I’ve made some changes to the feed structure for the blog to be more flexible and a little more standard.

While I expect all posts will be categorized under either “News” or “Articles” (with additional categories as appropriate), you’ll notice that the categories listed for posts now have feed icons next to them, which you can use to subscribe to more specific categories. The “News+Articles” feed is still the feed for the full blog.

If you’re already subscribed to a feed, you may wish to resubscribe as paths have been changed (e.g. the “News” feed is now “/blog/category/news/feed/” instead of “/news_feed.php”). Redirects are in place so your subscription should continue to operate as before even if you don’t, but resubscribing will reduce the number of requests your client needs to send.

My apologies if this causes any trouble. The dust is still settling a bit on the new systems.

The change for grouping table SEQUENCE definitions with the table and entry OBJECT-TYPEs made in 4.0.4 was not completely merged into the 4.0.x branch. As a result, a “wrong # args” error could occur when generating or saving modules in SMI format. The problem has been corrected in this patch release.

My apologies to any early subscribers who experienced oddities with the RSS feeds as past release notes were being moved into the blog. Now that that’s done, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself welcome you to the new Muonics Blog.

My name is Michael Kirkham, and I am President & CEO of Muonics, Inc. I founded the company in 2002 after creating MIB Smithy, our flagship SNMP MIB Editor/Compiler product, in 2001.

I’ve been writing software for around 20 years now, particularly in the network management industry since 1995, when I began a 5-year stint as the principal developer for one of the industry’s leading SNMP agent compliance test suites. There I developed tests for several SNMP MIBs, and was as a contributing member of the SNMPv3 Working Group. Prior to 1995 I was an embedded systems developer writing firmware for RF devices, such as radios and power amplifiers, used in applications including coast guard, air traffic control, and semiconductor manufacture.

One of the things that I valued most about my prior career and working with others in the network management industry was close interaction with users, partnering with them to provide for their needs at an individual level, while keeping a broad perspective for the entire current (or future) user base. I see this as a bit of a hybrid approach, between custom and traditional shrink-wrap software development.

The problem with custom software is that it doesn’t scale well as a business: a custom solution that works great for one customer is not necessarily going to work well for another, and you’re back to square one with each; plus it’s very expensive. On the other hand, with traditional shrink-wrap software there’s usually a very large disconnect between the individual user and the programmers–with the publisher’s desire to maximize market share in between.

For me, it’s not enough to churn out features just so that I can put check marks next to a competitor’s check marks on comparison sheet in a game of follow the leader. It’s infinitely more rewarding and satisfying to work closely with users to determine what their real needs are, extrapolate, and over-deliver; to create new and better ways of approaching a problem than simply copying what’s been done before.

Truthfully, I haven’t felt as much of a connection with the users lately. Part of that is because I often don’t get to communicate with users unless there’s a problem, and of course I try to keep problems from occurring! While the evaluation downloads do currently ask for contact information, and I follow up personally to address any comments or check for problems, they don’t go on any mailing lists, and if I don’t hear back I don’t keep sending messages. If I get too far behind on followups, I make the safer assumption that you’d rather not be bothered if it’s no longer timely. Part it is also because systems that were in place, such getting releases announced and notes published, were cobbled together back in 2002 with an aim for function before optimization.

Like other knowledge workers, I’m prone to neglect tedious tasks. I’m all about workflow efficiency, so I’m very excited to have the new blog up and running. Not only has this reduced four painful parts of the release process to one pain-free task, sure to get done in a timely fashion, but it will give me a platform for offering tips and tutorials to those interested that were previously only in the realm of support inquiries. With much better systems in place, I expect you’ll see great improvements in communication from me in the future, and look forward to reestablishing those missed connections. With better communication from me, I hope to hear more from you about what I can do to help you succeed.

I’ve been collecting topics to write about for some time, particularly with regards to SNMP and using our products, but I’d love to hear your topic suggestions as well. You’re welcome to comment or send a note to blogthis@muonics.com and I’ll put it on the list.

Thanks!

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