Thanks for putting up with my whiny little rant, folks!  I know it is probably annoying, but I feel better!
Jim

-J-Mac (November 24, 2007, 12:29 PM)

Not annoying. I welcome your rant :) I have often refrained from posting about similar annoyances - some very severe, others less so - and only gave in to the temptation when SFFS disappointed me greatly, earlier in this thread. I don't know what level of criticism mouser wants to see here, and I always feel uneasy about dressing down a piece of software whose author just offered DC a generous discount, posts here and is an awfully cool guy (or gal). But then, a warning to potential users is just as useful as a recommendation.

I tried SFFS twice, because after I uninstalled it the first time I was convinced it would never get such high recommendations here if it were as bad as I thought it was, but there it is.

I wonder if we could have a section specifically for complaining :) Especially in the case of software that is very good overall, but can have one or two bugs or bad design decisions that just make you tear at your hair - as in, Aargh, how can such an excellent application do something so stupid! I've recently had to ditch a number of apps I would have loved to buy and use due to various little annoyances that made those apps unusable.

I submit that an "Annoyances" section might be useful, since it could become a repository of things to watch out for and avoid when you code. I could list a dozen examples right away, but there's that negativity thing, so I'll shut up now :)

hi marek,
this is how i will do, for the 1st q:

-lanux128 (November 22, 2007, 06:54 PM)

Thanks!

you can use SetTimer to monitor if there are any selected text and run a routine from there but normally AHK requires a keyboard or mouse intervention to trigger an action. and also have a look at this script as an example:

-lanux128 (November 22, 2007, 06:54 PM)

Oh, I do want to trigger this manually. I may not have explained it fully. Standard hotstring operation is that you type "btw", and ahk gives you "By the way", as it is monitoring your keypresses. I would like to be able to select the text "btw", press a hotkey, and get "By the way". So the difference is I would not be typing b-t-w myself, since it's already in the document.

Since the operation could go via clipboard (as a last resort, but I could live with that), and I can assign clipboard contents to a variable, the only thing I'm missing is the ability to tell Ahk, in a script, to "expand this variable as if it were a hotstring I've just typed".

marek

While they call it a "robot", Drobo is really just a fancy NAS box.  Four bays, built-in processing & intelligence, an array of connection options.  Yawn.  So what?

-Ralf Maximus (November 21, 2007, 06:36 PM)

Drobo is absolutely gorgeous and well-worth a sigh. For me, sighs is where it ends, since they don't seem to be selling it outside of the US, Canada and UK. Might I consider moving to one of those fine places just for Dear Drobo?

Oh well, for now I've picked this NAS instead, by D-Link:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2091770,00.asp

And I have a story already. The thing was supposed to arrive today. A package arrives, a little big for what amounts to a two-drive enclosure. I pay the delivery gentleman, bid him goodbye, open the package and looksie here, what did the kind gentleman deliver? Seven (7) copies of Windows XP Home, eight (8) AMD Athlon CPUs and ten (10) Data Traveler thumb drives, 1 GB each.

Okay. For a moment I thought this was a Bioshock type situation, where you collect random goodies, like empty syringes and pieces of rubber hose, then invent something nifty out of them? Only those ten thumbdrives were bugging me, because they didn't quite add up to the 1.5 TB of storage I was expecting. Though maybe if I wired those to the cache dies in the Athlons, and did something clever to the XP CDs...

I should have ordered Drobo.