Topics

1

General Software Discussion / Search my personal wiki first, then go to Google?

« on: April 02, 2011, 11:23 AM »

I haven't been hanging around here very much since I switched to mainly using Linux, but I thought you guys might have an idea of where I should start researching this.  Bear in mind I have pretty much no coding skills but I kind of want to learn anyway, so a little project might be a good place to start.

Anyway I have been collecting various tidbits of information, articles, etc. on a personal tiddlywiki (mostly using the TiddlySnip extension for Firefox) for a few years now, and I have lots of little bits and pieces stored in this way.  I like this particular setup because it is cross-platform and I can keep my wiki online at tiddlyspot for free, so if I want to access it from elsewhere I can.  But I often forget to search the wiki for information. 

I would like to have a program/Firefox extension that would somehow search my wiki first, and then go on to search Google (or whatever search engine) for a given term.  I imagine the results would be presented in a Firefox tab, with a section that marks out which results are from the wiki and then which ones are from the web.  Maybe with tabs, like Dogpile?  That aspect of the design is pretty unimportant at this point.

Can anyone offer some suggestions as to how I might do something like this?  Or, indeed, if something already exists to do it?

2

General Software Discussion / Instant Boss: trouble on Wine with Ubuntu Jaunty

« on: September 16, 2009, 05:24 AM »

I haven't been on DC in forever, so I hope I haven't put this in the wrong place.

I switched to Ubuntu more-or-less full time almost 2 years ago, and so far most things have been fine.  However, I upgraded to Jaunty a little while ago, and a few things have been giving me trouble.

Instant Boss in particular doesn't seem to run quite right in Wine now.  The biggest problem is that minimizing and then restoring the main window doesn't quite work--the "frame" comes back, but the interior isn't redrawn--it just shows a bit of whatever window was underneath it when it was restored.

Has anyone had similar problems with Wine?  I'm sure there is a better place to ask, but I thought I'd come to where I know people use the program first.

By the way, I'm using the 64 bit version of Ubuntu, if that makes any difference.  There is also some kind of bug with general screen redrawing and the Nvidia driver, which I haven't managed to fix yet. It could be all related, but I'm not smart enough to figure it out.

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General Software Discussion / Version control on dual-boot system? (XP/Linux)

« on: February 28, 2008, 12:56 PM »

I'm sure this is a really stupid question, but I thought I'd give it a try anyhow.

I finally took the plunge and reformatted my laptop hard drive and set up partitions to dual boot, with a single fat32 "data" partition.  I haven't installed the Linux part yet (trying to decide between Fedora Core and Ubuntu) but I am setting up the Windows system to be more organized than it was before. 

After trying out FileHamster (mentioned in this thread https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=10212.0) and having a look at Tortoise SVN, I am starting to think that a more "proper" version control system would be a good idea.  Syncing and so on proved to be a pain in the butt, and because I tend to generate scads of changes in my PhD documents (in Word, LaTeX, Access, OOo, GRASS GIS, GIMP, etc, etc, etc...) I can easily get lost in the changes.  This has led me to screw up at least one important document in my file cleanup frenzy before I reformatted the hard drive.

So, the dumb question is this:  can I set up a Subversion system on my laptop to track changes that can be accessed by either Linux or XP?  It's not entirely clear to me whether both systems can understand changes made in a single set of documents.  Does anyone have a good solution for keeping one set of data files and using either operating system to modify them?

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Living Room / Best place for XP help? Can't install .inf files

« on: January 30, 2008, 03:39 PM »

I found something about this, only in reference to older versions of windows, and it doesn't seem to be transferrable.

For some reason (too many little utilities?) I cannot install .inf files.  "Install" is not available in the context menu, but all the registry keys seem to be right.

What's your favorite place to look for information like this?  Googling has turned up nothing so far...

5

General Software Discussion / How to keep track of the software you actually use?

« on: January 20, 2008, 09:34 AM »

I don't know if this is something I should be able to figure out using a native capacity of Windows XP, or what.  I've been contemplating a clean install of Windows for a while, and as part of that I want to clean up the clutter on my hard drive.  There are zillions of little programs and such that I have downloaded, most of which I never use, some of which I use all the time, and some of which are probably running and doing useful things right now but which I have been using for so long that I have forgotten I installed them.

What's the best way to see how often a program actually runs?  I was thinking that it would be nice to have something spreadsheet-like, that will tell you how many times a program was started and how long it was active in a defined period of time (in the last year, last 6 months, since Windows was installed, etc.).  Presumably there is a way to get at this information somewhere in Windows, but I don't know how to get to it.

Any advice?

6

General Software Discussion / Find and replace from text file? Or similar?

« on: November 25, 2007, 04:09 PM »

I might be being really dense, but it seems that none of the find and replace utilities that I have looked at do quite what I want.

I would like to be able to define a list of standard replacements to make and then store it somewhere, so that when I have a file that I need to do multiple replacements on I can just run it, rather than doing find-replace over and over. 

The particular application:  I have a very long BibTeX file (3500+ entries), some of which are written using the LaTeX codes for characters, and some of which have characters that I put in using ASCII codes, or whatever the places I imported them from used.  Some of them are causing problems when I try to compile the document, and I would like to go through and replace them all with the codes.  I anticipate having to do this more than once, so it would be nice to have a ready-defined list to run.  It only needs to be one file at a time.

The list would be something like:
find  replace
á      \'{a}
Á     \'{A}
é      \'{e}

And so on.  Lots of programs seem like they will do this, but I can't figure out how to avoid typing in the list over and over again.

Sorry if it is a dumb question...

7

General Software Discussion / Wanted: GNOME-style emblems for Windows XP?

« on: July 21, 2007, 10:09 AM »

My husband's computer runs Fedora Core 6, with the Gnome desktop (Nautilus file browser).  I am in love with the emblem feature--it lets you add little icons to files, folders, whatever so that they appear in the file browser with these little markers.  It does other nifty eye-candy things as well, like letting you add backgrounds to folders and so on.  The emblem feature would be highly useful for me, but I'm not yet in a position to switch to Linux myself (trust me, the day is coming very soon...).

Anyway, has anyone ever seen such a thing for Windows?  Or anything like it?

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General Software Discussion / Combine AHK scripts in tray button?

« on: June 07, 2007, 04:20 AM »

Apologies if this is misplaced and/or obvious.

Is it possible to combine all the AHK scripts and programs in such a way that there is only one taskbar button, and right-clicking on it would allow you to navigate to the program you want and then access the menu for that program?  Sort of like a miniature program launcher or start menu, only in the tray.

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General Software Discussion / Old school Pocket PC software?

« on: June 06, 2007, 02:46 AM »

I've got an ancient old Pocket PC (Cassiopeia, EM500) that I'm reluctant to replace because hey, it still works just fine.  Plus, it's turquoise.

Specs are:

Operating System: Windows CE ver 3.0
Processor: MIPS VR4122 processor operating at 150 MHz
Memory: 16MB RAM

But I'm having a hard time finding any new or improved software that will run on the thing (it's pre-ARM, or whatever it's called).  In particular, I would love to figure out how to run something like LyX or a similar LaTeX editor, and something that will let me change the orientation of the screen. 

Does anybody else use an antique thing like this and have any suggestions?

10

DesktopCoral / Er...what am I missing here?

« on: May 31, 2007, 06:07 AM »

DesktopCoral sounds like it could be useful for me sometimes, but I don't understand how to put things into the dock area.  Dragging shortcuts from the desktop doesn't work, and there don't seem to be any instructions.

What am I missing?

11

General Software Discussion / Changing properties of multiple files in WinXP?

« on: May 02, 2007, 01:56 PM »

I've searched all over the web and tried a zillion different programs, but nothing quite seems to do what I want.

I have a bunch (hundreds) of files that I would like to add a "comment" to, in the summary tab of the file properties.  As far as I can tell, the only way to access this is to right click-> properties-> summary -> and type in the comment (see screenshot).  I have tried selecting several files at once, but when you do this, the summary tab is all greyed out. 

Does anyone know of a way to edit several of these at once, or at least more quickly?  Even if I could just tab to the same field in the next item on the list, like you can in Windows Media Player (for example), that would be helpful. 

I messed around with recording a macro in DoOver, but I don't know how (or if it's possible) to make it generic, so that I could just select a file and hit a hot key that would go straight to the comments field.

Kind of like tagging, only for all files, not just music or photos.

Any suggestions?