This problem is fixed in the MIB Smithy 4.0.3 and MIB Smithy SDK 3.4.2 releases.