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1

General Software Discussion / FileBoss (soon on bits) vs. Directory Opus

« on: March 21, 2013, 02:14 PM »

No need to repeat the numerous missings in Directory Opus, all the more so since it's not well accepted in this forum to mention them, and when you do, you're invariably told that you are asking for sheer rubbish: Whenever Directory Opus doesn't have, it MUST be rubbish, it's that simple! Cf. the current DO thread for this, and I happily accept this. But let me speak about FileBoss:

They have a "home licence", for up to three computers, and a "commercial licence" where you pay for any computer - BUT the "home licence" is also valid for individuals, i.e. and if I understand well, if you have some corporation or work in some, the corp must pay per seat, but you're free to install your "home" licence on up to 3 comps, be them in your personal use (and not of your paid secretary) or that of your family members. (Compare this with DO where even your wife pays extra (all the more so since DO checks every single comp out every felt minute).)

Good news here, FileBoss will be 40 p.c. off very soon, on bits - remember bits takes 50 p.c., so don't blame FB for wanting 30 p.c. of the asking price, and not just 25 p.c. - unfortunately, 40 p.c. off seems to be a lot less "interesting" than 50 p.c. off for many prospects, but we're speaking of some 5 dollars here, so don't let pass a very interesting offer (and bear in mind, the DO-1-comp-30$ version is literally stripped to the bone).

On YouTube, see two videos (15, and 10 minutes, but they explain a lot), and I mention some points here that you can observe there.

Yes, FileBoss has more than 2 panes in one window / instance (you can see this in the 15-min. vid), and I won't repeat here why this is extremely handy for most pc users out there, any sorting out your inbox into multiple folders becomes so much easier then. This is a unique feature of file boss, within the big shots, neither DO, nor X2, nor XY, nor SC offering such a feature (and no, multiple tabs (which FB has, of course, as they all have) are NOT an alternative for multiple panes in any way). As for shortkey to access these multiple panes when you're a a keyboard guy, not a mouse guy (anymore, e.g. for carpal tunnel syndrome caused by far too many web sites in your previous life where amply mouse abuse had been inavoidable), let's see about this later.

The second video (about 10 min.) shows another specialty of FB, i.e. copying / moving files with common attributes (e.g. "tags" as name parts, and many more), also from many sources, to a common destination, BUT with replicating their respective source folders there. This seems incredibly useful to me, IF you need such a feature, i.e. then this function will save you an incredible amount of manual work. At this time, I don't grasp yet how I could make this unique feature useful for me (and then explain to others how it could become useful to them), but I have to admit I know this feature just from looking on, not from trialling, and I have got a certain feeling that for both for project management as for "software engineering" / versioning of multiple files in multiple folders and sub-folders, such a feature could become pure gold if used in a smart way (home-made CMS, anyone?!).

There are other such, sophisticated features in FB that are not immediately "accessible" for the casual prospect, so I'll write again after having thoroughly trialled. And FB isn't any newcomer, see the "mini review" for the previous version in the respective DC folder (which I discovered rather late I must say, so this hint might seem unneeded for some but may be helpful for others). The offer on bits is their brand-new version 3, just out a week or so.

2

General Software Discussion / Pdf Management

« on: February 06, 2013, 03:25 PM »

In this thread,

http://www.kinook.co...hp?p=20178#post20178

Kyle, the man behind kinook, says, in answer to a complaint by a user that Ultra Recall doesn't find text in pdf's that are not imported into UR, but just referenced by UR (which is the much smarter way imo, cf. my "Passion" thread here),

"Note that some PDF files aren't parseable for text content. One PDF text parser vendor indicated, "Some PDFs will simply never parse the way you would expect them to for various reasons. There is NO PDF to text converter in the world that can work with every PDF file ever created. Even Adobe itself cannot convert all PDFs to text properly." The PDF parser we use works with most files we have tested, but I believe that if the text in the PDF file is encrypted or stored in a non-standard format, most tools can't parse text from them."

This brings the idea to me of the respective reliability of those pim's or other pdf managers (e.g. of the "university kind") that index referenced pdf files since it's clear as day that people who store many such papers want this to be done automatically and without then having to wonder about the quality of the built-up index, i.e. if you store pdf's, thinking you'll be able to search them afterwards, you obviously rely upon this manager building up the index properly - if afterwards, it will not find but some terms, in an aleatoric way, whilst it won't find others, but not even indicating to you that many terms could be there that it has not been able to index (= and to search now), you might be in deep trouble:

In ancient times, we had to read books and journals in order to scan for possible "hits"; if you just store pdf papers now, relying on the search feature of your pdf manager to produce these same hits, and if this manager doesn't find but some of them, you'll end up discarding papers that could have been central to your subject or "overlook" important parts in them.

Hence my questions:

- What are such pdf managers (except for the obvious ones, i.e. pdf "editors" from Adobe and its competitors), and which index referenced pdf's? (I know about UR, then TheBrain, and not many more.)

- What about the "pdf quality" of those standard search progs, e.g. Copernic, X1, dtSearch, etc.?

- Have you got some experience with these reliability questions, with what sw?

- Is there sw that will check the global file size or such of an indexed pdf, and inform you of possible discrepancies between this overall size and the possible sparcity of terms it found in it, in order to be indexed? I.e. are there progs that at least "warn you" when doing the indexing? (I mean when they encounter probs or when they assume there are probs?)

- If not, do these progs at least warn you, on indexing, when they can't "read" the file to index? (I mean when a file is "secured" or such and cannot be indexed at least, vs. problematic parts "only", in the first alternative.)

- Of course, Kyle from kinook in his cited answer tries to reduce the problem to such pdf files that "cannot" be read, but then, in other respects, Kyle is not into expensive components for his prog, so his pdf parser is probably not the very best on the market either (a similar prob in UR: the quality / lacking speed of its html storage, cf. the "specialists", Surfulater and especially WebResearch), hence my idea that there will certainly be big differences in the quality / completeness (or absence of it) of this indexing pdf's.

For the reasons cited above - today, you often rely upon technology to "read" for you, so you should better know if the technology you rely upon is trustworthy or not - this - rather overlooked - subject seems to be of high importance. Any insights or sources?

At the end of the day, it could come down to Adobe Acrobat and / or dtSearch, i.e. the most expensive, specialised offerings, but perhaps we get valuable info on more practical offerings - some pim (and its in-built pdf parser) could be as good in indexing pdf's as could be Acrobat... all the more so since many pdf's are not created with Acrobat, so the Adobe solution might not necessarily be the best of them all, for "reading" / indexing, and it's certainly not a very practical one -

Pdf editing is rather advanced now, and there are many low or medium priced offerings. But reliable pdf M seems to be a thing needing further discussion, especially in the light of the possible harms of

a) absence of indexing, and
b) partial indexing only,
when in neither case the user is informed of the lacking index entries.


EDIT: I'd wish to add that many pdf's are compounds of various sources, i.e. different parts in it might have been created by very different means. So within the same pdf, different "cases" of processing needs might apply, and I hope a "good" parser will properly evaluate this and react accordingly, whilst a cheap parser probably will just skip the "difficult" parts, and worse, without telling you it just skipped them.

3

General Software Discussion / They're Still Standing or On Passion in Programming or The Soultron Lesson

« on: January 26, 2013, 05:19 PM »

I

I've said it in another thread here: helmut85 is clean. It had never been my intention to make trouble or bother people, it just had been a very unfortunate mishap that my two introductory posts here, more than a year ago, had been mistaken for "spam" when it was totally evident that they couldn't be considered as such, hence my anger that threatened to bias my judgement further on, hence my choice to write some 50 further posts as helmut85, in order to perfectly calm down things. Of course, I cannot totally deny my nature, so things tend to run high, under whichever pseudonym I could ever post (cf. hits for "On data storage and applications going cloud" from which this thread's a spin-off).

In fact, I'm a little bit ordealed in a way: I'm an amateur programmer who in the late Nineties, did a very fine pim, "Manuscript", flawed by the use of an inferior programming language, the one in "ToolBook" (= Paul Allen, from MS), with a 32 KB field limit and, especially, lack of stability by lack of proper memory M, so that any way of sophisticated programming didn't do anything to overcome the programming language's inherent instability (I have "proof" of this by numerous complaints of third parties in these times; the 32 KB limit seems to persist even today).

The name of "Manuscript" was daring, but then, the original Lotus "Manuscript" trademark hadn't been used for 5 years, so I didn't name my product in any illegal way (btw, the text processing sw of my choice then hadn't been Lotus Manuscript, but XyWrite, an incredibly sophisticated prog marketed by North American SW, that company that also marketed askSam in Europe at the time). From a conceptional pov, it was outstanding, i.e. it was a cascade of indentations, instead of a tree, since my programming capabilities always fell short of my my conceptional  mastery, and thus my work produced some very original solutions to common problems: I wasn't able to properly program the standard solution, so I had to look out for alternative ones, and often I found rather smart ones.

Anybody interested in a description of this outstanding and obscure sw, or in further ideas of mine, is invited to refer to the defunct askSam forum, searching under "fred", to the MyInfo forum ("fred"), to the outlinersoftware.com forum ("fredy", "fred" was taken), and to the Ultra Recall forum, under "schferk".

You bet that, when designing and programming "Manuscript", I delved deep into theory, hyperspace and all that, all the early research on information technology; later then, Yourdon, Warnier, etc., and, being a stranger to programming, I did "Manuscript" in object-oriented programming style notwithstanding, and applying at least some sw engineering standards to my work.

Then, I sold 4 or 5 "light" versions of this prog (= before (my introduction to) the net, by bookstores - some bookstores, at the time, sold sw beyond books and women's devotionalia, like greeting cards, candles...).

But you bet that with not even 300 bucks for more than 1 year of hard work, I left this field...

II

And then, I hoped that superior programmers would deliver some superior pim, perhaps not as good as mine had been, by conception, but something decent and technically superior.

Well, we're more than 15 years later now, and nothing really good has been done (except, perhaps, in Zoot).

These last days, I had the incredible chance to stumble upon some "Got Talent" and such posts on YT.

There's no doubt that YT is an International Treasure (pun intended to "National Treasure", of course), not because it gives free access to classic performers you otherwise had to pay for, but because it gives access to obscure performances that are world-class, and which otherwise, you'd never had a chance to even know of, let alone appreciate and fall in love with.

I'm not going here to invite you into obscure French Art Cinema, knowing that sw-affiliated guys (and the one Lady here) are much more rooted to the soil, which in itself hasn't to be something bad. But then, I need to explain something. It's the nature of passion.

Have a look at this YT vid, http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=g0IxVocQZiw

It's about Jack Vidgen, 14 years old winner of Australia's Got Talent 2011, a compilation of his 3 great songs in that competition, especially the first one, "I Have Nothing", brought to fame by Whitney Houston, written by David Foster and Linda Thompson and without no doubt one of the utmost works in the history of pop music. Now watch 14-year-old Jack delivering this song: From a shy beginning to incredible mastering, and you literally see him "thinking", sensing:

This is possible! And this, encore! And just a pitch higher: Everything is possible here!

It's an incredible crescendo into utmost mastering and one of those reasons YT must survive at all cost (and yes, I'm in love with the accent of this boy, as I had been in love, many years ago, with the accent of a young Irish girl singing) - "at all cost" meaning, I'm certainly prepared to pay 20 or more bucks a month for YT whenever this will become necessary to have continuing access to it.

Now look what our young Vidgen did then, after winning this contest and the 250,000 australian dollars that came with it. Well, he's an adolescent, don't blame him - blame his managers, his entourage. In this Australia's Got Talent performance, watch Brian McFadden (the judge on the left): He's falling in love, and rightly so, splendour is a thing so rare you HAVE to immediately react. And afterwards, it's "marketing", it's about making money, it's about maximizing profit - the spell's long gone.

It's of no interest to discuss if the passing of Whitney Houston, or the passing of Amy Winehouse, was that utmost loss in music these last months (and yes, Nickolas Ashford passed away, too), but there's no doubt "Whitney Houston songs" are among the treasures of today's music (and I cite the composers expressly since some dumb people out there really think these songs are written by the singers, and that actors write the scripts of films they starr in). Have another look at YT: Here comes Aliyah Kolf, 11 years old and the future definite Soul Queen:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=DlWHQXnF3KA

It's the same song - ok, the voice isn't there yet, but this voice leading and this timbre is world class (and I'm deeply in love with this accent, too: this "look" here, shortly after the beginning, I haven't heard anything as cute in my life, except in Vidgen's interpretation of the same song) - again, a screscendo into pure joy, into sheer heaven.

In quite another range of music, there's Emily Elbert, whose performances are very uneven, whose voice is sub-standard most of the time, and whose highs very easily can get on your nerves. But then, two of her songs she wrote herself, at her very young age, Dialed In & Opened Up,

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=i54XX1mg3KE

where nobody could claim it hadn't got the right groove in it, and then, her masterpiece so far, Michelangelo, which, had it been written by Joni Mitchell, everybody'd call world class, and since it's written by some young Emily Elbert, only some cognoscienti know and appreciate:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=vhmOFjcl-4w

Don't be mistaken, this is some of the very best of music that has been written in this century, and in the last one combined (I said it, her peaks are ugly, don't let you be mislead by such irrelevancies).

And it hasn't got anything to do with looks: Of course, I've fallen head over heals for this gal, some time ago yet, and I wouldn't hesitate to make a dozen of children to such a splendour if she ever was consenting, but then there's some Azerbaijanian jazz pianist called Isfar Sarabski who settled down to some more traditional jazz / "ethnic jazz" now, but his beginnings are filled with some false notes, and lots of passion which enabled him to do some of the most extraordinary piano solos I've ever heard in my lifetime (and from my youth, I cherish, and up to my deathbed, recitals from masters like Wilhelm Kempff, Emil Gilels or Sviatoslav Richter): Just search for "Isfar Sarabski Barnsdall" or "Isfar Sarabski Vibrato", especially the part 2 where pure joy easily overrides those wrong keys he presses here and then:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=7R41OHlLKKI

Or then, Isfar Sarabski at the Baku Jazz Festival 2010, from minute 56:00 and for the next seven and a half minutes, very sweet and to be classified Art, with a big A:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=E7srIho2CpU

Or in a more traditional range, what about (George Gershwin's) "Summertime" by the Ray Brown Trio, i.e. the late Gene Harris on piano?

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=YuW26BKVJ3U

All these do NOT do it for the money, they are in LOVE with what they are doing, and it shows. (And no, I'm not bothering you with Schubert and Schumann (Kreisleriana, anyone?) here - there dead and forgotten by the plebs.) But have a look at this guy: Danny McClain's interpretation of "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know" (which is from 2004, he should be an international superstar by now, and he isn't: see my point?):

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=1wxEV4M1rSU

(And no, it's not by Donny Hathaway, nor by Gary Moore, but by Al Kooper from Blood, Sweat & Tears.)

III

Now back to sw. We now see, by direct comparison, that most programmers are NOT driven by passion, and that they stop whenever they ain't paid enough anymore for their work (my case being extreme and thus not representative here).

And this brings me to a conclusion since the French have a saying, which is,

Ne demande à chacun ce qu'il peut donner.

Meaning, don't ask people what they ain't able to deliver.

The other way round: I didn't stop "Manuscript" because of these 4 or 5 sales-only, but because I would have to do it all again within a decent programming language, and not being a programmer, and not knowing of the existence of programming components at the time, I simply gave up, facing my missing programming capabilities and not knowing where to start anew, and on the other hand, I don't think anymore, today, that most programmers are perfect sw designers, and thus one-man shows in the sw field do have a big problem: Technical brilliance is sometimes there, but then, design quality is often lacking, and worse, they don't even listen to you when you explain to them how to do it instead - ok, as a naked assertion, this must sound incredibly pompous, but then, proof's plenty in those aforementioned fori, and when, in a rather sophisticated outliner like UR, there isn't even formatting within the tree, and for many, many years, stinginess and shortsightedness of the developers become apparent (= such trees are components, at different prices, you know... - same for the edit fields, etc., and most developers prefer them to be free...)

But this standstill of the industry (cf. UR and many more, e.g. Surfulater and his creator, Neville Franks, who anytime returns fall under his "acceptable" level, does something else) revolts me.

IV

So, I'm looking out for a top-notch programmer now. There's some money I can invest, and be sure that man that will take the other 50 % of proceeds, only 50 % of proceeds going to you, is one of the best sw architects out there when it comes to IM (cf. AS, MI, outlsw.com, UR fori) - and yes, the "Manuscript" source code is available for people with credits. Contact me by private message.

It's time we all get a decent outliner, 35 years after the intro of the pc. And that means development up to state of the art level, and not the Neville Franks / Ultra Recall / Mindjet / Controllers Rule way. Without love, in art and in programming, there's no excellence to be found.

And yes, the best female composer of all time is Carole King - or then, is it Laura Nyro? You got my point, hein? Money isn't everything, especially after you'll be dead. And yes, I consider Robert Carr's Framework, conceptionally-wise, the best sw of all time. "Better" sw's, then, built up on that masterpiece. Today, they serve us crap, mainly.

4

General Software Discussion / Two classes of membership here?

« on: November 13, 2012, 11:22 AM »

40hz, I kindly ask you if you could you comment on this site's policy / background or refer me to a page detailing these? As one of those posters who's done thousands of posts here, you might be best apt to inform me, and I'm sure many not-yet posters here ask themselves some of my questions, too, so clarification would certainly be welcomed by some people.

- Some people with many posts here often express very strong opinions and get away with it, they ain't banned and not even reprimanded - so it seems they have the "right" to do so

- I jumped in here, some days ago, not because of virtual kvm's, all the less so because of a given offering, but bec of another thread which treated censorship on bits, and MANY people here had been very astonished by this - this was TOO MUCH for me to not speak out, so I related my censorship history with bits, tongue-in-cheek, but the real reason was my having been TOTALLY CENSORED HERE: Some time ago, under another avatar, I had dared to make some posts where I had related bad experiences with software, and instead of triggering other posts on these subjects - perhaps with better experiences than mine -, I got deleted my posts within minutes, AND got my "account" deleted, i.e. no further posting possible, without getting the slightest explanation, which would have perfectly been possible since I had given my real mail account (which is certainly not the case with this current account that will probably be deleted within minutes from my clicking on the "Post" button.

- At the time, I had been totally surprised by that move, since I had thought to write about subjects of not too remote interest, and since I had not in any way been agressive, cynical or something in this order; on the other hand, this current "censorship at bits" thread here had made me laugh out loud, since people who do heavy censorship themselves shouldn't complain about them being censored elsewhere, right?

- You speak about "mouser" - who is "mouser", did he ever gave his name, or is anonymity important to him? I suppose he's the creator of this forum, right? Allow for another question: Why is he considered "God" or similar, here? Has he done exceptional things? Get me right, please, I'm not suggesting he didn't, I'm just in total absence of knowledge, so I'm asking.

- Then, is he funding this forum? It seems that for the financing of the servers, this forum relies upon public funding, by donations, so there might not be any (more) funding by "mouser", or is there? So here again, I haven't been successful in getting why "mouser" is considered "above it all", instead of this forum being sort of a democratic one.

- When I see the kind of speak of the "very frequent posters" here, addressing newcomers or "infrequent posters", I see sort of condescension and patronizing and which does NOT seem to be related to the respective content of the respective postings of either side, but simply to a "rule" or something that the former would have the "better rights" as the latter ones - of course, I don't discover this phenomenon in any thread and any exchange of posts, but it appears rather often and much more frequently than being coincidental or unintentionally.

- So what's going on here? What is the reason behind "unworthy" contributors here being treated like schoolboys were fifty years ago in civilised countries, especially in view of the fact that, as said, "regular" posters, the "masters" here, are allowed LOTS of "strong opinioning", so there does NOT seem to be a general rule of utmost complacency and attenuation, etc. that'd apply to everyone, far from that?

- What is the general idea behind this allowing to freely discuss things for a minority here when for everybody else, it's permanent self-censorship in order to avoid reprimands or even kick-out?

- This being a discussion forum with lots of participation, it seems to me that the questions I ask here are of some relevance, since for many a potential poster to such a forum, it's a question of adhering to such rules that need some explanation, or to shut up to begin with. There are many countries in this world where people ain't equal, and much worse, but for a forum where you'd instinctively presume equality among the participants, this blatant non-equality in the treatment different classes of participants are granting each other, mutually, seems astonishing and worthwile a little more info about the underlying reasons for all this than you can get by simple observation, hence my request to get some background to all this.

- Is there a chance go get this, or will the censor act first?