Messages

2676

Older Newsletters / Re: --> Newsletter for December 1 - Codename "Winter Wondercode"

« on: December 03, 2008, 11:13 AM »

Thanks for this edition (and exposure too ).

2677

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / NANY 2009 Release: Keyser

« on: December 03, 2008, 06:45 AM »

NANY 2009 Entry Information

Name of Application	Keyser FARR Plugin
Version	1.0.1.7
Short Description	Access Web Browser Searches via FARR
Supported OSes	WinAll
Web Page	n/a
Download Link	http://ewemoa.dcmembers.com/Plugins/Keyser/Keyser.zip
Checksums	MD5: b0b8514fc69fc45cfc6abcae835183a0, SHA1: 839198124f7fee0a898f4e2da97c2f77c49bd297
System Requirements	Requires Find and Run Robot (FARR) at least version 2.34.01
Version History	None yet
Author	ewemoa

Description
The initial motivation for this plugin was to enable FARR to reuse the searches already available in one's local installation of Firefox -- those available via its Search Bar / Search Box.  Firefox makes use of OpenSearch plugins to provide this functionality.  OpenSearch plugins are used by Firefox, IE 7, and other apps to allow one to search various sites more conveniently and quickly.  For those interested, there is more OpenSearch-related info at:

http://mycroft.mozdev.org/
http://www.opensearch.org/Home

As it stands now, the plugin has some level of support for the following browsers:

• Firefox 3 (2 might work, but I didn't test)
• IE7 (8 may end up working, but who knows?)
• K-Meleon (not as customizable as the other two)

I haven't decided whether to continue developing this plugin at this point.  Whether I continue may depend on the level of success I have with cleaning up the existing code


Screenshots








Usage

Installation

The installation flow is the same as other FARR plugins:

• Unpack the archive (probably a zip file) into FARR's Plugins directory
• If FARR is running already, tell it to reload plugins (e.g. via the 'goreload' alias)
• If FARR is not running, start it up

Configuration may be necessary to indicate to the plugin where to look for browser-maintained searches.  There is a detailed README.txt included in the plugin.

Using the Application

• Bring up FARR.
• Type: ks Amazon:little schemer
• Choose one of the results (e.g. via numeric keypad).

The usage is modeled after the SokuGin Alias -- more details are available for that at its forum thread.

Uninstallation

One way that may work is:

• Quit FARR
• Find and delete the plugin's folder from FARR's Plugins directory

2678

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Post your FARR v2 Plugin Idea Requests Here - Plugin Writers Read In

« on: December 03, 2008, 02:08 AM »

Thanks for the response, ecaradec.

I'd be interested in being able to interact with the registry more conveniently via FScript -- well, specifically, being able to enumerate registry keys. 

In addition to possibly helping a plugin for PuTTY along, I think it might make it easier to read IE 7's search providers which are also stored in the Registry [1] -- this would be helpful in the development of a plugin I'm working on.


[1] Though as I understand it from some searches, it's possible to use the reg.exe command to make that content available in file form -- which could then subsequently be parsed...but yuck.

2679

Find And Run Robot / Reflections on Using Multiple Instances of FARR Simultaneously

« on: December 03, 2008, 01:46 AM »

I have been using 2 instances of FARR running simultaneously for a bit now [1] -- below are some of my observations, followed by a sketch of what I did to set things up.  May be there are some others who are doing the same and wouldn't mind sharing their experiences.

Some advantages

• Can test out new versions of FARR more conveniently -- just upgrade one of them
• I am not FARR-less when one of them crashes
• Don't feel nearly as disabled when testing plugins in one of the installations and things aren't quite working -- I have a "left" FARR (appears on the left side of the screen and is invoked via double-left-control [2]) which is sort of my "stable" configuration and a "right" FARR (you can probably guess how this one works) which is more of my "development" configuration.  I tend to test with the right-hand one -- it ends up crashing (perhaps mostly MS' debugger-related) more often and consequently needs to be restarted more frequently.
• Can use KlipKeeper to interact w/ some of the FARR dialog boxen that I couldn't before.

Downsides include

• Portions of configuration information are not obviously shareable -- you don't want everything the same because you may want to maintain different sets of window locations, hotkeys, skins, icons, and plugins (and perhaps other things).  OTOH, you might basically want the same Search Folders.
• Another app is running all of the time -- but I've found FARR to be pretty light, so this hasn't really been a problem for my setup.
• Setup is a slight bother
• Upgrading and ongoing maintenance of configuration might be a pain depending on your situation -- it's been so-so for me so far
• Using Dcupp?dater and/or interacting with various FARR-related configuration dialog boxen may be a bit confusing -- AFAICT those things aren't affected by skin changes

Interesting and miscellaneous things

• Can drag back things between FARR windows -- say from the results list of one, to the text field of the other.
• Another reason to have skins and custom icons

Setup

0. Quit any running instances of FARR
1. Copy an existing FARR installation directory and rename it
2. Rename executable of new installation to not conflict w/ any existing FARR executables (I add 'dev' or something else right before '.exe')
3. Start the new installation's executable
4. Customize the skin and tray icon (Options -> Settings -> Advanced visuals)
5. Change hotkeys to not conflict w/ any of the other installations (Options -> Settings -> Hotkeys)
6. Move FARR window to a location where any of the other ones won't appear
7. Tweak anything else desired
8. Restart other FARR instances

That's what I remember at the moment - I may have missed something.


[1] I've noticed a place or two where this has come up and thought I'd "factor" out a thread as I hadn't succeeded in locating a dedicated one.
[2] Thanks to Tap Tap Hotkey Extender.

2680

General Software Discussion / Re: My Word! Is there any freeware out there that compares........

« on: December 02, 2008, 10:45 PM »

I don't know of anything. 

I'm not sure how much mileage you'd get out of the following approach, but FWIW, you might be able to learn something useful by running the PDFs through some converter first to produce something that can be compared more easily.

2681

Site/Forum Features / Re: New feature added to the forum: "My Personal Area"

« on: December 02, 2008, 09:09 PM »

Is there a way to do the following with a post added to one's personal area?  I'm stumped -- hopefully I'm just missing obvious things.

1. Delete it
2. After drafting it, choose to start a new topic -- without a copy/paste of the draft content -- i.e. specify which forum it is supposed to appear in from the "My Personal Area" section
3. After drafting it, choose to reply to a particular post -- without a copy/paste of the draft content -- i.e. specify which post it's a reply to

Alternatively, is there a way to leverage the personal area space from the ordinary posting area and have the forum to post to (or post to reply to) be remembered along w/ the draft and then later when finished with the draft be able to specify that it should be posted to the appropriate (remembered) "location"?

2682

General Software Discussion / Re: Linus Up Close and Personal [via Glyn Moody]

« on: December 02, 2008, 03:21 AM »

that's a funny back-and-forth presentation. The man is vicious on crappy software. The first five minutes kill.

-zridling (December 02, 2008, 02:38 AM)

I had fun watching too -- may be this is the type of thing folks were hinting at in the 'In praise of opinionated reviews' thread.

I'm slowly getting a sense of what git-related materials I'm coming across to figure out where to start -- I found a couple more videos and a few free books (a Wikipedia page on git provided some nice links too).  May be a git-dedicated thread would be in order

2683

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR plugin : FZip select files and zip them to any file

« on: December 02, 2008, 02:52 AM »

I got the latest version [1] [2] and verified that using Enter (not Control-Enter) is enough for completion of not-already completed folder names.

May be you are already considering this, but how about when a folder name is complete, making subsequent presses of Enter cycle through among other possible completions?  Perhaps that is a pain involving state or something...ah, I thought of a hack that wouldn't require state -- as long as one can 'calculate' (say based on some natural sort oder) the 'next' completion candidate based on the current completed folder name, it doesn't seem that state is necessary [3].  What do you think?


[1] 8c1beec944651212584b63964237185118edb10e
[2] Though at first github didn't provide anything -- a little waiting cured this.
[3] Other than the state implicit in the current completed folder name.

2684

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR plugin : FZip select files and zip them to any file

« on: December 02, 2008, 02:35 AM »

I tried how I understood what you suggested and it seems to work well.

Thanks!

2685

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR plugin : FZip select files and zip them to any file

« on: December 01, 2008, 11:20 PM »

Thanks for the answers.

I did the following locally after installing msysgit:

  git clone git://github.com/ecaradec/fsubscript.git
  cd fsubscript
  git config core.autocrlf # noticed it was true
  git config core.autocrlf false
  git config core.autocrlf # noticed it was now false
  git diff # noticed not-so-nice diff of FSSCSettings.ahk

Is the last thing something I should worry about at all?

2686

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Post your FARR v2 Plugin Idea Requests Here - Plugin Writers Read In

« on: December 01, 2008, 05:35 AM »

ecaradec: do I understand correctly that approaches such as used by:

http://digivation.ne...amming/registrytools

would not function in the current fscript?

2687

General Software Discussion / Re: Linus Up Close and Personal [via Glyn Moody]

« on: December 01, 2008, 01:18 AM »

Anyone else here on DC use Git?

-zridling (October 27, 2008, 09:40 PM)

I'm considering it.  BTW, you can find at least one other person who seems to be using git by searching for "git" on the forums here 

Slightly on-topic...I guess there's this Linus talk on Git...have you seen it?

2688

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR plugin : FZip select files and zip them to any file

« on: December 01, 2008, 12:56 AM »

I tried FZip for the following two cases:

  zip C:\a.txt;C:\b.txt to c:\test.zip <-- didn't work -- no resulting test.zip file

  zip C:\a\;C:\b\ to c:\test.zip <-- worked (completion of directory name via Control-Enter did too)

Any plans to have the completion work so it might "cycle" through various candidates?  I didn't have much luck w/ repeated presses of Control-Enter.


(Also, are you using msysgit or something else?)

2689

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Intro

« on: December 01, 2008, 12:11 AM »

I'm in.

2690

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Post your FARR v2 Plugin Idea Requests Here - Plugin Writers Read In

« on: December 01, 2008, 12:08 AM »

Good to hear that you got a work-around

FWIW, I looked into doing an FSubScript FARR plugin for PuTTY, but from what I learned so far, enumeration of registry keys is somewhat of a pain using JScript -- at least it's not nearly as straight-forward as reading, deleting, and writing keys.  I'm partial to versions of PuTTY that store setting information in the filesystem so my leaning is towards working on something that works with that (if I do make something).  But may be as time goes on I'll learn differently.

2691

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR plugin : FZip select files and zip them to any file

« on: November 30, 2008, 11:41 PM »

btw you also need to get latest fscript from ewe which can search deeper for fsubscript plugins.

-mouser (November 30, 2008, 11:50 AM)

As near as I can tell, that code (or czb's modification of it) is in the latest.  If the recursive searching is not working, perhaps something broke recently.

2692

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR Plugin: PopQuotes - Search quote/fortune files

« on: November 30, 2008, 09:07 AM »

I gave it a try and got it working -- mostly 

Things I noticed -- perhaps you know of some or all of these, but here goes:

• I needed to enable books (well, at least one book I presume) via the "Configure Advanced Plugin Options" to get anything to show up after typing "popq" -- I didn't see this in the docs and typing "popq" gave me nothing initially.
• The first quote from the results list that I invoked caused an access violation -- after restarting FARR, I haven't had this happen.  Now invoking a result causes the text of the quote to be pasted.
• Clicking on the folder icon next to the text field labeled "Quotes Directory" in the PopQuotes - Advanced Options dialog caused a dialog box to show up, but behind the Advanced Options dialog, so I didn't notice it at first.
• I chose to point the Quote Directory at my PopupWisdom set of books.  After invoking the "Rescan Book Directory" menu item from the context menu that appears when right-clicking in the area beneath the "Books Available" label I ended up waiting a bit -- and I spent some time wondering whether I'd end up terminating my FARR process.  I didn't end up having to.  The result was that all books from the PopupWisdom installation showed up and all of them were selected (in PopupWisdom, I only have 3 selected at the momment).
• A similar waiting and wondering occured after I clicked the OK button on the Advanced Options dialog.  I tried this a second time and at some point I think my FARR process went away.  Subsequent start-up took quite a while compared to what I'm used to -- and ProcessTamer decided to take some action.  Now when I type "popq" after some waiting, I see nearly 98000 results.
• The wait time after clicking the "Click to Examine and Configure Plugins" button seems longer to me than before.

2693

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 48

« on: November 29, 2008, 08:57 AM »

Thanks again for this week's issue

Number 6: Cool!  (On a somewhat related note.  There's a pretty interesting-sounding lecture series (expensive) from the Teaching Company named "Origins of Life" -- I haven't seen this series, but I've watched a different series (Joy Of Science) by the same lecturer and thought that was pretty good.)

2694

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR plugin : FSubScript enable loading of multiple javascript plugins

« on: November 28, 2008, 08:16 AM »

I didn't exactly follow what you meant about the naming of things, but thanks for the review and feedback.

Since my experience and understanding of FARR and FScript is rather limited, I guess my comments are likely to be too

2695

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Post your FARR v2 Plugin Idea Requests Here - Plugin Writers Read In

« on: November 28, 2008, 08:11 AM »

Thanks for the clarification.

Depending on how many sessions you have, may be a cheap way to get by until someone writes a plugin is to create an alias which gives you the option of choosing sessions - each choice could be specified via the -load command line option to putty.exe.  Does that help at all as a temporary solution?

2696

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Post your FARR v2 Plugin Idea Requests Here - Plugin Writers Read In

« on: November 27, 2008, 10:38 PM »

Sorry if this has already been suggested but I would really like to see a pidgin plugin like Launchy has (see http://code.google.c...utty-launchy-plugin/).

-Dagur (November 27, 2008, 11:05 AM)

I am confused -- did you mean PuTTY or Pidgin (or both...or something else)?

2697

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR plugin : FSubScript enable loading of multiple javascript plugins

« on: November 27, 2008, 09:54 AM »

Some initial comments on a few things I've looked at so far:

I noticed that for onSearchBegin(), a sub-plugin (?) defines search(), for onReceiveKey(), a sub-plugin defines receive(), and for onProcessTrigger(), a sub-plugin defines trigger().  I found it a little odd that for onInit(), a sub-plugin defines onInit() -- similarly for onSetStrValue().  I think init() [if that's possible] seems somehow better-fitting in terms of naming -- either that or change all of the other things to match the names used by fscript.js.  Or may be some other idea?  What do you think?

I'm not so clear on how fscript.js/onSetStrValue() should behave -- specifically, the return value seems to get decided purely on whether a single sub-plugin returns true.  Is that what we want?  What if more than one sub-plugin returns a value and one returns true while another returns false?  May be the current implementation is what we want -- which would be fine by me, I just don't currently have a sense of what it should be

onInit() in the original fscript.js took a single parameter iirc, in the most recent code candidate the sub-plugin's onInit() doesn't take a parameter. I wonder whether mirroring the original interface is preferable or not.  May be it's not a big deal.  Any thoughts?

I'm not sure about loading all fsubscript*.js files -- I wonder whether the loading order might matter in some cases and with the way the code is currently, a sub-plugin writer can only control this based on coming up with appropriate filenames.  I hadn't really thought about multiple files per sub-plugin so I start to wonder about the potential consequences and alternative designs

2698

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR plugin : FSubScript enable loading of multiple javascript plugins

« on: November 27, 2008, 08:43 AM »

Haven't tested yet, but hope to soon.

ecaradec: czb and I were chatting and started to wonder about extending things via prototypes -- e.g. String and trim.  Do you have any good ideas about how this might be managed to reduce (or eliminate?) conflicts among code produce by various plugin authors?

2699

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR plugin : FSubScript enable loading of multiple javascript plugins

« on: November 27, 2008, 06:02 AM »

May be ecaradec wouldn't mind updating his "fingers in the nose" guide

2700

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Alias: SokuGin - Some More Searches

« on: November 27, 2008, 01:25 AM »

What Is It?

SokuGin is an alias which provides a fair number of web-based searches. 

Installation

• Download the SokuGin alias (SokuGin.zip).
• Extract the contents under %FARRDIR%\AliasGroups\Installed\ [1] -- what you want to end up with is a SokuGin directory (containing among other files a file named "SokuGin.alias") that lives under the Installed directory.  Depending on your decompression method, a SokuGin directory may or may not be created.  If one is not created, please create one manually.  IIUC, this non-existence of a top-level directory within the archive file is for working with DCUpdater -- FARR plugins do this too, AFAICT.

Example Usage

• Bring up FARR.
• Type: sg Amazon:little schemer
• Choose one of the results (e.g. via numeric keypad).

Please note the existence of a colon character in the example.  Also note that colors were used in this post for illustrative purpose only

Notes

The string entered in the FARR window is basically made of 4 pieces:

• "sg" is short for "SokuGin" -- this is the alias name.
• The string (w/o the leading spaces) following "sg" and preceeding the last colon in the line specifies a search location.
• For the alias to distinguish between the search location and the search string, a colon character is used as a separator.
• The string following the last colon on the line is a search string.

See Regex Alias Filter Patterns for background on how this type of alias works.

The source of the web-based searches is a user-contributed Wiki page so there are likely a number of searches that are broken -- I've pruned some that were broken and others that were not straight-forward to make an alias for (e.g. POST-based queries) but I didn't check all of them (there are > 500 searches).

Credits

• mouser - FARR, improvements and testing
• Quicksilver and its user community - provided web-based searches
• GNU Emacs - data munging of Wiki page data
• lanux128 - started the Alias: Send Twitter updates from Farr topic on which the current post is based
• Others - ok, enough -- most things in the world seem to have multiple contributing factors, it can be interesting exploring what those might have been, but if you want to do anything else with your life, you probably have to stop somewhere...I think

[1] I think %FARRDIR% is the FARR installation directory.