Recent Posts

1301

Living Room / Re: For DC Fans: Bring DC Forum to your Desktop for searching/browsing/etc.

« Last post by urlwolf on March 21, 2007, 01:45 PM »

WDS does music files with no plugins (!):

Likewise, you can search by file extension or file size. But that’s just the beginning. For example, you can search for music files by artist name, or search for photos by the horizontal and vertical resolutions. You can search for text within a file (including PowerPoint presentations). You can search for an Outlook contact by his or her birthday, or search for a meeting request by meeting organizer. You can do Boolean-type searches (where FileName = something and CreationDate >= something else). You can – well, you get the idea.

And it seems it's scriptable... Yummy. Installing it now.

1302

Living Room / Re: For DC Fans: Bring DC Forum to your Desktop for searching/browsing/etc.

« Last post by urlwolf on March 21, 2007, 09:21 AM »

Thanks for that.
Looks like WDS is a pain to configure. I basically want it to ignore my entire HD, and index only the 2-3 folders I tell it to. I see that X 1 does that fine, but how difficult is it in WDS?

Also, does any of these applications index music tags? Say I want to search for album="foo", or artist="bar" is that possible?

1303

Living Room / Re: For DC Fans: Bring DC Forum to your Desktop for searching/browsing/etc.

« Last post by urlwolf on March 21, 2007, 08:53 AM »

While decompressing, I'm shopping around for an indexer
Looks like the windows one will make my oneNote searches faster too. Can you limit the dirs that windows DS indexes, to just say the DC archive and my onenote folder? If so, this could be one less application I need to install. Is there any reason you have all four in your computer and also recommend X1 dedicated to just the DC archive?

1304

Living Room / Re: For DC Fans: Bring DC Forum to your Desktop for searching/browsing/etc.

« Last post by urlwolf on March 21, 2007, 08:03 AM »

This is very clever and a real timesaver.
Which of the  desktop search engines you recommend?
Thanks!

1305

General Software Discussion / Re: I found a jewel of a program: XMplay

« Last post by urlwolf on March 20, 2007, 01:53 PM »

Oh, and live search! I've never seen live search with a large music library in any program.

I bought I life-time license for MM... but this is almost sci-Fi
Pros (on top of the previous ones)

• supports track and album replay gain!
  
• has an active forum and community
  
• lost of native plugins
  

Cons:

• no album art.
  
• most skins suck (so tiny!) but try the one that mimics i-tunes.
  
• Do not feed a huge lib at once, try small chunks, otherwise it crashes.
  
• Not supported by the default last.fm program (it uses an audioscrobbler plugin)
  
• No "live" changes in mp3 tags, no stars, etc
  

This program deserves being better known.

1306

General Software Discussion / I found a jewel of a program: XMplay

« Last post by urlwolf on March 20, 2007, 01:35 PM »

 XMPlay (http://www.un4seen.com/) - Old School media formats player (MOD, XM, etc), and all current media formats.

I was thinking to myself:
"I like mediamonkey, but it takes ~10sec to start, uses up ~60mb, and ~20% of the CPU while playing. It'd be niice to have that functionality on a tiny, non-resource-hogging application. Portable if possible".

My idea of a tiny player was evilplayer: reduced in size, but feature poor.

Enter XMPlay. it plays everything with a memory footprint of < 1mb. It has skins, and a library, for the same size of evilplayer. It supports all winamp plugins (for me the Ozone plugin is essential!). It can connect to last.fm. and all that using a few files in a folder, no registry at all, portable and super-compact.

It uses 15 mb when playing stuff through the Ozone plugin (CPU intensive) and about 17% CPU. It pops up immediately, vs 10 sec for MM. All my config comes with me in case I put in in a thumbdrive.

This, gentleman, is beautiful .

And the sound quality is, to my ears, better than MM (BASS engine).
see
http://fileforum.bet...ew/1011077179/1/view

Oh, and global shortcuts to boot, minizes to tray etc.

You don't see apps this complete and tiny often.

[edited to attach picture]

1307

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Backup4all for U3

« Last post by urlwolf on March 20, 2007, 11:34 AM »

Version Tracking
Backup4all for U3 is a portable backup software that offers a unique mode to track file versions. You can selectively restore any previous state of the file directly from the main window.
-
don't think even regular backup4all has that (? just got it lately myself so still not sure)


also

yes, it does that.
But it is really slow. And bk4all it's the single application that I have seen going over 300mb of memory usage.

I'm thinking that for backup, any unix application is more efficient (and free). I'm currently playing with rsync, unison, and box backup. If you don't mind editing a script, it looks like this is the best solution.

1308

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is it so hard to find a decent image organizer?

« Last post by urlwolf on March 20, 2007, 04:06 AM »

One quick thing...
If I tag my pictures (no small feat) I want to be able to automatically upload them to flickr WITH tags. I think picasa could do that, thanks to a plugin, but no other software did it reliably?

Which of those has the fastest interface for tagging?

1309

General Software Discussion / evaluating WSW: how do you get forums (like this one) to work?

« Last post by urlwolf on March 19, 2007, 12:22 PM »

If I use the macro facility, then I can log in with my user name, but the entire page is highlighted.

If I use the wizard for forums, and select headers etc, I get a better highlighted page (selective) but no username login/no unread post stuff.

I remember seeing a video/page somewhere in dc explaining how to do that, but can't find it...

Up to now, my veredict for WSW is that it's so complex that it takes more time than it's worth; I know someone will prove me wrong...

1310

General Software Discussion / Re: Super Flexible File Synchronizer Pro says Zaine

« Last post by urlwolf on March 18, 2007, 08:19 PM »

Ok, seems like for windows, there are some mature incremental backup solutions based on ryinc.

http://bbdev.fluffy....p-client-mingw32.zip

1311

Finished Programs / Re: MP3 Player

« Last post by urlwolf on March 18, 2007, 02:52 PM »

try evilplayer, really tiny and portable.

1312

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

« Last post by urlwolf on March 18, 2007, 01:42 PM »

You can use firefox + nextPlease + this extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3235/

HTH

1313

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Tolipo - todo list for programmers

« Last post by urlwolf on March 18, 2007, 08:32 AM »

the auto TODO and changelog generation are very good ideas. I think it'd be sensible to add those features to a larger, more complex tool such as toDoList. Many programmers use this. Of course, your implementation has the advantage of being multiplatform!

What do you think? Do you want to post this request for toDoList? Or do you mind if I do? Thanks!

1314

General Software Discussion / delicious and opera. Integreation

« Last post by urlwolf on March 18, 2007, 08:27 AM »

Hi,
Since I returned to opera as my main browser, the one feature I miss from FF is the delicious plugin.

All solutions I tested for opera (buttons, etc) require you to dl the delicious tagging page and are slow as hell. It removes the joy of tagging. When I was using FF as my main broser, I created 54 pages of delicious bookmarks in a month! The integreation is really fast, you hit ctrl D and start typing tags. Meanwhile, in the background it loads tag suggestions, popular, etc.

When using opera buttons, I never got into tagging. Too many precious seconds went by waiting for the delicious page to load.

A good hint to have your delicious tag cloud handy as an opera panel is this one, but I want to speed up the tagging process.

There are many opera lovers (and productivity ninjas) in this forum. What are your solutions?

1315

General Software Discussion / Re: join operations with excel tables (free?)

« Last post by urlwolf on March 17, 2007, 03:37 PM »

for help w/ excel & vba:

http://vbaexpress.com/

-AndyM (March 17, 2007, 03:02 PM)

This one  shows an empty page with the forum header only. Even after signing up. But thanks, the other one looks good.

I'm not sure I'll need to invest time in VBA just yet, this is all pretty basic. For example, I want to do a simple recode operation.

in a matrix, I want to replace all values with a different code. For example, if I have say a matrix of names, and I want to get a matrix of emails, having a table with the mail-name equivalence.

This is probably built in. I'm ashamed to realize how little I know about excel

1316

General Software Discussion / Re: Super Flexible File Synchronizer Pro says Zaine

« Last post by urlwolf on March 17, 2007, 08:43 AM »

Note: something like this:
http://www.rsnapshot.org/

Would be great if working on windows. It would nulify the need for things like backup4all (it takes 275mb of ram when operating!).

1317

General Software Discussion / Re: join operations with excel tables (free?)

« Last post by urlwolf on March 17, 2007, 08:35 AM »

hehe, that's a really good post tinjaw.

I'm a code monkey like anyone here, but I agree with mouser. I have written a library in R with wrappers around reshape() and merge() to do something that excel does natively and easily with pivot tables (heh! shame on me!).

Beware: some programmers believe that people relying on a GUI are simpletons that don't know better. That's simply not true. There is a lesson to be learnt here (in my experience at least!): sometimes the mainstream GUI equivalent does the job better and faster. You don't need to code everything. Spending time looking for the right tool pays off, one just has to find a balance (This is why this forum is so good, it helps fidning the right tools).

1318

General Software Discussion / Re: Super Flexible File Synchronizer Pro says Zaine

« Last post by urlwolf on March 16, 2007, 09:08 PM »

hm, send the devs your bug feedback; it works flawlessly for me...

what i really want however is rdiff-backup natively for windows (incremental backup with restore per delta) - anyone know of a package out there?

and thanks for that dreamhost howto - finally something to do with all that space!!!

-nontroppo (March 16, 2007, 03:18 PM)

The only "native" (you mean not a unix port?) win delta backup apps I have been able to find are SFFS, and suresync (expensive, needs an addin to do delta backups).

Yep, DH is totally worth it if only for the amount of space they give you, and the shell.

I was falling in love with SFFS, but rsync is doing a great job and I don't mind (almost prefer) scripting. It doesn't take much in term of system resources. The advantage of SFFS is that it can cache the 'right tree' (useful when it's a large tree)... but rsync is really fast counting files, and very portable.

What's the difference between rsync and unison then? Why is unison not capable of doing delta backup locally (if this info is correct!)?. If unison is based on rsync, it should.

I guess rsync is just a mirror, whereas unison is able to resolve conflicts and thus better to be used when you update both sides independently.

1319

General Software Discussion / Re: Super Flexible File Synchronizer Pro says Zaine

« Last post by urlwolf on March 16, 2007, 02:23 PM »

Thanks nontroppo, that was very useful. Deltacopy didn't really work for me but rsync itself did. Concretely, I'm using this rsync for windows: cwRsync
My particular case (backup to dreamhost using rsync) is covered here.

1320

General Software Discussion / Re: join operations with excel tables (free?)

« Last post by urlwolf on March 16, 2007, 01:18 PM »

You can take a look at Kettle / Pentaho Data Integration. This is a very nice open source data integration/ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) tool. It is more focused at integrating data from databases and other sources into data warehouse solutions, but it can also be used for "simple" excel transformations.

It is probably somewhat overkill for what you are after and it does have a learning barrier, but if you have some database knowledge it is very powerful.

-bmm (March 16, 2007, 12:32 PM)

Thanks bmm, love the avatar.
Looks like pentaho spreadsheet services is not free, and they only give a quote by mail. The entire thing seems much more complicated that I expected. I honestly don't know what kettle does after about a min. in their page. Looks like this would require serious time investment.

digDB seems to do join operations, which is what I want. But I'm sure there must be free alternatives.

I used to do all data mungling in R, but I have seen some hardcore excel people doing cool stuff visually, and I'm trying to 'learn' excel (pivot tables etc) after ignoring it for my entire life.

1321

General Software Discussion / join operations with excel tables (free?)

« Last post by urlwolf on March 16, 2007, 08:43 AM »

Hi,

is there any free (or cheap) program that can do join operations with excel tables? I have found digDB, but is pricey and it's only a six-month license...

Thanks

1322

General Software Discussion / Re: program/trick in file manager to count number of files in a folder (recursive)

« Last post by urlwolf on March 15, 2007, 07:40 AM »

to answer my own question:
in Dopus, rightclick the gray fields on top of each column in the listers (the one that has name| size | etc). select more. add Files (total).

Sorting by Files (total) didn't work but it's pretty close.

1323

General Software Discussion / ranking your folders by activity (how often files get changed in them)

« Last post by urlwolf on March 15, 2007, 06:43 AM »

Is it possible to do a ranking your folders by activity (how often files get changed in them)? Any program that does that out there?

1324

General Software Discussion / Re: Super Flexible File Synchronizer Pro says Zaine

« Last post by urlwolf on March 15, 2007, 06:39 AM »

news on unison delta update.
It uses rsync, so it does work only when using a remote connection.
If you copy from local to local, no delta update.
Interesting.
So SFFS seems to be unique in that.

To make SFFS work like a backup program, say backup4all do:
(1) create your normal profile, left to right.
(2) Select "add timestamp to filename" (note: do not use delta updating here)
(3) Keep as many versions as you like (say 10)
(4) zip files if needed
(5) create another profile by copying the first one, but swap the paths, so it's "right to left"
(6) test it

1325

General Software Discussion / Re: program/trick in file manager to count number of files in a folder (recursive)

« Last post by urlwolf on March 15, 2007, 05:38 AM »

yes, like that, but recursive, example:
A - 200 files
     X 100
     Y  25
     z  75

That's the idea.