Recent Posts

1626

LaunchBar Commander / Secondary monitor support

« Last post by justice on June 22, 2007, 04:25 AM »

I'm trying out Launchbar commander but I can't get the bar to appear on my second monitor. As it doesn't have a taskbar I though it would be an excellent place for the launchbar. Is it possible?

1627

General Software Discussion / Re: Automatic Reg Key Backup

« Last post by justice on June 22, 2007, 04:13 AM »

? I never actually back up registry keys prior to reinstall. do you think it is a useful practice?

1628

General Software Discussion / Re: get free licenses by signing up a new ebay account (roboform, novaPDF, etc)

« Last post by justice on June 22, 2007, 04:05 AM »

Ad Muncher supports trialpay too it seems.

1629

General Software Discussion / Enduser System Performance testing tools?

« Last post by justice on June 22, 2007, 03:48 AM »

When in the process of improving our software / os performance, there are often tweak guides mentioning to turn on /off certain features. However most times there are no benchmarking graphs that support the claim of performance increases. I'm thinking of things like turning of windows services, startup delayers, effects of fixed pagefile sizes etc.

Therefore I was wondering if anyone know of the best tool to run performance tests. Ideally it would allow you to run the right tests for multiple times, compares results with other runs (for the before/after effect) and outputs comparative results + graphs. Optionally these last steps can be done with something like Excel or another spreadsheet program.

I know Bootvis would be a likely candidate: it measures windows startup times and shows graphs of driver/service delays etc. However it is no longer supported on XP and it will cause problems on Vista. Also there are probably other tests you'd want to run, not just boot up times. A good tool would probably contain a better set of tests. Advice on which tests would measure 'performance increase' would be appreciated.

There are also performance testing tools within Vista, but they focus on making sure the system is running ok. It would need an additional layer to explain the results and how they impact on the user experience.

Then lastly there are general benchmarking suites such as 3dMark (for video) Sandra Sisoft but they again provide too much info and not distilled into a easy to compare format for system / software tweaking.

Any ideas, discussion and suggestions would be great.

1630

Developer's Corner / Re: Here's Why You Shouldn't Program Alone

« Last post by justice on June 22, 2007, 03:18 AM »

Even if you're working on a project together with others it doesn't mean they will improve your process. If you're working with a colleague with a bad attitude and no interest of improving their quality of work than it's actually hindering implementing any quality improvement practices 

Putting two 'good' people together might result in a better product than one 'good' person.

1631

General Software Discussion / Re: Is the Windows start menu dead?

« Last post by justice on June 21, 2007, 04:08 AM »

Great approach! I'm sure there's some small utility that can remove invalid shortcuts from a folder. I know crap cleaner can do it for the start menu.

1632

General Software Discussion / Re: Is an Organized Efficient Start Menu the Holy Grail of Daily Computing?

« Last post by justice on June 20, 2007, 04:19 PM »

If you need ideas for a syntax see https://www.donation...71.msg65525#msg65525
You can tag and list via farr.

1633

General Software Discussion / Re: Is the Windows start menu dead?

« Last post by justice on June 20, 2007, 09:58 AM »

Darwin I couldn't help but smile! I cannot understand why there I am unable to find any trace of discussion on this elsewhere (after a quick google)?!?

In a way the start menu is already dead, with most users I think either clicking on the few icons on their desktop, and on the other end of the spectrum launchers like FARR. Right click on your start menu and click Explore.. With Vista's/DS livesearches and a fullscreen view of your folders, there's not really any use for the start menu.However, it's one of the major symbolic items in Windows and doing away with it would probably kick up a lot of dust.

Anyone who has over 50 applications installed will soon realise it's impossible to have them all efficiently on the screen. For those who don't want to remember names to use with FARR, and as long as the icons are not as distinguished as OsX, I think it will never be a lot better than the present situation.

The existence of hundreds of application launchers proves that the situation is far from ideal. Quicksilver and FARR show the ingenius possibilities, but I don't see a great solution for the casual user?

1634

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA : go to parent folder with double-click

« Last post by justice on June 20, 2007, 07:36 AM »

Excellent stuff ak_!

1635

General Software Discussion / Re: My favorite software! What's yours?

« Last post by justice on June 20, 2007, 05:14 AM »

• MusicIP (music player)
• CrossLoop (technical assistance)
• Find and Run Robot (app launcher)
• Opera (browser)
• Topstyle Pro 3 (web development)
• MetaPad (text editor)
• WatchDog (startup delayer and system monitor)
• DirectAccess (text replacements)

1636

General Software Discussion / Re: Interesting: Tag2Find, Tagging for All Filetypes for Windows

« Last post by justice on June 20, 2007, 05:01 AM »

I recently read about FastCopy in the other thread about TeraCopy. FC has an option to enable copying alternate  streams (NTFS). Researching what this means, NTFS can store additional data which can be extracted only by a few windows commands (it's not backwards compatible). commandline Copy and echo support this, so do third party tools. However Explorer's copy does not (meaning if you copy or move the file, the data is lost -- maybe vista does this better?).

This might be the possible reason why these kind of programs work like they do, if they indeed use these alternate data streams.

1637

General Software Discussion / Re: teracopy: copy your files faster

« Last post by justice on June 20, 2007, 04:24 AM »

Quick Synopsis:

FastCopy =  Not bad at all, very light. Excellent for copying a disc to your hard drive (great if you use nLite lots). Tons of command switches, and source code available. Shows really detailed info in the dialog. Automatically saves used paths. Has no move function in context menu, but instead a delete feature. No system hooks.

-Nighted (June 15, 2007, 02:52 PM)

A few additiona and corrections: SuperCopier2 does not work on vista unfortunately (tried latest beta), even with compatibility settings. Both drag and drop and shell integration are broken.

FastCopy has no system hooks but you can create a context menu (or its own submenu) items to copy and delete folders using it. As it works on vista I will try this instead of robocopying things over via the commandline just now.

1638

General Software Discussion / Re: Is an Organized Efficient Start Menu the Holy Grail of Daily Computing?

« Last post by justice on June 20, 2007, 03:52 AM »

Would it be any use though? it would still be slower than FARR? For power users, it would have to scan the start menu periodically as well as the user might decide to move the groups manually.

You can see microsoft has given up on the start menu (in my opinion), as in vista the list of programs in the menu itself. It is harder to find the right program, unless you use the search facility. 

There is the same issue with the documents you keep. organising them can be a hell.

1639

General Software Discussion / Re: LocatePC: Free Theft Recovery Software For Your PC

« Last post by justice on June 20, 2007, 03:44 AM »

Great for college laptops I reckon. Thanks for the find.

Of course as always if the thief is smart enough they will just format it before connecting to the internet. However in most caes and in case of accidental losing work computers this could come in very handy.

1640

DcUpdater / Re: DcUpdater - Coming Soon - Teaser Screenshot

« Last post by justice on June 19, 2007, 04:09 PM »

looking good!
btw, How many hours do you estimate you will have spent on the app once you release the first version? (I am thinking of learning visual basic 2005 to build apps more advanced than ahk scripts, I am wondering if it will be a major waste of my time or not )

1641

General Software Discussion / Re: delicious and opera. Integreation

« Last post by justice on June 19, 2007, 04:37 AM »

What I just found out is that you can go import your delicious bookmarks into Opera and then weed out duplicates with Am-deadlink:

Login to delicious
go to settings -> export / backup
save the html to your desktop
Opera -> file -> import -> netscape bookmarks
They ended up for me under personal bar -> netscape bookmarks -> bookmarks

I cant' have it save any tags yet, but handy for syncing all bookmarks.

1642

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Post your FARR v2 Plugin Idea Requests Here - Plugin Writers Read In

« Last post by justice on June 19, 2007, 04:04 AM »

An idea would be to write a tagging system for Farr, where you can add tags to applications and then reload a listing of apps by typing in a

[Select]

:webdev

for example. (a shortkey for launching all items on the list would then be a productivity booster) typing a

[Select]

:

would list all tags, and use autocomplete to contruct tags.

tagging could go like this (command:tag,tag,tag,etc):

[Select]

dreamweaver :webdev,html,web

I'm not sure if it would be quick/easy enough to really use it though, although I think other people might be interested? Perhaps if popular applications would come pretagged at a later stage it would make it even easier to use

1643

General Software Discussion / Re: Is an Organized Efficient Start Menu the Holy Grail of Daily Computing?

« Last post by justice on June 19, 2007, 04:00 AM »

I used to think there should've been a utility that knows the type/categories of a piece of software, then looks at the organisational method the user created and sort all software itself based on logic. Result is an auto sorting start menu that uses a personal system. However it would be really hard to write and if its self learning (or centralised) then even more so. Most people will use similar systems however. There's a lot of effort required to make something this elegant, and no one will want to pay for using it.

There's too much effort in tagging unless a centalised system like delicious is used. Unless it's part of a launcher like FARR?

Nowadays I just use FARR and it finds applications better than any system I can specify myself.

1644

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Application Running and Notification Tool

« Last post by justice on June 13, 2007, 09:55 AM »

Run any application as a service. Perhaps you can then use the options that allow you to restart the service when it crashes or is not running etc with logging capabilities.

1645

DcUpdater / Re: DcUpdater - Coming Soon - Teaser Screenshot

« Last post by justice on June 13, 2007, 05:47 AM »

Great stuff mouser! Can't wait to find out how it works checking wise! there's a lot to it especially when supporting other people's software.

1646

General Software Discussion / Re: MOG: a different music community?

« Last post by justice on June 12, 2007, 07:57 AM »

According to wikipedia:

MOG was started by David Hyman, former CEO of Gracenote, co-founder of Addicted to Noise.

MOG is built on Web 2.0 technologies, including Ajax and Ruby on Rails, and powered by Gracenote Music ID technology.

MOG is a privately held company headquartered in Berkeley, CA. Since its launch on June 20, 2006, MOG has been featured in BoingBoing, Coolhunting, MTV.com, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Blender, Reuters, Spin.com, and many other media outlets and blogs.

1647

Living Room / Re: Is there a Safari for Windows?

« Last post by justice on June 12, 2007, 04:35 AM »

It seems faster than it is because it waits a while and then builds up the page in one pass, addin in images afterwards as they load. So part of the initial delay unconsciously you contribute to the os responding to your clicks, while safari works in the background. I think Opera builds up the page as it comes? Not sure but that seems to correspond with what I am seeing.

1648

Living Room / Re: Is there a Safari for Windows?

« Last post by justice on June 12, 2007, 04:04 AM »

Yeah they don't test CSS performance, which is where I think the majority of the performance gain comes from. It's impossible without a professional setup and some kind of application timer and browser debugger to verify the claims: a typical website can have several css files, a html file, several javascripts and dozens of images. It definately does seem quicker than IE7, similar to firefox, and slower than Opera. Sites like http://news.bbc.co.uk are really fast (must be html heavy), sites like http://zeldman.com (css heavy) are not as fast as the fastest competition), this on our work connection.

Rendering engine is great, mac on pc experience is great, native ui integration is poor, memory usage is 3x typical Opera, and it's a beta. A good first test I would say.

1649

General Software Discussion / Re: Safari 3 for Windows

« Last post by justice on June 11, 2007, 07:26 PM »

some other impressions from Gizmodo (and more)

1650

General Software Discussion / Re: teracopy: copy your files faster

« Last post by justice on June 07, 2007, 08:01 PM »

Interesting to see how this compares with Robocopy. Robocopy, or "Robust File Copy", is a command-line folder replication tool. Available as part of the Windows Resource Kit, and introduced as a standard feature of Windows Vista, Robocopy has always been available free to licensed users of Windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy