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Messages - gottadoit [ switch to compact view ]

Pages: [1] 2next
1
General Software Discussion / Re: Time Tracking Tool lost...
« on: March 21, 2011, 01:10 AM »
Mouser,
  Did this idea go anywhere?

2
Mouser,
  How can we populate the userfield_* columns in the dbisam database ?
  It would be nice to be able to split out some of the information that can be captured into its own fields (for later sorting or using in queries)
  Things like process name, pid, windowtitle (even PC name if you allowed it) are candidates for this

  It would also be useful to make the date/time stored so that it is either timezone independent or to store timezone information with it
  That way travellers would have consistency of date/time information as they move around and if you give your database to someone in a different time zone the data will not be wrong when displayed on their machine

Thanks

3
Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: A new name
« on: July 24, 2008, 11:58 AM »
I think people are just responding for a bit of fun....
Mouser has said twice now that he isn't changing the name from CHS

It would probably be a better idea to come up with new wordings for CHS, the funnier the better
And at the very least this thread will come up in search results so it doesn't really hurt anything

4
I noticed on the Evernote blog that people can invite friends into the evernote beta, does anyone have any invites spare ?

5
General Software Discussion / Re: SQLNotes...what is it exactly?
« on: March 11, 2008, 03:16 AM »
Well, that is quite open-ended... SN is build on top of a relational database. Currently JET, but SQL Server is coming very soon (I've got a paying customer who's willing to contribute to change to that back-end).
It could be useful if you could consider the interface design so the program could run against different databases as well (at the same time as you are making these changes)

There are several free and lightweight database options available these days and having your data not locked up in a proprietary db format never hurts

6
One thing that would really be quite useful would be to allow a little icon bar to be displayed between the search field and the results list, this could be used for displaying the contents of the quick launch toolbar as a quick shortcut to get to items (when they are not already in the history list)

7
Another fairly minor and probably fairly easy addition is the option to show the last executed time in the history list

8
After the new version has been released...

It would be good if we could (optionally) have FARR add in program entries for things directly executed by explorer
Explorer makes this relatively easy by default by storing a record of programs that have been executed in some registry keys

For the reg keys involved see http://www.personal-...m/abc3/v29/vic29.htm
The UserAssist keys are rot13'ed by default but there is a switch to toggle this back to plain text and there is also a switch to turn off the UserAssist information collection as well (so some people won't have anything to display)

It might be useful to be able to partition the results taken from explorer executions into a mini little list at the bottom so that they don't pollute the main list if people don't want to have a single combined list

NB: Found that someone has already written a little program to display the information, I have never tried this so caveat emptor
     http://didierstevens...programs/userassist/

9
A minor addition but potentially quite useful (seeing as I just noticed that the alpha I am running is a bit behind the times)
How about a "Check for New Version" from the help menu

10
Screenshot Captor / Re: Scripting to be added to Screenshot Captor
« on: April 12, 2007, 06:49 AM »
Mouser,
  I was thinking from a deployment point of view its much easier to have a single application with a little bit of scripting to go with it rather than having extra executables involved. Ideally I want something that would allow me to "paste" an image into a webform and with the current state of technology that doesnt seem very likely to happen any time soon

The underlying implementation of something that might work could be a context aware "paste" operation ; I'm not sure if clipboard notifications extend to paste or if they just work when data is going into the clipboard...

If it was possible to intercept the paste event when it is going to a program that doesn't accept an image datatype then a bit of scripting could make it all "just work"... either by creating a file (on a local or network filesystem) that is linked to or by uploading to an ftp site or an image hosting site

It sounds like a simple requirement... I just haven't thought of a good way to do it yet

11
Screenshot Captor / Re: Scripting to be added to Screenshot Captor
« on: April 09, 2007, 08:29 AM »
Mouser,
  Did you ever decide on whether you were going ahead with this and what you were thinking of using ?

  I came across this topic whilst looking at automating ftp uploads, in this case I would also be wanting to reference the name of the logged in user as part of either the path (and/or the uploaded filename) for the actual ftp upload

  This topic seems to have died but I thought I would ask anyway  ;)

12
Clipboard Help+Spell / A Vista change to the clipboard
« on: March 21, 2007, 12:53 PM »
FYI,
  Seeing as it is useful to know that there is a new method of receiving Clipboard events other than being in the Clipboard chain

  WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE Notification
  http://msdn2.microso...ibrary/ms649021.aspx

  Although its a shame that something like this didn't simply get added into XP, what sort of operating system requires applications to maintain a pointer chain... sheesh

  This might be useful to know for ScreenShot Captor as well of course

13
N.A.N.Y. Challenge 2007 / Re: WorkCoach - v0.7.7 - December 30, 2006
« on: January 04, 2007, 09:28 PM »
Hi gottadoit,

The window log information is stored in XML files, so with a custom XSLT file it would be possible to merge two of those into one. Right now only the window log information is saved to file (i.e. how much time is spent in each application / window title). The project log (i.e. how much time is spent on each project) is calculated from the window log file and the projects and rules defined by the user. I will soon make sure the project log is also saved, so it can be used for making reports like you mention.

The XML files WorkCoach creates are saved in the folder C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\WorkCoach

With regard to time syncing: right now the program only records how long you've been doing something, not the exact times, so this is not an issue.

I hope this helps - if you have any further questions or comments I'll be happy to hear them!

Arjen.

Arjen,
  Thanks for the reply this is an interesting project for sure

  In regards to time keeping it would actually be useful to have the actual times stored as well (with the local timezone) then it could be used to reverse engineer a timesheet or just to see when things were done. It would also make it easier to merge the multi-machine files so that you are not accounting for more than 100% of the time spent at the computer. In my case my sessions span time zones so it would be useful if you decide to record the time if you also keep the local timezone with it

 If I understood you correctly the program currently keeps a much simpler counter of time used per window and simply increments this and saves it in a file. Adding timestamped events if this is the case is probably too much to ask because it is a departure from your current lean and simple approach, what do you think ?

 I use workpace (as a rest break prompter) and that also keeps application use statistics, the only problem with it is that it is useless for custom reporting because it saves the information in a binary file and aggregates it daily. There are other similar opensource/freeware tools, like http://www.workrave.org/features/ and that might also keep statistics (I haven't tried it) and could be a source of ideas for you...

Seeing as you are resetting the timer each "day" it would be useful if a "day" could be defined, in some cases it might be useful to run the day so that it finishes after midnight. For example you could start the new day at 6am so that any overnight activities would be considered as part of yesterday, and as long as you have timestamps with the activities the data could still be loaded into a database (or processed in perl or even java) and then sliced and diced multiple ways if required. If you include the rollover time in the daily filename and a start/stop time inside the file then you pretty much have all the information anyone could ever want to process it

14
N.A.N.Y. Challenge 2007 / Re: WorkCoach - v0.7.7 - December 30, 2006
« on: January 01, 2007, 07:52 AM »
It would be interesting to be able to easily use this across multiple machines

In my case my primary use would be to record what is done on my primary PC and have secondary recorders collecting information on machines that I use via VPN with either RDP or a Citrix client. In this case the "primary" PC would be recording events against mstsc.exe or wfcica32.exe and I would want to "expand" on those using information captured at the remote machine

If I could easily export information from the remote machine to a file and to the clipboard then with some enhancements/processing it should hopefully be possible to create a detailed report with the combined data. If the data is going to the clipboard in the remote session then there is a fair chance that it will be transferred to the local session (at which point it would be easy to "import" from clipboard)

The only catch I can see is that all the PC clocks need to be sync'ed using NTP in order for the merge to happen without ambiguity but that is not very much to ask these days. Of course the "idle" time on the remote machines has less meaning in this scenario but the idle time on the local machine essentially overrides it.

An alternate scenario would be 2 computers and the person simply switches between them using different physical keyboards and mice (or a switch box). In this case the "primary" machine would be idle but the "remote/other" pc would not so it is a relatively easy case to identify

This would be very interesting to see how well it would work, I generally use 2 different sessions into work and my desktop as well (currently on 2 screens) so doing time collation would be useful but still a little bit of a challenge

15
ProcessTamer / Taming and option to restart based on Memory Usage
« on: December 28, 2006, 09:47 AM »
Mouser,
  Seeing as some programs leak memory (something we are all used to...) it would be nice if we could set a taming limit on memory usage
  Because the only real way to fix this situation is to restart the process it would be good if that was allowed
  The only caveat would be that the process would need to have saved its state and restore it on startup again (so it isn't useful for everything)

  If you do implement this it would be useful to be able to choose Restart based on one (or more) of several different memory thresholds
  I will refer to the values as they are displayed by Process Explorer (ex:sysinternals and now MS) because that is a richer set of datapoints
  Virtual Size can sometimes be useful as an indicator, much more useful is Private Bytes, Working Set Size and Working Set Private

  Thanks for a very useful program... this would potentially make it even more useful

16
Seeing as there doesn't seem to be too much interest in doing one for me, can someone that knows a little about AHK give me some pointers on whether this is feasible to do and a pointer or two ?

Thanks

17
Not exactly, have a read of what I suggested again and have a look at the link to the sysinternals site
The sysinternals suggestion involves *removing* security tokens from the current user for the child process and running with the same username and that gets around quite a lot of issues that you would encounter switching to a completely different user

In relation to the save credentials option for runas, I thought I would check as I had thought savecred was limited to XP Pro and assuming that the help is correct it seems to be
C:\>runas /?
RUNAS USAGE:

RUNAS [ [/noprofile | /profile] [/env] [/netonly] ]
        /user:<UserName> program

RUNAS [ [/noprofile | /profile] [/env] [/netonly] ]
        /smartcard [/user:<UserName>] program

   /noprofile        specifies that the user's profile should not be loaded.
                     This causes the application to load more quickly, but
                     can cause some applications to malfunction.
   /profile          specifies that the user's profile should be loaded.
                     This is the default.
   /env              to use current environment instead of user's.
   /netonly          use if the credentials specified are for remote
                     access only.
   /savecred         to use credentials previously saved by the user.
                     This option is not available on Windows XP Home Edition
                     and will be ignored.
   /smartcard        use if the credentials are to be supplied from a
                     smartcard.
   /user             <UserName> should be in form USER@DOMAIN or DOMAIN\USER
   program         command line for EXE.  See below for examples

Examples:
> runas /noprofile /user:mymachine\administrator cmd
> runas /profile /env /user:mydomain\admin "mmc %windir%\system32\dsa.msc"
> runas /env /user:[email protected] "notepad \"my file.txt\""

NOTE:  Enter user's password only when prompted.
NOTE:  USER@DOMAIN is not compatible with /netonly.
NOTE:  /profile is not compatible with /netonly.

18
Mouser,
  As mentioned earlier (but probably when you were busy doing other things) would it be something that you might consider allowing processes to be launched with more limited privileges (or even as different users with stored and encrypted credentials) ?

Well Process Explorer isn't really a "competing" launch program but it can launch programs in a special way (with limited privileges in the same user context)

As I mentioned in the FARR forum it would be great to extend this a little to also be able to have stored credentials inside the launchbar *and* additionally allow the launchbar to remove the appropriate privilege tokens and change group memberships so that the user context is still the same but the process is effectively running as a limited user

With this setup it would then nice to be able to specify the desired context as the default (if not otherwise specified), then this nice tool would also give some non-trivial security benefits as well

Ref: http://www.sysintern...d-user-easy-way.html

19
My Logitech keyboard has a program that does exactly this, I think it is called iTouch.exe, it shows when the special keys are pressed and does exactly what you described for the volume keys

I didn't actually know about this for the first year or two after I purchased the keyboard because I didn't bother installing the driver disk or reading the manuals and it was only when I wanted to make more use of the keyboard functionality with other programs that I had a look....

HTH

20
How about using a DNS name that is round robin to the 3 different "physical sites/server" and have each server at each of the 3 sites respond to that virtualhost name. That way the client side software doesn't really need to care and you do have redundancy of sorts and the load would (in theory) be spread between the sites

You could do that and also give DownloadAndRun 4 url's to fetch the file from, the first being the shared name (to get load sharing between the servers) and then the 3 individual names to go direct to each server to cater for one of them being down or unavailable

I would imagine that the desired extension to DownloadAndRun would simply be to be able to specify a list of url's, where the secondary url's would be used in succession if the connection failed or a non-2xx/3xx response was received from the webserver

Given this application it would probably be quite useful to send information about the existing file with the GET request (Last-Modified and ETag headers) so that the remote server could reply with Not Modified headers if the file hasn't changed since the user last checked as that would potentially save a lot of bandwidth for the people hosting the files (see http://www.w3.org/Pr...sec10.html#sec10.3.5)

Another potentially useful thing to indicate in the GET request is to send the header 'Accept-Encoding' with either gzip or deflate or both and accept a compressed stream in response, also to cut down on bandwidth usage. This only matters if the remote file hasn't already been compressed before being loaded on the server (and that would make more sense of course because the servers wouldn't need to do on the fly compression before sending it to the client)

Those suggestions might get the ball rolling....

21
It would be really nice to be able to have several windows and be able to send all keyboard input to them at the same time
This would be most useful to have several terminal emulation windows open to several hosts and perform the same changes on all
(ie: select a number of windows quickly and easily)

There are other situations where you might also want to have a notepad window open to keep track of everything you type, and in that case you might want to be able to say to send the keyboard input to the foreground window as well as the notepad window.

In both cases it would also be very useful if text pasted from the clipboard also went to the selected destination windows
This is so that I can have something similar to pconsole or fanterm [linux] to use under Windows

There is quite a useful description of functionality for a little tool like this on the Putty website
See http://www.chiark.gr...terminal-fanout.html

It would be great if the windows under control were tagged in a visible way to indicate that they are part of a set

Thanks

NB: A way I have seen other utilities like this work is to have their own "input" window that you can type in so that the keystrokes are directed to all of the child windows

22
Interesting, a product has been created with limited user execution as one of its key features
NB: for those who don't already know Winternals is the commercial side of Sysinternals

Is nobody else interested in this sort of thing at all, there were no comments made to the original post...
I would have thought that being able to use FARR to launch programs in a more secure manner would have been of interest to some people at least

Winternals Protection Manager.

Protection Manager provides two powerful layers of control to protect Windows systems.

http://www.winternals.com/NewControl

First, it blocks any and all untrusted applications from executing.

Second, it allows you to move all users to the Limited User group
without reducing their productivity.

With those two key forms of system control in place, you will:
 - Be able to decide which applications can and cannot execute
 - Eliminate help-desk calls caused by users having administrative access
 - Ensure standardization of software and hardware
 - Have the power to enforce technology policies

Protection Manager deploys in four tiers of gradually increasing
security so that you can lock down and protect your end-users without
disturbing or interrupting their work.

To download an evaluation version, or to learn more, please visit:

http://www.winternals.com/NewControl

23
This sounded like a good deal with the $20 rebate... until I read the t&c's for the rebate
Offer valid only in the U.S.A. and void where prohibited, taxed, or restricted by law.

24
I use alternative shells:  GeoShell for a bit, years ago, then Litestep for the last few years, now happily back to Geoshell.
I also used to use GeoShell for a while and I still switch between explorer and geoshell for my window manager sometimes. One thing that was a big negative was that geoshell wasn't 64bit clean and there were some comments that it would be a big job cleaning it up. One really useful thing that I got from using geoshell was reading this article on usability from the geoshell docs site, that article references the asktog.com site and this article on Fitts Law which is also a great read. I really found putting a vertical geobar on the left edge of screen #1 (I use dual monitors) easy & fast, application of those principles was easy and "obviously better" once tested (a sign of a really good idea)

If there was one single thing that eventually allowed me not to care which program I was using as a windows manager it would have to be FARR, I now use explorer most of the time and 99% of the time I use FARR to launch programs so the window manager has become largely irrelevant

I probably should have posted my comments about being able to run as a limited user and securely caching credentials in this thread, but seing as the post is already done its just as easy to read them in the launchbar commander similar apps thread

25
LaunchBar Commander / Re: Similar apps for collecting ideas thread
« on: March 09, 2006, 05:14 AM »
Well Process Explorer isn't really a "competing" launch program but it can launch programs in a special way (with limited privileges in the same user context)

As I mentioned in the FARR forum it would be great to extend this a little to also be able to have stored credentials inside the launchbar *and* additionally allow the launchbar to remove the appropriate privilege tokens and change group memberships so that the user context is still the same but the process is effectively running as a limited user

With this setup it would then nice to be able to specify the desired context as the default (if not otherwise specified), then this nice tool would also give some non-trivial security benefits as well

Ref: http://www.sysintern...d-user-easy-way.html

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