Recent Posts

1151

General Software Discussion / Re: If you think OpenOffice is a competitor to MS Office 2010, think again

« Last post by Target on June 17, 2010, 06:38 PM »

Perhaps it depends on the industry on whether the need for heavy desktop suites will thrive, no doubt for spreadsheet use at the least. But since most business "documents" (I use that term very loosely) are simple communications, i.e., simple shared documents, you'll likely see the likes of Google Docs, Zoho, and Office Live rise as mobile/tablet computing becomes more prevalent

-zridling (June 17, 2010, 05:49 PM)

could be, but for businesses (especially big businesses) at fixed sites the cost of bandwidth just to process their documentation (be that word processing, spreadsheeting, or data base applications) could well be prohibitive

also worth noting that potential privacy issues aside, that sort of bandwidth is available to everyone

1152

Living Room / Re: 20 years later, the movie "Total Recall" still kicks butt

« Last post by Target on June 17, 2010, 12:39 AM »

Avalon-  released in 2001 and directed by Mamoru Oshii, who also was responsible for the great animae classic Ghost in the Shell.

Avalon tells the story of Ash, a woman who competes in an illegal VR wargame called Avalon. Because the game links directly into the brain, Avalon players run the risk of becoming one of a growing  number of damaged players who live out their catatonic lives in state mental hospitals. But despite this risk, or maybe because of it, the game remains popular in the bleak industrial world its players live in.

-40hz (June 15, 2010, 10:25 PM)

I've never seen this film, but I was struck by the apparent similarity to Tad Williams otherland series (of books)

One of my alltime faves - anyone else read these?

1153

General Software Discussion / Re: Software for Business Process Modeling?

« Last post by Target on June 16, 2010, 06:52 PM »

I'm not sure that you need any particular sort of qualification for this (though it may  well be an advantage)

actually being outside of the processes (ie objective) is a HUGE advantage because you can view things dispassionately

you're also much more likely to ask logical questions and focus on the why's, and to see where there are potential gaps or opportunities because you don't have anything invested in any of the processes.

A lot of processes actually contain a lot of accepted practices rather than formal processes (even ones where a formal process has existed for sometime) and mapping them out will clearly show (everyone!) where things are and where things aren't quite right

and +1 for the feedback thing.  This is really important to those who have provided input and makes a big difference to their buy in at the end...

1154

General Software Discussion / Re: Software for Business Process Modeling?

« Last post by Target on June 14, 2010, 07:26 PM »

Because of the training challenges, varying skill levels, frequent change of personnel that are responsible for the documentation and ultimate infrequent use of the software, the best practices could be summarized with the ancient imperative to Keep It Simple. (I'll leave off the second "S").

-steveorg (June 11, 2010, 05:30 PM)

I've been following this thread and this seems to be the best piece of advice so far.

Rather than committing to a (potentially?) complex and expensive solution you would be much better served working with what you have and upgrading only when your requirements exceed the capabilities of your current solution (and it should be readily apparent when this happens).

It's really easy to get caught up in the excitement of implementing best practices etc, but at the end of the day do you really (really?) need a solution like that (why cough up for a cutting edge solution when all you need is notepad?)     

1155

Living Room / Re: Dating Sites for Geeks and Nerds?

« Last post by Target on June 10, 2010, 08:47 PM »

...I actually met my wife in an online war game, not on a dating site...

-Renegade (June 10, 2010, 08:32 PM)

that right there's the definition of a nerds dating site

1156

General Software Discussion / theremin hero...

« Last post by Target on June 10, 2010, 06:48 PM »

saw this on slashdot this morning - Theremin Hero

not quite sure where this fits - I was tempted to tack it onto the 'recommend some music video's' thread

regardless, I thought it was an interesting exercise (air guitar hero anyone?)
 

1157

Post New Requests Here / Re: All AutoHotkey (AHK) coders read: No more upx packing of compiled ahk utils

« Last post by Target on June 08, 2010, 08:29 PM »

You *really* want to make sure you keep that turkey badge, don't you? 

-wraith808 (June 08, 2010, 06:10 PM)

By fair means or fowl!

-cranioscopical (June 08, 2010, 06:41 PM)

does nothing phage you?

1158

Post New Requests Here / Re: All AutoHotkey (AHK) coders read: No more upx packing of compiled ahk utils

« Last post by Target on June 07, 2010, 05:03 AM »

nope, still being sarcastic (what can I say, I'm a sarcopath )

1159

Post New Requests Here / Re: All AutoHotkey (AHK) coders read: No more upx packing of compiled ahk utils

« Last post by Target on June 07, 2010, 02:03 AM »

we need a coding snack that searches through DC forums and displays links to upx-compiled exe files.

-lanux128 (June 07, 2010, 12:28 AM)

can't we just run a virus scan?

-Target (June 07, 2010, 01:31 AM)

i hope you're being sarcastic..

-lanux128 (June 07, 2010, 01:53 AM)

as if...

1160

Post New Requests Here / Re: All AutoHotkey (AHK) coders read: No more upx packing of compiled ahk utils

« Last post by Target on June 07, 2010, 01:31 AM »

we need a coding snack that searches through DC forums and displays links to upx-compiled exe files.

-lanux128 (June 07, 2010, 12:28 AM)

can't we just run a virus scan?

1161

General Software Discussion / Re: find hard drive info

« Last post by Target on June 02, 2010, 08:33 PM »

FWIW, there is a free version of SIW, and it's a green file (no install)

here's another one - HDD Scan

also appears to be free and no install (unpack and go),  I found it at HDD Guru

it appears to include the drive RPM, though it didn't report it on my laptop...

1162

General Software Discussion / Re: find hard drive info

« Last post by Target on June 02, 2010, 05:54 PM »

there are probably any number of PC info tools that will do this but i use SIW (Everest used to be another) will do all you wanted except for the rotation speed, though if you have the model number you can get this from the manufacturers spec's

1163

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: PDF OCR giveaway

« Last post by Target on June 01, 2010, 07:51 PM »

FWIW, I've been using this and I've found it useful

I generally only use it to extract part of the text rather than the whole document but so far it's been fine (though I have found a couple of instances where it couldn't read a document - I've put that down to something flakey in the PDF rather than something in the application)

downside is you get the text sans formatting, so you need to go through and clean it up manually.

1164

General Software Discussion / Re: Word 2007: Are Table Styles safe to use now?

« Last post by Target on May 27, 2010, 11:17 PM »

Interesting.  I'll have to try that tomorrow.  incidentally, when I have carriage returns in one of the cells in my grid in InfoQube, when I export it in anything besides HTML export, those carriage returns become a new line or cell, which makes sense, I suppose.  The problem is that it adds blank cells under the cells next to it to make it all fit.  The problem with that is when you use it to make a table, it messes up all the grid border format, because all the blank cells get borders also.  If there's a way around it, that would be nice.  I can't think of a good solution.

-superboyac (May 27, 2010, 11:01 PM)

this is one of those situations where you don't use 'hard' carriage returns - in Word you use SHIFT+RETURN instead, though whether or not IQ follows this behaviour I don't know

1165

Best Archive Tool / Re: Versions??

« Last post by Target on May 27, 2010, 09:57 PM »

If you are putting image files into ZIP or any other compressed file and think this is compressing them, then you might be surprised to know that no significant compression takes place. This is because there is no "air space" to compress in image files. The only compression system I know of that achieved significant compression on image files was fractal compression

-IainB (May 27, 2010, 09:41 PM)

not strictly true, some image formats are already compressed (eg JPG, GIF, PNG) and as such you will not gain much by ZIPping them.  Others (eg BMP) are not and significant (disk space) gains can be had by archiving
 
FYI, some of the file managers (total commander is my choice, but there are others) will allow you to work directly with archives as if they were folders - this includes opening/editing a file from within an archive (and updating the archive when you're finished), and modifying the content of the archive by adding/deleting/extracting files by drag and drop

1166

General Software Discussion / Re: Word 2007: Are Table Styles safe to use now?

« Last post by Target on May 27, 2010, 08:49 PM »

Sorry to jump in, but isn't that exactly what the InfoQube built-in HTML export (settings mode) gives you ?

-PPLandry (May 27, 2010, 08:17 PM)

not to denigrate a useful function in a great app, but in my experience pasting html into word = blech!!

1167

General Software Discussion / Re: Pdf tools-Getting Better

« Last post by Target on May 27, 2010, 06:01 PM »

anyone used nuance?

thoughts or opinions?

and for the coders I saw this one yesterday - VPE document design and printing library.

1168

General Software Discussion / Re: Word 2007: Are Table Styles safe to use now?

« Last post by Target on May 27, 2010, 05:54 PM »

So, what would you do if you already had a long glossary completed in another program (i.e. InfoQube) and you wanted to stick that information into a Word document?  That's what I'm doing.  Before I can stick it in, I have to massage IQ's output a little (headers, formatting, etc.)  So what I'm doing now is doing that all in Excel, and copy/paste it into Word.

-superboyac (May 27, 2010, 04:29 PM)

since your formatting requirements are minimal here (if i remember rightly you mentioned plain text, left column bold) I'd probably try pasting without any formatting (forgive me if I'm teaching you to suck eggs here).

that ties in with one of the suggestions from the MVP quote, and it's easy to apply that level of formatting uniformly to the whole table

1169

General Software Discussion / Re: Word 2007: Are Table Styles safe to use now?

« Last post by Target on May 26, 2010, 08:23 PM »

I have to ask why Tables are so "fundamental"?  One thing that annoys me to no end, as an IT guy AND a printer, is people using the wrong tool for the job just because they are comfortable in that environment.  Now I know you are willing to stretch, but many are not.  TABLES ARE BAD,BAD,BAD! (In Word).  Word is meant to be a word processor, not a spreadsheet.  If you are just formatting a report, that is one thing, that is what tab stops are for, but if you want form filled tables, then it is really the wrong tool.  Microsoft adds these features because of requests, but that doesn't mean they SHOULD be added.  Excel is designed around tables and should be used for that purpose.  I only miss the Binder tool Microsoft used to have that allowed you to combine pages from tools like Word and Excel into a single manuscript.</rant>

Now back to the original program....

Why would you need tables in your Word document?

-steeladept (May 26, 2010, 07:33 PM)

interesting, but what makes them so bad?

I have no qualifications here, I'm just an interested observer, but I'm not aware of any reason not use tables in a document (aside from the potential stability issues referred to above).

Tables are a well understood means of segregating and organising content, and most people will find them logical/natural to read.  They are not spreadsheets (I suspect anyone trying to use one like that will work that out pretty quickly)

Provided they are used sensibly and in context they're a useful tool (same as tabs, and bulleting, and, and, and...)

FYI, the OP is producing a large procedural document, so I don't believe there is any form filling involved
 

1170

Living Room / Re: What happened to my DC forum avatar?

« Last post by Target on May 26, 2010, 07:21 PM »

I'm not opposed to some levity.

-cranioscopical (May 26, 2010, 06:41 PM)

we're getting weigh out of my field here

I'm guessing the masses are probably also wishing for some brevity by now

1171

General Software Discussion / Re: Word 2007: Are Table Styles safe to use now?

« Last post by Target on May 26, 2010, 05:56 PM »

Holy crap:
Do Not Use Tables!!

-superboyac (May 26, 2010, 05:37 PM)

interesting, but what did you do?  Was it a massive table? did it have some sort of complex styling going on?

the quotes were interesting reading, but i have to wonder how serious an issue this actually is.  Tables have always been interesting (testing?) to work with, but this is the first I've heard of this 'undocumented feature'.

I would probably avoid embedding an excel sheet in your doc unless you really need it (personally, i don't like embedded things in docs at all).  While it may be simple Excel has it own 'quirks', and you probably won't have access to some of the 'niceties' that are available in word
 

1172

Living Room / Re: What happened to my DC forum avatar?

« Last post by Target on May 26, 2010, 05:42 PM »

If only there were no charge!

-cranioscopical (May 25, 2010, 10:26 PM)

you'd prefer things to be static?

-Target (May 25, 2010, 11:02 PM)

That's a matter of some gravity. Could you be more specific?

-cranioscopical (May 26, 2010, 10:07 AM)

that's a weighty subject, but G, let me think about it some and I'll see what I can come up with

1173

Living Room / Re: What happened to my DC forum avatar?

« Last post by Target on May 25, 2010, 11:02 PM »

If only there were no charge!

-cranioscopical (May 25, 2010, 10:26 PM)

you'd prefer things to be static?

1174

Living Room / Re: What happened to my DC forum avatar?

« Last post by Target on May 25, 2010, 09:33 PM »

I suppose you couldn't resist

-cranioscopical (May 25, 2010, 09:05 PM)

unfortunately (for our long suffering readers) i have an almost limitless capacitance for this stuff

1175

Living Room / Re: What happened to my DC forum avatar?

« Last post by Target on May 25, 2010, 06:38 PM »

Oh, I don't know.  Aren't degrees of affection, as tested by a snogometer, measured in hertz?

-rjbull (May 24, 2010, 04:48 PM)

There's  some question about that, especially if the degree is only a third.

-cranioscopical (May 24, 2010, 06:57 PM)

Clearly, those would be the black hertz.

-rjbull (May 25, 2010, 04:22 PM)

Very good, can I buy you a bier?

-cranioscopical (May 25, 2010, 04:37 PM)

anyone noticed how these threads come in waves?

-Target (May 25, 2010, 05:41 PM)

Now I'm crestfallen!

-cranioscopical (May 25, 2010, 06:05 PM)

ohm my god!! he's caught in a current!