Messages

126

Find And Run Robot / Re: Farr freezes : solved but...

« on: February 23, 2012, 02:25 PM »

My pleasure -- happy to be somewhat useful!

I should probably also try to detect the presence of MSE and report the tip to the user if it is found running

Keep in mind that the problem might not be MSE's exclusivity. This post suggests that Avast might cause problems too :

Looks like I may be switching from Avast to MSE in the near future, just so I can turn this off.(The problem occurs with Avast, also)

-daddydave (February 01, 2012, 07:35 AM)

I can't verify the hypothesis though, so maybe other users with different AVs can chime in.

127

Find And Run Robot / Re: Farr freezes : solved but...

« on: February 22, 2012, 11:19 AM »

You're welcome !

128

General Software Discussion / Re: I spy...with my little eye...on my hard drive...

« on: February 19, 2012, 11:04 AM »

@tranglos : hehe. Yup, quite a book. It is "real". I'd say it probably belongs to "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" 's *** category of book. Life is too short to really find out though, so I decided to just use the book as desktop search software test tool. My apologies to the author.

(I belong to that lower species too.)

I tried archivarius but I struggled with the way it presents the results. I have to search several hundred times in a pot of documents to find date/price of purchase of something. Might be in a spreadsheet, might be in a pdf or a letter. I would have loved it if archivarius showed me just enough of the results that I didnt need to open the document.

-iphigenie (February 19, 2012, 10:35 AM)

Archivarius isn't perfect, but I never got the problem you describe : you can filter results by documents types, name, see the excerpts containing what you're searching instead of the full text, etc. which is very convenient. That said, IMO the best implementation of filtering is in X1 through columns and Boolean operators.

129

General Software Discussion / Re: I spy...with my little eye...on my hard drive...

« on: February 19, 2012, 12:40 AM »

DTsearch:
Awesome!!  Love it.  Expensive.  It's a little too intense for casual use.  But if you want features, power, or just to get it to work exactly the way you want it to, this is the one.

-superboyac (February 18, 2012, 11:54 PM)

In 2008, DTSearch didn't index MS Word or pdf comments (see my post above and that). But Archivarius does.
So, IMO, in terms of reliability, Archivarius wins the content indexing contest... What good is a content indexer if it misses some of it ?

130

General Software Discussion / Re: I spy...with my little eye...on my hard drive...

« on: February 18, 2012, 11:25 PM »

Sorry, couldn't help it.

Spoiler

My test for huge documents has always been this weird book called Spinbitz. What a book. Never read it, but the title is fantastic. 

131

General Software Discussion / Re: I spy...with my little eye...on my hard drive...

« on: February 18, 2012, 11:16 PM »

My set up is similar to Darwin and Tranglos.

- Everything/farr (plugin) for quick filename searching.

- Windows Search/farr (plugin) for Outlook stuff (contacts, emails, etc.)

- Archivarius for file content. I found that Archivarius to be the most reliable of the bunch (Google Desktop Search included). Plus it's cheap... But development is on the slow side (only thing that happened in the last 4 years : more file types were added to the indexing engine capabilities -- it's a good thing, but a few GUI improvement here and there would also be good... Not to mention better Outlook indexing.)

If you read around DC, you'll see that I did extensive testing (Darwin and others did too) a few years ago. One thing I found out is that no other indexer than Archivarius could reliably index ALL pages of huge documents (1000s of pages) + index comments in Word documents and pdf files, which can be very important/useful if you're a researcher.

- Archivarius for filename search on network/removable disks... However, rarely used here.

132

Find And Run Robot / Re: Farr freezes : solved but...

« on: February 15, 2012, 10:43 AM »

This thread was mentioned in the Newsletter.
So just taking the opportunity add a few words : removing the farr process from the antivirus' scan makes such a difference, it's absolutely worth it.
I can't believe I didn't look into that before.

133

DonationCoder.com Newsletters / Re: --> Newsletter for February 14, 2012 - "Heart of a Bird"

« on: February 15, 2012, 10:35 AM »

 
And congratulations for Screenshot Captor v3's Best in Class award !

134

Find And Run Robot / Re: Farr freezes : solved but...

« on: February 01, 2012, 03:17 AM »

Great!
Now this is why I took the time to post this in the first place. I knew I couldn't be alone with this problem. Hopefully, we're not the majority.

135

Find And Run Robot / Re: Farr freezes : solved but...

« on: January 31, 2012, 09:49 PM »

I got exactly the same very annoying symptoms where it just felt that going to the start menu clicking my way through deep hierarchies would be quicker.

- Open MSE's main window (double click on tray icon)
- click "Settings" tab
- On the left part (column) of the MSE window : Click on "Excluded processes"
- Still in MSE, browse to your farr folder and select the FindAndRunRobot.exe process.

That's it. DISCLAIMER : it's not considered a safe practice to exclude processes from an AV scan. In this case though, I don't feel it's too risky. If others want to comment (I'm no security expert) on that issue, they're more than welcome...

You could also click on "Excluded file types" and type "ini" as the extension to exclude. That didn't seem to help, but who knows...

Unfortunately I don't have more time to explore alternatives.

Tell me if that fixes your "overly long delays" problem. (Here it fixed them completely and farr is running as it should and is much more useful this way).

136

Find And Run Robot / Farr freezes / delays : solved but...

« on: January 29, 2012, 07:00 PM »

For a while I got intermittent (and extremely annoying) farr freeze / delays. Didn't do anything about it as I didn't have the time to debug.

Recently decided to solve the problem: Turned out that it was the same problem described in this thread

But the problem is now with Microsoft Security Essentials (I changed antivirus since last time). Excluding ini files in MSE's "Settings" didn't seem to be enough and so I decided to exclude farr's process entirely from MSE's scans. That did it. No more freezes.

Now... I'm wondering how bad does this affect farr's user experience in general : so many people use MSE, I'm certainly not the only one experiencing long farr freezes (I'm on a 3y old laptop, 2.2ghz core2duo). In my case, the freezes were long enough to make me think of installing something else, even after years of use and enthusiasm. If I was new to farr I might have just dumped it right away for something that felt speedier.

Maybe something in the installation process, or somewhere VERY obvious should warn the user? Dunno...

Farr doesn't deserve to look bad because of some ill-mannered AV.

137

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR and Indexing Option - Feedback Requested

« on: January 06, 2012, 12:53 PM »

Everything is great when it is working.... but it continually breaks down here. My D:\ drive is my data drive - all data and media files are there. It is the largest and most used drive of the several I have. And Everything drops it at least two or three times a week! I mean, I get some results on D:\ drive, but mostly it ignores it. Settings are correct, the drive is healthy, and Everything initially indexes it along with the others. But then - it decides not to search it any more. No error mentioned in its errorlog.

No other utility or program does this with D:, so I Don’t know why Everything has a problem with it. I do notice though that a few others mention the same issue on their forum, and it is always D:\ drive.

So c'mon mouser!

Thanks!

Jim

-J-Mac (January 03, 2012, 10:26 PM)

Yep, Everything isn't bullet proof : I do experience problems with it too, from time to time (same as the other indexers : files can't be found, etc.) the problem seems to be that the journal or index isn't updated properly. Closing everything / re indexing the drives (which is still pretty fast) solves the problem.

138

Developer's Corner / Re: Is Clojure the next C ?

« on: December 13, 2011, 09:15 PM »

I think it's that lack of innovation/paradigm shift that he's talking about, and without it, it's kind of hard to point to.

At the heart of it, it seems to me that he wants a hardware agnostic language that uses all available resources.

-Renegade (December 13, 2011, 07:41 PM)

That's exactly what I found "interesting" in this "article". Basically : to what extent languages are / need to be projections of the hardware's own structure ? (By nature, certainly more than pure mathematical language(s).) And how much these ties between languages and hardware actually constrain the languages' own potential...? Are the author's thoughts mere unfounded speculations ? Maybe.

There's a definite exchange/mutual "influence" between languages (in the general sense of systematic means of communicating) and media, which in turn changes the way we think, perceive and understand the world around us. It certainly happens in the computer world.

In any case, I don't know clojure/lisp enough to be able to know how valid or legitimate the author's hypothesis/views are. Is Lisp/Clojure data types, control structures, mathematical like flavor etc. really an advantage ?

That's why I posted here -- I knew I'd get informed opinions.

Simple curiosity on my part. Nothing too serious.  

139

Developer's Corner / Re: Is Clojure the next C ?

« on: December 13, 2011, 08:30 PM »

"The next C"? What's wrong with the existing C?

-Tuxman (December 13, 2011, 07:44 PM)

Nothing, really. 1- It's just a title. 2- "Next" doesn't imply that "previous" is wrong.

140

Developer's Corner / Re: Is Clojure the next C ?

« on: December 13, 2011, 03:54 PM »

Thanks for your insight guys ! Much appreciated.

141

Developer's Corner / Is Clojure the next C ?

« on: December 13, 2011, 07:56 AM »

Interesting article on software vs hardware and... language "evolution".
The Barbarians are at the Gates

142

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.3.0

« on: December 09, 2011, 09:00 AM »

Thanks phitsc, I didn't realize that (/a etc.).
About stability : thanks for your professionalism. I understand where you're coming from.
At the same time, since we all have limited time, some bugs are inevitable and can't be fixed instantly. What I mean is that your plugin is appreciated even it not (yet) perfect.

143

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.3.0

« on: December 07, 2011, 08:05 AM »

Hi phitsc,
Apart from the problems mentioned above, it's working well here (I get the occasional crash but it's manageable).
I once got a problem mentioned by ewemoa : after a crash it's like if the connection between farr and WS was broken and I couldn't get any results in farr. Had to restart Windows (I didn't have the time to find out which service to restart exactly and try a variety of strategies.)

That said, I wonder if it would be possible to add the following special Farr modifiers to affect the results:

(from farr's help file)

+sall
show all matching results, bypassing the normal limit on result count

[...]

-history
do not give bonus scores to items in history

-.
do not show any files, only folders (and aliases)

-\
do not show any matching folders, only files (and aliases)
 
+\
show matching folders

Thanks

PS : I like the natural language option. Makes the searching a no brainer.

144

Living Room / Re: In search of ... information/opinions on VHS to DVD converters

« on: November 28, 2011, 02:41 PM »

Thanks for all the details. I won't be transferring anything before next Saturday, but I'll try that out for sure. Will keep you posted.

145

Living Room / Re: In search of ... information/opinions on VHS to DVD converters

« on: November 27, 2011, 09:12 PM »

I wasn't going to chime into this thread since it seemed barney was after a kind of one-shot device, (sorry if I'm wrong), but the video/sync problem you mention hasn't affected me out of the 50 or so transfers I've done because I spent a lot of time looking for software that didn't do it - the only one I found out of all the freeware I tried and quite a few payware was iuVCR, (or the updated iuVCS), as I mentioned here, (I still use the same transfer methodology).

I've yet to have this software give me sync problems, I have had no audio problems, (as in silence), due to me not selecting the right input  but that's it.

-4wd (November 27, 2011, 08:14 PM)

Oh ! Thanks. I'll that out.

146

Living Room / Re: In search of ... information/opinions on VHS to DVD converters

« on: November 27, 2011, 05:08 PM »

+1 ... keep us posted !

Your thread reminded me to convert a few things while my VCR is still alive. I still have about 20 unconverted tapes (family stuff and mostly artistic performances). I decided to do 1 tape every second day... Will see if I have the patience. 

The one I did today with the Diamond VC500 was converted properly, but... with a small sound/video sync problem. This won't be hard to fix with a video editing software (I'll either move the sound track slightly OR "compress" it a tad). But be warned : this is a common problem.

147

Living Room / Re: In search of ... information/opinions on VHS to DVD converters

« on: November 27, 2011, 02:48 PM »

The three will provide the same kind of functionality. Honestech VHS to DVD 5.0 Deluxe looks like it's better quality overall. Diamond VC500 One Touch Video Capture Device is the cheapest looking, and even if it work, I'd probably go with the Honestech VHS to DVD 5.0 Deluxe for almost the same price.

148

Living Room / Re: In search of ... information/opinions on VHS to DVD converters

« on: November 25, 2011, 04:18 PM »

There are lots of analog to digital converters out there, in the form of USB/RCA connectors + converter.
I personally bought the Diamond VC500 One Touch Video Capture Device a while ago. It does an ok job. Enough for my needs. BUT, cheaper alternatives might do exactly the same job : http://www.google.co...biw=1087&bih=716

And +1 for what Shades suggested.

149

Find And Run Robot / Re: Some shortcut keys don't work anymore.

« on: November 24, 2011, 05:51 PM »

Mouser : I just can't get use to that strange behaviour : shift+L/R arrows selects, ctrl+shift+ L/R arrows doesn't...  I found that I don't use them only to delete, but to select and copy. Can we expect to get this fixed in the next release ? It would be great. Thanks.

150

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.3.0

« on: November 24, 2011, 12:04 PM »

Z: and Y: are mapped network shares containing thousands of indexed documents. There is no problem searching them with Windows Search. I'll have a look at resetting.

-CGA (November 24, 2011, 11:41 AM)

Yes, exactly, that's what I meant : you potentially have much much more files and folders to index. So there's obviously something wrong with the index settings (it currently says : 9473 items indexed).

Here's the post about resetting that option I was referring to earlier (: "Allow Indexing Service to Index this disk for fast file searching") it was in another thread, sorry about that : https://www.donation....msg268552#msg268552