Messages

1051

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Instant Text V Pro - more than the usual features of a text expander

« on: March 13, 2007, 04:10 AM »

I wish InstantText would do a demo - I am always extremely suspicious of "30 day refund" offers, as you never know whether "turns out i don't use it enough to justify the price" will be an accepted reason, and that is what a demo would help justify.

It is the additional intelligence put in InstantText that makes it a different tool - most autocomplete come with a few presets, all english and generic "Fyi" etc. The fact that instant text analyses your own documents makes it seem very valuable to people who are always writing reports or proposals etc.

1052

General Software Discussion / Re: hosting: moving away from shared, and into Virtual Private Servers (VPS)?

« on: March 12, 2007, 11:08 AM »

Most rentable vps are of the xen variety or jails.

I have a toy server BSD jail and it's a lovely server to mess about with, install things, remove things, reset to blank state...

1053

Best Text Editor / Re: Some more editors of mention...

« on: March 12, 2007, 04:47 AM »

Slickedit. Stuck at version 6 cause I just can't justify the 299 price tag but even at version 6 it was a programmers editor which didnt look down at perl or php and had almost all it's great ide features work for those languages too.

Can't find the files i need for v6 anymore though 

1054

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: "Book maker" program-compiles documents to print in book form

« on: March 12, 2007, 04:44 AM »

do you perhaps have an old version of wordperfect sitting around? it did that kind of stuff pretty well as I recall

1055

General Software Discussion / Re: hosting: moving away from shared, and into Virtual Private Servers (VPS)?

« on: March 12, 2007, 04:42 AM »

Any OS that is on a VPS will have one of your automated software install system and a version of something like webmin and other tools to allow you to configure it.

They probably won't have cpanel or similar at the low end of the price tag list because those have costs associated - but if you want a fully managed server then you are probably better off with a really good hosting plan or a managed server, not a vps.

If on the other hand you wish you had a dedicated server so you can tweak it just right and install non standard things etc. but you can't quite justify the cost, then a vps might be just the ticket.

1056

Official Announcements / Re: Amazing Conversation on your site

« on: March 12, 2007, 04:34 AM »

I am confused. What exactly could running a search in google on one tab do if i have the donationcoder forum in another?

steal my session and therefore maybe my username access?

1057

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: SlickRun

« on: March 12, 2007, 04:29 AM »

I think one of the differences between the version of FARR that I have tried and slickrun is that slickrun can open particular web pages or documents, whereas from what I could try FARR just starts programs.

Farr seems to run off a database of "what an executable name could be for" whereas slickrun is for the most part hand-configured. As a result farr works out of the box, whereas slickrun needs configuring. But slickrun allows for its use as a proper command line, to an extent, as well as an app starter tool, which i don't think is the case with farr (i'm sure you'll correct me, its very possible i only used 5% of what farr could do)

It did cause a bit of a slowdown on my computer, but that was not really the software as much as the graphical transparency effects which seem to totally baffle my poor radeon 9800 (the same as the floating windows of bitdefender or taskbar bubbles. All slow my machine and make any game pretty much unplayable while they appear)

1058

Official Announcements / Re: Amazing Conversation on your site

« on: March 12, 2007, 04:24 AM »

maybe it was just a test run for an automated forum posting script

1059

General Software Discussion / Re: roboform2go or sticky password?

« on: March 10, 2007, 05:07 PM »

I am not sure how many forms you guys fill in every day - i certainly don't fill in very many, and i make do with opera's tools for that.

1060

General Software Discussion / Re: uploading old mail to imap

« on: March 10, 2007, 10:43 AM »

I had a good laugh reading this - resembles a lot of my experiences setting up imap servers and trying to get old stuff in them.

http://www.calbear.org/articles/tag/IMAP

1061

General Software Discussion / Re: uploading old mail to imap

« on: March 10, 2007, 09:47 AM »

Has anyone had any experience with the following:

http://www.weirdkid....products/emailchemy/

Emailchemy reads email from the closed, proprietary file formats of the most popular (and many of yesterday's forgotten) email applications and converts it to standard, portable formats that any application can use.  Emailchemy also includes an embedded IMAP mail server from which any IMAP-compatible email application can download your converted mail.

the latter could work for me since fmail has a "migrate from imap" option which could get all my old pocomail mail transferred. This seems to cost $28 for one person's email, which is not too bad considering the time it might save me, but it got me wondering...

is there maybe a free/open source imap server which has the option to import mbox? without necessitating 5+ hours of installation, configuration etc. After all I suspect that the developer of this program wrote the conversion bits, but might have embedded a freely available imap server which is happy to import mbox files. Since the mail I need to import is in mbox already I don't really need the conversion.

1062

Living Room / Re: Good email adress for ShareIt!

« on: March 10, 2007, 06:41 AM »

I use the paid fastmail service and it doesn't get spam to the fmail address (some spam to my aliases)
I picked fmail.co.uk as the domain, and a nice long name, so it might depend on the domain.

Since there is no difference in domain between the paid addresses and the free ones I bet nobody dares block the fmail domains, so it would be a decent option.

I think the free account dissolves if you don't use it for 3 months, but i can't see that being a problem.

1063

General Software Discussion / Re: Review of File Renamers — let's make a list

« on: March 10, 2007, 06:35 AM »

They all seem to have slightly quirky interface 

If you want non japanese screenies of FlexRename I can make some.
That program has far more features than I have ever used

* regexp and wildcard and char-2-char replace
* lots of "pre-canned" renames which are configurable and help you without having to do a regex (dates, cleanup operations like removing "copy n of" or "shortcut to"
* renames based on meta information, iptc, exif, music tags (not ogg yet), office meta tags (MS, not the open office format), html meta tags
* save your options as preset, retrieve them
* all the usual options move-and-rename, copy-and-rename but also delete-what-matches (technically not a rename). change or don't change the date etc.
* files selected by folder, or drag-and-drop to build the list
* add to context menu to run the program or a search from normal explorer use

But mostly I like it because  the listing of the files even with subfolders is very fast and so is the preview of whatever transformation you are asking. It feels instantaneous to me. That's the killer feature.

I'm sure many of the other tools in the list have similar features, but once I found this one I kept coming back to it. It's free too.

1064

Living Room / Re: New higher performance notebook pc drive shipping soon

« on: March 10, 2007, 06:15 AM »

The article amuses me "cannot compete with 80Gb hard drives". We don't need 80Gb hard drives for most of what we do on the PC. Your apps and the files you work on can easily fit on a 30Gb drive. My windows partition is about 3gb and my apps partition about 6gb and most of what's on those is totally unused and they could be shrunk significantly. Then my "files" directory is about 20Gb but most of it is archive and I have it archived 2 other places too, so I could remove it. There's only a few gig of stuff that has been used in the past year.

The things that take space:
* games
* huge archive of images I never do anything with
* huge archive of photos I need to keep but look at rarely
* 50Gb of mp3 / oggs
* some video files when i decide i want to try to learn video editing again (twice a year)
* archive of software
* archive of old code, old files

Most of these you don't need on your main drive. The music is the tricky one I guess.

I think I could fit my OS, the apps I use regularly, and the files I work on currently on an 8Gb thingie. I could have a second, mostly-asleep drive with apps i use less, games, and files i occasionally need + the usual external archive drive.

I am thinking as I write here but for me the ideal system would be:

1. Small boot/activity drive which is low power, totally silent, and very fast. I.e. some sort of solid state flash memory.

2. A larger traditional drive which is turned off most of the time, but accessible on demand - for the games, music files and less often but still regularly needed files. It could also have everything that is on drive 1.

3. An external repository for archives, backups, files you might need to check out now and then

Something that would be even cooler would be a system that lets you move files to the active disk, kind of like a check in/check out system, when you use them, then back in the other drive (or the off machine archive) when you're done with it. Then if you don't use them a while moves them to the back up disk, to make space for things you use more. Either it would ask you (a bit like the annoying "unused files on your desktop" pop up) or it could do it automagically for you. So if you use an app or a game a lot for a while, you could "move" it to the active drive, then move it back off when you don't

All this won't be needed once flash drives are 100Gb at a reasonable price but for now it'd be nice. It's really a pain that moving apps is so hard on windows nowadays.

The current things available in the mini-itx and embedded motherboards tend to go up to 4Gb. Which is huuuge when you're using linux or bsd but just too small for much under windows. 8Gb at a reasonable price is probably not too far though...

1065

Living Room / Re: New higher performance notebook pc drive shipping soon

« on: March 10, 2007, 06:09 AM »

Well in normal business use you replace all hard drives every two years anyway. When it comes to servers it can be more often - the risk of failure is just too much. The HD might be theoretically working for longer but usually with the heat level they are in on the desktop you can't trust them that long.

Your average industrial flash (at a reasonable cost) is good for about 2 million R/W - I have never thought about exactly how long this would mean in regular usage. I bet you can do drives that cost more but last longer. Maybe the drive could have multiple flash chips doing raid which can be regularly replaced, and the flash chip itself would cost a lot less that the whole set up...

There's also the saving to be had in power consumption and cooling - which will also become a major PR issue before we know it - and the lack of noise - which is great for the worker. And saving the 5 minutes it takes to boot every time.

All in all it can add up to a lot of benefits for a relatively low capex cost

1066

Developer's Corner / Re: Style Master CSS Editor

« on: March 10, 2007, 05:04 AM »

I have topstyle pro, might try this one out of curiosity.
I think i tried it a while back but it certainly has evolved since

1067

General Software Discussion / Re: Review of File Renamers — let's make a list

« on: March 09, 2007, 09:13 AM »

I tried at least 15 of the ones mentioned and the oneI use and often pass around is FlexRenamer (11) / the live preview means I could give it to designers to do their own image file name cleanups

1068

Developer's Corner / Re: Five important communication activities for teambuilding

« on: March 09, 2007, 08:52 AM »

The points are very true and very well made 

My weakness as a young manager was probably his point 4. I remembered how disruptive and annoying disruptions are when you are trying to get things done, so I often avoided using the phone or just walk over and ask to not interrupt the team members.

A good concept but as a result I used email far too much.

You need to watch the interruptions you cause carefully, but all/in/email is bad for communication.

1069

Living Room / Re: New higher performance notebook pc drive shipping soon

« on: March 09, 2007, 08:21 AM »

Who needs hybrid... I would love a pure flash boot drive of 6 to 8 gb and a traditional drive for all the rest... why is it that small embedded PCs have had that for years and it's still not an option on any desktop machine or notebook?

1070

General Software Discussion / Re: recommendations for web graphic and photo software

« on: March 08, 2007, 05:05 PM »

Xara is a nice tool but to me it's more of a vector program - the photo bits are quite weak.

I use photo impact quite a lot, the photo manipulation is very strong but it also has pretty good drawing/vectory tools - of course nothing like what xara has, but not bad for buttons etc.

1071

General Software Discussion / Re: Desktop chaos please help

« on: March 07, 2007, 04:18 AM »

No, those are open windows that I dragged the buttons off my taskbar and put them on my desktop.

I think dm2 has a feature that allows to minimize windows to desktop icons. I think they are icons not text buttons, but I haven't tried that one so it's all based on hearsay.

http://dm2.sourceforge.net/

1072

Official Announcements / Re: Upgrading the forum tonight to SMF 1.1.2 - Possibilities of minor turbulence

« on: March 07, 2007, 03:57 AM »

I have a site on smf with tiny portal and stuff updated, and the only way I seem to be able to upgrade it is through upload of the new smf - which totally breaks tinyportal - then go through all the tp manual changes again. I'm so tired of that!

1073

General Software Discussion / Re: nostalgia hour: old software you loved

« on: March 07, 2007, 03:52 AM »

you know, there are emulators that make it easy to preserve old games, good and bad, and even see them in action again, and preserve the name of the people who did them etc.

But there's very little to preserve even basic information about old non game software. Strange. I guess games can pretend to being borderline applied arts...

1074

General Software Discussion / Re: Firewalls - please, i can't be bothered.

« on: March 06, 2007, 03:58 PM »

no need to be sorry  , i was just curious whether you'd made it work or not

i haven't tried it but just from reading that thread it seems to me pc tools has some "cryptic" default rules which block a lot but don't necessarily make it obvious to you what they do without opening each rule to figure it out. I mean what would you guess hides behind a rule called "Block winNuke" - I sure wouldn't. Probably one of those rules is overriding your torrent rule...

In a way that's why i like the "simple" rules based firewalls - one rule per line... at least there i can figure out what happens.

Although at the moment i'm just using the fw that came with bitdefender, so I really can't brag much about my clever choice of firewall. It's not bad, app+protocol+direction+port+IP based filter, but without any sort of checksum on the executables, i think. My biggest gripe with it is the absence of log... totally stupid oversight in a firewall!

But I am too lazy to switch to a standalone product.

1075

General Software Discussion / Re: Desktop icon virtual grouping

« on: March 06, 2007, 01:04 PM »

you almost have to look at the alternate shells, or to programs like stardock's desktopx. quite overkill for what you are hoping to do about it.