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- type (for example): start /low notepad.exe

Put the above in a batch file,... associate the desired icon with it and done.

So can this be done using a Windows resource kit utility that would patch the registry for this program's install such that it would always run in low priority without using a batch or command-line pif file? I'm guessing "yes", but I need to know the name of the resource kit utility so I can read up on it.

I would like to pose the same question for the Flash install or Firefox Plugin Container install. Darn Flash ads make my browser slow and unusable. I wish the ads would use canvas and HTML5 instead of Flash.

[very]

Well, what else can it be? Sometimes (75% of the time) I can run the game and exit without any problems. Other times, if I enter, then exit the game for 5 seconds, things are sluggish afterwards. Logging out and back in always fixes it immediately.

That is a very good question - I just wouldn't expect anything as "near kernel level" as thread scheduling to be fixed by a mere relog.

Well maybe the working set (max memory allocation, max time slice) gets modified. But a shared resource could also be to blame.

It might be the game latches on to a Windows resource and fails to release it upon exiting. Logging out simply releases that resource. I've tried debugging it with process explorer without success.

Process explorer would be my best bet to start with. There's nothing fishy to spot? Is CPU and memory usage (both the overall as well as looking at individual processes) at normal levels, or is anything spiking? Can you describe the effects of the sluggishness?

The idle process is using up all the CPU cycles in process explorer when the system is sluggish.  It may take 6-8 seconds to simply open the WinXP START menu--unbelievable. Other windows open slowly as well. Programs seem to run okay, but everything about the UI is really slow. Upon trying to log out, sometimes it takes Windows two minutes to close programs.

The program is MahJongg Master 4.0 (2002). It's a very well designed board program, but it hogs every CPU cycle when it runs. What's weird is that 75% of the time Windows is fine after it exits. I wonder if I configure it to not use GPU hardware acceleration if that would make a difference?

What about knocking down the execution priority of the Firefox Plugin Container executable so Flash ads aren't stalling the browser? Is this a question for the Firefox forum?  Can Flash itself be tamed by reducing its execution priority? Shouldn't there be something in the Windows resource kit for doing that?

It's so bad, that after quitting this program, the time-slice quantums are adjusted by Windows XP to make all the other programs sluggish.

What? - is that actually what happens?

Well, what else can it be? Sometimes (75% of the time) I can run the game and exit without any problems. Other times, if I enter, then exit the game for 5 seconds, things are sluggish afterwards. Logging out and back in always fixes it immediately.

It might be the game latches on to a Windows resource and fails to release it upon exiting. Logging out simply releases that resource. I've tried debugging it with process explorer without success. What other monitoring utility would you recommend that shows system resource allocations?

As for flash, it's a well-known hog, and I doubt there's much you can do about it in Firefox.... If Process Tamer on plugin-container doesn't help,...

I've never used Process Tamer. I was hoping to setup some special priorities on these problem executables so I wouldn't need Process Tamer in the first place.

I have one game program that sucks CPU time, but it's only this program. It's so bad, that after quitting this program, the time-slice quantums are adjusted by Windows XP to make all the other programs sluggish. The only way I know to reset these quantums is to log out, then log back into Windows again. Is there a resource kit program that can be used to install this one program (executable) at a lower priority?

I also have exactly the same question for the Firefox plugin-container executable that seems to hog CPU cycles when visiting certain web pages with many DoubleClick Flash ads. The Chrome browser doesn't have this problem.

[copy or print]
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugin-container.exe

Other than that, all programs behave well on my Windows XP system, so I would like to avoid solutions that would affect all other well behaved programs.

I'm trying a fix in the new version about to some out, let me know if you notice any improvement.

Yes, I'll check for the race condition. But I may need to run it for a week or two before I can say for sure if it actually went away. With these nondeterministic problems, it's hard to be sure.

I can now confirm that the new-clip sound is played when the CTRL-ALT-C fails to capture the new clip with version 2.17.1. But it's also worth noting that this now occurs very rarely (under WinXP 32-bit). Something must have changed to reduce the affect of this race condition.

I'm trying a fix in the new version about to some out, let me know if you notice any improvement.

Yes, I'll check for the race condition. But I may need to run it for a week or two before I can say for sure if it actually went away. With these nondeterministic problems, it's hard to be sure.

The service gives users the ability to sample the content before they buy,... Those who are not satisfied can get their money back within 30 minutes.

I see an article ..., read it, decide it is crap, and get my money back. The content provider thinks I am abusing the system, tells Google, and they disable my Google account.

Probably not on the first refund attempt, but if you asked for 9 refunds over a week, then yes. The question remains what the user's refund rate has to be before it's considered abuse. That's why this service is considered experimental; it will need some tweaking. Perhaps Google sends the user an early warning if he's approaching his refund-rate limit.

Google has announced a new feature of Google Wallet, a micropayments service, that will let websites collect small payments from visitors for services/products via a single click. Google Wallet micropayments

This service will also allow web visitors to sample services, and then get a refund within 30 minutes, if they don't buy. This micropayment feature is in trial (beta) at Google Wallet as an experiment.

One is that the new clip was never captured at all by the CTRL-ALT-C operation.

It could be that when its sending the simulated Ctrl+C keypress, it's getting tripped up over the alt key still being held down, or over losing focus in the active window--that's the kind of thing that could happen unpredictably.

Perhaps you could "temporarily" add a timed delay between the simulated CTRL-C and the next operation to see if that fixes it.  If it does, then you've discovered where the race condition is.  Once you know that, you can design a callback completion routine so you don't need the timed delay.

Also, rather than using a callback routine, you could replace the timed delay with a semaphore guard.

Have you tried searching the entire clip database for the text to see if maybe its just going into the wrong group?

I'll try that next time it fails. That's an interesting idea.

The problem occurred again, and the new clip isn't present even after searching the entire database. But I did try pasting what was in the current Windows clipboard buffer and, to my surprise, it's not the new clip. Rather, it's the previous clip in the New folder.

So there are several possibilities here:  One is that the new clip was never captured at all by the CTRL-ALT-C operation. Instead, the previous clip was copied from the New folder to the Windows clipboard buffer instead when the captured sound was played.

The other possibility is that the new clip is placed on the Windows clipboard buffer okay, but then immediately overwritten by the last clip in the New folder when the captured sound was played.

Do you have any other questions?

What confuses me is why this failure is non-deterministic so it can't be easily reproduced?  It's as if there's some kind of race condition that occasionally is met, but only rarely. Are there two asynchronous Windows events that are colliding with each other 10% of the time?  Perhaps you need a semaphore to keep these two asynchronous Windows events from accessing the same shared resource simultaneously.

I see this kind of thing with device drivers because they service many "incoming" (outside) asynchronous requests, but not so much with OS-events within applications.

Have you tried searching the entire clip database for the text to see if maybe its just going into the wrong group?

I'll try that next time it fails. That's an interesting idea.

Since the CTRL-C function works correctly, why not simply have the CTRL-ALT-C function call the CTRL-C function as a subroutine, then open the CHS window with "New" folder selected? In other words, simplify the code to fix the hidden problem.

appending clips was going to be added to CHS, has this been done?

I think the existing merge function is much more powerful than any append function because you can selectively pick which clips you want to merge and which can be ignored (as append mistakes). And with the SHIFT key, you can quickly select contiguous clips to merge.

I wouldn't add too many redundant features; otherwise, CHS could get too confusing.

As for the not always capturing--that sounds like a real bug i haven't seen.. Any more clues about it?

You worked on this bug before about 1.5 years ago, and the fixes you added did improve it. But occasionally, it still fails. What I can tell you is the capture sound always plays even when CTRL-ALT-C fails to capture anything. I'm usually doing this capturing in my email client (Courier) to correct spelling, although other apps are affected as well. I'm running Windows XP SP3 and CHS 2.11.01.

I'm mentioning this bug now because you'll be looking in this area of the code again when adding the switch to "New" folder feature.

Since the sounds always plays and the CHS window always comes to the front (as expected), I'm now wondering if the clip is put on the Windows clipboard buffer okay, but the clip just occasionally fails to show up in the "New" folder for some reason when CTRL-ALT-C is used? I guess I could try a paste operation upon failure and report back to you. Give it a couple weeks to happen again, then I'll report back.

Whenever I add a new clip via CTRL-ALT-C, and the Clipboard Help+Spell window opens, it's not always on the "New" folder as expected. It would be nice if it automatically switched to the "New" folder with this hot-key action.

I'm not so sure, however, if it should switch to the "New" folder with a CTRL-C action alone.  I'll have to think about that.  I think the switching to the "New" folder should only happen when the hot-key action grabs a new clip and presents the CHS window altogether.

There's still a bug present (from a year or so ago) in the CTRL-ALT-C hot key where the clip-capture sound is played, but the new clip isn't actually captured. The work around solution is to use a CTRL-C followed by a CTRL-ALT-C combination to capture clips and bring the CHS window up front. This work around works well.

A saved preset saves/applies ALL formatting on all tabs.

I have an operational question. How can you make creating/using presets intuitive if saving a preset means saving across multiple tabs? In my mind, this design is counter intuitive. (I wonder if Steve Jobs would approve?)

Maybe you could group all the formatting operations that are commonly done together on a single tab. If that's done, then this issue is moot. This also means minimizing the number of tabs in the UI design.

I think you need something in the middle. The new design has too many tabs, but the old design doesn't have enough. Maybe create just three tabs where related items are grouped together.

This also brings up another issue. If the changes you want to make require operations on two different tabs, does that now mean you have define (and execute) two separate PreFormat definitions to get all these changes?

Because CHS works with plain text clips, the easiest way to ... [paste the last clip as plain text], instead of pasting with the normal system CTRL+V hotkey, just bring up the CHS quickpaste menu (defaults to Ctrl+Alt+Q), and select the most recent clip (usually bound to shortcut key '1').

Just to clarify, the MS Windows clipboard works independently from CHS and preserves all text formatting. So what you're doing above is washing the clip through CHS to sanitize out the text formatting otherwise saved in the Windows clipboard. That converts it to plain text.

When I first started using CHS, I mistakenly thought the Windows clipboard and the CHS clipboard were the same; they are not.

This is why solid state drives are purchased primarily for read applications (e.g. a web server) and not write applications (e.g. a database server). The solid state drive will really speed up any read-application heavy work.

I can assure you that today's solid-state drives are purchased for write-intensive applications as well, and they really do shine there compared to magnetic storage drives too - the management firmware doesn't "just" do remapping to reduce wear & tear, they also stripe the data across flash channels to achieve higher speed.

But there's that detail with pendrives vs. sata devices again.

It might be the SATA drives use DRAM (with battery backup) rather than flash; otherwise, you would have a really high failure rate in write intensive applications. I do know the SATA solid-state drives fail much more than their mechanical counter parts, and they fail without warning. That seems odd to me for a flash failure, but it would make sense in a DRAM design if the battery backup suddenly failed.

Come to think about it, it makes more sense to use DRAM over flash in a SATA drive design just because flash write speeds are so slow and their write times can be somewhat non-deterministic because of the MM firmware execution involved.

No wonder that random-writes are slow,...

Writes are slow in flash memory for important reasons. For today's flash, you can only write in the same physical memory location 15,000 times before that location will fail (because of a silicon metal state change). (That number was 10,000 times about 6 years ago.) So to prevent writing in the same location all the time, there's memory management (MM) firmware to map the writes evenly across the entire physical address space. So you need to factor the execution time of that MM firmware into the write speed.

This is why solid state drives are purchased primarily for read applications (e.g. a web server) and not write applications (e.g. a database server). The solid state drive will really speed up any read-application heavy work.

I'll try to add more formats like html/rtf later this year.

I wish the desktop version of The Form Letter Machine had an XML format so I could import data from the web version. Actually, with an XML format, one could convert to any other format (like HTML) or XML schema (like RSS). And since Windows Vista, Windows is able to compress those verbose XML files nicely.

Just three questions:

• How is the new image features for Clipboard Help+Spell going to be any different from Screenshot Captor?
• Would it make more sense to enhance Screenshot Captor so it would work more like Clipboard Help+Spell for images?
• After enhancements, could COM/OLE calls be added so the two programs could work seamlessly together to manage images?

... ready to add image support to Clipboard Help+Spell, iff it's something enough people really want.

There are two different problems here: (1) Image capture and (2) image archiving/photo album. I would start by creating an image photo album program (with plugins for the different image formats), then add image capture to it later.  I would leave Clipboard Help+Spell out of it.

Another approach would involve changing the name of Clipboard Help+Spell to something with "image clip" in it, then temporarily add the feature only to spin the feature off later into an image archiving program. But this seems like an awkward approach to me.

At any rate, you can always implement COM/DCOM calls (Microsoft OLE) so that both Clipboard Help+Spell and the image archiving program can talk to one another just as MS Word and MS Excel work together as a seamless solution. My only reservation is that the API for COM/OLE is so darn complicated beyond the "standard services," OPEN, PRINT, WRITE.  You almost need a Microsoft architect to design the calling sequences.

Instead of using your credit or debit smart card to pay with, Near Field Communications (NFC) chips are now being added to smartphones. It's estimated the new smartphones coming out at the end of 2011 (iPhone 4 maybe) will have them. The Google's Nexus S already does. Now we need to encourage PayPal to process these wireless NFC transactions.

Read about NFC chips in cell phones.

PayPal now officially supports 3 types of micropayments, which include (1) one-time micropayments, (2) pay-as-you-go, and (3) subscription models. One can make payments with two clicks of a mouse without leaving the vendor's website. See this Yahoo news article for more information.

... nervous about using the web technology in the desktop version, but on the other hand there are lots of neat things you can do with the web version that would be nice to bring into desktop version, and i really don't want to be maintaining two separate systems.  Having a single shared data and rendering system just seems more sensible ...

I would maintain a single source-code base regardless of what you do.

There are two very different options:
1) There are some tools that will turn a desktop application into a web application. They work okay, but you have to install a special run-time library.

2) Since most people already have the Java virtual machine installed, it may make more sense to just use Java coding for everything. The Web side can do everything in Java applets or beans. And Java has a nice database facility to work from. My only concern is:

2a) Java applications execute very slowly.
2b) I'm not sure where Java is going now that Oracle owns it.