Messages

1101

General Software Discussion / Re: Documeron on Freeware Genius: A great free program and website!

« on: March 01, 2007, 02:58 AM »

If we're listing shareware there's recenX, from the same people who did piky basket and quick notes plus / notezilla

http://www.conceptworld.com/RecentX/

It has a nice combination of features. I didnt like that it does its own little dock, though. I would have preferred something in the tray.

1102

General Software Discussion / Re: SuperboyAC's DC blog #2 (Live Search feature in software)

« on: March 01, 2007, 02:48 AM »

Now that I think of it, jriver Media Center has find-as-you-type from the search box.

On my collection (12000 tune, 1200 albums) it takes about 1 second to react so doesn't feel "instant". But it will return any album, artist or title that matches. It does not do the live search within tags or lyrics though, i suspect that'd be too slow.

1103

General Software Discussion / Re: Any app to auto-replace Notepad ??

« on: February 28, 2007, 03:58 PM »

ConText does it, if i recall.

1104

Developer's Corner / Re: Seeking your insightful advice...Where to start?

« on: February 28, 2007, 11:09 AM »

Renegade if we were on usenet i'd think you're tip toeing the flame bait line You're forgiven for mentioning fortran, as I have a background in physics, even though why anyone would suggest someone learn fortran today for a commercial carreer now is a puzzle to me . I know there's still cobol and fortran jobs out there but i think you learn those if you are in a field which uses them, not as a general IT practictioner...

You cannot do any kind of math or heavy iteration on a server

I'm sure you didn't really mean to say that, most heavy maths are done on dedicated servers not client workstations - whether it is computational physics or rendering 3D graphics.

As to web development, don't write it off like that... after all what differenciates web development from other kinds of development is simply the I/O via http and over open networks - apart from that it's not that different from any other client server system.  And just like every kind of development there are "script kiddies" and hugely mature systems out there, and some self taught script kiddies can code better than "software architects" with a degree in using diagramming software and IDEs...

But I don't think this topic was about mathematical development.

Nowadays there is a huge variety of platforms, languages, technologies and frameworks, and most are good, if not very good, as some things. None is good for everything. Although you can usually do a lot in any language you choose, there's usually a few other platforms around in which you can do it just as well. Anyone who says "X is crap, Y is great" probably doesn't know enough about X or Y to really be discussing the matter. There's not enough money to pay me to make me code in C/C++ if I ever have a choice, but I can still see that it's a great language, especially if you need the kind of low level hooks it gives you. I find it too much like micromanagement, and it makes it far too easy to get away with sloppy awful coding. (can you tell that my perspective comes from being the person who often has to come and rescue/analyse/re-engineer stuff?).

In spite of the MS bashers, C# is a good language. It does suffer from trying to be too many things to too many people, but how it is evolving is interesting. It does limit you to one platform though, for quite a while.

Anyway back to what i think was the main topic...

It depends if cnewtonne is asking about what IDE/platform to put on a cv to get jobs, or what language(s) to learn. I tend to think that any job ad that lists and IDE or framework as a key requirement was written by someone who doesn't understand the job in question...

If someone wants to learn a programming language and develpment practices, and has some experience like yours, I would probably recommend python as a good step. It's a nice and clean language, you can use it on the web or as a scripting language (i.e. start learning it in a context you are familiar with) but it has the toolkits to be used to create desktop applications. It's also in wide use in certain industries such as for example the gaming industry, so that's already one market you can go in. But it's a good language to learn things in, and learn them well. And Bruce Eckel's book thinking in python is probably still available as a pdf out there.

From python you can then jump on to another language, whether C++ or C# or even java, or whatever will be flavor of the month then... But for example .Net can be done in many languages.

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Mouser's Zone / Re: IDEA - Webpage archiving

« on: February 28, 2007, 05:36 AM »

A couple of the outliners tools can capture the URL a piece of information came from when you copy from a web page - and keep the link etc. Ultrarecall is one that can both keep live links and snapshots.

So did Webideatree, whizfolders, and I think taonotes has that... probably more And some clipboard tools but i don't remember which off the top of my head. (checking the site before i wrote that to make sure they still kind of exist, i think i'll give those three another try!)

* * *

Actually LWA does allow you to edit the files you snap, but I mostly use it to clean up unnecessary parts of the pages. It's meant as a researc archive and organise tool, but not as a writing/thinking tool. I use it because it supports opera and email clients and is not therefore tied to one browser, which most of the others are.

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

« on: February 28, 2007, 05:21 AM »

You're not having much luck with firewalls!

Let me have a look in my LWA what I have tried and liked...

ghostwall, (free) which someone has mentioned in another thread i think?  http://www.ghostsecurity.com/ghostwall/ Their malware defense products have a very good reputation, so the firewall is worth a look.

All the others I have on my list were either already mentioned, turned out not to be very secure, or are not free.

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General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: February 28, 2007, 05:16 AM »

yes, most can import, but one document at a time - and usually the import has more steps than opening the original file and using cut and paste.

* * *

I'm trying Clipboard Help+Spell but I can't see how I would use it for more than to speed up multiple cut and paste - it doesn't have the organising features that clipcache had. I mean it has "folders" but... I don't seem to be using them. I'm sure I'm not using all it can do. That's just typical of me

A lot of the shareware clipboard tools have good organising features, I agree, but many were a little too complex or heavy to use *for me" and as a result I didn't use the features... That says more about me and my lack of patience and dedication to learning a piece of software, than it says anything about the software. I want a tool that is so transparent to use it naturally pulls me through the features. It's hard to describe but some software will do that - pull you in and before you know it you're learning the advanced features without even trying to... I don't want to have to make a post it note by my screen to try to encourage me to use the features, if that happens, I know I'll never use those features and I might as well use another tool that's simpler and doesn't have those features.

For example clipmate and it's different modes just felt confusing and heavy. It's incredibly powerful and clever but I don't have time to learn it, and it didn't manage to pull me it to make me learn it. Clipmagic was nice, and the rules *were* quite powerful, but again I could not see me take the time to actually master it. I know I did use more of its features than clipmate's. I think i tried about 20 different ones over the years.

PS: every piece of software I try, I do a "features" page snapshot with LWA, write down price and some extremely terse test notes. Early on i would delete the ones that were instant uninstalls, now i keep that information too so i don't waste my time twice. It's very nice when you think "what tool was it that could do X, i didnt need that then but I could use that now" you can at least have a chance to jog your memory

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General Software Discussion / Re: : Does this site mean anything to us…I don’t know u tell me??

« on: February 28, 2007, 04:54 AM »

maybe de-URL the link at the top if you keep it

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Developer's Corner / Re: Best Programming Music

« on: February 27, 2007, 02:43 PM »

when coding i tend to go for instrumental music, as lyrics are harder to ignore when trying to think

as a result i have lots of electronic music - all genres from hectic to chilled, but also jazz and classical.

1110

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

« on: February 27, 2007, 02:34 PM »

I tried coreforce last summer (it refers to bsd, how could i not?) and had trouble with it. I was looking for a rule based firewall that would allow rules that were based on executable+protocol+port+state, like what you use on unix system and like the old kerio/tiny used to be in the old times. The first time it wouldn't run and I can't remember what i had the second time but it was conflicts with other programs (and no, i don't run 2 firewalls at once or anything) linked to that driver-level functionality.

I'm sure it has evolved a lot since though so probably it's a lot more stable. It'd be a very good technical firewall if that's the case, but it will expect you to understand the basics of tcpip and to make a lot of decisions yourself at first.

1111

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: February 27, 2007, 02:25 PM »

Reading through this thread I just realise that I have tried tons of those programs. I have registered/bought a few (webgal, weborganizer, qnp), I have made the effort to try to use at least 20 different ones (probably more like 50 if you count organisers, outliners, todo lsts, web based tools etc.), and almost never did I actually end up using them very much.

The key points for me I think is the ease of adding / editing notes - either to grab some notes from a source (web page, email)  or to write thoughts down. After that it would be a good way to search and structure, so you don't have to waste too much time organising things in subfolders. Oh, and an easy way to backup, export and share.

To write thoughts down, i seem to use email or open a text editor. I used winorganizer for a while, mostly to help writing documentation, but i don't know why but most times I would still often just open a text file in the text editor and think/write in there.

Looking back the tool(s) i used the most to capture snippets of information have been local website archive, clipcache (i used the demo a lot, was going to register, then the database got corrupted), and the notes tool in opera and previously firefox. Almost all the other tools (outliners, freeform databases, pims) the initial work moving all the information into the sytem and organising it was just too much and I never did it...

In a way it's the same thing with any sort of pim/database - you need to reach a "critical mass" of information put in the system and then it will be more convenient to continue using it than to revert to whatever old system you had. But most tools fail to get me to that critical mass, because they make it too slow to get things in them. As a result you're trying to use them while still needing to rely on your old system... and end up never switching. I think a killer feature would be one that has a "scanning" module which would crawl a bunch of directories you choose, find all the myriad documents in formats it can read (the more the merrier, if possible even word processor or other organiser files), then give you a list where you can tick all the ones you want to import, then import them... That'd get you started in whatever app does that.

1112

General Software Discussion / uploading old mail to imap

« on: February 27, 2007, 10:27 AM »

Hi

I got fed up with the email service which came with my domains and, not wanting to run my own email server, I ended up signing up with fastmail. Anyway, it's a pretty nice service, imap and all, but I have all this old email accumulated in pocomail over the years which I would love to bring forward.

Alas nobody managed to get pocomail to connect to fastmail. Thankfully the mailboxes are in a standard format so can be imported in almost any client i have ever seen... so i need another imap client which lets me move my old mail to imap.

I tried thunderbird last summer, and didn't have much luck - i imported my old email in tb, set up the imap and tried drag-n-drop to move the local messages on to imap. It seems I have to do it one message at a time and the date of the message becomes the date of the upload, not the original date.

I tried opera and I can do multiple messages with it, but the date is skewed too.

At this stage I don't know whether the date thing is a limitation of the software or the imap server at my provider.

Before I download and test 5 different imap clients, I wondered if those of you using newer versions of TB and other email clients could let me know if their tool lets them move multiple emails to the imap mailboxes and does so preserving the original dates?

thanks

1113

General Software Discussion / Re: recommend backup soft?

« on: February 27, 2007, 05:26 AM »

Backup4all is a very slick program.

I use No Hands Backup and Acronis driveimage - the first for file level backup, archiving and synchronisation, the other one for system wide backup and incremental backups.

Acronis is pretty good for incrememental backup and fairly good on restore(s). I can't remember if it did all the incrementals automatically or not last time i restored...

Since I have not seen NHB mentioned anywhere I'll give a quick description, even though it's not a solution for the scenario that started this thread...
No Hands Backup (http://www.anderssoftware.com/) has a bit of a quirky interface but it does all the standard file-level backup ups (zipped or not, multiple versions or not, filters, schedule). For me it has one killer feature, you can associate a backup with a particular removable media (by serial number or label). That way I could tell my mum "just put the red usb key in the drive once a week" and NHB automagically detects that this particular USB key is in and asks "want to start the backup?" and then just does it (i usually get her to do it when i chat with her on the phone). I use it to run different backups on different DVDram disks, and on my external drive etc. It's a very nice feature.

1114

Living Room / Re: Blog Essay: You Want a 10,000 RPM Boot Drive

« on: February 27, 2007, 05:16 AM »

Just reacting to the title... actually what you really want is a super fast flash memory based boot drive

The way prices are going, we're not far from being able to have a reasonably priced super fast 6Gb flash memory drive which is large enough to install the OS and the software you use most often. Then put the rest on other partitions on traditional hard drives. This is going to happen in laptops this year, as it not only improves performance but also saves energy.

I have had a mini-itx BSD machine that has a 4Gb flash drive for a few years, and been hoping for the move in the mainstream PC land for as long. It makes so much sense

I think this article sets the bar a little too high for normal users, but quite right for the audience of that blog.

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General Software Discussion / Re: ThunderBird users, read here

« on: February 24, 2007, 05:13 PM »

To go back to the current topic, if someone has a mailbox of 1Gb or more it could be full of attachments. They are a slowdown opening the message but might not cause a slowdown in search and day to day use, and would not be a worry.

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General Software Discussion / Re: ThunderBird users, read here

« on: February 24, 2007, 05:08 PM »

The good "open source" feeling doesn't do it for me. I have a good "support shareware" feeling and a "support freeware" and a "support independent developers" feeling too... 

Mulberry is freeware now, isn't it? Might try it, especially if you say it's fast. I had heard very good things about it but by the time i needed imap it was unavailable.

The biggest problem I have is finding a way to upload all my local mail mboxes to the imap server. I'd really like to do that, but when i have tried it the message always seems to get the date of the upload rather than the original date...

Anyway, that's something for a different thread.

1117

General Software Discussion / Re: correction of distorted grid in image ??

« on: February 24, 2007, 08:56 AM »

I have seen several tools that are made to allow you to use your digital camera to take photos of pages in a book, for example, and which can clean up the distorsion. They might work for your kind of usage.

They're the "photocopy with your digital camera" / "scan with your digital camera" tools, I'll see if I can dig some up. Some have been mentioned in this forum this year, I'm sure I learned about them here.

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General Software Discussion / Re: ThunderBird users, read here

« on: February 24, 2007, 08:53 AM »

I have used all 3 dantheman mentions. When it comes to spam filtering, all 3 are adequate but none are great.

I liked poco a lot, was a registered user through 2 versions. But the search never felt fast to me. Now I have a mail tree which nears 2Gb in size, so the speed issue is in part a size issue - poco had trouble with the sheer number of folders within folders and all the mail i have, and i had it lock up and crash in normal use several times a week.

Between that and my inability to make it work with imap (both fastmail and dovecot), I had to give up on poco and didnt upgrade. It always breaks my heart a bit when i have to give up on a program I have supported a long time and which does so many things right. I try new updates now and then in hope it gets better for me again.

Going from poco to thunderbird I just couldnt do it. I spent all the time importing all the mboxes (one by one) but I couldnt like it. It did seem to handle the size better, but I didnt use it long enough to really use the search etc. I just had this "what? it doesn't do that?" feeling a too many times - that purely comes from using something for 5 years and missing bits. I guess there's also the part of me that judged it compared to its hype. It is robust though, even with large numbers of messages. Didn't crash, handled imap...

The search felt weaker but I don't remember having to search folder by folder, i think that would have set me off ranting... I'm pretty sure it was able to search in both my imap folders and my poco-imported emails at the same time... but I could be wrong.

I currently use opera mail, have imported about 50% of my old messages, and its search is lovely. It's a quirky tool when it comes to organising, because it doesn't really use folders, just virtual organisation. So if you're the "lots of folders to classify things" type of person it won't be for you. I find that giving up on folders and having one big pot with live filtering and the option of saved searches works really well for me. Backup/export is weak on opera mail though and something that would prevent me from recommending it for many situations.

I still miss poco, and I am still considering trying a few more clients to try to find out a better one.

1119

Developer's Corner / Re: Content management solution for a small software site?

« on: February 24, 2007, 07:49 AM »

I don't think anyone was criticising EE outright, but I wouldn't say it's the best fit for the kind of site discussed, and my private toysite runs on EE.

EE is a quite bit more flexible than many blog systems because it supports custom fields, multiple content types/weblogs etc. It's better than many other "blog" systems that try to call themselves CMSes but it quickly can get frustrating if you try to extend it too far out of the blog form.

The companies which you list and which rely on EE a lot typically don't do e-commerce and tend to even stay away from sites that do the page model. They will mostly be news oriented sites or campaign oriented sites, where the multiple items per page, community-centric features of EE work pretty well to start with. There are a few exceptions which have found a way to make EE work as a catalogue or presentation website but that is because they knew it very well already. I wouldnt recommend starting a first project in EE which already requires bending EE out of shape, it will be a frustrating path.

It's simply the golden rule - don't plan a project in a new tool which will require you to bend the product backwards - it's a recipe for trouble. (I learned that the hard way with zope/plone)

For example in a tool like ezpublish I can create a "content type" of, say, "software product" with custom fields and subcontent (description, file to download, contact form, screenshots, history lines) and have the system automatically create a default "view" page with all the fields. Which you then can customise, extend etc. And having multiple lines of update history and multiple screenshots or related video demos etc. is very straightforward - adding a "related content" type block to the the page is a 2 minute job. Making a software object a "product" which can be used in the shopping cart is also a few minutes configuration etc. Now ezpublish is overkill for the site in question, but I just chose it as an example simply because the usage they had in mind designing it is the kind of thing that you will want to do and therefore it just happens to make your job easy.

In Expression Engine I could create a new "blog" and set custom fields to at least some of the options above. I then have to go and create new templates via the admin tool, then edit them to put those fields I created in the pages (else it just looks for the standard blog fields). And if I look in the database the data in in "generic" tables with fields called field11, field12 - makes it very cryptic if you want to pull the data to do something else like generate an order form etc. And if i wanted, say, multiple screenshots or multiple history lines I almost have to create yet another blog for screenshots and history updates and create a cross-link which is quite a bit of work. All this because the usage they had in mind when creating it was very far aways from "software sales site".

I know cause I moved my site from a bunch of 5 year old perl scripts to use pmachine with less perl scripts, then expression engine. EE promised cross linking between "blogs" so I imported all the list of games and related news into two blogs but it couldnt reproduce easily the functions I had on my old perl scripts which was all the cross linking between games and news. Of course that's because it needs a lot of fiddling and trial and error and some custom php in your pages and I havent yet spent the time to do it. (I want my private website time to be spent on content and ideas, not things that I do at work all the time)

For a blog type site, EE is great. To try to extend it into a software site is something that could be done but will be much more frustrating than using a system that is built from the grounds up to be a website engine. On the other hand using a full blown CMS to do a blog type site is a frustrating thing, you need to spend so much time configuring lots of details when a blog tool like EE or wordpress comes beautifully preconfigured from the start.

Lets not start being all defensive of our favorite platforms. I have tried more than 100 in the last 4-5 years, built sites on at least 20 different ones, modified/extended at least a dozen, written or led a team writing a CMS from scratch on 5 separate occasions  in 4 different programming languages. None is perfect and none will cover all situations. Most CMS and blog systems out there are really good at doing certain things for a certain type of people - the trick is to figure out which one will better work with your type of project and your type of user.

In this case I think we are looking at a website with "documents", some of which is structured "catalog like" data (software product sheets), probably one or two sections of which will be blog-like (what we used to call news-like, i.e. chronological with tagging) for news and developer diary, which needs to integrate with a forum section and probably an ordering system, as well as possibly a private "registered members" area. The best for this is one of the full blown "portal" system (eg drupal, xoops) or a website content management system (typo3, ezpublish). Of the blog tools I know, Expression engine is easy to get started with and could be cooerced to fit in the mode although making a "traditional" website with sections/single page documents and structured product sheets is a bit of a struggle with EE if you don't know it quite well already.

1120

Living Room / Re: cost of running a pc (in the UK)?

« on: February 23, 2007, 06:25 AM »

An ATX-based (and probably BTX based as well) PC is never really off - and yeah, I guess that's to support the wake-on-* events.

-f0dder (February 22, 2007, 01:51 PM)

I wonder if that's the case even if you disable them in bios. Interesting experiments ahead.

I gave in and ordered a gizmo - think of all the stuff i'll be able to measure now and do very little about...

1121

Developer's Corner / Re: Why AJAX is Preferred for RIAs over Java

« on: February 23, 2007, 06:16 AM »

I was puzzled by how the flex framework needs java - it's especially ironic considering this article kind of says "flash beats ajax beats java as a web UI" (which it does)

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Living Room / Re: cost of running a pc (in the UK)?

« on: February 22, 2007, 11:28 AM »

Well it might mean that when you turn your pc or monitor off something is not really turned off and still using some power...

Were they plugged in directly in the measuring tool or maybe in a fancy surge protecting rail?

I have been looking at http://www.electrisave.co.uk/ - a bit more expensive but you can go around your house and measure what changes when you turn things on/off. Can be found for between £60 and £79 different places around the net. This is making me actually jump and order it

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Best Text Editor / Re: Is this serious?

« on: February 22, 2007, 04:34 AM »

I have used vi for quick terminal editing for so long, quite a few of the keys and I must say I like it when text editors have the option to support the vi key bindings for things like word/line deletes, quick search, line jump etc.

Quite a few do, it'd be fun to have a list.

1124

Living Room / Re: In2TV: Fast, Free, Legal downloads of movies and TV episodes

« on: February 22, 2007, 03:49 AM »

Quite a few of these style of services only work in 2-3 countries because that's all they could negociate the rights for.

Although AOL owns the rights for a lot of content through time/warner so the other reason is that every country outside a short list is considered full of pirates.

 

1125

General Software Discussion / Re: global warming vs. local cooling

« on: February 22, 2007, 03:33 AM »

Maybe I am a cynic but does it actually do something? I saw that site and I thought it was a gimmick - something that would estimate the power saved by normal power saving features and then hopes to gather estimates on a website to be able to say "our users have saved XXX global warming" and therefore get lots of publicity...

Although i did try batterydoubler a while back and that did manage to save power, so things can be done. And even if all it does it set up the normal windows power saving options which most people never bother to set, it can be useful.

But it's a marketing gimmick. I think there's already a spoof site somewhere about how their members save more trees by turning their computer off when its not in use, instead of measuring what's saved when on idle