Recent Posts

1126

General Software Discussion / Re: Any Firefox addon to do multiple searches in same search engine?

« Last post by barney on August 07, 2010, 05:06 PM »

Call it a freak talent - although I'm not so certain talent is the appropriate phrase.

I've been clocked by the IT folk because I complained their system was slow.  They said I was typing over 250 wpm .  However, that was 10-20 character bursts, then hit tab or enter, so it's not near so fast as it seems .

1127

Living Room / Re: Paragon Go Virtual P2V

« Last post by barney on August 06, 2010, 08:43 PM »

Been testing this since Wednesday.  Just Virtual Box, so far, but it seems to work as advertised.  Ported XP (SP3), 2 each Win7 32-bit (Ultimate & Home Premium), Win7 64-bit (Home Premium), all apparently successfully (VMs on a 4-core 64-bit Win7 Home Premium box).  'Course, it'll take more time to discern if everything functions properly, but it's looking good so far .

1128

General Software Discussion / Re: What's up with Android versions and upgrading?

« Last post by barney on August 06, 2010, 01:26 PM »

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly.

But I spent the last decade of my corporate existence in telecom - MCI - and suspect it would take an act of congress to get them to go along with it, much less buy into it.  While it would significantly reduce their overhead - inventory, store maintenance, floor space, just to name a few - it would also generate a competition they really don't want.

From what I've seen, folk don't buy service from Verizon, Qwest, AT&T, T-Mobile, et.al. because of the service:  they buy the service because the phone they want is there.  The iPhone is a perfect example of that.  My service is T-Mobile.  Not because I think their service is great - it ain't! - but because I wanted an Android phone, 1st the G1, then the MyTouch.  And I'll probably stay with them because they've another Android-based phone I'd like to try.

From a consumer standpoint, your concept would be fantastic - the telcos would actually have to compete for your business with true service and innovation.
From a telco standpoint, it would be abomination, and I suspect they'd use every possible means, some legal, some shady, to fight such a development.  They don't want to lose their mini-monopolies  .

1129

General Software Discussion / Re: What's up with Android versions and upgrading?

« Last post by barney on August 06, 2010, 01:05 PM »

Hey! That's a business idea...

Yeah ... now get the telecoms to buy into it  .

Edit:  look how long it took before we could buy our own land-line phones, instead of going through Ma Bell.

1130

General Software Discussion / Re: Any Firefox addon to do multiple searches in same search engine?

« Last post by barney on August 06, 2010, 11:10 AM »

Google will block me if I perform several searches in rapid succession, e.g., spelling variants, modifiers, and the like.  It claims that I appear be using an automated search system and then it will block any searches from my IP address for 30-60 minutes.  Seems I've run into similar blockages at other search engines in the past, as well.

That does not bode well for your search  .

1131

General Software Discussion / Re: What's up with Android versions and upgrading?

« Last post by barney on August 06, 2010, 11:01 AM »

I am currently waiting on an official release of 2.2 for my HTC Incredible.

While I'm still waiting for an upgrade to the 1.6 version on a MyTouch .  Think they'd rather you buy a new phone than upgrade the software .

I've a curiosity, though, anent upgrading other, non-phone hardware, whether the upgrade capability will follow other OS standard practices or mimic the telecom scenario.  Already know of one netbook upgrade failure, but that guy is a bit inept, so don't know if was OS upgrade fail or user fail.

1132

General Software Discussion / Re: What's up with Android versions and upgrading?

« Last post by barney on August 06, 2010, 10:51 AM »

I'm not understanding something here.

Thee & me.

Can't speak to the other hardware, but I've tried to research the smartphone arena.
What I've found is a pretty soft implication that some phones cannot be upgraded to higher levels of Android because the phone hardware won't support the upgrade.

Nowhere have I found a statement to that effect, just implications - and very soft ones, at that.

'Twould seem that the developers don't care to try for any kind of hardware regression capability.

1133

Living Room / Re: Learning from Cats -- My New Strategy for Dealing with Things I Don't Understand

« Last post by barney on August 04, 2010, 10:29 PM »

maybe i don't know enough cats

Trust me, there is nothing unreal[istic] about the media presented.  Raised ~13 cats, just lost Baby Daughter & her cat, Malibu, to PA.  You don't own cats, they own you - and some of 'em are less than reticent about saying so  .  They also can get pretty physical about exercising their domain  .

Edit:  kinda like customers  .

1134

Living Room / Re: lap top cooling pad

« Last post by barney on July 29, 2010, 09:48 PM »

If nothing else, you'll save yourself $30: http://www.thinkgeek...tuff/41/ezbake.shtml

I want one!  Conquering hunger, one nacho at a time.

But I'd have to get a new box to hold it  .

1135

Developer's Corner / Re: The Inversion of the Open Source - Big Corporation Divide?

« Last post by barney on July 29, 2010, 06:55 PM »

I tend to agree with Eóin about the rental farms, albeit perhaps from a different perspective.  One infuriation over the last couple of decades has been finding a great app that won't run on the OS of choice.

With the tendency - trend? - to create Web apps, OS specificity will become less and less, so a developer will no longer have to pay as much attention to the user's platform of choice.  Assuming that as a given - it ain't yet, but we're moving in that direction - small developers will have a much larger audience.  If the server rental farm concept - already in process, methinks - comes to pass, the indie developers' product(s) can see a much larger audience than they currently might enjoy.

The downside could be renting the farm space, but tech-savvy angel investors will appear to alleviate that aspect, methinks.  They show up everywhere else  .

1136

Living Room / Re: lap top cooling pad

« Last post by barney on July 29, 2010, 05:22 PM »

While I cannot speak to the efficacy of cooling pads, I can speak about an alternative ,

I had a laptop, a WinBook, that I bought in 2000 ... it died earlier this year.  For nine (9) years, it has been powered up around the clock, used as a desktop machine.  Shortly after I bought it, I hot-glued four (4) plastic bottle-caps, screw-off caps from beverage bottles, to a piece of cardboard from a furniture box, cut to just larger than the WinBook footprint.

Considering the price of cooling pads as opposed to my impromptu riser, you might try that, see if the temperature drop is similar to the change yksyks saw.  As an alternative, it's green and free.  If it doesn't seem to work, you can always go the cooling pad route.

1137

General Software Discussion / Re: How to [partially] blur screenshots?

« Last post by barney on July 27, 2010, 03:11 PM »

'K.  Since I usually see steg* referenced for graphics, just wondered if similar algorithms applied  .  Obviously not  .

1138

General Software Discussion / Re: How to [partially] blur screenshots?

« Last post by barney on July 27, 2010, 02:57 PM »

Just curious ... would that fall into the same realm as steganography?  Or is steganography a different beast altogether?

1139

General Software Discussion / Re: Problem: The connection to the server was reset ...

« Last post by barney on July 25, 2010, 06:01 PM »

Completely uninstalled both Comodo & MSE, but still had approximately the same frequency of errors, so I reinstalled - running unprotected makes me nervous  .

I've been looking for another old software package, believe it was called Visual TraceRoute, but it's apparently off the market.  Used it from 98SE through 2K, but lost it somewhere in the transition to XP.  It had two very redeeming qualities:  after it had mapped all the nodes, you could hover over a node and see more information than most tracert progs provide; and it could be set to run continuously, writing results to a log file, until it was shut down, a valuable tool that saved me much grief at the time.  Actually, I don't think I lost it, I think it went shareware, and $$ were kinda hard to come by at that time.

Looked at several current variations on that theme, but none of 'em seem particularly effective or attractive.  I'm testing itlights.com's Visual Trace Route right now, and it works pretty well, but shows too many unknown hosts and doesn't log.

Reason I keep harping on a continuous tracert log is that it lets me see - if there's anything to see - a before/during/after scenario when this problem occurs.  That way, it's easier to identify seemingly random problems, much like the problem Shades encountered during the World Cup matches.  That, and history:  I learned to appreciate such logs in the IT sphere before I left MCI.

Anyway, while firewall & A/V software may, from time to time, contribute to the problem, they don't seem to be the overt cause.  Been thinkin' 'bout switching to something like OpenDNS for a bit, to see if that will help, but that still would not rule out the ISP's server configuration(s), wouldn't eliminate any sort of throttling that might be extant.

I'm looking for external tools, now, because the tools intrinsic to the system just aren't giving me the information I need - or, perhaps, I'm just not sharp enough to properly interpolate/interpret that information.

1140

General Software Discussion / Re: How to [partially] blur screenshots?

« Last post by barney on July 25, 2010, 01:58 PM »

Yeah,

I found the blackening option, but don't think I'll need it for the proposed project.  Mostly just need to de-focus all except topic/element under discussion.  Looks as though it'll take a while to discover all that Screenshot Capture can do, though    .  So much capability, so little time  .

Edit: typos

1141

General Software Discussion / Re: Seeking old (98SE?) LAN aware Post-It clone ...

« Last post by barney on July 25, 2010, 12:47 PM »

Awesome!
Memory responded as soon as you mention ATnotes ... last time I used it was ~2001, and memory that far back must needs be jogged  .

This should please the old broad (her naming, not mine, and soon to be her site name(?)  ), and we can get on with her task(s).

1142

General Software Discussion / Re: Problem: The connection to the server was reset ...

« Last post by barney on July 25, 2010, 02:09 AM »

@Shades:
Yeah, tracert will work, but only after the fact.  For example, I could run tracert after I get the message only to discover that nothing is wrong.  That's because whatever caused the original issue is no longer active/effectual/extant/working/there.  Tracert is a great tool for a consistent, non-random, problem, 'specially since it can be scripted, but it'll not work on something that has already happened  .

@cthorpe:
Nope.  MSE for everything but firewall, which is Comodo, free version. [Edit - added comment] Also happened with Avira A/V & two (2) other firewalls.

1143

General Software Discussion / Re: Seeking old (98SE?) LAN aware Post-It clone ...

« Last post by barney on July 25, 2010, 12:45 AM »

Did that first ... but didn't find what's required.  Mind you, I'd love to use some of 'em, but I'm up against a client request, and she is not particularly amenable to reason  .  Typical, "I can't say what I want, but I'll know it when I see it."  She's recalcitrant - {mulish? | pig-headed? | [insert your adjective of choice here]} - to accept any judgment/opinion except her own  .  Didja ever get into a contract - as a favor - you wished you'd declined?  I'm there  .  So I'm constrained to try to find something that probably does not any longer exist, and likely would not function in current Windows versions.  Frustrating, but there it is.

Edit:  correct typos.

1144

General Software Discussion / Re: Seeking old (98SE?) LAN aware Post-It clone ...

« Last post by barney on July 24, 2010, 10:42 PM »

Thanks.  Yeah, but Notezilla is much too dear for this purpose.  Even if Stickies networkability doesn't really impress me, it is - drumroll - free.

On the other hand, given a commercial environment, Notezilla has some definite pluses  .

1145

General Software Discussion / Problem: The connection to the server was reset ...

« Last post by barney on July 24, 2010, 09:52 PM »

Folk,

Been meaning to submit this query, but keep forgetting.  The browser (FF 3.x) error message is, "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading."

Several versions of Firefox, IE7 & 8, Google Chrome (non-beta), Opera v10.x, Comodo Dragon v?, Safari v?, all on a Win7 or WinXP SP3 box, all giving equivalent messages.  It's not consistent, but I might see it while trying to preview a post here, while trying to browse to a new Web site, or even when trying to view a page-in-work on my local version of Apache.

Many searches have garnered that it is not all that uncommon an error to encounter, and have indicated it's likely from one (1) of three (3) areas:

• the remote server disconnected, for a variety of reasons,
• the [local] DNS server interrupted the request,
• something local, such as a firewall, created the disconnect.

It's really frustrating, 'cause there's no clear indication where to look for causes.

I'm reasonably certain it's not a firewall (Comodo or the new MS offering) issue, but could be persuaded otherwise.
That it could be a DNS issue is not a stretch, considering Grande's performance of late.
Remote server issues seems realistic, save for the frequency, albeit randomness, of the occurrence.

OK, the question:  does anyone know of an error/trace logging software that will annotate where/when an error occurs in a Web request? 

Ideally, it would follow an HTTP(S) request from initiation to completion, but write to a log only when some error occurred during that process.  I'm thinkin' that someone, somewhere, has done this in order to validate Web/link requests, but have had no luck findin' the thing.  (If someone hasn't built it, they damned well should have  .)

Any hints welcome, a resolution would be fantastic!

1146

General Software Discussion / Re: Seeking old (98SE?) LAN aware Post-It clone ...

« Last post by barney on July 24, 2010, 04:41 PM »

Sorry, I may have mislead with the 98SE thing.  Intend to run in on Win7, maybe XP SP3 or a Linux distro with WinE or Virtual Box.  Just used the 98 reference to put a time frame for when it was first discovered.

Not wild about the way Stickies handles net stuff, although it works great for document notes - Web pages, scripts, and the like - since a note can be attached such that it only shows when that document is being displayed.

I'll take a look at Magic Notes - a bit pricey, methinks, but worth it if it'll do what's needed.  Don't think it's the one I [don't] remember, but didn't much expect to find that one still extant, anyway  .

Thanks for the reference  .

1147

General Software Discussion / Seeking old (98SE?) LAN aware Post-It clone ...

« Last post by barney on July 22, 2010, 10:02 PM »

Folk,

Back around Win98/SE, there was a handy little app that was a network-aware Post-It note clone.  'Twas lost many crashes/upgrades agone, but I'd certainly like to find whether it still exists.

After I showed it to a compatriot in the Field Engineering department, it became somewhat of a mailbomb tool, as it would send notes to any registered network address, even if that address was currently off line.  Very handy, but also very frustrating if, when you logged onto the LAN, you suddenly received fifty (50) message windows     .

Dunno if it still exists on the Web, nor whether it would run with Win7, but I'd surely like to find it again.

If memory serves,

• it would store notes locally (history)
• it would send notes to a specified LAN user regardless of that user's online status (delayed delivery)
• it would allow near-IM communication (quick)
• it was a low-resource resident app residing in the System Tray (now the Notification Area  ).

I'm in a situation where such - the discrete history, in particular - would be extremely convenient:  much faster than email, but same history record could be maintained.

Anybody recall seeing it, perhaps recall a name? 

1148

General Software Discussion / Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?

« Last post by barney on July 22, 2010, 04:34 PM »

<chortle /> While I can kinda, sorta see their naming logic - dare I call it logic? - I'm in full agreement with that sentiment.  The barber shop analogy has happened to me.  Guess I should be glad it wasn't day surgery  ?

1149

General Software Discussion / Re: How to [partially] blur screenshots?

« Last post by barney on July 21, 2010, 10:08 AM »

Whoops!

Just came back to say that I'd found the blur capabilities of Screenshot Captor, and found two (2) references to it  .

Found it last night, but got so busy playing with it I didn't get back here in time to say, "Never mind, mouser's tool does it." 

Thanks, folk.

1150

General Software Discussion / Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?

« Last post by barney on July 21, 2010, 08:32 AM »

Thanks for the heads up .

While I've seen good reviews of Genie Timeline, it didn't do too well on my system.  Seemed to be always active, causing excessive CPU activity.  'Course, that's an empirical judgement, but 'bout the only kind I can make  .  GT just couldn't seem to coexist with something else on the system.

On a slightly different tack, I kinda stay away from GOTD:  any necessity for a reinstall kills most all their products.  Prolly OK for many users, but I tend to introduce system instabilities - read reinstalls - on a regular basis  .