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2026
Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Clipboard Help and Spell - New Name? Avoid the NZ approach.
« Last post by IainB on September 25, 2015, 06:23 PM »
I wouldn't recommend that you change the name.

I would also suggest that you avoid taking the NZ approach, which is likely to lead to nothing but trouble:
Some time back, the Prime Minister of New Zealand apparently mooted that NZ "needed a new/redesigned flag" or something. From this grew an entire organisation geared to handling this complex and crucially important and vexing matter and canvass NZers about their thoughts (maybe even hold a referendum) - "What sort of flag would you like to see?" kind of questions. There seemed to be no doubt but that "the flag was to be changed", but changed to what? - that was the burning question occupyng our thoughts in every waking moment, and sometimes in our dreams, and sometimes felt in the cockles of our hearts, or maybe even in the sub-cockles.

There were debates/discussions and painting competitions organised in primary and secondary schools to get the children painting pictures of what sort of flag they would like to see. This must have been an unprecedented stimulus to the education system in NZ.
Meanwhile NZ Defence forces were involved as well, with submarines and frigates being commissioned and sent out with a supply of alternative possible flags, to pop up alongside the sunny beaches of the many peaceful island nations near NZ in the Pacific, and there they would display the various flags on top of the sub/frigate and ask "Which ones do you like the most?", and the crews would carefully note the responses. The startled islanders would point out one or two flags, wondering nervously whether they had selected the correct flags and whether an incorrect response on their part might be the trigger for war or a hostile invasion, or some new kind of Haka, for Kiwis are feared worldwide for their dreadfully welcoming Haka.
Some poor souls fainted clean away in terror as the thought occurred to them that by choosing the wrong answer, they might even be obliged to watch a Haka being performed, with their eyes held open by toothpicks, so that they would be unable to avoid seeing the whole terrifyingly dreary spectacle repeated a thousand times in front of them by grossly out-of-condition and badly tattoed Maori native warriors in sweaty grass skirts, or worse.

However, it turns out from a recent opinion survey of NZers (including many who hail from the aforementioned Pacific island nations) that the majority of printable responses generally fall into three categories:
  • 1. Who the heck cares?
  • 2. What does it matter?
  • 3. There are more pressing matters to address.

Incidentally, of the two  rhetorical responses, the latter famously echoes Hilary Clinton, so is not to be sniffed at.

The third response came from a group who felt that the whole flag thing was a silly and harmless diversion to take public attention away from more serious matters that the NZ government was - or was not - addressing.
Some examples were, in order of priority:
  • getting the Aussies to finally apologise for their underarm bowling and give their undeserved cricketing title to the Kiwis like an honest bloke should.
  • getting the Frogs to finally apologise and make full and formal reparations to New Zealand - and GreenPeace - for Mitterand's having authorised French government forces to commit an act of terrorism, blowing up the GreenPeace ship the Rainbow Warrior as she lay at rest in an Auckland harbour, killing one man on board and causing injury to another/others, and where the perpetrators were subsequently rewarded by being allowed free and promoted by the French government and put on fat pensions.
  • getting the Frogs to finally apologise for threatening the NZ PM with massive and disastrous economic sanctions if he didn't shut up about the matter and release those terrorists he had captured (the PM caved - he had to).
  • hold a referendum on what NZ's role should be in the proxy war being played out in the Middle East, and especially in Syria, between Russia and its allies, and the US and its allies, and how NZ should work to halt the massive tide of death and human misery this proxy war has caused, which now finds Syria even having to make the first ever withdrawal from the Arctic "Seed Doomesday Bank". If this isn't a theatrical political gesture, then it is Z59.5 (WHO disease number for Poverty) in action, and it is apparently human-caused.
2027
Living Room / Re: Preloaded spyware, courtesy Lenovo
« Last post by IainB on September 25, 2015, 04:51 PM »
I'm beginning to give up. I mean, what is the point?
"Resistance is futile!", as the soldiers on the Vogon constructor fleet said.
I suspect that there is already more than sufficient evidence to demonstrate that users are being so ceaselessly bombarded/inundated with reasons or arguments to substantiate/justify them being spied upon (for whatever reason, and whether it is by a nation's government, or some corporation, or whoever else wants to justify doing it) that they are beginning to accept it as a de facto condition of using the Internet or any telecommunications device in a Western society. It is a remorseless attack on our freedoms.

The freedoms have arguably, by now, already been lost, whilst we were sleeping, taken by those with more power than our pathetic franchise gives us, and possession being nine-tenths of the law, we are unlikely to be afforded any leeway to repossess them.

So, here we are now, seemingly left in the impotent and feeble position of considering/debating to what extent we will "allow" our freedoms to be further eroded, all the while pathetically deluding ourselves and pretending to believe that we actually have some say in the matter.

In such a storm, we will probably tend to become (or may already be becoming) desensitised to the matter.
Whenever I read this sort of discussion thread, for example, I experience ennui. I sometimes think I should change my email address to [email protected], and have done with it. I used that email address as the recommended fake browser html header when I was using JunkBuster some years back, but at the time I did not imagine that it would come to this.
2028
Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Last post by IainB on September 25, 2015, 04:00 PM »
I had been having a really strange dream that the Japs had hammered the Springboks and were going for the Rugby World Cup. Silly, I know, because everyone knows that couldn't happen - it'd be the stuff that nightmares are made of. I recall it vividly though, because I was awoken just at that point in the dream by our little boy at about 3am this morning. Poor little mite couldn't breathe - he's unwell, and his nose is all blocked up. So I sat up with him asleep upright in the crook of my arm. Unable to sleep, I got my laptop and started to read the newsfeeds in my bazqux feed aggregator, and up popped this item, and which immediately caught my attention:
Geothermal power's future may hinge on balls of DNA | Digital Trends
Geothermal exploitation uses a kind of "fracking" approach. It seems as though a bunch of canny scientists/engineers st Stanford U have teamed up and discovered an ingenious way of solving one of the major problems holding back geothermal development - i.e., where best to drill the "well" and how to best tap all the energy that it releases. They have started trialling the use of synthetic DNA to trace the underground fractures created by a well.

A lot of people don't realise that NZ is world famous not just for its All Blacks rugby team, but also for many other things too numerous to mention, including its historical ground-breaking use of geothermal energy:
Geothermal energy use in New Zealand is strongly tied to Wairakei, where the first geothermal plant was opened in 1958. At that time, it was only the second large-scale plant existing worldwide (the first being the Valle del Diavolo 'Devil's Valley' plant in Larderello, Italy opened in 1911).[5]
- Wikipedia
_______________________
As a keen environmentalist, what I find so great about this is the environmental aspect - geothermal energy has a near-zero marginal production cost and is not land-intensive (does not use a lot of land) and is one of New Zealand's most reliable renewable energy resources, currently contributing about 17% of the national grid supply.
Reliable because it is placed well above the land-intensive and "astronomical cost" (per Bill Gates) of wind and solar power, and even above the relatively cheap hydroelectricity (which currently provides more than half of the NZ grid supply), due to its lack of dependence on the weather or the rotation of the earth.

So, hats off to those Stanford U scientists/engineers.    :Thmbsup:
All countries have this energy source literally "under their feet". This discovery could now enable all countries to better locate and successfully tap their (renewable) geothermal resources for energy, which can only be good for the environment in the long run. It will provide some respite for the environment, from what have proven to be monumentally environmentally damaging and land-intensive renewables projects (onshore/offshore wind, and solar power), and any land-intensive (e.g., dams) environmental engineering projects (hydro-electric).
2029
General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced
« Last post by IainB on September 24, 2015, 05:18 PM »
My general notes about using Win10 Pro on a Toshiba Satellite L855D laptop:
  • seems very stable,
  • seems a bit slow starting up, but doesn't need rebooting all that often,
  • feels like faster response time in normal operation,
  • visually poor display quality with "flat", glary, white display, only partially fixed by use of f.lux and NoSquint,
  • high resolution DPI display translates into thin, grey or miniscule characters in the display (depending on application/font in use),
  • seriously bad ergonomics of the GUI, mostly fixed with installation of Classic Start Menu ($FREE),
  • battery saver software annoyingly reduces the display quality even further immediately the power supply is disconnected, and I haven't been able to fix this yet,
  • performance is not too bad at all (see table in image below),
  • ergonomically, I think I much prefer Win7 to Win10/Win8, and MS Office 2010 to 2013.

ToshibaL855D - Summary of WEI subscores to 2015-08-19.png
2030
General Software Discussion / Re: Chocolatey...opinions? portable?
« Last post by IainB on September 24, 2015, 06:01 AM »
Not familiar with CMM, so am scanning a Wikipedia page for it (perhaps that's not too awful ;)).
___________________

Try this. I think it will still work: CMM - Capability Maturity Model
2031
Screenshot Captor / Re: delayed screenshot and context menus
« Last post by IainB on September 24, 2015, 04:14 AM »
@IainB - thanks for the Send to OneNote tip (never knew it was there), sometimes I want to OCR a pop up, also good to have a backstop for SC
RP
_______________________

Be aware that there seems to be an undefined threshold in the number of words in an image, below which ON will not OCR scan the text:
2. OneNote OCR threshold text: I have noticed that OneNote will not OCR scan and index text in any image on a page where the amount of text is below some undefined threshold.
For example, yesterday, I clipped the image of a subtitle on a video where the text in the image was:
"ice age is creeping over the northern hemisphere even then it won't be as bad" (i.e., 15 words).
I then got OneNote to select the text from the image , and OneNote reported a longish error message that began:
    This image does not contain any recognised text. ...

ABBYY Screenshot Reader (was $FREE) is probably the best bet for OCR capture of text in images with few words in - seems to work every time. It is also unique in that it can capture columnar text and maintains the text in columnar position in the output. Pretty nifty.
2032
Living Room / Re: good Videos [short films] here :)
« Last post by IainB on September 24, 2015, 01:36 AM »
Monsanto Lobbyist Runs Away When Asked To Drink ‘Harmless’ Pesticide:
https://www.youtube..../watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM

Hahaha, that was priceless. Wot an idiot.
2033
Developer's Corner / Re: Ethics in Technology
« Last post by IainB on September 24, 2015, 01:05 AM »
Following the above comments, I would suggest from experience that the consideration of shady/dodgy, immoral, corrupt, unethical, borderline legal and downright illegal strategies is arguably the necessary norm for savvy senior management in many/most organisations, not just the three mentioned in the OP.
The proof of that is a history littered with relatively recent examples of this, in different countries worldwide, and would include governments, quangos, for-profit corporations, non-profits, and grant-funded academic/scientific research organisations. Of course, it goes without saying that ordinarily overtly criminal organisations would be in the mix as well.

For overtly non-criminal organisations, it will usually all be very hard-nosed and with defined, deliberate objectives, and in most cases require a collective/team effort to get it sanctioned  - if only tacitly - within the organisation, often/usually at Board level.
If the strategists have a strategy that can do something to maximise or optimise their profitability/gain, and if their evaluation of the risks and probabilities of critical blowback (i.e., unacceptable risks, where the potential financial risks might far outweigh the potential financial benefits) tells them that they can probably get away with it with minimal subsequent collateral damage control, then they are likely to feel obliged to seriously consider employing that strategy.

I am not sure whether it would be correct to label the strategists involved - or the other people they will necessarily co-opt along the way to help them pursue the strategy selected - as "bad" people. "Misguided", or of "deficient character" in some way, perhaps, yes - e.g., spineless - but, "bad"?
"Stupid" might be more appropriate, even for the clever ones.

I have in the past been put under enormous pressure, including thinly-veiled threats, in two different organisations, to enable something morally wrong to be accomplished at the financial expense of others, and in both cases I declined and in both cases it cost me my job.

The first case:
This was an internal matter in a major shared IT services subsidiary owned by a consortium of the New Zealand trading banks, where the senior management wanted to essentially rip off the pension funds of a group of non-management personnel during a planned restructuring/downsizing, which would leave the management group pension fund holding the seized funds by default, and thus any managers who were made redundant would be left laughing all the way to the bank.
As a highly ethical member of the senior management team and with no financial interest in the pension funds involved, I had documented a reasoned memo recommending that the matter be put on the agenda and addressed as important by the staff association committee, as it could have been perceived in hinsight (after the event) as being grossly unfair and tantamount to constructive theft. That rather set the cat amongst the pigeons.
A member of the senior management team came to quietly advise me that the management team were not happy about the memo, and that I was required to formally rescind it, whereupon the matter would be forgotten, or something.
The ominous threat was then conveyed that, "otherwise", I would be considered as "not playing as a member of the management team". Scary stuff.
The cretin who had been selected as messenger to deliver this cowardly verbal message to me, and whom I had previously held in high regard as a professional and able manager, was unaware that I had no tolerance at all for people who made threats or tried to intimidate me, so I politely told him that I would not rescind the memo and sat back to await events.
_______________________

The second Case:
This was a major New Zealand-owned (including a government stake) company whose output formed a significant item of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) for the national economy, and a hugely significant export item in the national accounts.
I was responsible for managing a portfolio of around 80 IT-related projects for the company's worldwide operations. The projects ranged in estimated cost from at least NZ$500K to several millions of dollars, and a conventional project lifecycle management method was used. One of these projects came to the BC (Business Case) stage, with a verbal request for URGENCY from my manager, and my job was simply to ensure that the BC was put swiftly through the usual gates in the formal project review process before being recommended for capex (capital expenditure) approval.

The BC had evidently come down from on high as it was apparently already signed off by (from memory) the then CEO and relevant senior/business stakeholder managers, but not the CFO.
The BC was based on the proposal for a restructuring of the SAP system for the company's organisation in a foreign nation. I saw (as an accountant) that this would effectively restructure the books of the company, but that was all, and I couldn't quite see why the urgency nor the point of it all until I came to the Benefits (short-term) part of the BC, which said that the restructured accounts (costing a modest outlay) would then configure the company such that it would be a de facto qualifying candidate for an approx. $5M once-off grant from the foreign government's revenue authority, under a specific government Act that had been passed to afford economic stimulus to a certain type of company with this structure.

Interested, but skeptical, I reread the BC and then did some research on the foreign government's Act in question. What I quickly discovered was that the Act would most definitely have delivered the grant funds BUT, if the organisation applying for the grant did not already have the required accounting structure, and if it then restructured solely to take advantage of the grant, then not only would this invalidate the organisation's application for the grant, but also it would be considered as a federal offence with severe penalties attached. I couldn't believe the mind-boggling idiocy of the proposers of this BC, and presumed that the senior managers who had already signed off on this had not been made aware of the risks. I mean not just the financial risks, but also the huge political/legal risks of a New Zealand (with government as a major stakeholder) organisation knowingly and deliberately defrauding the foreign government of a country where that government had allowed the company to operate, expecting it to obey that country's laws. I pointed out where, the same organisation, but in an earlier form, had similarly breached regulations in a large European market, and that had had major adverse repercussions for the organisation's profitability, the New Zealand government, and the New Zealand economy for several years after.

So, in plain English, I detailed the technical and financial/political/legal risks, said that it was thus not recommended for capex approval, and passed the BC back to the sponsor, whereupon all Hell started to let loose.
About 30 minutes later, our manager - whom I tried to respect but whom I felt adequately fitted (by his actions) the description "a f-ing idiot" conferred upon him ungenerously by my possibly more perspicacious colleagues - aggressively confronted me in my cubicle and asked me why I had not approved the BC. He was angry, so I presume someone had kicked his backside over this. He explained that the Executive wanted this BC to be approved for capex so that it could start immediately, and the $5M flow of benefits could thus be accounted for in this FYE. He needed me to approve it, now. At this, my lights went on. The risks had already been understood before I had clapped eyes on the BC. Some people just don't learn.

So I carefully repeated the description of the critical financial/political/legal risks and said that in all conscience I couldn't approve something as risky as that - it was outside of my fiduciary authority to approve - and if I did approve it, then if/when the thing backfired, the auditors would know who to come and blame for it. It would be repeating a mistake from the organisation's history. He got the point and rushed off to talk to his betters and I went home as it was the end of the day.

He was back first thing the next morning, still aggressive and angry. Clearly, he was under a lot of pressure over this matter,  and he thought I was being difficult. Through sometimes clenched teeth he instructed me to review the BC for technical risks and write a fresh report and recommendation for capex. on that basis alone, and I was NOT to review the financial/political/legal risks.
I looked at him and decided my colleagues were definitely correct in their estimation of this guy's abilities.
I patiently pointed out that by hamstringing me like that, I would be unable to properly perform my role, which had been created to avoid a repetition of former days when many IT projects had run aground because of inadequate risk management and projects thus getting capex. approval and then failing miserably and causing severe financial loss. I watched his face. Oh dear. The truth. But he seemed trapped by fear and couldn't budge.

So of course he insisted I do as he instructed, and so I did, carefully mentioning in my report that my risk review did not cover any potential financial/political/legal risks, and recommended it for capex. on that basis alone.
However, being scrupulously ethical in business matters, by nature and from training for work in very high security and fiduciary management areas, I could not leave it there. It was my problem and it was like a huge gorilla on my back, which was simply unfair, as it was the organisation's problem. So I made it SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) and dumped it back on the organisation that had created it. I copied my two reports on the BC to the Internal Audit manager, with a covering email that suggested the BC be audited for critical potential overseas risk assessment, and that if this was outside of their jurisdiction then they might consider asking the external auditors for advice on the financial/political/legal risks. That way, left and right hands got the message, and were left holding the responsibility, and it would be too hot to handle. An Internal Audit function is usually beholden only to the Board/CFO, but I had delivered the problem to them in such a way as they couldn't suppress or ignore it and would be obliged to take it to the External Auditors, who would put the kibosh on it PDQ - which is what I later gathered had happened.
_______________________
2034
Developer's Corner / Re: Ethics in Technology
« Last post by IainB on September 23, 2015, 09:06 AM »
The OP seems to be making the judgement/assertion that AVG, Microsoft, and Volkswagon have somehow been unethical/immoral and worked against the public good.
Is that necessarily true?

What do we mean by "ethics" and "morals" anyway?

Definitions:
  • ethics:
    · pl. n.
    1 [usu. treated as pl.] the moral principles governing or influencing conduct.
    2 [usu. treated as sing.] the branch of knowledge concerned with moral principles.
    – DERIVATIVES ethicist n.
    Concise Oxford Dictionary (10th Ed.)
    _____________________

  • moral:
    · adj.
    1 concerned with the principles of right and wrong behaviour and the goodness or badness of human character.
    2 adhering to the code of behaviour that is considered right or acceptable.
    · n.
    1 a lesson that can be derived from a story or experience.
    2 (morals) standards of behaviour, or principles of right and wrong.
    – DERIVATIVES morally adv.
    – ORIGIN ME: from L. moralis, from mos, mor- ‘custom’, (pl.) mores ‘morals’.
    Concise Oxford Dictionary (10th Ed.)
    _____________________
2035
Living Room / Re: Video-Game Algorithm to Solve Online Abuse?
« Last post by IainB on September 23, 2015, 04:09 AM »
...If more communities on the web could just be more like here...
_________________________

I suspect you hit the nail on the head there by use of the word "communities". I think it was the Bell Hawthorne Labs workgroup experiments in the '50s that showed pretty conclusively that a workgroup community will tend to generate its own collective ethos - i.e., the characteristic spirit of the community as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations.
One of the conclusions was that, whilst one can dictate formal rules, the group will find its own vector and rules regardless and may even informally overturn any formal rules set that it does not agree with.

To avoid this, @mouser's relatively laissez-faire approach, coupled with a strict diversion of irrelevant (to the forum) or flameworthy discussions to the private Basement area probably ensures that the forum is controlled and the community cannot hijack it and alter the ethos. The forum thus retains an air of being very much "@mouser's front room", and people seem to respect that.
It seems to be a fairly straightforward approach to maintaining a public focus on what matters to the forum, and because the forum does not necessarily condone or agree with what goes on in the Basement, the robot.txt file blocks crawlers, so the Basement content can never appear in searches or the Wayback machine and is thus effectively expunged.

Any problems or issues arising in the public forum otherwise seem to be managed adequately by admins or forum members putting people straight.

The result is arguably a relatively stable, well-focused forum, and at a personal level the donation aspect probably tends to give a subconscious feeling of individual personal buy-in and commitment to the community, amongst DCF members. It seems to work.
2036
General Software Discussion / Re: Chocolatey...opinions? portable?
« Last post by IainB on September 23, 2015, 12:18 AM »
...I'd guess it's quite normal for something of this nature to not have documentation that's spelled out tidily -- but apart from docs, who knows how well the software behaves in practice (it might be fine, just haven't tested)!  Single programmer working for fun in spare time and all :)
_________________________

Yes, sure, but I wasn't suggesting that the AS-IS process had to be covered by "documentation that's spelled out tidily", but that the documentation should always  - at any point in time - accurately reflect the AS-IS process (regardless of the form that the documentation took).
I wasn't trying to denigrate the efforts of the people who got the video to that state, I was trying to show a line of reasoning, based on general theory, that the likelihood of being able to automate the relevant AS-IS processes seemed potentially low. I put the video link there because I reckon it was fantastic - I mean, it seemed really impressive in what it showed could be done there. It's just that, if you have that dependency - i.e., that you need to be a Grade A systems mechanic, or something, or drag one around with you to get it all working - then it's unlikely to be of much use to the general public/user. Only the techos would really be able to take advantage of all that good technology. So that could probably be quite a severe a limitation as to practical usage/applicability.

A key realisation to the understanding of the CMM and its implications is that, to all practical intents and purposes, if a process is generally likely to be in a perpetual or semi-perpetual state of dynamic change - e.g., as in CMM Level 1 (Ad hoc/Chaotic) or Level 2 (Repeatable) - then it is impermanent, and, try as one might to define it and automate it, it would be likely to keep changing whilst one was doing that, thus invalidating the definition/automation.  A bit like trying to pin down a blob of mercury. It would be a process that was probably outside of one's control, and would almost certainly be out of statistical control (Shewhart, Deming et al), so it would be unpredictable, by definition.

Automation necessarily carries the prerequisite of predictability of the AS-IS process and its outcomes.

Interestingly, and as an aside, the characteristics of organisations whose processes are generally at CMM Level 1 or 2 can typically include:
  • (a) the working environment is chaotic,
  • (b) there is a low level of general knowledge/understanding as to how the core business processes operate,
  • (c) there is a lack of mutual professional respect,
  • (d) there is frustration with the seeming inability to manage projects in a consistent, orderly and planned fashion,
  • (e) there is a persistent culture of blame,
  • (f) the rate of staff turnover is relatively high.

 - so if that seems somewhat déjà vu, then that could be the the explanation as to why.
2037
Screenshot Captor / Re: delayed screenshot and context menus
« Last post by IainB on September 21, 2015, 02:27 PM »
This is an interesting thread. For a long time I have had similar difficulties with SC in capturing transient objects such as pop-up or drop-down menus from some applications, so tend to now always first try to do the captures of these using the MS Office OneNote STOT (Send to OneNote Tool).
STOT "freezes" the whole screen - including any transients objects - so you can take your time and do a clip of whichever part of the screen you select. Though the clips are not necessarily as professional-looking as SC's active window captures, it works and is fast, with the clips going to Clipboard and to a page in a default OneNote Notebook.

However, if I want to do any image manipulation, I import the image from Clipboard into SC, because the OneNote capability for image manipulation is rubbish by comparison.

If the transient objects limitation in SC has been overcome - which seems to be the case(?) - then that's very good news. Shall check it out.
2038
General Software Discussion / Re: Chocolatey...opinions? portable?
« Last post by IainB on September 21, 2015, 12:39 PM »
...Does that sound about right?...
_______________________

Hahaha, well it looks like it could be, but it seems that there's probably a lot more going on - or at least implicit in what is going on - than a simple précis such as yours might be able to do justice to.
For example, one of the implications that stood out for me was the potential usefulness of all the tools that were being used in a linked/sequential fashion. The demo showed it all being done manually (by typing commands into the PowerShell interface), complete with errors and then corrections, at the keyboard. The person at the keyboard probably needs to be something like (say) a Grade A system mechanic in the systems being used with current knowledge all in his head as he types - and he did say he had spent a lot of time getting to that point - so there's a dependency right there.

Could it be done by an inexperienced operator/user? Probably not without further automation.
The challenge would thus seem to be to encapsulate/automate all of what he did, as (say) a batch job or (better) via a stable and robust GUI wizard interface.
The OP for this thread requests opinions/thoughts about Chocolatey and using it as a portable tool. Portability might actually make what already seems to be a powerful and complex toolset even more complex to use, and thus more complex/difficult to automate (e.g., a decision table with too many potential decision branches with unknown exits in the process to be able to easily cater for them all). Furthermore, even if you did manage to automate it, would the potential impermanence of some of the toolset components frustrate the objective of the wizard GUI?

What I mean by that is, looking at it from a theoretical perspective, if:
  • (a) the AS-IS process steps to achieve a given outcome are undocumented or poorly documented and liable to be changed at short notice in an uncontrolled fashion, then they are Ad hoc (CMM Level 1) - aka Chaotic. It would be a waste of time trying to automate that as the risk would be that by the time you had automated and tested the automation, the process steps could have been changed without your knowledge, pulling the rug out from underneath you, as it were. So that would not be recommended as a cost-effective action.

  • (b) the AS-IS process steps to achieve a given outcome are undocumented or poorly documented at best, and used repeatably and are thus more reliable, but still changed in an uncontrolled fashion, then they are Repeatable (CMM Level 2), and though it might seem worthwhile to try to automate that, it still carries the same risk as in (a). So that would not be recommended as a cost-effective action.

  • (c) the AS-IS process steps to achieve a given outcome are defined and documented and used repeatably and only changed occasionally in a relatively controlled fashion, then they are Defined (CMM Level 3), and reliable to the extent that it would probably be worthwhile putting the effort into trying to automate the process. So that would be recommended as a cost-effective action.

Things get even better at CMM Levels above that, but - and I could be wrong, of course - I get the impression from the video that the CMM Level in this case was likely to be 1 or 2, but not 3 for some/most of the toolset components - in which case, from a risk-avoidance perspective - you take the lowest CMM Level of any part of the AS-IS process as your LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) and overall CMM level (it's the weakest link). That could be termed as being "Not yet ready for Prime Time", or something.

Therefore, overall, I'd not be too optimistic about the process being something that could be fully automated with (say) a GUI wizard on the front. However, if one had the resources, an experimental approach might still be interesting. Try to do an exploratory "suck-it-and-see" - i.e., build a prototype of the automation Wizard - and see how long it lasts before a change (or successive changes) in the toolset breaks it. The trick then would be to see if you could obtain advance warning of any impending changes, so as to have a fix in place for the Wizard in sufficiently timely fashion as to avoid the Wizard failing.

A bit of a rant:
A current example of an update process with an LCD at CMM Level 1 (Ad hoc/Chaotic) could be the process for releasing Mozilla Firefox Beta versions. I subscribe to the Beta release channel, and I have to put up with releases coming out like water sputtering out of a hosepipe with air-locks. Just about every release screws something or other up, typically breaking one or several FF add-ons/extensions, and usually for no other better reason than that the probably overworked add-on developers don't have the time/resources to jump when FF says "Jump!" and so don't manage to get the add-on verified in time for the uncontrolled release schedule.
So the add-ons tab is spattered with disabled add-ons, because some wag at Mozilla has issued a bureaucratic mandate that all add-ons must be verified by Mozilla for each new FF release or the add-on will be disabled, or something.

Wherever you get CMM Level 1 or 2, you can usually identify cost inefficiencies and waste. The above Beta release process is what is often referred to by the euphemism "uncontrolled release management" in ITIL-speak, and is simply nothing more than just bad IT service management practice where the use of the term "management" could be a moot point.
The amount of work it creates (a lot of which may be unnecessary/unproductive) for the add-on developers must be rather like an iceberg, and Mozilla probably isn't paying these third-party developers to dance to their tune either, so it seems to be a cynical cost-transfer or economic externalisation exercise with "all care and no responsibility" on Mozilla's part, and with the developers footing the bill.
Quite a lot of pundits seem to be saying that Mozilla might have had a "cultural collapse" and lost sight of their original objectives, and that this verification dance is likely one of the outcomes from that collapse - and they may be right, but I couldn't possibly comment.
2039
Living Room / Google Drive webhosting functionality to be shut down. (AOBTD)
« Last post by IainB on September 20, 2015, 08:54 PM »
"Another one bites the dust."

I only discovered by chance that Google Drive webhosting functionality is to be shut down by Google.
It was from here: Google Starts Deprecating Web Hosting Support In Google Drive | TechCrunch
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Posted Aug 31, 2015 by Frederic Lardinois (@fredericl)

One of the lesser-known features of Google Drive has always been its ability to host basic web sites for free. If you only found out about this from the preceding sentence, you now have one year to enjoy this tool. Google today announced that it will deprecate the web hosting service starting today and will turn it off completely on August 31, 2016.

The company says that in the time since it launched this feature three years ago, “a wide variety of public web content hosting services have emerged,” so it has decided to discontinue the feature in order to focus on the core user experience in Drive. That’s been the standard reason for Google to deprecate services lately, but it’s still a bit of a surprise that the company would turn off hosting support.

For now, you can still use Drive to host basic sites that only need a few JavaScript resources and CSS files. You can’t use any server-side scripting tools, of course, but Drive has always been a useful service for quickly putting up a basic site. It even offers an API for developers.

Google itself, of course, offers Google Sites as part of its Google Apps for Work package as an alternative. It feels like it’s been a while since Sites got any major update, though, and it doesn’t quite offer the same flexibility when hosting your own sites.

It’s worth noting that others, like GitHub, for example, have long offered a very similar service. In addition, you can also use Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service, Dropbox and a number of other services for hosting basic sites.
___________________________

The source was Google Apps Develpers'Blog: Deprecating web hosting support in Google Drive
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Monday, August 31, 2015 | 10:22 AM
Labels: Google Drive
Posted by Dan McGrath, Product Manager, Google Drive

Beginning August 31st, 2015, web hosting in Google Drive for users and developers will be deprecated. You can continue to use this feature for a period of one year until August 31st, 2016, when we will discontinue serving content via googledrive.com/host/[doc id].

In the time since we launched web hosting in Drive, a wide variety of public web content hosting services have emerged. After careful consideration, we have decided to discontinue this feature and focus on our core user experience.

For those who have used Drive to host websites, Google Domains can refer you to third parties for website hosting functionality.

For those who use this feature to serve non-user content to web and mobile applications, Google Cloud Platform offers a better-performing solution.

Google Drive - a safe place for all your files (650).png

Definition: "deprecate" = a new ambiguous and  clichéd euphemism to be used at all times in place of anything remotely specific but especially including such as  "shut down", "terminate", "kill off", "remove (life) support".
Never to be used in the same sentence with "excited".
Avoid confusion with "depreciate", "deprecatingly", "decapitate".
Usage: "the terrorist was deprecated with prejudice after decapitating his prisoner", or "we deprecated 2,000 of our personnel today as a cost-cutting measure", "the HR manager responsible for hiring the unabomber onto the corporate payroll has been deprecated", "we deprecated the solar generation plant as it had depreciated to zero with no residual value".
 - Source: Grooglespeak vocab and labelling guidelines (2015) © Groogle SpinWriting Corp. AL.
2040
...and I always have the choice of where to save...
__________________

Good point.
I always want my working stuff on my client PC's hard drive, and in the Cloud (for backup/contingency). So I attempt to get the best of both worlds and usually save to the OneDrive directory on my hard drive, and I have my User documents directory mapped to OneDrive.

With OneNote though - and which is part of MS Office - I got OneNote to move all my primary Notebooks from their former default location on the hard drive to OneDrive. That way, they don't figure as a workload component in my usual backup regime (I TRUST OneDrive) and can be accessed by others (OneNote is a pretty good collaboration tool). The Notebooks are cached to the hard drive and can be accessed when offline.

For example, the other day I was sat down alongside my daughter, and we each had a laptop on our laps, and I introduced her to using OneNote and Excel and SC (Screenshot Captor) to:
  • 1. write up the notes for her latest science assignment (using OneNote), with me working collaboratively online;
  • 2. conduct a statistical analysis and charting of the time series data (observations) involved (using Excel and its graphing capability);
  • 3. save the Excel Workbook as an embedded file in her Notebook.
  • 4. manipulate images captured in OneNote (manipulation done using SC);

Having learned what drudgery it is to try and do that sort of thing by hand, even using a scientific calculator, and never having previously understood what OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) or collaborative online working implied, she was blown away by the experience - very impressed. There'll be no holding her back now!
2041
...so I don't have to endure the aforementioned font rendering problem...
__________________

So now that you have installed (?) MS Office 2010 on your Windows OS, how it it working out? Is it more legible?
What OS are you using?
Are you using the 32 or 64 bit version of MS Office?

I am using 32-bit MS Office 2013, on Win10-64bit Pro.
My eyes really object to the glary display.
2042
General Software Discussion / Re: Chocolatey...opinions? portable?
« Last post by IainB on September 19, 2015, 04:47 PM »
@panzer's list above shows that there are several options for third-party non-proprietary application AUMs (Auto-Update Managers) in the market, and an exhaustively comprehensive list could well be much longer.
...
I gave up as I found that they generally tended to have some unavoidable common limitations which, taken together, made them not-so-useful for my purposes.
_______________________________

That had been the case here too, but things seem to have evolved over the years -- of course, my criteria are different.  For example, I'd much prefer something along the lines of:

* Can examine, tweak and extend source code of the system, but also allow creation of 'recipes' for additional software with a reasonable amount of effort
* Can build with tools which I 'can build' / trust
* The system itself being portable
* Not requiring additional components to be installed (or minimal additions if possible -- it turns out that there appears to be a version of Scoop which runs with PowerShell 2 so PowerShell 3 may not have to be installed if one is using Windows 7 SP1)

As we're likely all aware, the installation / deployment step has been abused in recent years so some might say it's prudent to be on the paranoid side regarding tools and systems that aid in such processes :)
_______________________________________

Things certainly do seem to have evolved over the years.
Quite by chance, I stumbled upon these links (below) whilst looking at ways to automate the updates of AutoHotkey  Hotkey files across disparate client devices, via the Internet.
The vid in the first link is very instructive - about 36mins. long.
The second link is what led me to the first, and it has some useful information there.
  • Chocolatey Hotkey – using and creating plugins, hosts, and libraries | AlexDresko.com

  • Chocolatey + AutoHotKey = Chocolatey Hotkey (CHK) | AlexDresko.com
    ...Wouldn’t it be cool if anyone could quickly and easily install one of your AHK scripts on their own computer?  Or imagine sitting down at someone’s computer and typing a simple command to install an AHK script that you find useful.  And wouldn’t it be cool if others could contribute to this mechanism to create a community of easily installable and maintainable scripts?!?!?

    You can now, with Chocolatey Hotkey (CHK). CHK is, essentially, a package manager for AutoHotKey scripts that utilizes Chocolatey for distribution. It is also a great way to modularize your scripts as plugins instead of having one big AHK script that you have to maintain.  ...
    ______________________
2043
This looked like it might be useful - I think I shall trial it for my use, anyway - I stumbled upon it whilst searching the AutoHotkey Help file (which is a mine of information):
Hotstring Helper

Andreas Borutta suggested the following script, which might be useful if you are a heavy user of hotstrings. By pressing Win+H (or another hotkey of your choice), the currently selected text can be turned into a hotstring. For example, if you have "by the way" selected in a word processor, pressing Win+H will prompt you for its abbreviation (e.g. btw) and then add the new hotstring to the script. It will then reload the script to activate the hotstring.

Code: Autohotkey [Select]
  1. #h::  ; Win+H hotkey
  2. ; Get the text currently selected. The clipboard is used instead of
  3. ; "ControlGet Selected" because it works in a greater variety of editors
  4. ; (namely word processors).  Save the current clipboard contents to be
  5. ; restored later. Although this handles only plain text, it seems better
  6. ; than nothing:
  7. AutoTrim Off  ; Retain any leading and trailing whitespace on the clipboard.
  8. ClipboardOld = %ClipboardAll%
  9. Clipboard =  ; Must start off blank for detection to work.
  10. Send ^c
  11. if ErrorLevel  ; ClipWait timed out.
  12.     return
  13. ; Replace CRLF and/or LF with `n for use in a "send-raw" hotstring:
  14. ; The same is done for any other characters that might otherwise
  15. ; be a problem in raw mode:
  16. StringReplace, Hotstring, Clipboard, ``, ````, All  ; Do this replacement first to avoid interfering with the others below.
  17. StringReplace, Hotstring, Hotstring, `r`n, ``r, All  ; Using `r works better than `n in MS Word, etc.
  18. StringReplace, Hotstring, Hotstring, `n, ``r, All
  19. StringReplace, Hotstring, Hotstring, %A_Tab%, ``t, All
  20. StringReplace, Hotstring, Hotstring, `;, ```;, All
  21. Clipboard = %ClipboardOld%  ; Restore previous contents of clipboard.
  22. ; This will move the InputBox's caret to a more friendly position:
  23. SetTimer, MoveCaret, 10
  24. ; Show the InputBox, providing the default hotstring:
  25. InputBox, Hotstring, New Hotstring, Type your abreviation at the indicated insertion point. You can also edit the replacement text if you wish.`n`nExample entry: :R:btw`::by the way,,,,,,,, :R:`::%Hotstring%
  26. if ErrorLevel  ; The user pressed Cancel.
  27.     return
  28. IfInString, Hotstring, :R`:::
  29. {
  30.     MsgBox You didn't provide an abbreviation. The hotstring has not been added.
  31.     return
  32. }
  33. ; Otherwise, add the hotstring and reload the script:
  34. FileAppend, `n%Hotstring%, %A_ScriptFullPath%  ; Put a `n at the beginning in case file lacks a blank line at its end.
  35. Sleep 200 ; If successful, the reload will close this instance during the Sleep, so the line below will never be reached.
  36. MsgBox, 4,, The hotstring just added appears to be improperly formatted.  Would you like to open the script for editing? Note that the bad hotstring is at the bottom of the script.
  37. return
  38.  
  39. MoveCaret:
  40. IfWinNotActive, New Hotstring
  41.     return
  42. ; Otherwise, move the InputBox's insertion point to where the user will type the abbreviation.
  43. Send {Home}{Right 3}
  44. SetTimer, MoveCaret, Off
  45. return
2044
@mouser: Well it happened first in SC (v4.12.0) whilst using a Samsung-S3 laptop, and I (erroneously, as it turned out) put it down to probably being the Samsung's keyboard, which seems to have a problem that needs fixing at the BIOS level (the function keys, and function lock do not work properly). I guessed that the keyboard control processor or mouse could be outputting garbled instructions, or something.

However, yesterday I was using SC (v4.12.0) on a ToshibaL855D laptop and was surprised to see the exact same error. Now I think that by that stage, all the Win10 and MS Office auto-updates had completed, and it was then that I updated SC to v4.13.0. Testing after  that showed to my pleasant surprise that the error seemed to have gone away.

So, though I feel reasonably sure from the foregoing that the SC v4.13.0 update probably fixed it, I can't be certain.
I did think of doing exactly what you suggest - namely, "...install 4.12 on top of 4.13 temporarily and see if the problem is still there. ...", but, as you suggest, it is a new/uncommon issue, and since it's "gone away", I'd be unwilling to invest any more of my time in it unless I had to for some reason. It'd be of academic value at best.

You ask me "you do know that SC has a very easy built-in ability to combine images side-by-side (vertically, horizontally, with various automatic resizing options)?". Yes, I do know that, and I have occasionally used that functionality and its overlaying capability when I have needed it, but for me the issue tends to be "what's the quickest or most efficient way of getting the image manipulation done effectively?", and since a lot of the image capture tends to be via OneNote's Send to OneNote clipping tool, and imprecise clips are fine, then it is easiest to do it all in OneNote, wrapped up amongst the text in some notes, and completed there. The quality of the result is usually pretty impressive.

However, OneNote's image manipulation and drawing tools are mediocre at best, its overlaying is a joke and doesn't work, and so I rarely, if ever use OneNote for those things. Instead, to get the job done quickly, efficiently and effectively I then always use SC. In fact, it was whilst I was coaching my daughter on the use of SC for some work on a school project that I observed the error on her Samsung-S3 laptop. I'd told her how great SC was and how it made light work of the heavy lifting of image manipulation, and there it didn't work!    :-[

I was wanting to get to the bottom of it, and I was using the Toshiba as that was a known quantity. It's a virtual no-brainer to always use SC, because that is usually rock solid and reliable.

Looking ahead, it would be great if I could use SC in place of Send to OneNote, as a more efficient input front end to OneNote and as an efficient input front end to ABBYY Screenshot Reader. It would be even better if SC was also integrated with CHS and/or the MS OCR API - as I think I have separately suggested for CHS. ...    :)
2045
General Software Discussion / Re: Must be too easy ? or Windows 10 does not like it
« Last post by IainB on September 18, 2015, 05:33 PM »
...This guy is now looking at ~1,000 man-hours rebuilding a database from paper files ... Because there just wasn't time to lock anything down properly...or do backups for that matter.
_________________________________

Interesting. Look at it from an accounting perspective.
So, it's necessary to rebuild a mission-critical database from scratch. right? And he's the only guy that can do it?
Let's see now...that's equivalent to 1000/40=25 40-hour working weeks of paid effort...
That's 25/48*100=52% of a working year.
Just for the sake of argument, let's say he's paid at the rate of $50/hr...
He's looking at 1000*50=$50,000 pay, right there.    :o
Of course, once it's been rebuilt, there'll be an awful lot of extra work to verify/correct data quality, and design, set up, test and operate all those new backup/recovery/network and contingency processes that weren't there before - so's the database can't be lost so easily again, see?

I could be wrong, of course, without knowing the context and details, but this incident seems like it could offer some good job continuity/security for at least a year in these uncertain times.
If he's an employee, then maybe the guy is pretty smart.
If the job's done properly, it will be a long-lasting risk mitigation strategy for the company data and he'll be a hero. It sounds like it should've been done years ago.
2046
Just some feedback about a problem that SC v4.13.0 seems to have fixed and that I had thought was probably a OneNote issue, not a SC issue.
The MS OneNote user can copy from any OneNote page an image or a note "canvas"/placeholder containing images and text, and whatever was copied can then be pasted as a single image into an image-handling app. (e.g., irfanview). It's very handy.

Yesterday and today, using SC on two different laptops, I noticed that if:
  • I clipped 2 separate images into OneNote, using the Send to OneNote tool, and then
  • abutted the images on a Onenote page, one above the other with an invisible join so you didn't see the point where they met/joined, and then
  • selected and copied both images simultaneously, or just copied the container holding them, and then
  • pasted that into SC, or did a Create new image from Clipboard image, and then
  • did a Deluxe splice that cut across the invisible join in the image,
  • then SC would hang and could not be used, so I would have to kill the SC process and restart it to continue.

This was repeatable, but the workaround was to make sure that the image had been saved in its file first, and then perform the Deluxe splice. There was then no SC hang.

However, I can report that this behaviour seems to have gone away in the SC v4.13.0 Beta update, but there have also been some MS Office updates occurring in the background, so I am unsure as to which update (of MS Office or SC) is to blame for fixing the problem.

I was actually just on the point of using a NirSoft tool to extract the details of the contents of the Clipboard, so I could send it to you to see if you could throw some light on this behaviour, when I ran the SC v4.13.0 Beta update on one of the laptops and tested it and found this peculiar problem had gone away.

Hope that makes sense and is useful info.
2047
General Software Discussion / Re: Chocolatey...opinions? portable?
« Last post by IainB on September 18, 2015, 11:17 AM »
@panzer's list above shows that there are several options for third-party non-proprietary application AUMs (Auto-Update Managers) in the market, and an exhaustively comprehensive list could well be much longer. By "non-proprietary" I am excluding here the proprietary AUMs, such as, for example (say), the Toshiba AUM that is part of the OEM installation on Toshiba laptops and which is designed for maintaining consistency/currency of the OEM-branded components of desktop client images.

From experience, updating apps tends to potentially be a chore and a time bandit, and so, over the years I have often wanted to use non-proprietary application AUMs. However, after trialing several, I gave up as I found that they generally tended to have some unavoidable common limitations which, taken together, made them not-so-useful for my purposes.
For example, the main ones for me:
  • Performance impacts: They sometimes became a CPU priority and resource hog - though they might otherwise have worked quite well.
  • Rigid defaults: They would be designed to only install apps in their default location - whereas my peculiar requirements might often necessitate that some apps be installed in my own designated program folders, rather than, for example (say), Program Files.
  • Scope constraints: They were generally unable to manage a lot of the apps for which I required to have automated updates.

Having said that, AUMs are well worth considering (especially where $FREE) as they could potentially serve a useful purpose for maintaining consistency/currency of desktop client images, either in a home environment/network or a small business environment/network, and they could definitely help reduce the chore and time bandit factors.

The most prominent AUM - and one that most Windows users would tend to be familiar with - is Microsoft's Windows Update, which updates not only the OS files but also Microsoft apps - e.g., including (say) MS Security Essentials (now combined with the Windows Firewall as Windows Defender), Skype, the MS Office Pro suite, and MS IE/MS Edge browsers.

Worth thinking about?:
Microsoft's Windows Update seems to be a seriously thorough and intelligent AUM, and if apps developers could somehow be given a standards-based approach to piggybacking on Windows Update, then that could be a really useful approach worth consideration for the future.
However, I suspect that it would be unlikely to happen, simply because of conflicting marketing objectives - for example, I recall that the FREE version of the excellent CCleaner defaulted to automatically checking for updated versions of itself on startup, and it tells you if there is an updated version available. If you then tell it to go get the update, it takes you to a web page where it seems to deliberately put an in-your-face default option to upgrade to CCleaner Pro and deliberately obscure/confuse access to the download link for the FREE version. You eventually find it minimised in the small print - e.g., Piriform.com (as at 2015-09-19), where you have to scroll down to the small print (no Big Fat Button, like for the paid version) where it merely says, for example, Piriform.com as an optional site to download from.

CCleaner - Piriform misleading clickbaiting candyware.png

Some people (not me, you understand) might say that this could be considered as deliberately misleading, shonky and borderline legitimate commercial behaviour, and arguably only one step removed from the Candyware concept, but hey, if it gets a sale, then whether the punter bought it by mistake is neither here nor there, right? - however I couldn't possibly comment.
2048
DC Gamer Club / Fallout 3 (GOTYE) on Windows 10 Pro.
« Last post by IainB on September 17, 2015, 12:07 PM »
Note: "GOTYE" = "Game of the Year Edition".

We had been given some gift vouchers to spend at a high street IT chain store, so we went to their store to buy a computer game, and came away with my daughter's choice, which was Fallout 3.
It installed the Steam delivery system and required GFWL (Games For Windows Live) to be installed and running as well.
After a bit of mucking about recovering our relatively unused GFWL signon ID/Password, Steam, the game, and GFWL were installed and ran fine on a Samsung-S3 (Series 3) laptop with standard Windows 10 update.

A couple of days later I installed the thing (Steam, the game, and GFWL) on a Toshiba Satellite L855D laptop with Windows 10 Pro. It all seemed to install OK, but it wouldn't run - kept coming up with the same nondescript error at startup:
      ____________________
      Fallout 3 Launcher
      Fallout 3 Launcher has stopped working
      A problem caused the program to stop working correctly.
      Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.
      [Close program]
      ____________________

For several hours I scoured the discussion forums, searching for a solution or a workaround.
Not being able to run Fallout 3 on Win8 or Win10 seemed to be a common problem.
There were two very useful posts at steamcommunity.com:

However, after several hours of playing Sherlock Holmes and repeatedly reinstalling the thing on the Toshiba-L855D, using different tweaks here and there, I still couldn't get Fallout 3 to run. So near, and yet so far! Very frustrating.
I checked and compared, and found that game installation folders/files and Steam components were identical on both laptops, but I had noticed that, on both laptops, GFWL Client had been set to run at Windows startup, and, out of interest tonight I compared the GFWL files as installed on each laptop, and noticed a difference:

One subfolder was different: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games for Windows - LIVE\Redist\DirectX
 - on the ToshibaL855D, there were only two files in that folder, and though the same two were in the corresponding folder on the Samsung-S3, on the latter the folder held a few more files, so I copied them across to the ToshibaL855D folder, leaving it with these in all:
  • APR2007_xinput_x86.cab   
    Aug2009_d3dx10_42_x86.cab
    Aug2009_d3dx9_42_x86.cab
    DSETUP.dll               
    dsetup32.dll             
    dxdllreg_x86.cab         
    DXSETUP.exe             
    dxupdate.cab

I then ran DXSETUP.exe, after which I stopped and restarted the GFWL Client, logged in to GFWL, and then started the Fallout 3 game after searching for the link using the Start menu: "Fallout 3 - Game of the Year Edition".
It seems to work OK now, though I have only now started playing it.
I suspect it will have been worth all the trouble, but I thought I'd post my notes about it here, in case they might be of help/use to others with similar Fallout 3 problems under Win10.
2049
http://www.1-4a.com/ is alive again - must learn to be patient...
___________________________

Thanks for the heads-up. Very droll.
What a curious website though!
2050
Community Giveaways / Re: Scrivener at 50% off
« Last post by IainB on September 14, 2015, 01:10 PM »
@40hz: Thanks for the $ "boost"!    :Thmbsup:

By the way, what the heck is your avatar image ("Post-It" note) saying? I can't read it.
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