Messages

351

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR window shrinks over time

« on: May 08, 2011, 06:50 AM »

try this (just the exe, overwrite existing):
https://www.donation.../FindAndRunRobot.zip

see if it improves it at all -- it's a shot in the dark so i wouldn't count on it.

-mouser (May 07, 2011, 10:33 PM)

Mouser, it's clear now that you're way better than some at shooting in the dark! The new build no longer shrinks with the skin I am using.  Thank you!

352

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR window shrinks over time

« on: May 07, 2011, 07:12 PM »

Thanks for looking into it, mouser!

if you keep hiding and showing farr window, does it shrink over time as you do this?

-mouser (May 07, 2011, 04:04 PM)

It does not. I actually tried this before: kept hitting Pause and ESC for a good while until I got tired :-) I did not observe a change in the size of the window.

does it shrink 1 pixel each time you launch and exit farr? or does something else seem to trigger the shrinking?

It only seems to happen when FARR exits and is restarted. I've just tried it a number of times. There seems to be a regularity, and it's more than 1 pixel. Each time I restarted FARR I took a screenshot and noted the window dimensions reported by Snagit:

224 x 621
216 x 618
208 x 615
206 x 612
206 x 609
206 x 606

Looks like it was shrinking by 8 pixels horizontally and 3 pixels vertically each time, well on its way to the black hole and the lolcat-infested singularity. Then it seems to have hit a limit. Past the red line, farr's height continues to shrink by 3 pixels, but the width won't go below 206 pixels. It now looks like this:



So I resized it back to a larger window, and tried again:

585 x 732
577 x 729
569 x 726

Seems conclusive: every time farr is restarted, it loses 8 pixels in width and 3 pixels in height. If you find out what's causing it, do you think you could package it into a pill that would shrink my gut by 8 pixels when I am restarted every morning? I could wear my wedding suit pants again!

what skin are you using?

Mollis-BLUE.

And bingo! With skins disabled, the shrinking does not occur. (I should have tried that in the first place, would have saved you time.) It would appear that applying the skin causes an adjustment in width and height. It's going to be hard to test all skins, but trying corona-CORONA12, the results are slightly different:

577 x 731
569 x 731
561 x 731

Still 8 pixels loss in width, but height stays the same.

I can resize my farr window, but do think about the pill, won't you?

353

General Software Discussion / Re: ShadowProtect Desktop just did an awesome job for me

« on: May 06, 2011, 06:26 AM »

Is probably caused by the partition with Windows 7 installed on it being set as the active partition rather than the small 100 - 200MB one.

-tezza (May 06, 2011, 04:34 AM)

Thanks, Terry! This is probably it, I did mark the partition as active. I guess I'll fix it the next time :-)

One other good thing about ShadowProtect that I forgot to mention: when restoring an image it provides an option to restore the old drive's serial number. This helps a lot with applications that tie their licenses to hardware. I use a handful of those, and none of them required re-licensing after I installed the new drive. Windows doesn't seem to have noticed, either.

354

General Software Discussion / Re: ShadowProtect Desktop just did an awesome job for me

« on: May 04, 2011, 08:42 AM »

You are probably right. I registered ShadowProtect while I was still on XP. I realize 7 has the imaging feature built in, but I've no idea how good that is.

I am pretty much convinced that all the "disk doctor" type applications and disk defragmenters that come built in are about as good as third-party apps, especially that they're all using the same system APIs in the end. The difference may lie in the interface and configurability, but in the end they do the same job.

As for imaging, ShadowProtect people have developed their own technology, and the interface for restoring an image needs more functionality than just a "restore" button. I'd certainly like to hear from someone who has used the built-in imaging feature in 7.

355

Living Room / Re: Congratz to the US Military Forces!

« on: May 02, 2011, 04:39 PM »

So, what would you advocate? I ask this not with any sarcasm, I am truly curious as to what you think the alternative should be.

-edbro (May 02, 2011, 10:46 AM)

That really depends on the context. It is one thing to trace and take out a person with a significant history of violent terrorist attacks (but first we'd have to agree on the terms here), and quite another to start bombing the heck out of the Taliban, for example, even though they offered to deliver OBL to Bush back in September 2001. (And no, GWB did not bomb the Taliban because he was a feminist or pitied the loss of ancient Buddha statues!)

When one party launches a military assault on a country, inflicting heavy civilian casualties, what should be done? Should it go unanswered, which would invite more attacks?

-edbro (May 02, 2011, 10:46 AM)

Again, we'd have to agree - very carefully - on all the terms in your description. 9-11 was not a military assault, for one thing. Heavy casualties, yes, but many more died in Afghanistan, and even more in Iraq. Does the response not have to be (a) proportionate, and (b) directed at the actual guilty party?

Next, we should really ask ourselves why we are being attacked in the first place. No-one is born a suicide terrorist. Or a religious fundamentalist. These people have serious grievances. I disagree with their tactics, but we should at least understand what drives them to do what they do.

(Curiously, not long after 9-11 GWB did exactly what OBL wanted done: removed the US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. Troops on Saudi land was one of Osama's major grudges against the US. So Osama got his wish, though of course Bush's move wasn't billed like that.)

I should also remind you that a lot of the collateral damage is caused by cowards who take refuge in population centers and who use women and children as human shields.

-edbro (May 02, 2011, 10:46 AM)

One, I wonder how much of that is propaganda. We only know our side of the story, or what the military commanders want us to know. Remember Jessica Lynch? That was all a fabrication. (Not a "human shield" scenario, but a similarly convenient good guys - bad guys story, all made up.)

Two, if you're about to shoot a bad guy, but he's grabbed your {mother|father|sister|son} and is holding a knife to their throat, will you still shoot? Most people probably won't. The police won't shoot either in such a case. But when it's a war in a distant country, suddenly it becomes OK. Collateral damage is the same, except the dead people live in faraway countries and are not our families, so we paper it over.

People say "Well, it's a war, these things happen", but to me that means we shouldn't be doing that in the first place. We all say war is wrong, but somehow that never stops us. And that's without even approaching the issue of false pretenses for wars, the question of who profits or the question of the end result. Did we get what we wanted in Iraq? Do the Iraqi people think it was worth the price they paid?

I should really shut up now :-) I love how this thread has remained polite and civil despite disagreements, which would never have happened on most sites where politics is the subject, but I don't think we should push it, and I'd hate to be responsible in a smallest part for any hard feelings here. I'll read on, but won't post here after this. Especially as this gentleman says it much more eloquently than I ever could:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=XUBYI97cUgU

356

Living Room / Re: Congratz to the US Military Forces!

« on: May 02, 2011, 04:09 PM »

But the point of the matter is that it is avoidable, for the fact that there are operations where it doesn't happen.

-wraith808 (May 02, 2011, 10:47 AM)

I suppose "collateral damage" is often avoidable in what used to be called "surgical strike" operations (haven't heard of those in a while! Are they all out of fashion now?) when a small, specialized team is sent to perform a small, focused task, like apprehending or killing OBL.

It is never avoidable when you launch a full-scale war like in Iraq or Afghanistan, or even limited air strikes such as in Libya.

357

Living Room / Re: Congratz to the US Military Forces!

« on: May 02, 2011, 10:34 AM »

(there is IMHO a big difference between collateral damage and deliberately targeting civilians, though)

-f0dder (May 02, 2011, 07:34 AM)

IMHO, no difference whatsoever. When you start bombing a country, you know there will be civilian casualties and you know this is not avoidable. Saying they are not deliberate is just that - saying it. You made it deliberate when you set out to bomb a city or a village full of civilians.

358

Living Room / Re: Congratz to the US Military Forces!

« on: May 02, 2011, 04:56 AM »

Well Done Lads...Well Done 

-Stephen66515 (May 01, 2011, 10:48 PM)

Pics or it didn't happen. Some say the guy has apparently been dead for years. Pretty please, let's leave all politics off DC, because it's only downhill from there!

359

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10

« on: May 01, 2011, 04:51 PM »

and what is this with placing C:\Program Files\GPSoftware\Directory Opus\dopusrt.exe to always start with Windows? I can't even delay it!

-Curt (May 01, 2011, 04:16 PM)

You can disable it easily (and yes, it was one of the first things I did after installing). Settings -> Preferences -> expand "Launching Opus" -> From the Desktop -> make sure "Disable" is checked. This will stop the helper app from starting.

In general, DOpus is immensely configurable, which is a good thing too, because many of the default behaviors and settings are quite peculiar to say the least, especially if you're used to another file manager. Some I think are downright silly, like using red and green to mark active and inactive panes. I never knew which was which: red stands out more and means "important" or "error", but it was the inactive page! Why not use colors defined in the system for that very purpose?

But you can tame all of this - that is, if you think you'll be using DOpus at all. I found that I could not leave TC no matter how much time I spent reading all the tutorials and configuring DOpus to my liking.

360

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10

« on: May 01, 2011, 12:23 PM »

* Finally adds the possibility of showing the ".." item in file lists (like TC etc. does it). This makes keyboard navigation quite a bit faster for me.

-Dirhael link=topic=26594.msg247466#msg247466

The author finally relented on this? Yay, now I might actually be able to use it somewhat comfortably :-)

361

Find And Run Robot / FARR window shrinks over time

« on: May 01, 2011, 12:17 PM »

A purely cosmetic issue, but it's there. Here's an initial screenshot I took on April 18th,  two weeks ago:



I had noticed that FARR window had the tendency to shrink, and I was wondering how fast or how slow it was happening. For two weeks I never moved or resized FARR manually. It was only ever opened by pressing the activation hotkey, started and stopped with the system. Today the window looks like this:



And here is FARR's display configuration:



If you exit and restart FARR, the difference is imperceptible, but it adds up over time, so that every two weeks or so it must be manually resized again. Note that I keep "auto shrink"disabled, because it reduces the flicker, and I like to see as may items as I can.

(Win 7, 32-bit. No screen resolution changes, of course.)

362

General Software Discussion / Re: Unlocker punishes you for not installing toolbar.

« on: April 22, 2011, 05:52 AM »

yeah i have to say, i think having to wait 30 seconds doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing.  it's a bit similar to the DC approach to license keys.

-mouser (January 19, 2011, 09:17 PM)

Mouser, I don't think it is similar at all. 30 seconds is not a big deal. These days even Firefox makes you wait before you can click the "Install" button for an add-on (though more like 5 seconds, not 30, and not for a commercial reason), and we're all used to shareware nag screens - but the short wait s not the problem. Like Deozaan, I'd quit the installation, because the software author clearly thinks I'm an idiot!

I unchecked the box, meaning I don't want the toolbar. So the 30 second wait is either (a) indeed designed as a punishment of sorts, or (b) designed to give me time to change my mind. As if the author was thinking: Maybe the user is really dumb, maybe in 30 seconds he or she will decide they want the toolbar after all.

Well, sorry. A no is a no.

You know how difficult it is to say no to an insurance guy who really needs to make his  monthly quota? I won't accept that experience with software :-)

363

General Software Discussion / ShadowProtect Desktop just did an awesome job for me

« on: April 15, 2011, 06:41 AM »

My WD Raptor system drive died the other day after about 4 years of great performance. Lesson One: when the SMART warning kicks in, it is already too late! One moment I run the WD diagnostic tool and SMART checks out fine, a mere two hours later Windows tells me the drive has failed and needs to be replaced asap, data throughput speed drops to something like a 1.44" floppy, and you know it's going to die on you any minute.  Good thing I saw heard it coming hours before SMART did and made a fresh image just in time. Lesson Two: listen to your hard drive! :-)

Lesson Three: system image is a wonderful thing.

It took me about an hour to go and buy a new drive and only a couple of minutes remove the bad drive and install the new one (yay for Antec cases, check the side view).

But I was apprehensive about restoring the system image. Due to my specific setup of external drives, I once had a less-than-stellar experience restoring an XP system using ShadowProtect 3.5, described here. All ended well, but it took some hair pulling and manual editing of MBR config. If anything, I expected 7 to be harder, since there are now two partitions to restore: the main bootable system partition, and the hidden one 7 setup creates.

Well, it would seem that when ShadowProtect went from 3.5 to version 4, those wrinkles I experienced were smoothed out. There is an option to restore the original disk layout exactly as stored in the image file, and it does precisely that. Restoring both partitions took under 20 minutes, and after one reboot I was back in business, with an image only a day old.  Smooth sailing all the way!

The whole thing took maybe 90 minutes of my day, most of which was to go and buy a new drive. If I had a spare one on hand, the whole procedure would have taken under 30 minutes.

One weird thing though... you know when 7 boots, it displays the colored dancing balls and petal-like things? Well, after restoring the 7 image, the boot-up animation has reverted to the sickly green-ish progress bar that XP had. How come?

364

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Ethervane Radio 0.2.4

« on: April 14, 2011, 10:10 AM »

P.S. in what language is this written?

-DeVamp (April 14, 2011, 06:42 AM)

Thanks, DeVamp It's written in Delphi XE, which I think is the best Delphi edition ever.

365

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: List & print all hotkeys used by programs

« on: March 26, 2011, 10:49 AM »

If you mean system-wide hotkeys (key combinations that work regardless of what application is currently active), that's pretty much what my ActiveHotkeys does.

Caveat: Windows make it impossible to find out what program registered a particular hotkey. There just isn't a way to find this out. So ActiveHotkeys will tell you what system-wide hotkeys are registered, but not what apps they belong to.

(Oh, there's no way to print the list, sorry!)

However, if you want to know all the key combinations available within a particular application (e.g. Ctrl+N = New document in Word), than no, I don't think this can be done. There is no way to poll an application for all the key combinations it uses to trigger its functions.

366

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Ethervane Radio 0.2.4

« on: February 28, 2011, 06:43 PM »

...and I also want to say, THE MUG IS AWESOME! Thank you, Mouser, and thank you, Nudone! 

367

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Ethervane Radio 0.2.4

« on: February 28, 2011, 05:31 PM »

Whew... it's taken some time, but I've had to clear the path for mo' better features.  Next up, more station data, proxy configuration (not yet, sorry!) and finally the actual station browser, so you can browse through what's available instead of searching.

I'm going for a short trip this week, so if I don't reply here within a few days, don't worry.

It is always possible to mess something up in a new release. Keep your current version, just in case, so you can revert to it if the new version fails.

368

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Ethervane Radio

« on: February 28, 2011, 05:19 PM »

New version: 0.2.4, released 2011-02-28

1. Significantly improved Search dialog box:

- The dialog box now has its own taskbar button (can switch to it via Alt+Tab)

- Search is significantly faster, especially when a large number of matches is returned. (Search is now completed in about 30% of the time it took previously)

- Two search modes: "Basic" and "Advanced". To switch press F4 or use the "Options" button.

a) BASIC mode works as before, the program finds the text exactly as it is entered. However, wildcards (? and *) can now be used in the middle of the string, so that "United States" and "Uni*tes" will return pretty much the same results.

b) ADVANCED mode works a little like Google search.
- Enter terms separated by spaces, e.g.

tango argentina

- Ethervane Radio will find all stations which contain BOTH terms. This is the same as typing:

tango AND argentina

- Phrases must be enclosed in double quotes:

jazz AND "united states"

- AND is the default conjunction (operator), but you can also use OR and NOT, as well as parentheses:

( tango OR salsa ) AND ( argentina OR brazil )
tango AND NOT argentina

- Wildcards can be used anywhere in the search terms. For example, if you are not sure whether to spell "Brasil" or "Brazil", enter:

bra?il

Or, if you don't want to spell a long name, you can say

tango and arg*

- All terms entered as described above will be found in ALL station fields (name, genre, country, region, network, website, tagline, etc.). However, you can also specify that a term must occur in a specific field. To do that, use the full or abbreviated name of a field, followed by colon, followed by the text you are looking for. To find stations from France:

country:France
cou:France
c:France

or even (using a wildcard)

c:Fr*

Note: "city" and "country" start with the same letter. If you only use  "c:", country is assumed.
- Phrases must still be quoted:

city:"New York"

You can combine any of the above in whatever ways you wish. Note that because the default operator is AND, the following will return no results:

genre:jazz genre:chillout

This, however, will work as expected:

genre:jazz OR genre:chillout

To know the available fields and their names, click the "Field" button in the search window. Clicking one of the listed fields will enter it into the search box and let you continue typing.
Note: to search for station websites you can use both "w:" (website) or "u:" (url).

- Synonym matching has been introduced. It cannot be configured yet, and for now only 1 synonym is defined: you can search for "usa" instead of always having to type "United States". (ADVANCED mode only.)

- Using the Options button in the search window you can switch between "Instant search" (search as you type) and "Wait for Enter". Instant search is only available in the BASIC mode.

- A new option under the Options button in the search window is "Automatic wildcards". It applies only to the ADVANCED mode. When this option is turned OFF, ER will find the text exactly as typed, and you may use wildcards anywhere. For example, to search for stations whose genre is "jazz", you can type

g:jazz

However, this will not find stations where genre is "smooth jazz" (or "jazz, smooth"). You can manually add wildcards to find those:

g:*jazz*

If "Automatic wildcards" is turned ON, the program will always automatically wrap your search terms in wildcards, so that searching for "jazz" is the same as searching for "*jazz*". This applies to ADVANCED mode only. (In BASIC mode terms are always wrapped in wildcards).

- All settings described above will be remembered when you close and restart the program.

- Current mode is shown on the Options button. Also, in ADVANCED mode, the search box background is light yellow, so you can easily recognize the current mode.

2. Log window improved (use the Options button, and right-click the message list for more options)

3. Track titles ("now playing" data) are now displayed, if available from the server you are listening to. Still more station and track information will be shown in the next release.

4. Lots of improvements under the hood. (All configuration settings will be reset, sorry about that! It may happen any time as long as the app is in alpha stage, and until there is a proper configuration dialog box.)

5. Added a timer in the status bar to show playback time.

6. From now on, you can also download Ethervane Radio from the following links:
http://www.tranglos....s/EthervaneRadio.zip
http://www.ethervane...s/EthervaneRadio.zip

369

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Ethervane Radio

« on: February 22, 2011, 07:48 AM »

Hi DeVamp,

The truth is the program doesn't do anything at all (yet) about the proxy. So one part of the program (the BASS library, which downloads and decodes audio streams) uses IE settings by default, while another part (my own code that downloads playlists) does not use proxies at all.

This is one of the things I need to straighten our pretty urgently. I hope to do a new release before the end of the month.

370

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: New program: ActiveHotkeys (freeware)

« on: January 31, 2011, 02:45 PM »

Unfortunately, because of limitations in the Win32 API, you can't.

-skwire (January 31, 2011, 02:18 PM)

What skwire said. Windows has that information, but there is no API function to retrieve it. Your only bet is to stop individual apps and see which hotkeys disappear together with the apps.

Theoretically, a program might:
a) check registered hotkeys
b) kill a process
c) check hotkeys again
d) the difference in hotkeys will show those that the killed app used.
e) repeat from the top.

But it's such an ugly solution (force-killing processes) that I don't think anyone'd want to implement it And of course under Vista and highter there will be processes which the user just cannot kill.

Maybe better: remove/disable as much as you can in the various Autostart sections (e.g. using Autoruns), the check the hotkeys, start the suspect apps manually and check again.

371

General Software Discussion / Re: My new favorite ftp client: Total Commander (yes, really)

« on: January 31, 2011, 08:05 AM »

tranglos, check if this helps:
Total Commander - FTP upload mistery

For some users, it helped to increase the upload block size. You may try this too: Please add the following string to the file wcx_ftp.ini, section [General]:
UploadBlockSize=32768

Thanks, Mark, will try!

372

General Software Discussion / Re: My new favorite ftp client: Total Commander (yes, really)

« on: January 31, 2011, 07:31 AM »

As much as I love TC and use it for everything, including FTP most of the time, I do also use FileZilla for any larger files. This is because I've noticed that TC always uses exactly half of the available bandwidth.

My outgoing connection isn't very fast, about 70 kbps max, and FileZilla will use all of it, while TC tops at 35 kbps every time. Unless I'm missing something that's going to be obvious in hindsight, there doesn't seem to be a throttle setting in the configuration,  yet some kind of throttling appears to be in effect.

However, for sheer convenience, nothing beats an ftp interface that's integrated with your default file manager. I only use FileZilla to upload really large files.

373

General Software Discussion / Re: How To Type Symbols and more

« on: January 25, 2011, 12:30 PM »

There's also Type Accents:



Not free, but very slick. Press a combination of modifier keys and the base (unaccented) letter you want. For instance, to type ë, ê, æ or € you may press Ctrl+Win+e. The window above will display, just choose the accented version you need.

Lots of languages and symbols are supported (in the higher editions; the basic edition supports only 1 language, I think).

The concept is really nice; I'd love to see a freeware clone.

374

General Software Discussion / Re: Checking for available domain name = giving it away?

« on: January 22, 2011, 07:50 PM »

I had a similar experience a few years back. My wife was setting up her one-person business, required for tax reasons here in Poland. She named the business using a Spanish word ("Adelante"), which sounds pleasantly exotic to Polish ears, and unlikely to have existed as a .pl domain. I checked with one online service (a large hosting provider) and it was available. Now comes the part where I was head-slappingly stupid - I waited two weeks for the paperwork to go through on the new company. Well, two weeks later the domain adelante.pl was gone. Today it's for sale.

To say I was irked is an understatement, especially that I used a supposedly reputable hosting provider to check availability. I have two other .pl domains registered with them, they're not freebies. Either they themselves are in the business of stealing potential domain names, or they outsource the availability checking mechanism to someone who does. It's pretty hopeless these days.

375

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Ethervane Radio

« on: January 17, 2011, 07:06 PM »

Just wanted to give my heartfelt thanks for a fabulous little piece of software.

-iebbed (January 16, 2011, 06:07 PM)

This is really fantastic to hear. Thank you so much, and welcome to DC!