Messages

576

General Software Discussion / Re: Which app stays open on your desktop all day?

« on: January 26, 2006, 10:01 PM »

List o' always apps:

Thunderbird (just switched from Becky2)
Firefox ( 5 tabs @ startup w/ DC in tab#3) 
Total Commander 
Virtual Daemon for virtual CDROM (load ISO file w/o burning them)
RocketTime for up to the ms NIST time accuracy.
FreeLaunchBar  (vertical, left side)

Frequent run apps:
PuTTY for SSH
ATI TV Player
Groupwise
EditPad Lite
Irfanview
Ultra ISO for create ISO files from CDROM
Autoruns from SysInternals.com for tweaking startup apps
Process Explorer from SysInternals.com for finding and killing BAD apps


Background stuff that you have to have...
Blackberry desktop for syncing
VNC for remote access
Kerio Personal Firewall
Norton Ghost
AVG Antivirus

577

General Software Discussion / Re: Folder Size Explorer Extension

« on: January 26, 2006, 06:07 PM »

@masu

Who's the girl?  nice pic.

578

Living Room / Re: What's your "Autism Quotient"?

« on: January 26, 2006, 06:05 PM »

13... nice and normal

579

Living Room / Re: Looking for a few good puns

« on: January 23, 2006, 02:47 PM »

Viking Warlord Sven the Black (STB) was sitting with his wife Helga, on the night before the big raid.   After a knock on the door, his friend Rudolf the Red (RTR) walks in.  "Let's say we call over some friends, and get a party together," suggests RTR.

"Are you nuts?" asks STB, "We've got a big raid tomorrow, early to bed and lots of sleep for all the crew tonight."

"The raid will be canceled on account of the heavy rains, let's drink," replies RTR.

"Dude, I just checked the weather, tomorrow will be clear and sunny, we're going on a raid!" argued STB.
"Nope, big downpour, I'm sure of it," retored RTR.
STB started in again "But.."

"Now, dear," interrupted Helga, "RTR is right, let's just call some friends and..."

"Why are you siding with him over me?" asked an indignant Sven.

"Well, Rudolf the Red know rain, dear."


Sorry for all your pain.... 

580

Living Room / Re: Rubber Johnny

« on: January 19, 2006, 10:37 PM »

   I must be getting old, or I've worn out my weirdness enjoyment sensors...

Thanks for sharing (and for the warning... I was prepared) .... not my cup of tea tho.

581

General Software Discussion / Re: Holding code ransom?

« on: January 19, 2006, 10:29 PM »

IMO, the dc's system is the one that gives more trust to the donator (that, in the end, is the one that pays ), possibly it's the best system.
(or maybe a sort of hybrid system? don't know..)

-jgpaiva (January 19, 2006, 04:35 AM)

Good point!    DC is good.

582

Living Room / Re: caffeine free week - who wants to join me?

« on: January 19, 2006, 10:24 PM »

@mouser  We expect daily reports on your kick the habit campaign

583

Living Room / Re: Why Macs Suck

« on: January 18, 2006, 11:59 PM »

[snip] if a company decides to go with what to me is an obviously inefficient design (one button mouse) for the benefit of aethetics and easier tech support over the phone, then i know it's not a set of standards i want to be part of.

-mouser (January 18, 2006, 11:02 PM)

Which is the point that I failed to make.  Different users, different skill levels. 

The stereotypical mac user calls tech support to ask where the "any" key is on the keyboard & can't handle the whole right click thing.

Linux users create a new term cap to invent an "any" key.

Windoze users just click on the "any" button.

There is no single interface that is the "best" for everyone and/or the easiest to learn.  Most corp. users live in MS Office all day;  I rarely see it.    It just doesn't make sense that everyone should to things the same way.  Especially when it only has 1 freaking mouse button...

Now if I was in charge, we'd be enforcing standards.   

584

Living Room / Re: Why Macs Suck

« on: January 18, 2006, 10:57 PM »

From the article mouse linked:

Apple wants all developers to follow their interface guidelines. [..] If every application can be expected to work the same way, the learning curve for the user is minimized. Apple has gone through great pains and great expense to study human-computer interaction.

The author goes on to explain all features should be accessable from a menu, which is his main point.  The other thing that struck me, was they want all developers to follow their interface guidelines. 

In other words, we're [Apple] the experts on human/computer interfaces, so you need to do things our way.

Personally, I think the computer industry is still too young and growing to have some barefoot hippie tell us how things ought to be done.  Interfaces change all of the time as developers learn more about what people want and how to deliver it.

Mac users (according to the support theory above) can't deal with a second button on their mouse.  Windoze users can have  3 more with a clickable scroll wheel and use them all.

As long as we don't end up with MS Bob in the end, I think it'll be OK.

@mouser: agreed, "every OS sucks."  Of course you'll notice they didn't mention OS/2 in that song.  And yes, it was alive and very well when the song was written and recorded.

585

Living Room / Re: caffeine free week - who wants to join me?

« on: January 18, 2006, 10:35 PM »

I went without caffeine for 6 months once...  It didn't make me feel better.

I'm back to a regular routine of Dr. Pepper starting ~ 9 AM.  I try not to have anything w/ caffeine after 5 PM.

If it works out for you guys, you might convince me to try again... or not 

586

Living Room / Re: Why Macs Suck

« on: January 18, 2006, 04:45 PM »

The thing I really hate about Apple's philosphy is that it doesn't let you use your system the way you want to. Until fairly recently you had to purchase specialised tools just to open the box. Generally hardware addons have always been very restricted - not by drivers but by the way the damn things have to be fitted!

-Carol Haynes (January 18, 2006, 03:42 PM)

Note: I am not a mac lover!  Their new BSD OS looks like fun, but I'm no jobs junkie.
Macs are noted for their higher level of stability over windoze systems.  I know of some horror stories from mac users who have installed a really bad program and totally destabilized their systems, but overall, they are much more stable than windoze.  The closed architecture is the reason.

In theory, it's a great idea because you can control the way the hardware interacts with the OS, etc.  In practice, it make for very expensive 'puters.  It also limits outside innovation, which is never good.

Windoze on the other hand, is required to run on any piece of crap that claims to be "compatible."  That's about 20% of the reason it crashes... the other 80% is Bill G himself.

For more viewing pleasure, google "three dead trolls" and watch their "Every OS Sucks" music video.  The song lead-in is a little long, but it's worth the wait.  The "Internet Helpdesk" isn't bad either.

"16 kilobytes of RAM; it was good enough to send men to the moon, it's good enough for you and me."

587

Post New Requests Here / Re: BIG Idea: GUD

« on: January 17, 2006, 08:38 PM »

fodder,

Do you know if any of these applets support sync'ing to blackberry or palm os? 

What's that?  Google it myself?   OK... going to google...

588

General Software Discussion / O/T: Google Ads Re: SPAMPAL replacement

« on: January 17, 2006, 08:35 PM »

OK, I'll comment on this.

1) It doesn't bug me to see a google ad in the thread... too much.
2) It doesn't really apply to my query... I don't use outlook.
3) If DC can make a few bucks this way, let it ride.

$0.02

589

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: GUD (BIG idea)

« on: January 16, 2006, 10:05 PM »

When I say big, I mean as in big project, big pain, etc...  It'd be really cool tho. 

Anyway, I was reading a thread about yet another desktop reminder program when it hit me... shouldn't this be part of the OS?  No, it should be an add on, but my calendar program can be a reminder, so can Act and 1/2 of my other apps.  Lots of overlap, nothing is quite right... you know how it works.

So the big idea is this:  The Grand Unified Desktop.  Basically it would just be the coordination point for many applets to do the things we all want.   

Then I Google'd GUD and found a couple.  Zope aims to do this via the web.  RedHat tried this with a KDE/Gnome combo, but I don't think it went very well. 

To do this on windows, you'd probably need to replace explorer.exe and start with something like blackbox.  There are lots of interesting GUI's to examine to see what works best.  AmigaDOS had REXX ports built into just about every app.  I think XML could server a similar purpose here.

At any rate, it's be a lot to take on... anyone intersted in starting a concept list... or is this just too... (insert your negative adjective here)?

590

General Software Discussion / Re: SPAMPAL replacement

« on: January 16, 2006, 09:19 PM »

Update:

So I've been running Spambayes for a week or so. It seem OK, except that there is a warning on the status page that keeps telling my Spambayes works better with a near 50/50 mix of spam and ham (non-spam).  If only half of my mail was spam, I might forget the whole thing.  I need a spam filter because about 95% of my mail is spam.  (register a domain or two and you can enjoy the same.)

Anyway, I'm going to switch to Thunderbird.  It has built in spam filters and it's pretty darn fast.  It also meets some of my email requirements... multiple email addresses (7) with an identity and server settings for each.  No I'm not a pervert, I have a couple of business relationships, personal email, etc. 

I'll try to let everyone know how it all turns out.

591

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Fewer system tray icons?

« on: January 16, 2006, 09:05 PM »

Hey m_s,

Nice job finding and describing this.  I think I'll give it a go... 

592

Living Room / Re: 84.40.3.164 = WOW!

« on: January 14, 2006, 08:59 PM »

Really great video at http://84.40.3.164/ - check it out!

-brotherS (January 14, 2006, 03:14 AM)

OK, geek that I am, I was really into the image quality of that.  What type of compression was used and how much bandwidth is required to see it that well? 

As far as selling Honda's, I thought it was stupid. 

593

Mouser's Zone / Bird update

« on: January 12, 2006, 10:41 AM »

@mouser. 

Is it time to take the hat off of the DC bird?

Probably still have your Christmas light up ... 

594

General Software Discussion / Re: Software license upgrade experiences: pricing, support & the stuff that matt

« on: January 11, 2006, 10:18 PM »

the way back machine:
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

-mouser (January 11, 2006, 08:42 PM)

Don't bother, diskeeper.com is blocked via robots.txt.  Nothing since EARLY 2005.

Keep after them darwin, they should realize that they advertised it to you incorrectly and make good just to shut you up.

595

General Software Discussion / SPAMPAL replacement

« on: January 11, 2006, 07:06 PM »

I've had spampal running on my system for about a year now.  While it works very well at detecting spam, it HOGS my system.  I have a pretty spiffy P4 3Ghz w/ 2G of RAM.  Everytime spampal is used (checking mail) my system grinds to a near halt.  Web pages time out, response is sluggish.  I've had enough...

So what's a decent spam filtering tool I can use?  I'm currently using Becky2 Internet mail and I really don't want to change.  Something that fits in as a proxy (like spampal) will work just fine.

Thanks
Chris

596

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: MP3Drive

« on: January 08, 2006, 11:42 PM »

Kidz these days... why back in my day, everyone knew abust SUBST... of course we had other problems then..

What you want to do is this:
Start|Run  "cmd"
at the friendly CMD Prompt type:
subst m: c:\long or short path\to huge selection\of MP3s\

You'll need to put that in  bat file and add it to startup if you want it to map the drive everytime you boot.

Enjoy.

597

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Software Cataloger

« on: January 06, 2006, 11:29 PM »

Cool idea.   

598

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your favorite launch bar? Your favorite features? Missing Features?

« on: January 06, 2006, 11:27 PM »

I use free launch bar just because it's easy and does what I want.  It goes vertical along the left of my screen and allows me to add folders of one click apps.  I don't need much

Go Mouser!

599

Screenshot Captor / Re: HELP: Screening an entire Web page

« on: January 06, 2006, 12:23 AM »

Being the lazy sot that I am, I'd try something like printing the page from the browser to oh... say ghostscript.  Then you can convert it to a pdf.  CutePDF does this all at once.

It doesn't get you a clipboard image, but it does get you a scrolling rendition of whatever you can print...

BTW, it's free.

Otherwise you would need to capture a screen, have the user scroll down, capture the next screen (repeat as needed) and then seam the images to gether.  Image seaming is not new, we used to have to do it with hand scanners. (yuck)  You might find some image seaming code laying around that would help.

600

Living Room / Re: nudone's new pc

« on: December 21, 2005, 07:51 PM »

Short RAID lesson for PC's.  There are two types these days... Hardware & Software.

Hardware RAID is the old tired and true, better performance RAID we know and love from SCSI Systems.  They use coprocessors on the RAID controller to offload some of the lower level drive operations from the CPU. 

A few years ago, the Linux folks (Note: Someone else may have started this, I first saw it on Linux) started futzing with software RAID.  The concept was simple, use a kernel lever drive to emulate Hardware RAID.

There are several inexpensive SATA RAID controllers available today.  Many of them on the mobo.  I would not be surprised to find that a software based RAID configuration did not improve performance by much.  It will tax the CPU and general be more work to get the data off than a true hardware solution. 

Disk access is usually the bottleneck for overall processing speed.  It's why we still have mainframes in use today.  They kick ass at moving data around on DASD.  Offloading some of the disk processes to a RAID controller and adding more spindles to the mix should generally improve performance on any system.  It may not be enough of an improvement to justify the cost, and hassle though...

As always, your mileage may vary.