Topics

26

General Software Discussion / Microsoft Update. Worth it?

« on: December 18, 2008, 08:48 PM »

With the recent truckload of patches for every software package produced by Microsoft, and the impossibility of tracking patches for the Office viewers, I was wondering if Microsoft Update has been fixed during the past couple of years, and as such, it can be used without fear of seeing the old issues creeping up. I recall we discussed these same issues in the forum, but I can't find the right thread.

27

General Software Discussion / How can I dual boot between Vista and XP?

« on: December 18, 2008, 08:41 PM »

So one of my friends finally upgraded his computer (good stuff, I was thinking into stealing some of the components for my personal usage ), and dropt me a call to install the OS, and make some post-assembly work (moving his old hard drive there basically).

The thing is that, while he installed Vista in the main HDD, he wanted to keep XP in the old one. Since the original installation was beat up, and new components would not do any benefit to it, I simply got the HDD there, and left it disconnected. Besides, Vista complained about the new HDD not being the main one, and thus the OS installation phase was halted at that point.

So I installed Vista, changed something here and there, while admiring Vista idiosyncrasies and hunting for moved options. Also, it seems now you need an antivirus if you want to fully "enjoy" WLM chat facilities (and they wonder why I don't use it...). Everything ran fine, though, so I copied the old files to the new drive, turned off the computer, and proceeded to connect the older one and install XP. Just like before, everything went fine, and with my job nearly done, I went to Google for fixing up possible bootloader issues.

You see, apc published a few tutorials of how to dual boot between various OS, including Vista and XP, so I followed their tips to the letter. The problem is that: first, unlike they say there, XP didn't mess with Vista bootloader, and second, EasyBCD did not find XP in the other drive, so here I just opted to fix such thing myself with the tool, because in theory it should work.

OK, it didn't. XP did not start in any way, but fortunately Vista remains fine. I did some googling, and found another way to do it, old-schol, but reliable, using bcdedit. According to the guy who wrote the guide, it should work with two separate drives, but did not again.

So, the question is how to do it correctly. In my mind, a few explanations for the failure cooked over, like that the old drive was disconnected when I installed Vista, and he does not like it now, or that because of the peculiarities of the motherboard southbridge (SB700), everything is running in IDE mode (I nearly panicked when I peeked into the BIOS, and did not see SATA in any place), and the fact that the old drive is in channel 0 as the master device, and both the optical drive and the new HDD are in the channel 3 as slave and master respectively (weirdness) causes them to fight over bus dominance or something. Or perhaps that I should get some sleep, because I'm making up extravagant explanations with no basis in reality, and missed something very evident.

So, I'll appreciate if someone did something like this before would tell me how they did it, or where did they find the information about how it should be done.

28

Found Deals and Discounts / Peggle Extreme now free on Steam

« on: December 13, 2008, 04:28 PM »

Deozaan brought to our attention on the IRC channel that Valve has made available for free Peggle Extreme, an Orange Box^w-themed variation of a well-known puzzle game with an insanely addictive gameplay. Note that you need to have the Steam client installed to be able to play it.

In related news, as usual there's a weekend-only offer running on Steam. This week, the acclaimed multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2 is sold by a mere $9.99, down from its normal $19.99 price.

29

General Software Discussion / Opera - An exercise on frustration

« on: November 17, 2008, 03:12 PM »

Yes, you're reading it right. No, nobody took over my account. I'm here, complaining about the Opera browser, and specially about the latest version with which Opera Software has achieved the impossible: Having an Internet-compatible browser (mostly) after years of trying and web creators constantly giving them cold shoulders. Yet, they also done another incredible thing: to completely undermine all this effort due to a half-assed new feature introduced in Opera 9.5 named content indexing.

As you may know, the latest trend when it comes to web browsing history is to index not only the URLs you visit, but also the page title, and letting you search every single character in them directly from the URL bar. The boon to procrastination productivity is immense, yet Opera wished to go a step further: to index ALL text contained in every single page you visit. The idea is even more brilliant, and while it turned out it's not as useful as having URL searching, when you need it, it's a wonderful feature.

If it worked.

Let me explain. Turns out when they devised the frontend for it, either they smoked something or simply did not care. Instead of doing something so simple, like, well, list FIRST the results of the URL search, and later the results of content search, they mixed both, so you end up with tons of noise in the address bar and effectively killing much of its usefulness as you have to pay attention to the underlined results to actually found what you really want. An even better way to implement this frontend would be putting up the content search part under an alias (there's actually one), so the user could launch it on demand, and leave URL search alone in the address bar.

The problem gets worse when you see that, for no good reason, the program simply refuses to index certain pages titles, just the URL addresses. And that the number of results listed by the feature is fixed, and sometimes what you want does not appear in the results list, despite knowing it's there.

It should be said that those problems appear as time passes and Opera's history gets filled with items. Precisely this, coupled with my desire to have a page history as big as possible, gets me to the ultimate weak point of this feature: performance. You see, the search function is pretty snappy as long as the word actually exists in the history file. But sometimes it turns out it's not in there, and it's then when you witness the self-proclaimed "Fastest browser on Earth" bringing modern HDDs to their knees during sometimes as much as 20 seconds.

I constantly experiment this due to my appreciation for the possibility of searching things directly from the address bar, and it's something I use several times a day. But while a single programmer as mouser implemented an option to stop searches when the inputted string matches an alias, a company with more than 500 employees wasn't able to do the same, and so I'm forced to constantly witness how Opera freezes itself and the drive works like mad trying to find something a string like "g cheese" (which launches a search in Google for cheese). Of course, there's a way to fix this and it's typing the string and waiting until the drive stops thrashing around (hooray for HDD leds), and only then you press "Enter". With this trick, you can actually use the browser, but if you input the string and press Enter, prepare yourself to see how even the whole computer gets nearly unusable, and I'm running a dualcore machine. Should I get a RAID 0 array and a quadcore to "fix" Opera Software errors?

There's actually a way to end with all of this. But the problem is that you get reverted to pre-Opera 9.5 behaviour (save for the fact that you don't have to type "http://www." to find every address). And this is either deactivating content indexing, or going into opera:config and disabling content search from the address bar. Since both URL addresses and page titles are stored in the "opera.dir" file, I thought that I could replicate Firefox 3 behaviour while keeping Opera advantages and using them as needed. Turns out I was wrong.

You see, the only way to reach Codex Transportica, for example, is typing "codextransportica" or "codex", not "Codex Transportica", nor "Transportica", despite seeing the "Codex" part of the title bolded as you type it. A more complex page like the Recent Posts section of this very forum is unreachable by typing "Recent Posts Donation Coder", while in Firefox 3 is totally possible. So, you either bring back content indexing, or you get forced to remember entire addresses. Which, frankly, I prefer considering the number of I/O operations done by the browser to update indexes which I rarely use, and the aforementioned noise.

"Planet" will take me to all these sites, but "Planet WebKit" or "Planet Emulation" will take me nowhere.

This is perhaps the most glaring issue with Opera post-9.5. The other one that troubles me is the way memory gets released, which makes that after a while without touching a single page, switching the focus back to its tab shows you a little slide show as you see the browser repainting the entire page, and reloading the pictures, probably from the cache. And then, minor issues, like the overflowing loading bar when the page loaded has more than 100 elements, artifacts in the history panel, or dialogs that continue to be in English. Practically everything mentioned here has been reported on the official bugtracker by me, and there are several threads about them in the Opera forums. But they continue to be unfixed, and probably they won't be until Opera 10.

I'm used to navigate around software shortcomings, and bugs, but this is a joke. No wonder some Opera users complain as loud as they do, even if the company chooses to ignore them. I am starting to believe what I read here a while ago (I think Josh wrote it), that Opera do things as they want and they rarely finish the work. Perhaps if they packed less features in the program (let's be sincere, there are tons of features included in Opera just for the sake of being included or to please a really small group of users, scroll marker coming to mind, for example), and they focused on the really useful ones, perhaps they could have avoided the train wreck that Opera 9.5x was (Opera 9.6x, while not perfect, is much improved in all areas).

30

General Software Discussion / Lessons from 2 years without Windows

« on: November 12, 2008, 04:56 PM »

Derrick Sobodash, an American freelance journalist working in China who, in other life, was a well-known translator in the romhacking scene, writes an in depth article over the pleasures and (specially) the pains of running Linux full-time and trying to adapt the OS to fulfill his needs. Note that while the article reads like Derrick wants to escape from Linux at all costs due to the difficulties he encounters, he's still a committed Linux user.

Although I know it's beating a dead horse, most of the other articles of this kind I encountered usually stop at everyday computing instead of going to the core, which I think make this one specially worthwhile. Now, wouldn't it be nice to read a similar article mixing OSes other than Windows and Linux?

A bit offtopic, but this comment cracked me up:

Mac is the OS for rich, trendy kids from New York who like modern art, U2 and white ear buds.

Well, looks like I'm a bit closer of being the target user of a Mac
via Romhacking.net

31

General Software Discussion / Microsoft MASSIVELY improves JavaScript performance in IE8

« on: October 23, 2008, 06:26 PM »

Look who is coming back into the web browser game. Proving that competition is the best recipe towards improving one's product, Microsoft has tweaked IE's JavaScript engine in unexpected ways, just like Derick Eisenhardt is showing in his blog with the famous SunSpider benchmark.

While it's still a bit far from the competition, at least IE developers are doing something to address all the criticism directed to the aging Trident engine. Of course, benchmarks are one thing, and real world usage is another, and frankly with today webpages and webapps IE7 does not feel as slow as the numbers might make it look, but it's better prepared for future JS-heavy developments.
via Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

32

General Software Discussion / Critical vulnerability in Windows

« on: October 23, 2008, 05:38 PM »

It's rare that Microsoft decides to release a patch for Windows outside the monthly Patch Tuesday, but today they decided to do just that. The vulnerability is located in the Server service, and just like many others before allows remote code execution. It's rated as highly critical, and according to the details published in the Secunia advisory, it's a 0-day exploit, so it's better to patch sooner than later.

As a curiosity, it should be noted that even the private builds of Windows 7 are affected.
via Unhandled Perception

33

Find And Run Robot / FARR window narrows by itself at random

« on: October 19, 2008, 01:46 PM »

So, I've observed some weird behaviour in FARR during the last versions. When I run it for the first time, the window is a perfectly wide floating thing on my desktop, which I really like because it offers me more information about the links at a glance, like so:

But, as time passes and I use the system as normal, I observed that the window ends up narrowed like this:

The only explanation I can find for this is that the window loses part of its width due to a change in desktop resolution, probably triggered by some full-screen game or video. Is there a way to stop this to happen?

34

Found Deals and Discounts / And... The Ultimate Steal makes a comeback

« on: September 03, 2008, 08:55 PM »

So, yeah, Microsoft decided again to offer its entire suite for nothing, or almost, just $59.95. Just a catch: you have to be a student, and live in one of the countries that offers the promotion (hover the mouse cursors over the flag to see them).

Frankly, if I knew Microsoft would get ODF support right with the SP2, I would buy it right away
via One Microsoft Way

35

Living Room / The Root of Game Piracy

« on: August 11, 2008, 11:03 AM »

A game developer takes on a novel idea to "combat" game piracy: instead of resorting to the usual DRM and prosecution of the offenders, he ask them why they're doing it. The answers seem to be the usual, and AFAIK most of them have been mentioned here when discussing software piracy, but still the article makes a nice analysis on the current state of videogaming regarding the piracy matter, and the blog post is an interesting read. Also, I wonder what conclusions Mr. Harris will extract from the comments and the mails.

Note that the discussion is mostly centered about PC gaming, as the current generation of consoles does not suffer from the rampant piracy present in the last two generations, due to various reasons (expensive blank media and duplicators, locked-down systems, etc.). And the blog is getting hammered as well ;D

36

General Software Discussion / Opera UserJS contest winners

« on: July 28, 2008, 07:07 PM »

Errr, I should have posted about this when they *announced* it, but totally forgot about it, and so the contest ended, and winners were chosen.

Anyway, the Opera Software guys held a contest to create new and innovative User JavaScript, em, scripts (the closest thing to Firefox extensions), with quite a nice reward for the winners in the two sole categories. There are a few really interesting scripts, either for its usefulness, or just for being original.

It looks like it won't be the last time they'll do this, which hopefully means the coming of the long-desired extensibility in Opera (or a least a more elegant way to find and handle what's already available).

37

Living Room / Where's my TCP/IP?

« on: July 08, 2008, 10:04 AM »

During the past days, I've been having connection problems, suddenly the pages are inaccessible, IM is disconnected, and file transfers drop to 0. I swear these problems use a timetable, because during the afternoon, everything is rock solid, but at night or in the mornings, it's a nightmare. I have to punch my ISP, but first I want to fix this particular problem, and see if it's connected somehow.

The thing is that the other day, while I suffered one of the first disconnections, I went to see the status of the connection, and I encountered this:

I went like crazy, because clearly something was not right there. First, the entry for the TCP/IP protocol is nowhere to be found; second, the dialog is not showing which Ethernet port is providing the connection; third, I can't uncheck any of the entries (and I unchecked the first two when I installed Windows). I thought it was because of the disconnection, but no, it stays the same when things go back to normal. Clearly, there is a connection, otherwise I could not be posting this, and everything is working as usual.

I tried to install the protocol, but I get an error box: "Can't find the file". What file? There is no prompt to search for one, and putting the installation CD in the drive does not get me anywhere. I tried to configure the hardware from that dialog as well, but I can't solve anything like that. I searched Google, and there lots of results, but no solution, since everyone recommends what I've already tried (including resetting the TCP/IP protocol per this Microsoft article), and the people with these problems can't solve them after applying the fixes as well.

I can't remember the last time that dialog showed what it should, but I did not see anything wrong in the computer that might suggest something is at work (no viruses, trojans or anything similar). I wonder if maybe I broke something in the registry, or some tweak or change in the system caused this. Any ideas?

38

General Software Discussion / Nero - WHY?

« on: June 23, 2008, 07:14 PM »

Welcome to another edition of "Beating a Dead Horse", this night the program will revolve around one of the audience past favourite programs... gone wrong (and you know how people love to see heroes in the mud), the ever present Nero Burning ROM (or whatever it's called now)

OK, everybody knows what immensely bloated suite Nero has become since version 6, and how people still use it in a great percentage due to inertia (just like they use Real Player, Adobe Acrobat or iTunes), and that free license you get with every DVD writer that is available in the market. OK, despite that, Nero, as a burner, is still a very decent program, and as such, some of its shortcomings can be ignored. Like the fact that, even if you can disable the installation of most of the shovelware that brings along, the program insists on installing Nero Scout (barf!), or all those video decoders, WITHOUT asking. At least you can disable them, and they don't take over the computer, unlike some other video players.

What it can't be forgiven is how shitty is to update *something* in this trainwreck of a suite. Not only Nero did combine ALL the languages available in a single installation package, ending up with a > 300 MB file, but they also decide to release the help files in a separate RAR archive to reduce the size of the distribution. And imagine my reaction when I see that decompressing them in the default locations does absolutely nothing, and calling for help in most applications of the suite brings up the default help file, telling me to download the help package. Exactly that one: "Wow, what a mess"

You may argue that Nero provides its own update system, and this is the final thing that drove me nuts, and made me forget about Nero until they fix their ways. First, you have to check to updates, and once you know there are updates available, the program checks again! WTF? All of this with a big banner of Nero 8 in front of your face. So, you start updating, for what it needs to configure the Windows' Firewall, because it blocked the connection (what? the firewall did not say anything, and I already added the program to the exception list), download files for God-knows-what-engine, and then you start the update, which usually weights between 40 and 80 MB (if you update often that is).

But wait! In the last two updates, Nero prompted me to uninstall the previous version, which is typical as you may know. So, I accepted the dialog, waited for the program to do its job, and rebooted the computer. The update continued afterwards. And this is when everything breaks. I was doing some other things meanwhile the setup ended downloading the files, and installing everything, but the installation phase was taking too long, like 10 minutes, and there was no sign of activity anywhere. I launched Process Monitor, and confirmed my suspicions, nothing was going on. This is the second time that it happens, and the last as well. Bye, bye, Nero, I tried to give you an opportunity, but you really wanted to be kicked out of the door.

It's a shame, really, there are very capable people working in Nero, like the guys in charge of the Nero AAC encoder, or Erik Deppe, the sole programmer of Nero DiscSpeed, the burner is still quite good IMO, and some of the best tools of the suite are being available for free, but the program crumbles under its own weight, the rest of the applications are poor excuses and suck hard compared with the competition. It does not help that programs like CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn are far more capable that Burning ROM, with tons of options for power users, much less footprint, and free. I suppose Nero would continue its own path, until it comes to a RealPlayer situation, and tries to reverse it by doing too little and too late.

Tune in next month to see if it's possible to find a less obnoxious alternative to Adobe Reader, OpenOffice and QuickTime (it there's no broadcast, that means they're not obnoxious enough)

39

General Software Discussion / Firefox 3 - A visual guide to the new features

« on: June 12, 2008, 06:26 PM »

The new version of Firefox is almost here, and in a timely fashion, Deb Richardson, a Mozilla employee, has compiled a list of the new major features, including live screenshots (Mac version) and links explaining the functions more in depth. All in all, it looks like a very nice release, and definitely a big step compared with the mild disappointments that Firefox 1.5 and 2 were (at least in my opinion).

Though this is not all, and a Firefox 3.1 will be here by the end of the year including some things that, because one thing or the other could not be included in the main release.
via Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

40

Mini-Reviews by Members / GCstar - Personal collections manager

« on: June 07, 2008, 07:51 PM »

Basic Info

App Name	GCstar
App URL	http://www.gcstar.org/
App Version Reviewed	1.4.0
Test System Specs	AthlonX2 5200+, 2 GB RAM, WinXP Pro SP2 & Sandboxie 3.26
Supported OSes	FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
Support Methods	Support forum
Upgrade Policy	It's a free application, so use your imagination :)
Trial Version Available?	Nope, free for all
Pricing Scheme	The price is LOW: $0
Author Donation Link	You can make a donation via PayPal
Reviewer Donation Link	Donate to Lashiec, the author
Relationship btwn. Reviewer and Product	Hey, it's free as in freedom of speech (not free as in beer, sheesh ;D), how can you think I was paid to do this? OK, seriously, I am just testing the program for my own use

DISCLAIMER: This is not the usual mini-review, it started as a simple remark in General Software Discussion, but in the end it got so big I decided it should belong here. So that's why the usual sections are missing.

After looking at the mess created by all the items sitting in my shelves, drawers, and other unspecified places (room corners, for example), I decided that it was impossible to remember what I have and where it is, so it was time to put my ass to work and catalog these things to prevent future losses and be able to accumulate more crap have quick access to my precious belongings :D

So I searched around for the software to let me accomplish such thing. The main option was (and continue to be, despite this post) MediaMan, a very polished piece of software that lets you catalog music, films, books and other media pulling data from the Internet, but shareware. A quick search in DC also unearthed Libra, very much like MediaMan, not as good, but freeware, and Listal, a web service that looks like a nice option to have your data up in the cloud, while having a social component in it, it seems you can even backup that data locally.

Then I remembered that an OSS movie cataloging software called GCfilm stopped development a while ago to be fully rewritten and contain every kind of collectible thing created by humankind. So, I googled it, and came upon GCstar. GCstar is a cross platform app, that uses the GTK toolkit and several external libraries to do its job.

The first thing that impressed me was that it looked quite nice under Windows. Usually, I cringe every time I run a GTK app in Windows, but the developers did a nice job with the skin. Still, it maintains most identifying widgets of GTK, including its file browser. It's easy to get used to it, but still feels awkward despite packing some shiny eye candy:

After getting familiar with the interface, I decided to create a new database. Contrary to other apps, GCstar does not let you have different types of things coexist in the same collection, so forget about having Krzysztof Kieslowski and Britney Spears sitting one next to the other (unless you were so crazy to bought that "movie" she made). GCstar brings along quite some plugins to extract information from various sources, instead of using the APIs sites like Amazon provide, GCstar queries and parses HTML code to find the relevant data. This has an advantage, being that it can interact with far more services than its competitors, but also it's quite slower, and not very flexible.

For example, I decided to build a game collection to test the program, and when I went to select the source of the data, I was thrilled to found MobyGames between the sources (those guys hold tons of high resolution videogame covers scans). Unfortunately, instead of importing the covers, the program imports the thumbnails, as the real covers are a few pages ahead. Not a letdown, as I can import them manually, but I prefer to do it automatically. Also, maybe it's because I'm running the program sandboxed, but it seems like those images imported by hand are not saved along the others, that means if you delete the source files, you lose the pictures in the program.

Apart from that, the most prominent bugs are three: First, sometimes the information fetching stage gets stalled, but I ignore if it's the program's fault, or the server being queried. In those cases, all you can do is restart the application, which despite this, stays fully responsive, so you can save the database before exiting without problems. Second, the commands calling external applications, specially browsers, sometimes hang up as well, a console window shows up but nothing happens until a minute or two later. Again, I don't know what causes this, though it's as easy to correct as to close the window and try again. And third, sorting the elements alphabetically when you add new items only works when you save the database, exit the program, and enter again :S

Other features include item searching, complete with the creation of virtual folders; data replacing; integration with the digital copies of the catalogued objects (game executables, music files, DVD rips...); a system to track borrowed items; tagging, and specific information for each collectible (secret codes for games, historic data for coins, etc.). A high point is the choice of objects to catalog, going from your typical movies and games to more exotic things, like coins, wine or board games, and with the option of creating custom collections (beer bottles, wife jewels, etc.). And no, no barcode scanning for the moment, but the developing team is toying with the idea.

Wrapping up, GCstar is a excellent piece of software, handicapped by its cross platform heritage (well, I'd say "handicapped by the choice of GTK"), but still very attractive and well designed, and quite capable to compete against the big names of this particular type of software. Being freeware and open source, I think the problems inherent in the program will be fixed while the program continues to evolve. It may not steal market share from the MediaMan users (of which a gorgeous new version is in development) or the worshipped Delicious Library in the Mac, but for those searching for a quality alternative without paying a cent, it looks like the best alternative...

... unless you don't run Windows, in that case Tellico looks quite nice, and it has some advanced features GCstar lacks, like barcode scanning.

41

General Software Discussion / Fedora 9 out in the wild

« on: May 15, 2008, 09:47 AM »

After the numerous problems that the early-adopters of the so called LTS release of Ubuntu experienced, perhaps it would be a good idea to check out what the other major distros are offering, and judging from its release notes, Fedora 9 looks quite promising.

Homepage

Apart from the usual enhancements that new versions of the different packages that conform the distro bring, the Fedora team decided to go wild, and adopt KDE 4 as the default KDE version in the KDE-centric variation. Another new feature that looks quite interesting if it *works* it's what they call a preupgrade tool, that in theory guarantees a seamless upgrade to the new version from Fedora 7 and upwards. We know how Ubuntu upgrades usually perform, so if the things works as advertised, they could have some advantage here. They also included experimental support for the ext4 filesystem, a welcome upgrade to the aging ext3 (now that the filesystems designed by Hans Reiser won't be updated in some time, for obvious reasons).

A more in-depth look at what's new is also available. Personally, I'm waiting for the next Mint version (which I hope does not carry the problems from its "parent" distro), but Fedora is looking more and more interesting each passing release.

42

Living Room / Pixel art by the bucketload

« on: May 14, 2008, 05:07 PM »

Smashing Magazine published a few days ago tons of the best examples of what can be achieved with pixels and some time. Lots of 8-bit spirit for some really cool illustrations.

It also includes one of the best videoclips in recent times, Move Your Feet by Junior Senior. And contrary to most posts these days, this is not spam
via Unhandled Perception

43

Mini-Reviews by Members / Wez's Evil Shell - A shell replacement

« on: April 30, 2008, 06:30 PM »

Basic Info

App Name	Wez's Evil Shell
App URL	http://evildesk.netevil.org/index.php
App Version Reviewed	0.9.0
Test System Specs	Athlon64 X2 5200, 2GB RAM, Windows XP SP2
Supported OSes	Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server
Support Methods	I'm afraid you're on your own
Upgrade Policy	Go to the download page, and get the latest version
Trial Version Available?	See below
Pricing Scheme	Donationware
Author Donation Link	Sure, there's a PayPal link in the main page
Reviewer Donation Link	Donate to Lashiec, the author (that's me! )
Relationship btwn. Reviewer and Product	No relationship at all, just me testing a piece of software that a fellow DC member recommended

Intro:

Wez's Evil Shell is, as the name (and the title of the thread ) suggests, a shell replacement for last generation NT-based Windows OS. But don't fear, it's not evil at all (apart from some mysterious crashes that I'll comment later), quite the contrary, as is barely noticeable on your computer, save for a few interface elements.

The story goes that Wez Furlong (self-titled as Dr. Evil), his sole author, and one of the developers of PHP, is a supporter of the idea of virtual desktops, but less-than-good experiences with 3rd party managers, and other shell replacements prompted him to write his own replacement, which gets ideas from various places.

The Evil Shell uses a dock ala OS X pre-Leopard, that does a double task as a launcher and taskbar, apart from having a section to house the system tray and the clock, everything packed in a compact interface. The rest of the shell is accessible via context menus, including the Start Menu, the filesystem and several Windows functions, like the shutdown menu. Plus, it has support for up to 32 workspaces, with various method to switch between apps and workspaces (hotkeys, the dock, a glorified Alt-Tab with thumbnails, and a Expose clone).

Who is this app designed for:

Well, it's clear, the app is intended for those who either wish to leave Windows' default shell or get a nice virtual desktop manager with some ideas of its own of how interacting with the desktop and applications should be. Alternatively, it's aimed at people who want to get some advantages of shells like liteStep, but desire something usable and capable out of the box.

My opinion on the product

The first thing that comes to mind using Evil Shell it's "minimalism". Only the dock is activated once you start Windows, and does not take much space, what's more, it can be set up to auto hide, making available the complete screen for your apps. There's no regular taskbar (with everything it holds), no icons on the desktop (nor you can add them), it's only you, your wallpaper, a dock and a mouse. Or, if you prefer, the keyboard.

The dock (here called 'slit') can be positioned everywhere along the desktop edges, using the shell menu over it. It can't be moved with the mouse, nor you can't set its position calling the menu outside it. Theoretically, icons can be added to the dock, but I haven't found how to do it. Arrows below program icons are used to point out which ones are being executed at the moment, exactly like Mac OS X does. As there is no taskbar, the flashing window feature is not available, but it's replaced by a simple animation that shows the program (the one which demands your attention) icon bouncing up and down.

The shell menu is easy to navigate, you can click everywhere on your empty desktop, bring it up, and surf its cascading menus. Or hold Win + S to show it when working with other apps.

This is not the best method, for obvious reasons, so the shell also has its own launcher, accessible via Win + R. Unfortunately, it's quite basic, only being useful for launching apps and navigating the file system ala FARR, and not too good at it. If you're a fast typist, I suggest you to stick with your favourite launcher, this alternative searches crawls through the Start menu directories, and to actually find something, you have to type slow, letter by letter. Also, its response time is weird, reacts fast when called, but takes some time to disappear once the program has been launched. Oh well, at least you have it there.

Unfortunately, with so many minimalism, things get lost. Let's start by the most obvious one: no Recycle Bin. No icon in the desktop, no entry in the shell menu, no icon in the dock, nothing. Either you delete files altogether, or you have to launch a file manager, and empty it from there.

No way to set up a mosaic with your open windows, so forget about side-by-side comparisons. You can always use GridMove for that, I guess. And forget about drag and drop between apps as well, at least by dropping files in an app entry in the taskbar.

Although the author says the shell supports systray bubbles, this is not the case, Windows Defender didn't warn me of any changes, though the icon in the systray said that those changes happened (a bubble informing me of Defender setting up itself to start up with the computer was shown, though), foobar2000 did not notify me of the new songs being played... Custom notifications (avast!, XMPlay, Miranda, etc.) still work fine.

The final pet peeve is that some Windows functions using the Win key are disabled. Personally, I think that it could be nice to show up the dock with this key, but such thing is not implemented. Win + D to show the desktop does not work as well. Although without no icons in the desktop, this is not a problem, I'd like to have the option. Of course, you can't use the desktop as your playground, so create a folder for that somewhere.

Let's move to some good news, workspace usage is fantastic. By editing the config file you can have as many workspaces you want (by default you have 4), and changing from one to another is fast. There are two ways to do this, holding Alt and pressing a Function key (I wonder how you change to the 25th workspace with only 12 Function keys in the keyboard), or cycling through workspaces using the Alt-Enter combo. This has to be activated first with the Alt-Tab combination, and once there, you can use the other hotkey. Moving a window to a different workspace is piece of cake, press Win + W, and select to which workspace you want to move the window, this menu is also added to the "icon" menu that appears when you click on the icon of any open application.

Alt-Tabbing is really nice, the dialog for it shows you some (low-quality, but enough) previews of the apps, along with the workspace you're into, and the titlebar of those apps, everything contained in a slick-looking window with some transparency.

You can also use Expose, pressing Win + F9, with self-updating previews of the apps, this is a very responsive function, and helps a lot with many apps. Of course, this is not Vista, so forget about previews in realtime.

(Kudos to the member who can spot what albums are visible in foobar, and which files are being downloaded in µTorrent)

There is trouble in paradise, though. The different methods to move between apps are not workspace aware, so you can only choose those apps contained in the current workspace, even when using the Expose view. You can use Alt-Tab and Alt-Enter to achieve it, but it's not nearly as convenient as it could be. Alt-Tab has some problems, being incapable of switching to certain windows, like Screenshot Captor's popup choice dialog, and doing wonky things with those that work, like graying out and showing the English version of Opera menus or XnView appearing without anything loaded even if an image is sitting there. And Expose sometimes borks, showing a very blurry preview of the window, if this is minimized or wasn't used for some time.

Documentation is sparse at best, both the one included with the software, and that being available at the site. The program appears to be very configurable, including plugin support, but there's nothing available apart from what comes with the package, and some sections are undocumented, including the Expose function (if I did not open that file, it would go unnoticed). It has some nice possibilities, like specifying a set of programs to run with reduced privileges (using "Run as"), and comes preconfigured with a few, most of them internet-facing apps. Not a problem if you use DropMyRights. You can change hotkeys there as well, something advisable, as the default ones could be a bit better, apart from supplying a set of them to quickly send a window to a certain workspace.

Finally, the program is more or less stable, uses less memory than the Windows shell (don't expect miracles, though) and starts faster. I had some weird crashes yesterday, when toying with the program, but nothing today. Perhaps because it was too late, and should be in bed (or playing TrackMania) instead of losing time trying software *AHEM*

Why I think you should use this product

Well, if you think the program fits you and you can live with the shortcomings and bugs outlined above, then you're a candidate to like the software. If it's not the case, but you have some free time, give it a shot, I'm sure you'll be impressed.

How does it compare to similar apps

I only tried a couple of shells in the past, namely bbLean and Aston Shell. Both are more pleasing to the eye and configurable than Evil Shell, but miss some unique features, and a slick but minimalist appearance.

Conclusions

Despite all my complains, Wez's Evil Shell is not as bad as it seems, actually, I'm quite pleased with it, and most of its problems can be overcome with external software, or a mentality change. Surely I won't keep it, but it's a nice paradigm shift (thanks LTE) from run-of-the-mill Windows.

Links to other reviews of this application

Nothing found...

44

Living Room / TrackMania Nations Forever! w00t!

« on: April 16, 2008, 09:37 AM »

Pardon my excitement, but this is a great game. So, the good guys at Nadeo did it again, releasing an update to the acclaimed TrackMania Nations that was also given away two years ago. Not only that, but those who purchased TrackMania United can download a BIG patch to update the game to the new installment.

What's so great about this game? Apart from being something impressive to be offered for free, the game is total mayhem and joy all the way. It's the simplest racing game you could ever think about, but that doesn't mean it's challenging. It's exactly the same as I used to do when I was a kid, playing with toy cars over the strangest tracks conceived with whatever I had at hand, but this time is for grown-ups, so you don't have to feel bad about it ;)

Get it here



Alternative download

Their servers are getting hammered, so you'll probably have better luck downloading it from external servers, either the one I link above, or from your favourite gaming site.
via ShackNews

45

General Software Discussion / Confirmed: UAC designed to annoy us!

« on: April 11, 2008, 03:09 PM »

Straight from Redmond comes the revelation that the much criticised UAC elevation prompt built into Vista was designed simply to annoy those users confronting it. Now you can direct all your hate towards Microsoft without any reservation

No, it's not a joke

Another take on this revelation, complete with some links analyzing why it would be a good idea.

46

Living Room / Now even your ISP is tracking you

« on: April 10, 2008, 11:06 AM »

Remember how people around the web wasn't happy about Google tracking practices for the sake of "improving" advertising? Well, it seems some U.S. ISPs are doing the same using deep packet inspection, not only used to disrupt P2P traffic it seems. For now, nothing is confirmed about what and how is being tracked, and although some ISPs list such practise in their service agreements, it's not that it appears bolded among the rest of the text. Oh, and BT is also going to test it in the UK.

Article in The Washington Post

Woohoo
via The Tech Report

47

Living Room / Water-powered mobile phone

« on: February 19, 2008, 05:42 PM »

This is pretty cool, a mobile phone that uses a hydrogen fuel cell in substitution of the usual lithium battery. You charge it in around 10 minutes, and it lasts twice more than normal batteries. And it's more environmentally friendly, of course. I hope the idea makes it to the mainstream soon.

48

General Software Discussion / Spatial navigation or how to surf the web faster

« on: February 15, 2008, 11:48 AM »

Days ago, Jeff Atwood posted an article complaining about the lack of visual indications to find where the focus is when interacting with text forms. Now he published another one, expanding the issue to page navigation without the mouse, which is at the moment unrealistic in stock browsers, except in Opera, which is praised by its implementation of spatial navigation.

But that's no the focus of the post, instead the real meat of the article is in the comments, where the readers discuss highly interesting methods they use to surf the Internet in unconventional ways. That includes Firefox addons, Opera tricks, and other hidden features of less known browsers, like Konqueror.

49

Living Room / Sun Microsystems buys innotek

« on: February 14, 2008, 01:03 PM »

Whoa, this one caught me off guard. Sun Microsystems made an agreement with innotek to buy all their assets. As you may know, innotek is the company that makes the other virtual machine, VirtualBox, known for being the only one solution that is really open, not only for its open source nature, but also for supporting a great variety of operating systems. This is very cool, as it means now they have a strong backing to properly compete against VMware and Parallels in its own terrain.

Seems the OSS world is in the midst of constant buyouts this year. First, Sun buys MySQL, then Nokia Trolltech, now Sun buys something again... I wonder who will be the next...

edit by jgpaiva: added image
via Infinite Loop

50

Living Room / Flash Game: Apollo Justice - Ace Attorney

« on: February 10, 2008, 12:49 PM »

Capcom is releasing the Nintendo DS game Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney in a couple of weeks, and to give gamers a glimpse of what they can expect in the game, they have released a Flash demo of it, containing part of the first case you encounter in the game. Those who played the previous games starring Phoenix Wright might be familiar with the whole premise of the series, but for those who don't, check up the Wikipedia to see what the whole game is all about. Despite the change of the main character, the game seems to be more or less the same, which is good, as the plot is the main point in these games.

Play it right now

It's a shame you can't grab a microphone and shout out: "OBJECTION!", but you can always put yourself to shame later when you buy the game and decide to play in a bus full of people

EDIT: One caveat though. It's EXTREMELY short. Perhaps I jumped too early to post about this, because it's really limited.