Official Home of BootZilla

I’ve done some minor updates and released a stop-gap beta  on the downloads page. Changelog can be found here: https://www.bootzilla.org/sdm_downloads/beta-1-5/

I’m still in the process of rewriting the template that all the cmdlets are based off of. There’s a handful of changes I have planned. I don’t have much time allocated to the project at the moment, due to life and stuff. There’s a few other projects out there that I spend time on, and have been working on learning Arduino stuff in the little free time I devote to hobbies as of late.

Feel free to contact me via the site for any additional tools you’d like to see. I’m planning on adding a few more bits and pieces (bells and whistles) to the kit before it’s considered done. Not to mention some sort of updating functionality, which is still missing – I may decide on implementing a git repository for the cmdlets in the end, so that it can be easily built upon and rebuilt on as time goes on. That, and making the project more public is a good idea in the grand scheme of things. Too many projects like this one are closed source, with all the downloading functionality hidden within either a .NET control, or some proprietary file host that only responds to the client software that the developer pushes. Ideally, all the data that I process into scripts could be all scraped into a database and linked on a single page – which I may end up doing in the end, as a devblog post.

That’s enough words for today I think. I’m running out of time for leisure activities on this weekend day.

The months seem to be passing by at an alarming rate. As such, development and refactoring development is going on at a slow pace.  Typically, the cmdlet files themselves that need to be cleaned up and re-written in their entirety are updated as-needed, bi-weekly. For now, I’m going to release a slightly updated set of scripts as another Beta release. Be on the lookout for that soon.

As for update functionality in the future, I’d like to get that in sooner rather than later. It shouldn’t be too hard to get that function written and implemented in the next release. Since development has taken far longer than originally anticipated, it makes sense to postpone the so-called Winter release, and in turn, clean up the current codebase for a Spring-Summer 2015 release instead.

The Spring/Summer 2015 release will include all the missing features from the beta releases so far – Updating, Boot CD, USB image creation, and maybe a few more bells and whistles I can scrape together.

While tracking down some issues in some of the cmdlets, I came to the conclusion that it may be a good idea to rebuild all the scripts prior to a release. There’s a lot of missing bits and pieces in various cmdlets, which came about due to the nature of the project. Initially, a cmdlet was going to be very simple, but over time, the template became 8kb in size. From here on out, I can either keep the 8kb template and rebuild each script, or extract the necessary bits from each script and strip all comments out so each script is only the necessary bits to grab that particular set of files. In any case, one of these will be needed in order to complete the current release.

There’s also the boot functionality that needs to be fully implemented and utilized.

For the time being, BootZilla is in a ‘refactoring’ period of development. A final build is likely to be out by April 2015.

While doing some mandatory domain updates, it was decided to invest in an SSL/TLS certificate for the site, for both security and peace of mind. I’ll be changing to few minor things in the next release to utilize https for downloads from the site. Additional work is being done to make logging more useful, and will likely include the use of Awk in the next release to parse logs for errors, which will in turn give better reasons to users as to why a download may have failed or why an extraction may have ended badly (corrupt archive, for instance).

The deadline I set for myself has been over for over 8 days. I haven’t had a chance to work on BZ for a while, with work and health taking precedence over this side project.

As such, there’s really no way to set a deadline, from there on out, so the ‘latest’ version will be done when it’s done. I’m taking a page out of Gabe Newell’s book, and 3DRealms – don’t rush it. It could take a while, but the final product will be great and a joy to use.

Besides, I make no money from this… No one has ever donated to the project, in the past 10 years of its existence. I continue work on it just to make my life as an IT guy a little easier – instead of having to hunt down the tools I need, I manage a nice little package of up-to-date download scripts, for my personal peace of mind – then release it for the rest of the IT world to use, or grow on.

I still plan on finishing the new version this weekend, with a final release ready for use by December 1st. What time on December 1st, I do not know. It’s likely to be later in the day (for US users, anyway. It’ll likely be December 2nd for the rest of the world).

Final bits and pieces needed:

•  Boot CD functionality builder
• USB Boot Image Builder (may be added later on)

fix some of the logging in the cmdlets

Work will continue. As an aside, here’s some demographics of the site’s current traffic –

Most traffic comes from Italian users! The USA is second to Italy in viewers of the site. This tells me that in the future, an Italian translation would be beneficial – the good news is, most applications included are already multilingual – just the instructions need a proper translation. I’d like to reach out to my Italian users for this. If you can help with this small side project, get in touch with me!

 

For the time being, I’m slowly adding a handful of new programs in the form of cmdlets. Since I’d rather not bother with releasing minor versions of the beta, I’m just using Google Drive to synchronize some of these new scripts. They may have issues that I haven’t ironed out yet, but if you want to test them, it would be of great help to me. Simply drop each cmdlet into the cmdlets directory, and either run them directly or from BZBuilder.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_DC7Oz95HMLZy1aUkhWVFRXQjg&usp;=sharing

I’m going to have to rewrite a bit of the code I had set aside for the BootCD functionality, as I made the mistake of eliminating the boot cmdlet I had created in a previous, unreleased alpha build. As such, expect to see some Boot functionality begin making its way into the next 2-3 beta builds.