Recent Posts

2176

Living Room / Re: 5 Insane Devices for Monitoring Your Kids

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 14, 2015, 06:54 PM »

(5) The new Apple Watch is a revolutionary device, but I worry it could turn into the Swiss Army Knife of tracking tools—video feeds, GPS locators, biometric sensors.

-Renegade (April 14, 2015, 09:02 AM)

I really don't think that kids have to be worried about being tracked while wearing one of these, no doubt they'd be mugged and have it stolen before they reach the end of the block.

-4wd (April 14, 2015, 05:08 PM)

Besides, if it's computer driven the parents will have to consult the kids how to enable and disable the various tracking tools. 

2177

General Software Discussion / Re: Solved: Visual Studio Toolbox Blues

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 14, 2015, 06:43 PM »

There is a built in progress bar, unless I'm not understanding you.  I don't think most people use the toolbox with the advent of xaml and wpf.  Just type in the tags for the control in question in the editor.  I've not used the toolbox in a long time.

-wraith808 (April 14, 2015, 09:56 AM)

I remember WPF coming in now.  I didn't like the look of it as it was markup.  I get the theory of separating appearance from action.  If I can grok Blend maybe I'll try to get it to do something.  All in good time. 

2178

General Software Discussion / Re: Solved: Visual Studio Toolbox Blues

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 14, 2015, 07:16 AM »

One thing I did try:  My IniEdit program uses a Glass form with a Searchable RichEdit coded by a programmer on CodeProject.  Visual Studio Buttons can sit on Glass without distortion.  But it seems like the button is still the only control adapted to Glass.  I tried a standard Main Menu and everything on the menu strip turned white.. which is typical of controls that look distorted on Glass.  Seems the Glass thing has been totally neglected since VS2010.

2179

General Software Discussion / Re: Solved: Visual Studio Toolbox Blues

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 14, 2015, 05:51 AM »

I'm a bit surprised.  AFAICT there's no built in ProgressBar control that does Taskbar Button progress.  The stuff in the Toolbox looks pretty much like the stuff from VS2010 Express.  Part of this may be due to the fact I excluded DB stuff and am not interested in Phone development yet.  But Desktop stuff looks like same old same old. ( I have VS2013 Pro.  Initially I went with most of the recommended install but since it just hung there staring at me for an hour I chopped it down to bare minimum c++ and C# stuff.  Even with that I had to do a repair install the next day.)

For anything snazzy I'm still looking through user written controls in CodeProject.

The VC++ I pretty much just selected MFC and Win32 stuff.  I don't see myself doing VC++ managed form programs.  I haven't done a c++ program yet but supposedly there are 64 bit and cross compilers installed.

I remember why I decided to do most stuff in AutoIt3 and AHK because especially on the Laptop it is so sluggish.  Also one time I opened a solution file just by using Open File instead of Open Solution and the whole IDE crashed(nothing else was open,  I did a Close Solution first.)

The other thing that strikes me is why does everything look like it is running on a phone with a shades of gray only screen?  Just because it does multiple device dev the environment itself has to be drab?  I don't get it.

I still haven't stuck my toe into F# or WPF yet.  But you can't go by my experience.  I tend to do a program or two to keep my hand in.  Then go back to scripting out of an editor as it's just so much faster.

Right now I'm trying to find a free ProgressBar that does animation to make something with a humorous progressbar instead of just the plane jane green thermometer.

I had to do a Repair Install just to get the VC++ stuff to show up.  I may have to turn off fast boot on this Laptop since restore points and updates sure don't run smoothly.  The repair install basically went through the whole shooting match that should have been completed yesterday.  On the plus side I wasn'r back to square one "Toolbox hides the main form" mode.  It remembered my layout and Help Viewer settings at least.

I'll know more once I have some new programs running.  I have to slog it like a Volga Boatman since I forget a lot of this stuff.  Maybe by the end of May I'll have something small to post.  

2180

DC Member Programs and Projects / Re: Quick Website Blocker

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 13, 2015, 01:42 PM »

What else does it bring for that size? It's rather large at nearly 2 MB (imho). Is that because of the development environment used?

-Ath (April 13, 2015, 01:25 PM)

Maybe that's the debug build.

2181

DC Member Programs and Projects / Re: Quick Website Blocker

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 13, 2015, 10:24 AM »

Nice idea.   

2182

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Macrium Reflect 6 News

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 13, 2015, 10:20 AM »

Incremental has won me over.  I did one after install of Visual Studio 2013.  It took about 13 minutes.  Better than 1/2 hour every time for full.  I like it. 

2183

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 12, 2015, 07:00 PM »

Based on the angle of the walls at what appears to be the entrance to the stairs, I'd say the cat is going up.

-Stoic Joker (April 12, 2015, 04:37 PM)

If it weren't for the cat, I could see this as a "flip illusion" like the cup/faces, but as is, I can only see the cat going up most of the time, and I certainly can't see the cat *backing up* the stairs the other way!

THAT would be viral Youtube gold!

-TaoPhoenix (April 12, 2015, 06:11 PM)

It seems to me if the cat was going downstairs the shoulders would be hunched to prevent going down the stairs out of control.  Since the cat seems untroubled and is looking at someone next to the photographer my feeling is the cat is going upstairs.

2184

General Software Discussion / Re: Comodo Internet Security -- a cautionary tale?

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 11, 2015, 02:53 PM »

I've tried ClamWin a few times.  Especially for me it's not good because it only seems to turn up false positives for ahk and autoit3 programs.  When my new hosting provider started taking files off my download page citing virus reports I went to the page they used for scanning.  4 of my zi files got bad reports on 2 out of 57 av scanners.  ClamWin was one of the two in all cases.

The whole approach seems like lock the barn door after the barn has burned down.  When I do Windows support on forums if someone is getting something really weird it seems a very high percentage of the time it goes away if they turn the av off.  They are just petrified to run without it though.  I tell them disable internet while you do the test so you cannot get infected etc..

To me it's a cure worse thn the disease in the majority of cases.  It's like giving someone malaria to cure acne.

2185

General Software Discussion / Re: Comodo Internet Security -- a cautionary tale?

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 11, 2015, 10:25 AM »

I'm with you on the suites.  I'm not big on AV usage.  It seems like every time I try one i can feel either the performance or stability decrease.  In any case I noticed 360 Total Security for free.  It seemed well thought out.  I tried it and had no complaints for a few days.  Then stuff started to get weird.  In the end I took it off.

It seems as far as AV stuff is concerned, I can use scanners.  But as soon as I try something of the Real Time Shield variety, it doesn't run smoothly.  I keep image backups and do scans.

Even those browsers that have the AV built in don't want to work well for me.  I don't know what it is but it seems like running with any kind of protection as the default setup just won't work for me.

Plus it seems to me like the AV publishers are the worst for providing uninstallers that don't remove everything they should.  I get the feeling the salesman should have a black shirt and white tie with racing tout hat and be telling me "well you know it's really risky to run without protection. Yeah those street punks just might come by and bust up the place if you don't buy protection from us."

I never found an AV shield I ever liked.

2186

Living Room / Re: mp3 sharing?

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 11, 2015, 07:59 AM »

Also some MP3 players can play FLAC.  My old trusty rusty Phillips Go can play mp3, wma, flac etc..

If you go to the FLAC page I think there are Guis where you just drag and drop files to convert to and from FLAC.  It's easy.  Even CDBurnerXP supports FLAC and automatically converts it on the fly when burning a conventional audio CD from FLAC files.

You can download FLAC front end Gui and other free tools from here:
https://xiph.org/flac/download.html

2187

Living Room / Re: Programming/Coder humor

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 11, 2015, 07:41 AM »

Q: If Jesus was a programmer what tools would he use?

A:

Cross Compilers

2188

General Software Discussion / Re: Solved: Visual Studio Toolbox Blues

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 11, 2015, 07:30 AM »

I haven't had much chance to look around.  I got an old project that does a tiny Ini Editor, that I originally did on VS8 in C#, to build and run on it so far.  Just judging from the install it seems to have both 32 and 64 bit compilers.  Hopefully I can do 64 bit C++ stuff without kludging on the SDK as I did in the past.

My first goal is to redo my MD5Hash program in C#.  I did it as a dialog Win32 msg loop type program in C++ but I lost the source code.  In any case I learned that the time consumption was the disk i/o rather than the MD5Sum calculations.  If I can optimize the disk reads of large files I'll try the built in hash algorithms in C#(I assume it has them in the framework) and see how it compares to the C++ implementation.

I haven't even looked through the Toolbox yet to see what's neat.  This Laptop seems to have a complex about doing updates.  It must have sat on the updates required for install for 45 minutes.  Even using a Restore Point hangs on this thing.  It's the only Laptop I ever used so I can't say if that is strange but I have a feeling it's uncommon.  

2189

General Software Discussion / Solved: Visual Studio Toolbox Blues

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 10, 2015, 02:45 PM »

I can never remember how to get Visual Studio to show the Toolbox, Form Design, Solution Explorer and Properties windows at the same time.  No autohiding or Toolbox overlapping the Form Design view.  I just installed VS 2013 and I'm in that "about to waste 4 hours doing this for the tenth time" twilight zone.  Anyone know the trick?  It's some little setting I can never find.  Man it drives me nuts.

It's the type of thing that makes me want to stay with C# standard v. 1.06 except it wouldn't emit any useful code.  

Edit:  I got it.  I figured out how to use that window position template thing when you drag a window with the mouse.  I think venting helped though.    I just hope everything hangs together.

2190

General Software Discussion / Re: Adventures in cleaning (my cranky) computer

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 10, 2015, 05:51 AM »

For trying utilities without risking messing up your system both virtualization and Sandboxie will work.  Another quick and dirty free way to accomplish this is to use ToolWiz TimeFreeze.  It protects the system partition by using shadow service to fake programs out.  The program saves files, changes Registry etc. but this is all redirected to a cache file by the shadow service.  When you reboot the installed program and all its settings are gone.  This is good for a one off trial.  If you want to use the program for some length of time the other options are more suitable.

I have used Snadboxie for years.  It is especially effective on a 32 bit Windows since it can patch the kernel in memory. On x64 Windows it does other things but they aren't as elegant a solution as the patch.  Win64 has PatchGuard so the Sandboxie simple method to protect the system is stymied.  But it uses other stuff like Drop My Rights etc..


Edit:  right now the link seems to take awhile to load.  But it did load.  If not you can get it from SnapFiles:
http://www.snapfiles...et/twtimefreeze.html

2191

Post New Requests Here / Re: Idea: An on the fly mouse speed changer, or pre-set for different programs

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 09, 2015, 03:56 PM »

I found this one that can use 3 preset speeds.  But it is $15.

2192

General Software Discussion / Re: So, what pdf reader app is your fav?

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 09, 2015, 05:37 AM »

PDFXchange Editor is free for private use.  I don't know if it is light or fast exactly.  I don't get into PDF much.  But I saw this free and you don't see a full PDF Editor for free often so I installed it.  Also it has a plugin for FF to display PDF inside the browser.

2193

General Software Discussion / Re: Adventures in cleaning (my cranky) computer

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 08, 2015, 04:20 PM »

Some of y'all are talking about images - that's not the tool I wanted. I mentioned earlier about "modular" - if I install five things and later want to remove #2, images aren't going to help me - what I want is a tool that captured the full changes caused by prog install #2, that then correctly reverses it, registry and all. More like a super-uninstaller, since I am getting quite tired of "Windows uninstalled X, some things have to be deleted manually". That's where all of this junk ended up from to begin with.

-TaoPhoenix (April 08, 2015, 10:06 AM)

The trouble with uninstall utilities that take a snapshot during install to get rid of everything during uninstall is if you install other stuff between those 2 events.  The uninstall can munge what got installed in the middle.  It's ok for a test where you install using the snapshot utility, run it and test it, then remove it, without installing anything else.  At least I haven't heard of one that works perfectly.

2194

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 08, 2015, 06:05 AM »

(see attachment in previous post)
Microsoft's 'Redstone' An update to Windows 10 due in 2016  ZDNet

-Arizona Hot (April 08, 2015, 01:15 AM)

It seems like the "one size fits all" OS is going to have big platform dependent modules after all.  

2195

General Software Discussion / Re: Adventures in cleaning (my cranky) computer

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 08, 2015, 05:56 AM »

It is good to have Registry backup short of Restore Points, although I use those too.  I have used ERUNT for years.  Read the readme as it has dense information packed in.  A bit wordy.  But this utility has worked for me in every NT based OS.

Of course I use Restore Points and image backups also.  Many who say never clean the registry probably only have Windows clean installed off the CD/DVD and don't suffer the crapware leftover crud we who buy at Best Buy getting preloaded OS have to suffer.  I've had this Laptop since October 2014 and just last week I found Norton still had a task in Task Scheduler even though I uninstalled it, ran the removal tool many times, and cleaned it out of the Registry.

As I mentioned, I got complacent after running CCleaner Registry Clean across dozens of minor version updates with no issues.  I had one bad minor version update where it caused a problem.  I restored the Registry using a Restore Point.  The next CCleaner update the bug was fixed.  So now I always make the .reg file backup before cleaning as well as having current ERUNT saves etc..

Especially file associations will leave a bunch of crap in the context menu.  Again, for those who run servers with a stable assortment of software it's not the same as for those of us who try every new freeware that pops up on Softpedia.  Likewise I cannot do an image save of a clean fresh install and just lay it back on every few months to freshen up the Windows install.  I'd lose a lot of tweaks and tinkering.  I have to make an image every couple of weeks or so as well as backing up files.  It's different than running a stable system setup.

However I do agree that when I see ads to speed up your system by cleaning the registry and other tweaks I move on.  Cleaning the Registry should only be donewhen fixing it by hand would likely cause more errors than fixed.  Sometimes uninstall programs just leve the settings assuming eventually you will install a newer version of their wonderful software.

2196

General Software Discussion / Re: Adventures in cleaning (my cranky) computer

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 07, 2015, 03:12 PM »

I just uninstalled by hand

-TaoPhoenix (April 07, 2015, 02:55 PM)

I find CCleaner Registry Cleaner very useful after having to remove programs manually.  It does a good job of getting rid of no longer supported file type associations, missing handlers etc..

I always save the .reg backup file it makes.  I only got burned on one version of CCleaner messing up my Registry.  But you never know when that bug may pop up.

I forgot about the FF ads.  I hope that means they're gone.  Out of sight out of mind. 

2197

General Software Discussion / Re: Adventures in cleaning (my cranky) computer

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 07, 2015, 01:57 PM »

I envy those who have a stable setup.  They install their programs, configure them, then make an image before the system gets loaded with bloat.  Every so often they restore from the image(having their data on an external drive most likely.)

I wish I could do that.  But I'm always trying freeware I see and tweaking settings, changing browsers and AddOns etc..  Plus writing small utilities.  I don't have a stock setup that I can save as backup.  Just make another image every so often.

I know you have your work ahead of you.   

2198

Living Room / Microsoft Silently Fired More Employees This Week

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 06, 2015, 02:57 PM »

Microsoft Silently Fired More Employees This Week

I can visualize it.  The manager waves to get the employee's attention.  Then he curls his finger to get the employee to come over.  They go into the manager's office and close the door.  The manager points at the employee, then makes the slit throat signal.  The manager opens the door.  They leave the office.  Repeat until employees equals zero.

2199

General Software Discussion / Re: Busy Body Browsers

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 06, 2015, 05:36 AM »

Your problem is solved; ask nicely and he can give you a house! He'll feel better and you'll have done him a favour.

-cranioscopical (April 05, 2015, 07:38 AM)

I'm afraid he'll insist I learn to flip it.  Anything larger than a one bedroom condo I'd probably throw my back out. 

-MilesAhead (April 05, 2015, 08:44 AM)

It's a tricky move; you have to know when to re-lease it.
 

-cranioscopical (April 05, 2015, 03:44 PM)

I hear you have to be hip to Judo to throw one of those two bedroom two bath suckers.

2200

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

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 05, 2015, 03:17 PM »

Happy Easter one and all.

-jadinolf (April 05, 2015, 12:40 PM)

+1