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General Software Discussion / The problem with text compare tools - similar, in database compare tools
« on: July 14, 2013, 05:26 AM »
Here on DC, there is an old "comparitive" review of Beyond Compare:

https://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/CompareTools/index.html

It states, there is one prob with BC, which is lack of in-place editing. Now, the review being from 2005, this prob has been resolved long ago.

But there is another prob with almost all of these text compare tools, which is they are unable to compare "displaced text parts", or whatever you would call them.

"All" these tools just compare line by line, and the respective line content, and are thus unable to "see" that a bunch of 10 or 50 lines is UNCHANGED, whenever that bunch of lines has been displaced elsewhere in the second text.

For every programmer who displaces routines within his global set of programming lines, this makes these ordinary tools almost unusable, and existing tools which lack such functionality, unfortunately are NOT amended in such a way (and the developers of BC (of which I have a license) are very friendly but don't do the necessary development to their otherwise fine program either), but there should be SOME tools at least that DO such a thing.


Now let me explain. I know that for discovering that a single LINE has been displaced elsewhere, first, such a tool would need a much more complicated algorithm, since without being really sophisticated, it would process lots of false "hits": It goes without saying that in normal texts, here and there, but in programming, LOTS of lines would be identical, but without being displaced, it's just that the same lines occur, again and again, within many, DIFFERENT, contexts. So, these respective contexts would have to be analyzed, too, by such a tool.

Also, the same problem COULD occur with "PARAGRAPHS": Since in programming, a line is also a paragraph, for such a tool, checking for "paragraph" first, would not be helpful in order to avoid such "false hits". On the other hand, most paragraphs in normal texts would be "enclosed" by blank lines, whilst in programming, these lines would be paragraphs, but normally NOT "enclosed" by blank lines, so the algorithm could check for "REAL" paragraphs vs. paragraphs that are just separate lines, and then try for finding just these "real paragraphs" elsewhere, whenever in place they would be expected, in text 2, they are missing. So this would be ONE OPTION for such a tool.

A SECOND OPTION for such a tool (and this could be realized even within the same tool, "by option") would be to look after a special character or any other "divider character combination" or such, i.e. it would not even to check for displaced "real paragraphs", but only for displaced "paragraph groups" / "text entities" or such, meaning, when text enclosed in these "divider codes" is there in text 1, but missing in text 2. Such "divider codes" could be TWO blank lines, or a really special character that does not occur BUT for separating your "programming entities" within your big file (e.g. the Japanese Yen character, or anything you want), and it would be easy to put such a very special character into your programming text whenever needed, since any programming language has got a special character for "comment line", and you would only put such lines between your sub-routines, in the form

CommentLineCharacter and then SeparateEntityBeginCode


Also, such a tool, with such functionality, would be a relief for anybody doing his work within an outliner, since outliners "invite" to re-arrange all your stuff again and again, in order to have, in the end and ideally, all your stuff within "meaning ful context", in the same way some people don't so much multiply separate paper files, but put them, whenever possible, into lever files, in order to group them. (It goes without saying here that this is a good thing for "reference material", but not really advisable for separate customer files or such.)

Now, most of these outliners have got an EXPORT function, to plain text at least, and for a text compare tool, this is the format in which such "outliner files" could be read and be compared, and it immediately becomes evident what the above-mentioned functionality would be able to to here:

Any outliner item that you just would have displaced, would be checked by such a tool, and then discarded as identical, which in fact it is, and this tool would only show then items in which you would have done ADDITIONS or CHANGES, or NEW items, or (in the other pane, respectively,) DELETED items, but it would NOT show all these, perhaps numerous, items that are unchanged, but just displaced to another position within your tree.


So, here as with programming bits above, the question is, which TEXT compare tools are able to to such a more sophisticated comparison, without all those "false hits" showing up in less elaborate tools,

AND, there also should perhaps be some DATABASE compare tools that are able to do such a comparison, by database "RECORD CONTENT" comparison. Here, the very first problem is that most databse compare tools do NOT EVEN compare content, but only structure, and those that are (possibly) able to compare content, are "just for MySQL", so the question is, are they able to compare "records" in just text format, and with the "record begin code" of your choice (of course, it would be possible to use the special character the db compare tools then "needs", or to replace the "commentlinecharacter plus recordbegincharer" to the special "recordbegincharacter" the db compare tool then needs in order to properly function.

But there is also the question if these db compare tools, comparing content, are able to then compare the content of any record to the content of any record, or if they, too, as in the usual text compare tools, just compare content of record 1 in "text" 1 to content of record 1 in "text" 2, then record 2 to record 2, and so on, which would be devoid of any sense. (Of course, there is an additional prob with db compare tools, price: some of them are 1,000 dollars or even more, so I'm looking out for such a tool, in case, that's not as expensive as that.)



Hence my questions:

- any insight into text compare tools, with respect to these details?
- or any insight into database compare tools, ditto?

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General Software Discussion / Chrome tab management; Chrome cache management; OneTab; developers and use logic
« on: July 07, 2013, 02:19 PM »
I won't fall on fellow DCs' nerves by endlessly repeating how happy I am to have switched from IE to Chrome, you will have understood this. But now, it's my task to "personalize" Chrome a little bit - which is a pure joy, having all those "extensions" around, BUT some of thise get just rave reviews, and then, ain't but crap, or something similar at least.

First, there is many ERRONEOUS "info" about Chrome's cache M (for management): Many "info" will make you believe the setting "Menu - Settings - Show advanced settings - Privacy - Content settings - Cookies - Keep local data only until I quit my browser" (my gosh!) will clear cookies, history and cache after closing down Chrome - some of them even outrightly will state so.

This is all rubbish.

It seems that some time, Chrome HAD a similar setting (in their early "twenties" perhaps), but they have done away with it, in order to better sell your browsing history (and there is no tool to automatically (!) do away with all those awful Flash cookies, anyway, so you have to regularly go to that macromedia site by your own).

Current state of affairs is, you have to use an extension for clearing your history and your cache (or do it manually; and with such an extension, you don't need those Chrome settings above anymore, anyway...).

As for relevant extensions, multiple sites propose Click&Clean, so I installed that one, but in fact, there are many more, and I suppose they ain't any worse:

History Eraser (from the same developer), ClearCache, OneClickCleaner, CleanTheJunk, NoHistory, SimpleClear, Browser Privacy Clean-Up Assistant, or then BetterHistory (which is something different and could be useful in some instances). ("The winner takes it all" - "nowhere", these alternatives get any coverage, so "they all" install C&C, but well, it seems to do what it promises to do, then!)



And now for tab M and use logic hampered by developers' technical incompetence:

In IE8, this was totally awful, the prob being you get from one link to the other, and at a certain moment in your browsing session, you will have opened 60, 80 or 120 tabs: On my XP system with 2 GB of working memory, response times are totally down in such circumstances.

How to manage such links "for later"? Doing bookmarks? Not handy! So many a times, I left my comp on, for the next day, and even further days, and of course, at some time all of this will become totally corrupted, and you will lose all your finds you will not have properly "processed" then.

Now this in Chrome: First, memory M is MUCH better than with IE, even without that incredibly effective AdBlock running, but WITH Adblock running, it's pure joy to have dozens of Chrome tabs open, in direct comparison with IE: Acceptable response times, no real problems.

But then, from a less compare-it-with-total-sh** but more objective, "2013" pov, having dozens of tabs open in Chrome isn't THAT fun, since you will have to process them (= some checking, some hdd storage if there is something of value for your current research subject, etc.) in a row, which is not really possible without leaving your comp on for days, depending on the subject, and not speaking of any "navigation" between such pages, virtually impossible here, i.e. you have to go "one-by-one", then process the page that presents itself to you, and close it, in order to have, many hours (and / or some days) later, a Chrome state from which then you could close down Windows and your pc.

So there is one extension that only gets rave reviews but which is almost useless though: OneTab.

I installed it, b/o all those rave reviews, and the idea behind it is simple: Close down all your currently openend tabs, but have them stored in one "container" tab, so it's sort of a "local, intermediate bookmarking service" - this also frees your working memory, but my pov is twofold here:

- for one, this freeing of the working memory, most of the time, isn't even really necessary
- and then, whenever you click on such a page, it has to be reloaded, from the web it seems (judging by the response times then)

So, in the end, immediate availability of these pages would be preferable, in most circumstances, but an OPTION to have them cleared from working memory in extreme cases, would indeed be helpful.

Now for my saying it's almost useless, and to explain that part of the title saying that some developers don't code in a logical way, from the users' pov:

In practical use, whenever you have got too many tabs open in your browsing session, you would click on OneTab's symbol, and then have all these pages relegated to the container tab.

But afterward, you will need to "open" these tabs again, in order to process them: "Restore all" would do this, and since you can even form "groups", this doesn't seem to bad at all.

Where things GO BAD, though, is when you will be PROCESSING these re-opened tabs:

Of course, you assume that they will vanish from OneTab list whenever you close them down, or to speak the truth:

There are THREE scenarii in which you would need such a tool:

- in the scenario above where the tool serves for clearing "tab clutter", when there are too many tabs opened at the same time
- in a totally different scenario where you would like to constitute groups of bookmarks for further use
- in a combination of these two where you would use it to de-clutter your tabs, but here and there, you would even want to preserve SOME tab for further use, instead of getting rid of it after processing it

Now, getting rid of tabs is almost impossible with OneTab, since whenever you then close one of your re-openend tabs, it will NOT vanish from the OneTab list, and unfortunately, this makes this tool almost unusable for its intended main use, since you never really know which one from all these pages listed there is ready to be deleted from there, too, manually, and which one has to be preserved, since most of the time, doing research, these pages are rather similarly-named, and, as already said,

there is no back-synch whatsoever from your closed tabs to their listing in the OneTab list.

But again, OneTab is not marketed as a permanent-bookmark tool, but as a tab M tool, and as such, evidently, it's a total failure.

So let's muse about the background: The developer has no knowledge / expertise, presumable, to DO that back-synch between closed-down tabs and his list. Of course, two routines would be needed:

- the usual control-F4 one, for "close current tab AND delete this page from the OneTab list", and then
- a special key combi, let's say, shift-control-F4, for "close current tab BUT preserve it in the OneTab list for further access to it"

It's evident the first alternative would be needed in most cases, for making OneTab the tab M tool it wants to be, AND, indeed, the second alternative would be most helpful for SOME such tabs, but only some... and it's evident the developer doesn't know how to code this, so he codes some appealing offering that at the end of the day is almost useless.

Question is, why those rave reviews, then, on https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall?hl=en ?

Some interesting extensions I'll have to check out:

Tabs Outliner (very interesting thing, with which OneTab won't work together anyway...)
Tabman Tabs Manager
TabsPlus
Awsome New Tab Page
Vertabs
TabsSaver
SaveMyTabs
TooManyTabsforChrome
Sidewise Tree Style Tabs
TabWrangler
and perhaps some more

But as we see here

1) sheer programming incompetence of developers prevents many good ideas from being realized, and worse:

2) instead of doing nothing, they then realize what they are able to do, and which is not much, and worse:

3) they even get rave reviews for such deceptive tools

Awful. And yes, why not pay some 20 bucks for a tool that lives up to its promises, but good-enough free tools that only do the minor part... the part the developer was technically able to program, leaving out the relevant, really important part... life's too short to be endlessly bothered by such minor software.

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General Software Discussion / Ad blockers, newspaper sites, etc.
« on: July 02, 2013, 06:16 PM »
So, I said, after 12 or 15 years of IE, I switched to Chrome, and first thing I installed was AdBlock, oh my! So read here my defence speech!:

As for "ads needed in order to finance the sites", well, I understand the argument, but I mainly browse such news sites, and during these last months, there has been lots of propaganda there, in the way of "web users should PAY us for our quality journalism" (= on top of looking at ads, and of clicking on them, please...), when in fact, the only interesting thing there are the users' comments, and certainly not any "quality journalism" which is blatantly absent from such sites.

Also, they all cite the example of the NYT, and here, there IS quality journalism (as there is in guardian.co.uk, but in NOT ONE of the many German or French newspaper or weekly magazine sites), and so, welt.de or zeit.de, with their constant reminders of them delivering "quality journalism", went greatly on my nerves, these last months, all the more so since all of them, on top of delivering (heavily-biased) "news" those same newspapers would have been deeply ashamed of just 10 or 12 years ago (cf. spiegel.de and Der Spiegel today, and that same weekly newsmagazine 20 years ago, being the best one in the world at its time), AND their heavy censorship of those aforementioned user comments.

In fact, in order to get some "back-up" news or such, some details that shine a new light on the news they present, some info that better makes you understand what you hear and see, you now have to rely virtually exclusively upon some user comments, and this means you must be "thankful" to them for any such instructive user comment they do NOT censor as soon as possible, in order to "mainstream" their sites as much as they can. And yes, here and there, you even have the impression that they "leave some important info in" such user comments, instead of deleting them, because, here and there, they're just too ashamed of holding back ALL relevant facts, and not being allowed, from their owners, to present them themselves, they at least leave such info alone, when it comes from some well-informed user.

All this has brought me, a once heavily, and long-time paying reader of Der Spiegel, Die Zeit (both expensive weeklies) and FAZ (faz.net, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) to seriously thinking, get paid by your owners, and by those powerful people you do your daily propaganda for, and if you don't get paid enough that way, go to he**.

And this way, I never considered clicking on any of their ads, in order to get them some click money: I just endured those ads since for IE, there isn't a good ad blocker: Here, with Chrome, Adblock works tremendously well if I dare say!

As for blogs and other sites where ads "should" be clicked, well, it seems you can do some setting in Adblock or Adblock Plus, in order to see them again there... but I have to say, being not sure if a click was enough, or if I also had to do some clicking within that ad page, then, in order for the blog, etc. to get my click money (= without me buying anything there), I very rarely took the effort to click an such an ad, and then navigate within that site I wasn't interested in, and in any such case I wondered if what I did there was perhaps completely pointless, without my buying that crap on offering there.

So, having installed an adblocker now, after 12 or 15 years of browsing WITH ads, is also a means to get out of such schizophrenia to just SIMULATE interest in ads, in order to "help" bloggers, etc.

A similar phenomenon with Google ads (which ain't blocked this way): Very often, instead of getting good hits (within the very first 30 or 50 hits there), you just (or mostly) get crap, but also the ads of some overpriced offerings when in fact you want info, not buy unnecessary goods/services, and the very fact of not finding what I was searching for, triggered my clicks on such ads, in order to make them COST their unwanted advertizing.

But this is weird, unhealthy, or, as the French say, louche et malade!

We all pay a monthly fee for our browsing experience (in my case, 35 euro), and why not distribute some of this money (let's say 15 euro, or make it 25 plus 15, = 40 euro) evenly to those sites we spend our time in? Ok, this would undeservingly advantage those "newspaper" sites (in my case at least), since they would be paid for my reading "their" user comments... but it would certainly be a much healthier approach to webspace financing than all this unwanted advertizing now.

And not speaking here of all those Google ads like "lawyer (specialty) (town)" on which 90 p.c. of the clicks come from "another lawyer (same specialty) (same town)".

So discussing ads is discussing visual clutter, and burnt money... and whenever I want to buy something, I'm searching offers in vain that'd read "look here, we're NOT more expensive than our competitors, but we have a real good product/service: here's proof:..." Never ever. Everytime I want to spend money, I have to search for hours, delving into biased "reviews", offers made as intransparent as possible in order to make them as in-comparable as it gets, etc.

What's blatantly missing, especially, is a thing honorable vendors could easily do now, in most countries, and yes, even in Germany:

They could compare their product/service to those similar, by their competitors, and they could do it in an honorable way, listing not only their products' strengths and their competitors' products' weaknesses, but they could do a balanced, equilibrated, real comparison - at this condition = at this "price" of total honesty, they could even do it in Germany, where "comparative advertizing" had been forbidden for many years.

This way, products' and services' quality would be literally multiplied within a few years, and you know what this would imply for the "economies" of the Western Hemisphere:

They would literally roar up!

But no, "everybody" convenes instead in lying to us, in taking all efforts to have us not know the negative core aspects, in a word, they treat us like idiots: They BLUR our knowledge, instead of widening it up.

And that's why I'm very happy to use Chrome, with AdBlock, now, at last.

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General Software Discussion / How to handle those really awful "endlessly scrolling down" web pages?
« on: July 02, 2013, 12:12 PM »
Does anybody know how to go far back within those tumblr "archives" that ain't e.g. 12 new photos on each new page, and where by this you can select page 124, by its number, within the address line, but which are made of just ONE, endlessly scrolling page? Let's say you want to see what they did publish there some 3 months ago... prob here, you'd have to scroll down, again and again, the same 1,000 or 1,500 photos, before even reaching the first photo you might be interested in! I won't give you response times for this in IE8, they are incredibly awful even for the first 500 such photos... but Chrome isn't THAT much better here on my system (with 2 GB of memory), so how to do it, or what to do alternatively, except for making a spider attack in the night?

I even thought of "hiding photos" when endlessly scrolling down, and then "unhide photos" after having scrolled down by a 1,000 photos. Any better idea than that (since it THEN will break my system, trying to display all these 1,000 "unnecessary" pictures, before displaying any "new" (i.e. sufficiently old) one), anyone?

So this is quite an awful web page format, but quite common on tumblr, and perhaps some web specialist here knows how to handle it best, from the outside?



EDIT

I'm sorry, I should have put a question mark at the end of the title line.

Another example of these special "back-loading" pages - or what's the correct denomination of these, in order to google for an answer? - ist this one:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/themes?hl=en

Here again, every "pgdn" or "end" pressing will load more pictures, again and again. Are there elements in the source code that could be of interest, to check, or even to manipulate, in order to get to the "depths" of such a page, more quickly than by incessant, endless scrolling down?

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General Software Discussion / MS Windows Internet Explorer 8 Problems
« on: July 01, 2013, 04:07 PM »
I normally use comp 1, with IE8 and MS updates latest version; unfortunately, this IE8 doesn't work properly (anymore) with many websites (I've got XP so IE9 won't install). So, in order to get beyond such probs, I also installed FF, using it just for such problematic sites.

Now I "lost" my AC adaptor for my comp 1 (will have to do 160 km to retrieve it, in some weeks), and so I unpacked pc 2 which in fact I hadn't used for months (or was it years?), and without having done the "necessary" MS update installs.

Now, a revelation: Many of the websites that don't show up properly in IE8 on my up-to-date comp 1, don't cause any problems here, with IE8 a little bit older... or is it just different settings here?, and certainly with XP3 in a version many months older than on comp 1.

To give a precise example: On the website welt.de, it's the users' comments that are really interesting (as it's in lotsa other press offerings: zeit.de, faz.net, taz.de, sueddeutsche.de, and many more). Now, in order to read those comments, I had to revert to FF, on my comp 1, "in spite of" doing any possible MS update (when in fact, it's probable those updates CAUSED those problems!)... and here, on comp 2, I CAN read the welt.de comments (which would not open in comp 1 anymore, for many, many months now) again! I don't have to say this is an incredible relief for me, it's so more pleasant to just use just ONE browser, and I'm fine with IE8 when it works!

Hence my big question: How to assure that in pc 1 (when it will work again) I can read the "Disqus-powered" user comments of welt.de again, like in old times?

Should I check for some special settings? And yes, I've got very old backups, but they would destroy ALL new things in my pc 1 system, so going back a year or two isn't a viable solution.

(In the normal curse of things, you'd assume that you could resolve problems with updates; in MS' case, it seems to be the other way round - how to get an early version of IE8, then, for downloading, after having de-installed the current version - if that ever is possible? Or, to put that question in another way: On pc 2, I obviously have got a working, old (but installed, not fresh) version of IE8 - how to retrieve that, in order to install it over my new crap version on pc 1? (All those are English versions, which I prefer.))

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