Recent Posts

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General Software Discussion / Re: Office 2007 has been RTM'd

« Last post by Renegade on November 06, 2006, 08:44 PM »

Hmmm... I suppose it's time to download it and check it out.

I was invited to the beta testing, but just didn't have the time to risk any possible incompatibilities. But, sounds like it's about time to dive in!

Has anyone tried it yet? Any thoughts on what you like or don't like?

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General Software Discussion / Re: IE7 Rant

« Last post by Renegade on November 06, 2006, 03:33 AM »

it just boggles my mind though how often microsoft uses some weird user interface stuff that i hate.  the idea of removing the menu bar from internet explorer 7? HORRIBLE idea. wtf are these people smoking. ridiculous. it took me 15 minutes of hunting to figure out how to get it back and get to the options..

-mouser (November 05, 2006, 01:02 PM)

Hahaha~! 

Yep.

What ticks me there is that the toolbar is gone. None. Like you said, "WTF?" I want my damn STOP button back.

But the new Quick Tabs thing is uber-cool. (The far left tab - check it out.)

Right now there are a lot of very cool things in both browsers, and a mix of the two would be perfect. IE load up speed. FF tab switching speed, etc. etc.

I saw a new "mouse gestures" at work today. (I've tried another one and it really sucks in IE.) But the one at work WORKED! It was fast and smooth. I've GOT to get that into some of the new releases coming out soon. (ALTools will have some new stuff coming out, and there's some very cool stuff that you're going to HAVE to check out.) We're planning some toolbar stuff and it's really going to kick if what I've seen so far is any indication of what it will be.

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General Software Discussion / Re: IE7 Rant

« Last post by Renegade on November 05, 2006, 10:14 AM »

It sucks that IE is so full of nasty bugs, since it's so much more lightweight than firefox...

-f0dder (November 05, 2006, 09:52 AM)

I'm not so sure that IE is lighter than FF. They differ. FF is a HUGE memory hog where IE is nice and light there. Very good memory management from the IE team and they did a good job there.

But when it comes to responsiveness, create a tab in IE then create a tab in FF. FF is faster. Of course it's chewing up a lot more memory, but it's still faster.

There are some really cool things in IE like the new preview tab that lets you look at all your tabs at once in a thumbnail view. Very very cool.

But the normal create tab thing and a couple other things in IE are SLOW. If the IE team can hammer out those issues, IE will truly rock hard again like it did against NN4.

I haven't looked into the security thing and whether or not the slowness of IE is partially due to memory spaces with new tabs, but then again... I don't care. I just want that speed.

I remember a while ago about some banner exploits going through. Some guys had exploited a graphics things (JPGs I think - might have been something else as the beer + memory thing may be slightly out of order ) and pushed out a ton of banners to get zombies. No matter what you do, the scum bags will always find a way... The new Vista security model will help though. Hopefully then we'll see more Mac and Linux exploits.

But I just want IE to be faster... (And for the things that are now broken to work.)

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General Software Discussion / Re: IE7 Rant

« Last post by Renegade on November 04, 2006, 10:15 PM »

FF is really good with resizing text, and IE6 was good as well. IE7 though is just wacked. When you make a selection, it's doesn't select where the mouse cursor is. It's like it's half baked between the original size and the larger size. Not critical, but annoying.

Mouser, have you noticed how slow creating new tabs is in IE7? I've found that FF (1.5) is very fast there. Then again, it does soak up a lot of RAM.

Floating Ruler - I still need to do some work there - But I've got another thing to finish up then get on to a custom dictionary application. I'll post the floating ruler at Renegade Minds when I can get around to finishing up some of the other stuff for it. (I use it quite a bit with Visual Studio when doing interfaces.)

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General Software Discussion / Re: IE7 Rant

« Last post by Renegade on November 04, 2006, 08:24 AM »

Oh - another thing... Selections just completely suck if you resize the text. Beyond inaccurate, they're just silly. To reproduce it, press CTRL and scroll your mouse wheel then make a selection. It's just total non-sense.

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General Software Discussion / IE7 Rant

« Last post by Renegade on November 04, 2006, 08:22 AM »

Well, it looks like my venture back into IE and IE7 is about to end. I haven't had time to try out FF 2.0, and I'm not about to as 1.5 is working fine (i.e. I've heard of stability issue so let's wait & see...)

But for IE... I've just about had it. I'm getting really sick of it. It's not the memory hog that FF is, but it's just slow. New tabs take too long. The mouse gesture plug-in is incredibly awkward. I just don't have time for it anymore.

On top of that, I found an annoying CSS bug in the System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser object that just really ticks me off (not sure if it's the IE team's fault or the .NET team's fault - and I don't care much - it's still a problem).  I spent an entire day trying to track it down. No luck. That wasn't an 8 hour work day - that was from the time I got up until now - late at night and into beer time.    These things should take 2 hours max. As it stands, this stupid bug will probably take me DAYS to work around. It should take me zero seconds. If I'm lucky, I might be able to have a crummy semi-work around to do the absolute minimum that I need by abandoning the object and going with some static junk that might take me 1~2 days. Not a happy camper here...

I'll give IE a bit longer, but not much. It's seriously wearing on my nerves now. 

I really hope that the IE team gets on top of it and seriously fixes IE. I don't give a about security in IE. IE security is never as bad as the media makes out, and even when it is bad only twits that surf garbage sites get hammered by that. I just want things to work smoothly. IE7 isn't doing that at the moment. If anyone from the IE team is reading - PLEASE SPEED IE UP! And fix the WebBrowser object too - or go and complain to the .NET team about it. (3dlight and darkshadow scrollbar items don't display in the WebBrowser object at all.)

So... How is everyone else finding IE7 so far? Better than me I hope. 

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General Software Discussion / Re: A decent CHM viewer for Windows

« Last post by Renegade on November 04, 2006, 07:56 AM »

There's a back button on the toolbar. You can use ALT + left/right arrow to go back/forward.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Interface Design Desperation.. Help needed!

« Last post by Renegade on November 02, 2006, 09:22 PM »

Then again, I still like Visual Studio, and very much deserve to win the Team System

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General Software Discussion / Re: Interface Design Desperation.. Help needed!

« Last post by Renegade on November 02, 2006, 09:19 PM »

There's an IDE for Flash that looked really cool. Let's you build real applications with Flash.

http://www.multidmedia.com/software/zinc/

It might help out, but it's not free. You could just use the trial though.

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General Software Discussion / My Linux Decision Has Been Made

« Last post by Renegade on November 02, 2006, 09:14 PM »

http://www.novell.com/linux/

MS & Novell have teamed up. That's good enough for me. I've always liked SUSE whenever I've used it as well, so now it's a no-brainer for me.

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General Software Discussion / RTFM :)

« Last post by Renegade on November 02, 2006, 07:31 AM »

RTFM

The new pilot for the new possibly regular show from your friends (fiends?) at TheRegister.com. (I love those guys!  )

I've only listened to the first couple minutes so far. I had to stop as I was at the office and it's just way too funny. I'd be roaring on the floor if I listened to another 30 seconds.

Enjoy~!

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: DotNetNuke Keep Alive Utility

« Last post by Renegade on October 29, 2006, 10:05 AM »

That doesn't exactly answer the question. But oh well.

-JavaJones (October 27, 2006, 07:51 PM)

Blah - My bad.

.NET offers you a lot more than something like PHP. (I'm not interested in any ASP.NET vs. PHP fights - it's just a fact that ASP.NET out of the box offers a lot more than PHP out of the box.)

There is so much to .NET and so much that you can do with it. It's also very RAD. You just get things done a lot faster than with something like ASP or PHP. There's no comparison. Yeah - yeah... If you want to write a 3 line script, then ASP or PHP is faster. But really... If you are developing anything of any size, you'll get a lot more mileage out of ASP.NET. And you've still got the option of using almost any language that you want, e.g. C#, J#, VB.NET, Perl.Net, etc.

If you maintain any number of sites with more than a few pages, you'll know that you just can't do it efficiently without a CMS.

Then again, if you know PHP really well, then the learning curve may be too expensive and you may want something like Joomla. There are some very large sites that run on Joomla, Mambo and other spinoffs or other PHP CMSes.

One real downside to DotNetNuke is that some of the 3rd party developers of some of the modules are complete ers...

I could relate some horror stories, but it's late, and I couldn't do so without resorting to profanity.

But then again, that goes all across software. There are complete ers all over the place. I'm quite sure that everyone has encountered them. The guys that provide zero support when you find bugs or when the product doesn't do what it says it does.

But at the end of the day, whichever platform someone chooses for their application should just match what they need. Once I can easily afford another server, I plan to get a LAMP box so that I can run some stuff that just doesn't work on Windows servers.

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: DotNetNuke Keep Alive Utility

« Last post by Renegade on October 27, 2006, 11:06 AM »

So remind me why anyone would want to do a CMS in .NET then?

-JavaJones (October 18, 2006, 02:19 AM)

The problem only affects new sites that basically have no traffic. Once you've got some traffic coming in, things pan out and the application stays in memory.

It's a good system, but it hits new sites a bit hard. This is the fix.

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Living Room / ALTools Halloween Desktop Wallpapers (5 of them)

« Last post by Renegade on October 26, 2006, 11:39 PM »

Hello fellow DCers!

It's almost Halloween, so check out the newest addition to the ALTools Holiday Desktop Wallpapers collection - Halloween Desktop Wallpapers for 2006.

They're all fun free ways to spruce up your desktop for Halloween




Enjoy~!

Ryan

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General Software Discussion / Re: New Winzip will open rar archives

« Last post by Renegade on October 26, 2006, 11:15 PM »

Burak does a good job with WinRar. And I agree - WinRar is much superior to WinZip.

Speaking of... I need to check out the WinZip 11 beta. I'll probably get to that on Monday if I finish this round of promotions. Speaking of... Got to hop over to the other forum

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General Software Discussion / Re: Writing perfect software

« Last post by Renegade on October 26, 2006, 11:12 PM »

And money is not the critical constraint: the groups $35 million per year budget is a trivial slice of the NASA pie, but on a dollars-per-line basis, it makes the group among the nation's most expensive software organizations.

And that's why. Money is no object for them. In the "real world", money matters. People need to get paid because eating is good, and sleeping with a roof over your house is good, and having clothes to wear is good, and...

That's a completely unrealistic and utopian idea about software development. Some of the practices can certainly be used (and should be), but their level of detail is extremely extreme.

At the end of the day you've got to ship a product - bugs and all. A friend of mine is the CEO of a well known software company and says ship at 80% and get the other 20% from feedback. It works for him and the company does well. I think he's right.

It was an interesting article, but not very informative. If anything, it's damaging to software development because it gives unrealistic expectations that can only be met in a glass bubble - the kind of bubble you get from an exclusive government contract and lots of money.

No matter what, at the end of the day shipping the product is where you're going to start making money. That's going to put food on people's tables and keep them developing. There are no coders with empty plates. Developing software like that for most companies is a great way to ensure products don't ever get shipped. I've seen them before - ventures that spend all their money on development and zero on marketing. They never ship and end up in bankruptcy.

Cheers,

Ryan

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General Software Discussion / Re: New Winzip will open rar archives

« Last post by Renegade on October 26, 2006, 10:38 PM »

Do people actually pay for that crap?

-Tekzel (October 26, 2006, 07:26 PM)

Yep. When you run a company, and need things to work, it's cheaper to pay for software than to try and use something that's free (very often anyways). It all boils down to time saved with support. Commercial software is usually better and you can expect support (usually - not always).

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General Software Discussion / Re: Sophos no whiner

« Last post by Renegade on October 26, 2006, 10:35 PM »

I use AVG as well. Haven't used Sophos, but I'd use almost anything over McAfee or Symantec. They really just put me off.

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General Software Discussion / Sophos no whiner

« Last post by Renegade on October 26, 2006, 10:12 PM »

http://www.forbes.com/technology/enterprisetech/2006/10/24/sophos-microsoft-vista-cx_ll_1023sophos.html

HA! Take that McAfee and Symantec! 

Sounds like McAfee and Symantec want Vista LESS secure so that they can peddle their scareware.  "Oh my! A cookie! You've been p0wn3d!"

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General Software Discussion / Re: Software Frustrations

« Last post by Renegade on October 26, 2006, 11:12 AM »

not sure if it's just me but i can't get the shitware forum to work - i wish the shit ethic wasn't such an all encompassing idea over there and the forum engine could be changed from something non-shit.

-nudone (October 25, 2006, 02:21 AM)

Yeah... NFS! (That's a censored short form...) The forum sometimes throws an exception, and it really pisses me off. I just don't have time to fix it. Grrr... 

In other words shitware.net is shitware 

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General Software Discussion / Re: New Winzip will open rar archives

« Last post by Renegade on October 26, 2006, 11:09 AM »

Grrr... (That's not directed at you - long story.) Not if I get my way... I'm still hammering away for features I want at the day job. (And I've been hammering away for a long time, but it looks like I've finally made some people "see the light". Time will tell.)

-Renegade (October 21, 2006, 12:28 PM)

Ummmm... OK?

-Lashiec (October 26, 2006, 06:41 AM)

Good mother of God... You have no idea how frustrating working in the ROK can be... I simply can't post anything here as it's not possible without profanity. And lots of it.

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

« Last post by Renegade on October 23, 2006, 10:19 AM »

I've used Flash Renamer before, and found it quite good.

But holy mother! There are just soooo many. It would be easier for me to create my own than to review them and choose a decent one.

So - for lazy/busy ol' me - what's the final verdict? Directory Opus looks a bit ugly... Is the power worth it?

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General Software Discussion / Re: You Should Pay Me to Read This Post (It's worth it...)

« Last post by Renegade on October 23, 2006, 08:13 AM »

I'm likewise curious as to how it will work out. I can imagine a few scenarios to optimize how to present the offers, but quite frankly, I just don't have the time to put it together. So rather I've just slapped the button on the product page. I know that I could present things better, but time as it is...

As for bad user experiences, well, I'm not too worried about it. It's kind of aimed at those users that you wouldn't normally sell to anyways. So even if only part of those that start the transaction finish it, it's all still gravy.

I'll post back in a month or two once I've got a feel for how it works more.

Cheers!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Two New Internet Explorer 7 Reviews

« Last post by Renegade on October 23, 2006, 02:51 AM »

I had a client that installed IE 7 Beta awhile back.

-REkz (October 23, 2006, 01:57 AM)

And you didn't fire him as a client?   

Man, there are pieces of beta software that you just don't mess with. IE is one of them. Other good examples of beta software that nobody should ever tough include disk imaging software, backup solutions, partitioning software, etc. On a test box, sure, but man... I'd be way too scared to try something like those even inside of a virtual machine.

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General Software Discussion / Re: You Should Pay Me to Read This Post (It's worth it...)

« Last post by Renegade on October 23, 2006, 01:06 AM »

So mouser, so you need an American Express or Discover card?  hehehe

It's definitely not for everyone, and not for all software. You've got to be judicious in choosing how you market your software, and how you accept payments. But it's certainly a novel approach to generating revenue for software.