Recent Posts

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General Software Discussion / Re: QTTabbar (now at version 1024) is once again my favourite

« Last post by Shades on February 03, 2015, 07:09 PM »

As far as I know, Classic shell (by default) adjust Windows Explorer to have it work like Windows 7 again. Could it be that these changes cause QTabbar to fail? You can disable the changes Classic Shell makes in Windows Explorer.

Windows 8 without Classic Shell....yeah, well...no! The modern interface of Server 2012 is (much) more agreeable, add CS to that OS and it becomes even more excellent.

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Developer's Corner / Re: Would appreciate some feedback on my new logos

« Last post by Shades on January 31, 2015, 07:18 PM »

Liking '23Q1Rie.jpg?1' best....but 'bVjWMrJ.jpg?1' is better, because it will translate/convert best to a uniform 'house style'. You know, no change of style between logo, favicon, icon is better for brand recognition.

My

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Living Room / Re: Movies or films you've seen lately

« Last post by Shades on January 24, 2015, 04:32 PM »

I always like to watch several episodes or season of a series. That is, with series that have an story arc which can span over several seasons. This is also what I like about the 12/13 episodes per season series...especially when the writers are daring enough to make the (support) characters suffer severely of even kill.

Anyway, for me that can give a series some added value. You do see quite some 'rinse and repeat' with series that have 20 to 23 episodes per season.

On topic now:
What we do in the shadows - Weird comedy shot in reality-TV style. It's about 3...actually 4 vampires living in one house. Definitely not everyone's cup of tea and probably better when enjoyed under some kind of influence and/or the right crowd. Dark(ish)/dry humor, something I appreciate.

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Living Room / Re: Movies or films you've seen lately

« Last post by Shades on January 23, 2015, 11:13 PM »

The mule - movie about a guy who escaped going to prison after swallowing a kilo,s worth of condoms with hard drugs. And that he had to hold his 'number 2' for 11 days!

Whether you agree or not with the premise, it is an interesting story. It won't win Oscars, but don't let that stop you from watching. This is a good Aussie flick.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Urgent request for informatioon regarding time stamp in Windows 8

« Last post by Shades on January 21, 2015, 08:17 PM »

You state that the time shown on your computer matches with the time/date you get from a website. It is easy to have a computer in the wrong time-zone tell the correct time and date. Especially when it is configured not to auto-update. So it is important that you verify your computer uses the correct time-zone.

Such a setting I am forced to use myself. All Windows servers I run here are all 1 hour off. And yes, I did verify that these are in the correct time zone

But even when I specifically configure to have no updates from any of the standard time servers that are default configured in Windows, within 8 hours my servers are all 1 hour behind again. This behavior is something I am accustomed to in the "no mans land" that exists between the US and Europe (the US uses the solstices, most of the other countries use the seasonal change, which are usually 2-3 weeks apart). A nuisance in an otherwise reasonably functioning system of monitoring the passage of time. Here in Paraguay the president decides the moments of DST changes each year. The current president didn't make a reasonable choice for me. Almost 2 moths of a discrepancy! Which isn't adjusted correctly anymore in my Windows servers when updating with any of the time servers I can reach here.


Getting timing right on a computer looks deceptively easy, but it really isn't. Especially when you have to work with different international time zones and systems of the DST changes.

Imagine the following: Offer a programmer money and a programming job that includes the above. Then offer them to to give them a kick in the nuts and the same amount of money.
An inexperienced programmer will choose the money and the job. A programmer with experience in this field will choose the money and the kick in the nuts...because that is the less painful way of making easy money.

There is a nice/funny youtube video that explains the implications of time zones and DST in a much nicer and funnier way than I can.   

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Living Room / Re: issues with uefi, more than 6 drives, ahci, windows 8.

« Last post by Shades on January 20, 2015, 05:25 AM »

If you didn't do this already, make your system's boot slower. In BIOS/UEFI you have an option to turn 'fastboot' off.

When you go for the limits, that is usually the first thing I would do. With 'fastboot' turned on, it is a possibility that not all drives properly register themselves in BIOS/UEFI during boot. If the watts of your power supply is more or less equal match the watts required to run your system, the drives may not have enough power available to spin up properly during boot.

In that case it doesn't matter at all what filesystem you are using on your HD's. But it can be fixed by adjusting a tiny setting in BIOS/UEFI. I was running a 6-drive Linux server here, but that has been reduced to 5 drives, because hd capacity is cheap and I could combine content from 2 drives to one. The other 4 are part of a software-based RAID setup.

The suggestion in a previous pot about getting a NAS solution is solid with the amount of drives you are running.

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Living Room / Re: chrome browser is so nasty

« Last post by Shades on January 19, 2015, 07:54 PM »

Didn't bother at the time I was lulled into trying Chrome...then I needed to do a test with Server 2012. Another hard disk was installed and I've booting from that OS ever since.

Still the fact that it wouldn't listen to my (I think not so unreasonable) request to no not start at start-up, was enough for me to not want Chrome at all.

Only at my own behest I will apply updates (which is usually not too long after they come out), because I don't need or want the mess auto-updates can generate. Especially with my sometimes extravagant/unorthodox/bull-headed way of setting up things.

If Chrome works for you, by all means be happy with it. It isn't a bad browser at all. For me, the major turn-off is just the behavior of the baggage that comes along with it.

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Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by Shades on January 19, 2015, 03:18 PM »

Looks more like a puppy that got a spoonful of peanut butter. 

And that is as much enjoyment for yourself and the dog. At least, I haven't met one dog being upset by this. 

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Living Room / Re: chrome browser is so nasty

« Last post by Shades on January 19, 2015, 03:09 PM »

Try to get rid of Google Update after you install Chrome. No, uninstalling Chrome won't help. Removing it from the sequence of software items that Windows starts during it's own start-up, proved to be more nasty than previously thought. Sure you can disable or delete it with 'autoruns' (outstanding systinternals tool), but after Windows reboots you have a second google update entry that is active. Rinse and repeat...

A virus behaves practically the same.

So no Chrome for me. Ever. The portable SRW Iron browser is much better/friendlier in that respect. Opera browsers now-a-days use the webkit engine as well, so you might want to look into that as well. PortableApps website offers(very) recent Opera browsers. Personally, I prefer that over SRW Iron now. Although (portable) SRW Iron is no slouch, (portable) Opera is faster. 

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General Software Discussion / Re: Onscreen notification in Windows8 Similar to Outlook incoming mail but for other

« Last post by Shades on January 18, 2015, 05:19 PM »

Maybe a tool like 'RainMeter' might do?

By default, it tracks a lot of system info that can be shown/heard in a myriad of ways. It used to be so that you could write your own extensions (or mods...or whatever the creators call this functionality) that could combine all kinds of meters/trackers/triggers to your hearts desire.

I have only seen screenshots, no hands-on experience with it. But, from what I remember, its capabilities might prove to be your solution.

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Living Room / Re: Animal Friends thread

« Last post by Shades on January 18, 2015, 10:31 AM »

To my knowledge, hippo's kill much more Africans than lion(ess)'s do. Temper, tons and very(!) territorial. Don't let their looks fool you.

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Living Room / Re: Donating to EFF

« Last post by Shades on January 18, 2015, 09:56 AM »

@40Hz:
In the Netherlands it was relatively easy to get such a device for an organization. Because there you had to pay upfront for the expected postal mail. Those also came with a counter that counted back and even weighed the envelope/letter. At least the one in the army base where I was working at the time did. Although we often bypassed that part to speed up the process. Pre-sorting on weight by hand (literally) was much faster (we had to handle all military/civilian postal needs for 4 army bases and 15 auxiliary units).   

Also, you'd better not exceed the agreed upon limits, or use the wrong frank with the weight of an envelope/letter. Those 'civies' would become quite hostile if we did...forgetting who they were talking to (army, having weapons and all ). Then again, the Dutch and German postal services are/were very efficient and fast. Standard postage mail would even arrive after 1 day, although that qualified to be delivered in 3 days. Even standard postage mail sent to any country in Europe or US/Canada would arrive within a day, sometimes 2 at the intended location. Northern Africa (Tunesia, Marocco) and Turkey were quite efficient as well. Other continents or parts thereof...not so much in my experience.

Here in Paraguay (South America) international mail may arrive quite fast at the national postal services, although that is not a given. Doesn't even matter if the sender paid for high priority postage or not. Also, this doesn't mean that the mail will arrive at the intended destination any soon either. Unfortunately, the rule of 3 applies here. Don't expect any mail to arrive within 3 days. More realistic is 3 weeks or 3 months. After that...consider it lost. National mail is also problematic, bills arriving on the final day that they can be paid is quite common. Automatic payment facilities, web or otherwise, do not exist here. It is quite easy to get disconnected not of your own fault.

In all the time I have been here, I don't think I have ever seen national mail being sent without stamps. Utility bills don't even have stamps at all. So I'll assume there are no such frank systems here.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for Windows Email Server Options

« Last post by Shades on January 10, 2015, 12:47 PM »

Standard Windows 2012 license is about 6000USD (if memory serves me correctly)
Hardware can be modest, from experience I can tell you that it runs adequately on a dual core AMD CPU (2GHz) with only 2GByte of RAM and an old SATA hard disk. I run a trial version of MS-SQL Server 2012 (database has 50GByte content) on that and it doesn't disappoint.

But I wouldn't use any modern version of Exchange on any PC with less than 4GByte of RAM and that is already asking for trouble. Expanding RAM on an older PC can be quite costly and getting a new one with desirable amount of RAM will also make quite some cut in the budget. Exchange does require a big hard disk and the faster it is, the better.

Software that prevents spammers from creating havoc on a Exchange server with port(s) open the interwebs also comes with a price tag.

And all that for a home lab setup? I wouldn't be around anyone Ms. after the appointed Mr. asked for her consent on the purchase of this setup. You know, with MMA fights the opponents are more or less matched. After that Mr. & Ms. "conversation" I don't intend to be remembered as collateral damage...  

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Living Room / Re: For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by Shades on January 06, 2015, 07:22 PM »

Looks like we need to look for some obituaries soon...

1240

N.A.N.Y. 2015 / Re: NANY 2015 Release - Splat (Simple Program Launching and Termination)

« Last post by Shades on January 05, 2015, 07:15 PM »

Also featured on AddictiveTips. 

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General Software Discussion / Re: Search & Replace internal hyperlinks

« Last post by Shades on January 04, 2015, 03:05 PM »

I would make a copy of the complete file/folder construction you have in place for these self-created web-pages and start working on that copy. Make a dummy Word document (if that is the format you want to use) with all each type of link etc. that you use in your web-pages. Separate those clearly and 'Save as ...' this document as complete Webpage. Open that document in your favorite HTML and/or text editor to have the examples you need.

Then use InfoRapid (private use is free) to search-replace for everything you want changed in the complete file/folder structure in one go or one-by-one, whatever you prefer. These queries can be as simple or complex as you want (and can be stored).

Although the software is really old, from personal experience I can tell you that it works absolutely fine (and fast) on any version of Windows 2000 and up.

Combine all the edited web-pages into Word and store your document in .doc or docx format or use Word with your preferred PDF-printer to generate a PDF document. Actually, I use a portable version of LibreOffice 4.x to read Word documents and save these in PDF format directly. This standard LibreOffice PDF functionality is vastly superior to any PDF-printing solution, in my not so humble opinion. 

If you only want one big HTML formatted document, use any decent HTML editor. Most, if not all, come with an import function that will convert links etc. automatically.

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General Software Discussion / Re: patchpae

« Last post by Shades on January 04, 2015, 02:00 AM »

The only thing this type of kind of patches are good for, is to test your backup(s).

32-bit operating systems have their limits.You would better respect these, because you will invite lots more misery than you are willing to handle much(!) sooner than you think.

If your software demands lots of hardware resources, get a 64-bit operating system. 32-bit operating systems have had their hay-day, get over it.

In general, 32-bit operating systems are nice for basic consumer computers such as HTPCs/laptops/netbooks and the like. With those devices you want to apply the least amount of hardware resources you can get away with to keep either battery or energy consumption down. Or if you still need/want to use 16-bit software.

For the rest, don't consider anything less than 64-bit operating systems nowadays. For years none of the software I use and/or apply required me to go back to a 32-bit OS.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Changing from MyISAM to InnoDB in MYSQL DB

« Last post by Shades on January 04, 2015, 01:03 AM »

Are you hung up on database names or can you use whatever database?

With the latter, you could make a database "<your db name>_ISAM", recreate all tables & columns from "<your db name>" into "<your db name>_ISAM", then transfer/replicate the data and point your application(s) to use "<your db name>_ISAM"?

This way you are creating a test environment where you can see if the engine change is beneficial or not (to current the work flow).

Really consider the vastly improved MySQL Workbench 6.2.4 as your assistant in this task (Oracle provides Community (free) and commercial editions). The Community edition (which I have a bit of personal experience with) helped me out of a situation with my mediawiki setup and showed me that its wizard for replicating MySQL databases is very competent while very easy to use.

The look and feel of MySQL Workbench has improved a lot, making it much(!) more useful than previous incarnations of this software. Now this software is practically similar to the software that comes with full-fledged database solutions such as those from Oracle and Microsoft.

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Living Room / Re: Movies or films you've seen lately

« Last post by Shades on January 03, 2015, 10:27 AM »

There are 3 episodes in one season of Black Mirror. Season 3 kicks of very soon now. Some episodes are not interesting, the rest is really great (in a disturbing way).

-Shades (January 02, 2015, 05:57 AM)

I'm not sure what you found "not interesting". Everything I've seen seems to be pretty good. Could just be personal preferences and the like there -- chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream preferences?

-Renegade (January 03, 2015, 08:24 AM)

All the episodes I have seen so far were made with very good production value. Good actors as well. I really liked where the story with the eye recorder went. The story where making a living on a home-trainer didn't. But that might be caused by my stance on watching dreck such as "reality"-TV, Dancing with the American idol's Big brother and what not.

Tech devices making a serious impact in lives and behavior...magnitudes more interesting than that kind of useless, dreary and moronic form of "entertainment". To me, at least.

And if you do like that kind of TV-shows, by all means, pitch the idea I mentioned, consider it my gift to your happy new year. 

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Living Room / Re: Movies or films you've seen lately

« Last post by Shades on January 02, 2015, 05:57 AM »

There are 3 episodes in one season of Black Mirror. Season 3 kicks of very soon now. Some episodes are not interesting, the rest is really great (in a disturbing way).

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Living Room / Re: Happy New Year! =D

« Last post by Shades on December 31, 2014, 03:39 PM »

Indeed a happy new year to everyone here at DC.


My resolution is to work on my belly (decreasing it or increasing it...but work on it I shall! )

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General Software Discussion / Re: Program to copy contents of a cloud drive to a local drive -slowly

« Last post by Shades on December 27, 2014, 11:40 AM »

With copying through networks in the XP days I always had good experiences with TerraCopy. Copying 4Gbyte archives and Oracle dump files over the LAN took 5 to 10 minutes less with TeraCopy than with the the standard explorer copy routine from MS. More secure too, as there was a function to verify if the hash of the copy matched the hash of the original file and it would show you a report of files that were copied correctly and which failed. Repeating the copy action would only copy the files that failed.

Now I'm on a gigabit LAN and copy speeds are a magnitude higher, even with the standard copy routine from MS, so I don't bother with copy optimizer software anymore.

Anyway, there is a piece of freeware, PathSync which is in essence sync software. The reason I mention it would be that the installer is only 130KByte in size, very easy to configure even as a one-way copier, it is very fast with checking for changes between the destination and the source, you can filter which files/folders you want and do not want to be copied or synchronized.

It also keeps logs of everything it does if you enable that functionality. The whole configuration can be stored as a file and reloaded at your desire. Also, after it is installed once, you can copy the installation folder and use it as portable application.

To say it isn't actively developed would be an understatement...the last stable version is from 2007 (v0.35), the latest beta from 2010 (v0.40).

When I discovered this software many(!) moons ago, I really appreciated the simplicity this software offers for the rather advanced features it contains. It's speed is awesome and it works absolutely fine on any version of Windows 2000 and onwards. Again, free, small and portable, what more could you want ;-)

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Living Room / Re: For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by Shades on December 24, 2014, 08:56 AM »

Granted, I went along with the promise from Wave at that time.

Being vague didn't help their cause, but I didn't think they expected the back-fire it got. Most people are quite entrenched on the tools and software they already have (learned to use).

Getting people out of that way of thinking and into another, safer way of communicating...without an already existing, somewhat useable concept in front of their noses? Good luck with that.

With hindsight 20/20, I agree Wave wasn't the answer and tried to do too much. However, the idea remains (in my head at least) that with more time, something could have spun off that base/concept with a better chance of adoption as a more secure communication environment.

Getting things (exactly) right the first time around is not easy and it will surely fail without a chance to evolve. So what if it didn't do things better than existing solutions. It was a fresh code base that arguably is easier to protect than all other products from different creators, each with different kinds of "baggage" regarding backwards compatibility, coding standards, protocols, etc.

Just sayin'.

Then again, 2009/2010 was not that long ago, but it feels like it was a different time then.

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Living Room / Re: For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by Shades on December 24, 2014, 06:35 AM »

Google Wave was a (half-hearted) attempt. And it got got flamed down, before it even got a chance to come to fruition.

As it was in development still, encryption could have been a building block, instead of a bolted-on thing for almost all other forms of communication.

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Living Room / Re: Website access for someone in a temprarily Down Zone

« Last post by Shades on December 18, 2014, 05:22 PM »

I can only offer rather general advice. First I would ask them to add a 2nd (or third) DNS server entry in their network configuration. 208.67.222.222 is the ip of OpenDNS and that is decent (and free) DNS server service. If they cannot get to you one way, OpenDNS provides another.

If you think the above sounds too complicated for the people that want to make contact with your website, find out what the IP address of the computer/ISP that hosts your website. In case the domain name is pointing to your own webserver, 'www.whatismyip.com' will tell you. With that information you can ask those people to type the IP address into their browser.

When they see your web page, chances are that the DNS service from their ISP could be flaky. If they still cannot see your page, then it might be time to take a look at what is happening on your side.

That is, when they are not using a proxy. If they do, there might be some hiccups there. Proxy servers come in different shapes and sizes, so you need to know exactly which one they are using and look for solutions. Without that info....have fun. And even if you have a solution, without administrative access to that server the problem remains anyway.

Very generic, I know