Recent Posts

326

Living Room / Re: 40+ Free Professional Fonts from Smashing Magazine

« Last post by nontroppo on November 17, 2007, 07:43 AM »

I was going to link to that, thanks Ralf.

Fontin(Sans) is just wonderful, kerned with care and full of Opentype goodness. Most of the fonts by Jos Buivenga are equally carefully crafted. As a pixel font, unibody is unique, and the foundary that makes it, Underware, also make my favorite book font, Dolly:

http://www.underware...index.php3?id1=fonts

As a typographical aside, I was recently shocked that Vista's fonts (which are realy nice), are still so neanderthal - how can anyone that cares about typography continue to ignore opentype. But then, Windows typographical technology is still stuck in the dark ages...

As a launcher aside linked to that list, Enso uses Gentium for its UI typeface, and elegantly lovely it looks too. Gentium is just great, a flexible multilingual humanist renaissance font. Day serif on that list is also great, keeping the imperfections from the original 15th century version in tact unlike more modern digital Garamonds.

327

General Software Discussion / Re: Scott Finnie unimpressed by NOD32 ...

« Last post by nontroppo on November 17, 2007, 06:55 AM »

FYI: IMON causes havoc for browsers who use more advanced rendering engines (now everything except IE). Progressive content rendering is totally broken when IMON is in Speed mode, and only works in compatibility mode.

328

Living Room / Re: What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away

« Last post by nontroppo on November 17, 2007, 06:46 AM »

F**k, that chart is just sensational; even though I believe the overall premise, I cannot believe the magnitude of the that. I think the sheer scale of regression with Vista can't be so large. I suspect a change in working set allocation is responsible for the memory change (more memory allocated is not necessarily bad), but I cannot explain the overall speed regression. I don't have a clear sense of how that data was aggregated, nor thus its variability. I do realise incredulity is hardly a cogent argument against that data ;-)

329

Living Room / Re: Laptop or Desktop — which are you?

« Last post by nontroppo on November 17, 2007, 06:19 AM »

I do a lot of analysis and statistical computation in the monolithc Matlab, at the same time as making up graphics in illustrator / Photoshop detailing said analyses, and running software to write about that (along with reference manager), and browsing for references etc. Until the last iteration of laptops, desktops were simply far more useable for such stuff. That has radically changed. All of that stuff happily runs on a laptop with ease. A 2Ghz core2 duo with 2GB runs that without breaking so much as a bead of sweat; indeed, bits of that now run in XP and bits in OS X seamlessly. My monster Xeon dual-processor 4GB desktop workstation is now almost entirely unused (it is still a glorified print server  ), except I plug its main monitor into my laptop for dual-screen goodness. I much prefer my laptop keyboard too, and would buy a version of it for the desktop if I bothered to use it more ;-)

330

General Software Discussion / DoMercury - another Quicksilver/FARR type program

« Last post by nontroppo on November 15, 2007, 12:55 PM »

Hm, I tried to skin it, but it doesn't yet allow PNG transparency...

331

General Software Discussion / Re: Implementing Leopard features for Vista?

« Last post by nontroppo on November 15, 2007, 11:45 AM »

Actually, some Linux users are working hard to prove me wrong:

http://code.google.com/p/flyback/

Currently it uses rsync, thus it has to scan the whole drive on each backup. The latest Kernel contains inotify, which affords the same benefits as FSevents. They also cannot use multi-links as Linux doesn't cleanly handle hard-links to directories.

My critical caveat though, which is proper system integration, is also unknown, but it should be possible to hook this into Desktop search if they both use inotify.

Note, using rdiff-backup rigged up in this way, will also get you a block-level mechanism.

See also:

http://blog.interlin...nc_time_machine.html
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeVault

Which I assume is also applicable to cygwin...

332

General Software Discussion / DoMercury - another Quicksilver/FARR type program

« Last post by nontroppo on November 15, 2007, 11:16 AM »

Hi odiernod, sorry to have sounded harsh, I do very much welcome the possibility to get something close to Quicksilver in functionality terms on Windows (and thanks for the portable version!). Will check out the new version and give people here an update - I suspect you'll need some time before there are usable skins though (the gree/yellow/brown one on display on your page is little better than the last one). Will you allow PNG/alpha transparency? If so I may take a stab at making a skin when you've published more details...

Visually, unless you've seen Quicksilver, you cannot appreciate how amazingly beautiful the UI is. Screenshots simply don't do it justice. The UI is animated in subtle ways, and is always just fluid (CPU is simply unmeasurable). Alcor did an amazing job making everything flow together. This elegance is functional, for example DOMercury shows the arguments pane always, whereas Quicksilver only shows it when needed. I've never seen anything on Windows that does anything similar.

odiernod, you may also want to have a look at FARR, as it has some wonderful features such as user-modifiable matching heuristics, powerful alias system, and extensive tweakability:

https://www.donation...r/findrun/index.html

333

General Software Discussion / DoMercury - another Quicksilver/FARR type program

« Last post by nontroppo on November 13, 2007, 06:46 PM »

If anyone wanted to try DOMercury - don't. Ugly and underpowered (needs more plugins and a radically new UI skinning system). I hope it improves as it develops...

334

Living Room / Re: LOL strikes again...

« Last post by nontroppo on November 13, 2007, 04:16 PM »

ARGH, LOLcats are attacking Donationcoder:

Yikes DC software has been LOLcatted!?!

join donationcoda.com now wit 1-tiem donation uv any amount 2 get lot uv speshl benefit.
support author!!??!!
when u make donation… it iz allocatd  2 u in form uv donationcredit. u can giv these credit 2 author on our siet uv ur choice 2 support their individual wurk.

Yikes on this very page!

335

General Software Discussion / Re: Maybe Vista doesn't suck?

« Last post by nontroppo on November 12, 2007, 03:41 AM »

Zaine: it is a feature. It simply allows the user to test Time Machine functions properly... 

336

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for a Profile Desktops

« Last post by nontroppo on November 10, 2007, 01:11 PM »

Dexpot allows you to run commands when you switch desktop, so i suspect you could get it to swap files in and out, but performance would probably suck (unless it was just shortcuts). But I can imagine swapping in / out desktop shortcuts and shortcuts in the startbar would work OK. Dexpot also provides an overview mode of all your desktops, you can see it in a screencast here: https://www.donation...21.msg85153#msg85153

337

General Software Discussion / Re: compare text files

« Last post by nontroppo on November 10, 2007, 07:24 AM »

The reason I originally chose Compare It! "compared" to Beyond Compare / Ultracompare is that I found its heuristics to handle moved sections better (as well as better within-line comparison). One can also use Regex pre-parsing or input plugins prior to matching to improve matching efficiency.

338

General Software Discussion / Re: Virtual Desktop suggestions?

« Last post by nontroppo on November 10, 2007, 06:00 AM »

Hi, having demoed Dexpot I can heartily recommend it. I also run a virtual desktop manager in Tiger (VirtueDesktops) and so I normally have 3 OS X desktops, one of which has 4 Windows desktops running within (I just need a Linux VM running in one of the Windows screens for the full Russian doll) ;-)

Dexpot has a global overview mode which is nice, and is really friendly to configure, and light in resources.

Screencast of it all working together (any jerkiness comes from the limited framerate to keep screencast smallish...)

339

General Software Discussion / Re: Implementing Leopard features for Vista?

« Last post by nontroppo on November 10, 2007, 03:47 AM »

MrCrispy: 

As a challenge, I will state (tongue-in-cheek but in the spirit of my above posts) that you will be unable to easily write a TM clone using the Win32 API. And I'd genuinely love to be proved wrong 

340

General Software Discussion / Re: Maybe Vista doesn't suck?

« Last post by nontroppo on November 10, 2007, 03:36 AM »

Zaine: fantastic post!

I do think DRM probably doesn't adversely affect a majority of users (arguments have been made back and forth over Guttman's article), but as an analogy I ditched IE as a browser not because I couldn't view web pages, but because Microsoft's land grab via proprietry access to an open global resource was outrageous.

341

General Software Discussion / DoMercury & QiiNinja - other Quicksilver/FARR type programs

« Last post by nontroppo on November 09, 2007, 10:10 AM »

A kind-of QS clone, though I don't think it uses any of QSs source:

http://www.odierno.com/domercury/

342

General Software Discussion / Re: compare text files

« Last post by nontroppo on November 09, 2007, 09:10 AM »

Compare It! if you want to spend money (clearly best paid app IMO).

Winmerge if you want to do it for free.

Though I doubt most people care any more about INI files, I wrote an online INI diff tool ages ago (the issue being INI sections can move around without lines changing which most Diff tools fail to handle well):

http://nontroppo.org/ini/

343

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« Last post by nontroppo on November 09, 2007, 09:06 AM »

Quicksilver is much more than an application launcher. Having said that I find it hard to see how it could be difficult to use as a launcher (though thoroughly understand how it is difficult to master once you move forward from that). For App launching, surely you just open it, start typing the application name and hit enter?

I just type [scr][enter]

<bigotry alert>Launchy is an underperforming resource hog compared to FARR  (yes, I'm launchist!)</bigotry alert> :tounge-in-cheek:

Though it is now OSS, QS really works magic because it uses Cocoa to pull in resources across the operating system in a way not so easily possible on Windows without many more plugins. As such any QS clone for windows would need to write a lot of additional code to get similar functionality. But as we've discussed for FARR, I do believe using the noun<->verb<->argument model is the most elegant metaphor for doing work on objects (launching apps being a very reduced sub-set of that). In windows, the context menu is the closest analogy (subject<->predicate).

noun:mustafa verb:add note (to address book) argument: typed text

And where QS+cocoa does the extra magic is in the predicate verbs, because it has convinced most applications to interoperate using a standard scripting interface, thus a single developer can pull in lots of resources easily (most of the many QS plugins were written by Alcor). And it is in the verbs where most of the recoding would be needed in Windows/Linux. FARR now has a fantanstic plugin architecture, and this is where FARR will evolve from app launcher to Explorer replacement (as Quicksilver is to Finder). I doubt opening QSs source will reveal too much; just my

What may be useful though, are the algorithms QS uses to learn launch associations. FARR adds scores to nouns, but QS adds scores to [text]<->[noun] pairings. So for example over time it will learn that scvr is mostly associated with [sc]ri[v]ene[r] without me having to manually add a [scvr] nickname. Exploring how it does the weightings could give some insight into how it seems to really know what I want to do.

344

General Software Discussion / Re: ERUNT - Restore Replacement

« Last post by nontroppo on November 09, 2007, 06:16 AM »

ERUNT: 

Two weeks ago, under heavy workloads and fast-approaching deadlines, XP decided to go belly up (both for me and a colleague working from home on the same day!). Luckily for me, knowing the horrid fragility of the registry, I regularly run ERUNT. And because I dual-boot XP via bootcamp, it was pretty trivial to use OS X as a recovery console to manually restore the registry (system restore utterly failed , so did safe mode btw...). My colleage wasn't quite so lucky, not using ERUNT and running W2K it needed a day to get a recovery CD sorted out for her to get her work off her dead machine.

345

General Software Discussion / Re: A rant about how I finally ditched iTunes... :D

« Last post by nontroppo on November 09, 2007, 05:54 AM »

Lashiec: OS X differentiates between documents/windows, and applications. So closing all my iTunes windows keeps iTunes running in the background (confuses the hell out of you when you first use a Mac!;)). iTunes uses well under half the CPU with its UI Window closed, but it is not technically a daemon (service in Winspeak). QS uses spotlight to generate a catalog of all my artists, tracks and albums, as well as playlists, and I can play now or queue them up for later playing. It even has a special mode where only music items will be searched for (faster results for single track searching).

I've yet to try the foobar plugin for FARR, I'll put it on my play(with)-list

And yes, QS is OSS, but it relies so heavily on Cocoa frameworks to do its magic I doubt it will be any more portable to other platforms. The iTunes magic uses universal Applescript dictionaries which probably aren't available elsewhere. Perhaps for KDE, who seem to have really nice cross-app interaction support.

346

Living Room / Re: How do you tag (or even organize) your files?

« Last post by nontroppo on November 08, 2007, 10:41 AM »

Not fully, the Spotmeta dev has stopped work on it (explaining said problems), and Quicksilver is transitioning to open-source so I doubt any Quicksilver devs will adopt it soon... I use Quicksilver to quickly find Spotmeta tagged items (using the spotlight plugin), but cannot not add tags to an item. So I still mostly use Quicksilver comment tagging for the grunt work and spotmeta via its own window or the Finder for more detailed tag additions.

347

General Software Discussion / Re: Google OS already here, with hardware?! Well, sort of.

« Last post by nontroppo on November 08, 2007, 10:06 AM »

Lashiec: yup - I suspect there are even more than 215 errors once a DOCTYPE was used.

f0dder: In Microsoft's defence, their websites at least partly try to use web standards, and they have almost 4X less errors than Google, only 65 errors ;-)

http://validator.w3....e=Inline&group=0

348

General Software Discussion / Re: Implementing Leopard features for Vista?

« Last post by nontroppo on November 08, 2007, 10:00 AM »

I am not quiote sure what TM indexes consist of - are they really like a desktop search of document contents or is it just file names? If it is indexing 24 snapshots a day it must make a huge performance hit both in terms of CPU usage and disc space usage !!!

-Carol Haynes (November 08, 2007, 07:19 AM)

The Ars Technica and Prince McLean review delves into the details. But the basic point is that the filesystem transparently monitors file system events anyway. Any app can use these notifications (instead of forcibly watching for chages, just register to receive updates). This arrived with Spotlight, but has been made a public API in Leopard. This gives a low overhead mechanism[1] to know what to backup without specifically scanning the FS. It will ignore temp files and the like already, but if you want you can manually micromanage what is backup up IIUC. It uses something called multi-links (like a hard-link):

http://www.appleinsi...hine.html&page=3

to keep each versioned system complete but not use up more space than needed. Every day, it drops the previous day's hourly backups. Every week it drops the previous week's daily backups. Thus is balances the fact that you probably want to restore something you deleted quite recently with the possibility of still keeping older versions around.

Maybe my other idea with FileHamster (or another file versioning utility like Adobes Version Cue) would be a better approach on windows.

-Carol Haynes (November 08, 2007, 07:19 AM)

Well, I love Filehamster and depend on it in Windows. But it isn't a versioned recovery tool, it is a personal versioning system. I suspect part of the role of TM can be served by it, though I'm not quite sure how comfortably it would integrate with a desktop search.

Again I suggest that, for most users, the interface does matter. Hobbling together 3 or more utilities, each with a different UI, not servicing the purpose, is not the same experience as a tool built for the purpose. Unifying disaster recovery, versioned filing and desktop search throughout the OS is a usability win. That will reduce the discrepancy between those who know they should back up with those who do.


----
[1] I use a program that builds lists of events, FSEventer to see changes to the whole FS in real time, the kernel overhead of that app tapping into FSEvents is not measurable.

349

General Software Discussion / Re: Implementing Leopard features for Vista?

« Last post by nontroppo on November 08, 2007, 05:46 AM »

So to get something close to Time machine, one needs to mount drives for each snapshot (TM does hourly (24), then daily (~29), then weekly (...) snapshots). I suspect one will run out of drive letters before long? I think one would need to break that useful timing scheme, so only allow weekly for two months then monthly (or can windows use "silent" drive letters)? This doesn't seem like a serviceable solution for general users unless some changes are made to the requirements of having to mount drives - is there any other way to do it?

Could one not use some program which catches requests to mount a drive and uses a hash of that mount volume to find the right mount - thus only one drive letter would be needed?

Is there any way to get Vista's desktop search to index those revisions (even as mounts) currently?

r.e. block mode: as I understand it, Apple had originally wanted to use ZFS to do the grunt work for block mode, but technical difficulties forced them to withdraw ZFS support for Leopard final (which is read-only for users and experimental read/write for developers). Indeed the weakness currently is for monolithic files, of which VMs are the clearest example. I wonder if they can't do some sort of delta mechanism on top of the hardlinks - deltas don't need block-mode IIUC.

350

General Software Discussion / Re: Mobile Browsing: Opera Mini 4

« Last post by nontroppo on November 08, 2007, 05:25 AM »

For any HTML code monkeys out there, there are some great articles about how to code web sites to be mobile friendly:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/mobile/

Basically, Opera is pushing one-web, a standrds driven unified web, and not lots of little fiefdoms (iPhone pages, Windows mobile pages etc). Using elegant semantic markup and core W3C standards you can make sure your web site will look good on any platform / device...

Apple, who have previously been great proponents of an open web, have failed to provide such clear guidance when it comes to the iPhone, failing to support CSS3 media queries properly for example. Ans so iPhone web sites may not work with other devices, just as IE / Netscape battles of the 90s caused incompatible sites on desktop...