Never on a Friday

Sod's Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. And it has! This most fundamental of engineering principles has really been biting us trying to get 1.1.5 together.

For the last few weeks we've been chasing a really nasty crash bug in the graphics drivers on early Intel Macs with Radeon X cards. This kills the machine stone dead and we were very keen to get a fix for it. Unfortunately we don't have one of these to test on so I've been borrowing a mate's machine every so often to try a fix out on. Last weekend I finally got a fix that didn't break anything else at the same time and wouldn't leave users on those machines severely disadvantaged. And then we tried to build the patch... Since we wanted to update some dlls we then ran into problems with the launcher under Windows not releasing the dlls and failing to write over them. Sigh. The patch doesn't even affect Windows! Back out of that and try a different way to update things. Nope. Back out of that and try a different way of applying the fix. Phew! That works.

And then last night we learnt that the fix only works for Mac Leopard (1.5) users and that Mac Tiger (1.4) users see different symptoms... Sorry, Hugh :(

Perhaps in hindsight we should have released 1.1.5 when the main bit was ready and resolved the Mac bug with a hot fix, but Johnnie & Ben are hard taskmasters on QA and rightly don't like to let things out unfinished!

So unless any other horrors turn up at the last moment, we'll be releasing 1.1.5 on Monday.

We have a strict rule here that we never ever release on a Friday. There are two reasons for that:
(1) By Friday we are often so fed up and frustrated by the last minute little niggles that there is a strong temptation just to get it out of the door so we can end the week clean.
(2) If we release on Friday and there are problems, there's not so much support available over the weekend and it would probably be Monday before we could help.

Thanks for your patience!