Recent Posts

1576

Living Room / Re: Incredible photo from Australian wildfires

« Last post by Target on February 11, 2009, 04:59 PM »

controlled burns are used to reduce the likelihood of huge bushfires like we're experiencing at the moment

done under controlled conditions (usually under the supervision/management of the local fire service, and within a defined area) it reduces the amount of combustible materials in the bush and reduces the potential for fires to get out of hand

Local agencies used to do them more often, but environmental (read political) concerns have significantly reduced them.

Personally I think this is only half the issue as home owners and local governments also need to be a lot more vigilant/responsible (having said that, it probably wouldn't have helped much in the current situation... ) 

1577

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

« Last post by Target on February 11, 2009, 04:31 PM »

somewhat OT, but nice avatar App!!

1578

Site/Forum Features / Re: Badge/Award Mod Rewritten

« Last post by Target on February 08, 2009, 10:07 PM »

How cool is this:
https://www.donation...ex.php?action=badges

-mouser (February 08, 2009, 08:43 PM)

Mouser

for the merit badges (Coding School, etc), how about a link or a literal that says what they got them for?

possibly impractical where multiple awards have been granted, but maybe a bit of extra recognition for their inputs.. 

1579

General Software Discussion / Re: Macro needed

« Last post by Target on January 31, 2009, 04:23 AM »

He just tried to save it as an Office 2003 file, but it converted his fields into plain text.
Since the macro needs to extract data from fields specific to Office 2007, you would need it to write this macro.

-SKesselman (January 30, 2009, 01:57 PM)

that doesn't necessarily mean that the code in the background is that different

if you can supply the details we can probably work something out (and I have no doubt there are others here who do use Office 2007 and are far more competent than I...)

1580

General Software Discussion / Re: Macro needed

« Last post by Target on January 29, 2009, 07:49 PM »

still not promising anything, but do you have a template already?

you seem pretty sure about what you're looking for so I assume you do

1581

General Software Discussion / Re: The Difference between Anonymity and Privacy

« Last post by Target on January 29, 2009, 07:45 PM »

i suspect it has to do with us being so 'fashion conscious', and by that I mean we (as a society) are always looking for (demanding?) new things (witness our proliferation of gadgets, or look at the fashion or music industries... actually all those things are probably the same anyway  ).

In practice this means that the herd congregates at the latest and greatest - a constantly moving target.

often there is no good reason for the herd to move, it can be triggered by a single opinion expressed at the right place and time, regardless of the validity or substance of said opinion

Having said that it's also true that as the congregation increases, the destination becomes less attractive to those who perhaps consider themselves to be at the front of the pack.  Of course when they (inevitably) move on, the herd follows

watch long enough and the cyclical nature of this behaviour is apparent, and while the 'cycles' may be purely arbitrary (we're nothing if not fickle) the same things tend to come in and out of fashion over time.   

1582

General Software Discussion / Re: Macro needed

« Last post by Target on January 29, 2009, 04:51 PM »

sorry, not sure I can help with this one (I don't have access to office 2007, or much experience with VBA coding for word)

having said that it seems pretty straight forward, though i have no idea what (if any) impact the new document format might have

1583

General Software Discussion / Re: Macro needed

« Last post by Target on January 29, 2009, 01:01 AM »

short answer would be yes, but more info needed, eg what sort of documents are we talking about

1584

Living Room / Re: Going Into Frugality Mode -- What are your Tricks and Tips

« Last post by Target on January 28, 2009, 10:16 PM »

it's been mentioned before, but if you have the space, grow your own fruit and vege's

you don't necessarily need a lot of space, the quality is usually better than anything you can buy, and you will save money.  And you can sell or trade any excess you might produce.

If you don't have the space, look into joining a community garden - you can find these all over (in public open spaces, on rooftops, etc) and not only will you save money on your groceries, you'll likely make some new friends.  An added benefit to these sort of arrangements is that there will be a w i d e variety of produce being grown, and people are always willing to trade or share...

1585

General Software Discussion / Re: Awesome article re: organization and notetaking

« Last post by Target on January 22, 2009, 12:32 AM »

Target, nice find! Unfortunately the program appears to be an indexer no more different than drag and dropping a file in Compendium and tagging it.

The problem with these kinds of programs is that you are almost afraid to be reliant on them for fear of messing up your cloud and then you're screwed. (especially since these will just say file missing if you move the files)

-Paul Keith (January 21, 2009, 10:54 PM)

thanks, I'm a bit surprised no one else has mentioned it.  I'm notoriously bad at organising, but I really like the concept and it's almost enough to make me want to find a reason to use it 

Of course this is probably also true of any tagging or indexing tool (or system, for that matter).

On the upside, even if you do move a file, you still have the file name as a search field, though if you routinely rename files then nothing's going to help you.

Maybe I've misunderstood the operation of this thing, but I'm not really sure how you could mess up the cloud.  As I understand it, if you just keep adding tags (key words) the cloud will just keep getting bigger.  It shouldn't matter if you're tagging 'style' changes over time (as it invariably does) as your just adding to the cloud

(apologies to all for veering off topic...)

1586

General Software Discussion / Re: Awesome article re: organization and notetaking

« Last post by Target on January 21, 2009, 10:53 PM »

I spent some time (actually a lot of time) looking for a systemwide tagging system but there simply is not one that can do what I need.

-J-Mac (January 21, 2009, 10:39 PM)

this one might be of interest to you

It's popped up in a few places that I watch over the last week or so - <a href="http://lunarfrog.com/taggedfrog/">Tagged Frog</a>

somewhat like a wiki, it uses Tags to 'organise' your files.  tags are visible within the app as a cloud, and can be searched,filtered, etc

you can apply multiple tags to a file, so there's plenty of scope to cover all manner of classifications and/or organisational methodologies

1587

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft Word Question --

« Last post by Target on January 20, 2009, 12:05 AM »

i have no knowledge of or experience with e-book devices so I've been trying not to ask what is probably a dumb question, but why do you need to persist with hard page breaks?

I assume from what you said that the document your working with is formatted using hard breaks, however there is generally no real requirement for them if your not making hard copies, and removing them will allow the document to repaginate 'naturally' without any ugly blanks or extraneous white spaces...

1588

Living Room / TED.com - Inspired talks by the world's leading thinkers and doers

« Last post by Target on January 13, 2009, 01:07 AM »

apologies for the title, it's a blatant rip from the website, but I really didn't quite know how else to describe it

<a href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/">TED.com</a>

A friend of mine put me onto it a couple of days ago and I just had to share it - it's a series vid's of presentations on a wide (wide!!) range of topics

Many are fascinating or thought provoking, though some seem a little bizarre in that context (like the guy miming DJing)...

enjoy

1589

General Software Discussion / Re: The Monkeys Have Hit The Button

« Last post by Target on January 07, 2009, 04:40 PM »

could be, I'm using greenbrowser (an IE shell) over IE 6 here (not my browser of preference) and the counters are only half in the frames

1590

Developer's Corner / Re: Seeking Programming Language To Learn

« Last post by Target on January 06, 2009, 09:31 PM »

since you're already here, you might like to look at the <a href="https://www.donation...index.php?board=77.0">DC programming school</a>

you have the opportunity to attempt a series of challenges in a range of languages - you might find something that appeals this way without having to invest on the off chance that your purchase is going to work for you

with respect to the potential limitations of your chosen language I suspect that this is likely to be an issue regardless of your choice (eventually...).  Pick a likely candidate and see where it takes you - you might be surprised.  If it doesn't work out, just remember what you've learned along the way (it's better to make a start and work it out as you go than it is to worry about how it might end if you do start)

1591

General Software Discussion / Re: The Monkeys Have Hit The Button

« Last post by Target on January 04, 2009, 11:28 PM »

glad to see there is something happening - ran across this one recently and while the hype seems to promise a lot, browsing the site didn't reveal too much...

I might feel more confident if they'd managed to line the digits up with the frames in the countdown timer 

EDIT: The countdown does render correctly in firefox, but not in Explorer

1592

Living Room / Re: Portable MP3 player recommendations

« Last post by Target on January 01, 2009, 10:31 PM »

Kind of implies surprise that they expect anyone still to be using that old a model.

Obviously their planned obsolescence has back-fired 

-4wd (January 01, 2009, 09:45 PM)

not that uncommon - I bought my wife a creative zen mid last year.  Now I have no idea how old this model is (I assume from the price that it was runout stock), but you can't charge the thing without their proprietry drivers, and there are no drivers for Vista (which my wife uses...)

Lucky I still use XP, but still, they haven't even relied on the player failing - it's been rendered obsolete by Vista

1593

Living Room / Re: What the? - the case of the undeletable file...

« Last post by Target on December 29, 2008, 05:30 PM »

This may seem silly but is there anyway you have missed a file on the drive, network drives or in a shared files on the users computers and other computers and it is being run at startup. Try checking your startup locations in the reg, ini files and config files and any other location.

-Davidtheo (December 29, 2008, 01:35 AM)

it's possible that I've missed it, though I've done numerous searches without finding anything

I haven't checked any reg entries (or equivalent) as I haven't set any (the addin is added to the default Excel startup directory) - it seems logical (to me) though to assume that any reg entries (or equivalent) that pointed to a non-existent file would have no effect

1594

Coding Snacks / Re: Idea for a useful tool for windows

« Last post by Target on December 28, 2008, 05:28 PM »

or perhaps <a href="http://thesoftpro.tr...wnloads/fe/index.htm">Fast Explorer</a>

1595

Living Room / Re: What the? - the case of the undeletable file...

« Last post by Target on December 28, 2008, 05:10 PM »

Your knowledge of Office greatly exceeds my own. 

-gonetomorrow (December 28, 2008, 12:46 PM)

unlikely, and thanks for the link

1596

Living Room / Re: What the? - the case of the undeletable file...

« Last post by Target on December 26, 2008, 04:13 AM »

the file isn't locked, so an unlocker isn't necessary - closing excel is all thats necessary to delete the file, and once deleted the new version loads as advertised, at least until the next reboot...

I always search hidden/system files as well, just in case.  And as I said, I've scanned all the local and network drives and the file cannot be found, but it always comes back at the next reboot 

I haven't tried shredding the file, though I'm not quite sure how that might help (if the file isn't staying deleted, then it seems logical that there's something wrong with either the OS or the network, or both, though the number of occurences would indicate otherwise)

I had thought of going back to the old naming convention (I've added an 'about' button to give version info), but there is still the issue of deleting the thing should someone ever need to...

1597

General Software Discussion / Re: Bear Bottoms Freeware: A very nice high-quality software site

« Last post by Target on December 15, 2008, 12:32 AM »

Guys, please heed Deozans advice (don't feed the trolls!!)

There are 2 posters on ACF who are most prolific in their posts against (and about) BearBottoms purported activities and various character flaws and Franklin is one of them.  FYI he is permanently killfiled as I have never seen a worthwhile post from him (plenty of trash talk though)

FWIW, I've been a long time lurker in ACF and can't say as I've ever seen a post from Silverstein.  I suspect he may go under the nym of Hummingbird (I could be wrong about this, but Hummingbird is the only other poster who so vigorously pursues this line of 'discussion'...)

It's also quite possible that they are one and the same (curious that franklin appears moments after silverstein, literally coming to his defence).

Regardless, can we please not encourage them further with requests to justify themselves in any way as it's quite plain they are only looking for a forum in which to espouse their own views, which have little to do with software
 

1598

General Software Discussion / Re: Bear Bottoms Freeware: A very nice high-quality software site

« Last post by Target on December 14, 2008, 07:21 PM »

A quick browse of ACF will list innumerable threads villifying BearBottoms (and many others for that matter)

Not sure what caused the enmity certain ACFers feel about this individual but I've been a long term lurker (several years) and the ACF community seems to have been over run by a new breed of usenetters

Unfortunately it has also ceased (IMHO) to live up to any reputation it might have had as a useful source of freeware (though if your interested in name calling you might find it worth a visit...)

1599

Living Room / Re: What the? - the case of the undeletable file...

« Last post by Target on December 11, 2008, 12:37 AM »

both those articles appear to be referring to the use of the 'pps' addin in Excel (office?) 2007 which we aren't using

sounds feasible, though i can't see any reference to anything like this in any of the Excel Help files (not that that means much... )

1600

Living Room / What the? - the case of the undeletable file...

« Last post by Target on December 10, 2008, 07:32 PM »

I don't really expect to get a definitive answer to this one as there are simple too many unknowns, but...

I have written a bundle of Excel macros that are used widely throughout our company.  To simplify the distribution/installation they are packaged into an (NSIS) installer.

I recently released an update to a limited number of crash test dummies users and have run across an issue that I don't understand and which is preventing me from distributing it further.

In this release I renamed the addin to indicate the version, something I hadn't previously done.  Problem is that whilst the installer deletes all traces of the old version, the deleted file is magically reincarnated at the next reboot (and blocks the loading of the new version).

to further complicate the issue, it doesn't happen to everyone (though it is consistent for those who are afflicted).

I have been through a couple of users PC's and can find no trace of the offending file anywhere (including network drives), yet after a reboot the file returns.

I've uninstalled the addin and it still returns

We are operating on a corporate LAN using XP desktops and office 2003 - the desktop environments are (virtually) SOE so there is little room for an unruly app to be the culprit here (and what app would do something like this anyway??)

I've also asked this question on our internal tech forums and no one had any ideas or suggestions...

I realise the enormity of what I'm asking but any/all suggestions would be appreciated