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401

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera - new alpha version brings untold pleasures...or something like that.

« Last post by nontroppo on September 20, 2007, 03:25 PM »

For anyone who likes search keyword shortcuts and the new history search — note you can even make a search keyword for the historysearch; lovely integration of features:

http://files.myopera...oppo/blog/memory.mov

So, for example I can now press:

F2 > hs elephant

and I can search for *any* web page I visited that contained the word elephant. The advantage over the address bar (just typing F8 > elephant) is that opera:historysearch has more detail and focusses just on indexed pages.

402

General Software Discussion / Re: Help with finding accurate software.

« Last post by nontroppo on September 20, 2007, 03:20 PM »

If you want something more streamlined, for some writers having the research within the application you write in is a great workflow advantage; no need to keep juggling different apps around. In this case there are a couple of programs that may be worthwhile:

Liquid Story Binder: http://www.blackobelisksoftware.com/

Idea Mason: http://www.ideamason.com/

And though it is for screenplays, this seems to allow research and document import / management for free: http://www.celtx.com/overview.html

If you have access to a Mac, there are a number of of IMO superior writers tools, my favorite being Scrivener http://literatureand...e.com/scrivener.html which allows full keywording / searching in a beautiful writers interface. The "workflow" (yes, horribly overused word) is just astounding, and writing and researching within really makes a difference compared to juggling writing program + note taking for me...

403

General Software Discussion / Re: New interesting features for Firefox 3

« Last post by nontroppo on September 12, 2007, 03:32 PM »

Why? There's no law of nature requiring this... the coders just need to pay a bit more attention and focus on efficiency than eye-candy. More interesting anyway.
-f0dder (September 11, 2007, 06:22 AM)

I think lots of very gifted developers work(ed) on Mozilla, and in 9 years of constant hacking they have got to where Firefox is now with Firefox 3 (XUL recieves considerable attention I believe). Being cross-platform, and using XML+JS+CSS as your base simply can't get where native code can. But the tradeoff is a flexible platform non-programmers can pick-up where OS doesn't matter. With infinite dev resources I'm sure they would get further, but I don't think Mozilla was/is practically resource starved.

Now, if they'd just used Lua...

404

General Software Discussion / Re: New interesting features for Firefox 3

« Last post by nontroppo on September 11, 2007, 06:00 AM »

nontroppo, I know that but I really think that XUL is causing all these problems with memory management.
-Lashiec (September 10, 2007, 08:55 PM)

Oh, I think you are absolutely right

But I think this is unavoidable — a flexible and low-entry extension system that doesn't need compiling will be fat and heavy resource-wise. Mozilla never has, and never will be "light", but if you can code XML+CSS+JS - you can do stuff in it no other browser can.

I wonder if the next-generation javascript engine, tamarin, will make a substansive difference to XUL, it certainly out-performs spidermonkey (existing engine) by a huge factor:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

405

General Software Discussion / Re: New interesting features for Firefox 3

« Last post by nontroppo on September 10, 2007, 01:38 PM »

The GUICLI, which we know well from Find and Run Robot is an interesting idea for a browser. Indeed the Opera team also think so, and there was an internal concept version last year which uses a CLI metaphor to interact with the browser.

Currently Firefox 3 is considerably fatter than Firefox 2, and runs much slower, but I expect that to improve through the beta cycle.

Lashiec: If you remove XUL, you remove the only thing Firefox / Mozilla has going for it! I really doubt you would see such a vibrant development community if extensions had to be coded in traditional languages. The idea of using web technology to power a web browser is elegant, and many more people can mix-and-mash their own extensions.

406

Living Room / Re: Mac OS X Leopard - All show and no go, or is it worth a try?

« Last post by nontroppo on September 10, 2007, 01:30 PM »

Just do a search of OSX86 and you will find ample info on dual-booting the two OSes

I have a Macbook, my first ever Mac since being a PC user since MS-DOS days. If I had to go back to a PC, I would try to install my existing Tiger or future Leopard licence dual-booted, as I now really appreciate OS X.

407

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is it so hard to find a decent image organizer?

« Last post by nontroppo on September 06, 2007, 06:20 PM »

Sorry for not reading through all the posts here, but I gotta spill: I

lightroom.

I initially was just looking for a organizer - I didn't think I wanted any more. My plan was to use Adobe Camera Raw + Photoshop for doing the pixel-pushing. Bridge has some horrid bugs for me in CS2 and so off I went downloading things to try. Unexpectedly, my journey took me to Bibble Pro, which is both a store and a pixel pusher, and using RAW + JPGs I could do my non-destructive editing with ease. However, Bibble is pretty sluggish as you add more and more images, so off I went again, until I hit the Lightroom beta. As is the golden rule on a computer - find the shortcuts and I was amazed and delighted. Lightroom is just beautiful. I hate to use the non-word, but 'workflow' is so well balanced - and it does make a difference. I am not a professional photographer, but I do take pride in my photos. Lightroom, especially 1.1 allows fantastic flexibility, comprehensive tagging and rugged handling. But tying the darkroom so closely into the image store makes a real difference. Applying enhancments to sets of images suddenly becomes less of a batch battle. The darkroom itself is just fantastic, from clarity to selective colour control to competitive noise removal and selective sharpening. This works on JPGs and RAW transparently. Performance, at least on a Macbook is excellent; only if I have a full Virtual machine running XP, photoshop open and some others would I notice any slowdown. I actually resent Adobe for many things (their bug fixing is atrocious, they respond arrogantly and the CS suite drags all but the strongest machine to Pentium II performance), but they have weaved magic with Lightroom, truly photo-heaven...

408

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera - new alpha version brings untold pleasures...or something like that.

« Last post by nontroppo on September 06, 2007, 05:01 PM »

Having just looked at the adblock plus thread - one nice thing about 9.5 is that you can use site-specific preferences to override the content filter. This means I can block ads in general, but enable them for sites I want to support.

The content blocker in 9.5 will also let you know when your URL patterns match JS and CSS files too, which is valuable feedback when blocking i.e. contextual text ads

409

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera - new alpha version brings untold pleasures...or something like that.

« Last post by nontroppo on September 06, 2007, 04:31 PM »

oops, my URL was borked: http://nontroppo.org...timer/kestrel_tests/

410

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera - new alpha version brings untold pleasures...or something like that.

« Last post by nontroppo on September 06, 2007, 02:35 PM »

Yes, silverlight is supported - the problem is many silverlight demos use browser sniffing so it looks like it doesn't work...

jgpaiva: the inline find is a known bug that is targetted for fixing, so it will once again work out of the box.

For an alpha it is very solid - make sure you don't install over an old profile (it won't by default) and you are good to go.

For those interested in performance, I made a summary, mostly aimed at comparison with 9.x focussed on Web 2ish peformance but threw other browsers into the mix:

http://nontroppo.org...timer/kestrel_tests/ <- URL Fixed ;-)

There is a lot to digest in the changelogs. For developers, there is a TON of cool new technology to play with, and some stuff like using SVG just as any other image format that is long overdue.

411

General Software Discussion / Re: firefox vs. opera: FF is slow when hitting 'back', opera just uses cache

« Last post by nontroppo on August 14, 2007, 08:18 AM »

Opera are trying to "simplify" the UI and so options like this are only available via editing the site prefs INI file manually. To do this:

1) In Opera, make a site-specific prefs entry for SiteX (context-menu > Edit site preferences...) via the UI. I normally remove the domain www to leave just the main site e.g. nytimes.com rather than www.nytimes.com. Close Opera.
2) Go to your profile directory (look in opera:about to se where it is) and find override.ini. Open it in an editor of your choice.
3) Find the site you added, and append:

User Prefs|History Navigation Mode=#

# is
Automatic mode = 1 (uses heuristics to best guess)
Compatible mode = 2 (slow mode)
Fast mode = 3 (turbo mode!)

to that entry, for example:

[Select]

In this example, this forces Opera to use fast navigation for ebay.co.uk - so i ensure I get lightning fast navigation there no matter what my default global setting is :-) Setting the number to 2 uses the compatible mode - which I use for [mail.google.com]. I also add some personal modifications to the CSS (change link colours and fonts to my liking), turn off my UserJS (aka greasemonkey) scripts as I don't use them for EBay, and allow EBay to set permanent cookies (my default sets all cookies as session only). thos last options are fully available via the UI. Site-specific preferences rocks, and IINM it is coming to Firefox too in V3 :-)

412

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux or Mac: Which is the better alternative to Windows?

« Last post by nontroppo on August 14, 2007, 06:58 AM »

Parallels is much more feature rich than fusion actually - but it uses more CPU/RAM and has an horrifically bad support record and bug fix record. Go to their forums and weep. Actually i'm using VMWare Fusion at the moment for evaluation purposes, I've yet to choose between them.

RAM usage of the VM is good, you ideally need 2GB and assign around 768MB to windows. I regularly run Adobe Illustrator CS3 twice (win AND in Mac simultaneously!) + Matlab (win) + Word (Win) + Excel (win) + Endnote (mac) + Scrivener (mac) + Salamander (win) + Forklift (mac) + Opera (mac) + ITunes (mac) + colloquy (mac) + Terminal (mac) running a secondary external 24" monitor without any slowdowns whatsoever on my Macbook. If I run Photoshop on top of that then I'll start to get some swapping, but it is not awful.

413

General Software Discussion / Re: Does it work? Caching Proxy to speed up browsing

« Last post by nontroppo on August 13, 2007, 04:58 PM »

A local proxy could be "better" than a browsers cache in the sense that you could have more control in how to overdies remote server cache directives. Investing lots of tweak time may save you fractions of a second per web site ;-)

I'd stick with the browser cache. With regard to the DNS cache, what does more than the built-in DNS cache of the OS -- is it simply more persistent?

414

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux or Mac: Which is the better alternative to Windows?

« Last post by nontroppo on August 13, 2007, 04:52 PM »

Well, in the sense that Intel's VT technology allows the VM to run natively (no processor emulation and the like) it is partly native. but the reality is that it is a seperate VM and there is some overhead running that way (some 5% of one processor (2.5% overall) for me on average). In real terms Windows feels 'native' fast, and mixing windows and OSX windows together makes it ergonomically native (windows apps appear in the Dock, Mac apps in the Start menu too).

r.e. Freedom: As we've seen with HD DRM, the OS is becoming secondary to the principal battle run by Entertainment Industry Lawyers. If Linux and OS X users will want to watch HD DVDs, they will have to close / secure the data just as Microsoft have been so zealous to do, or just pirate it... I have serious reservations about how zealous Apple will be to drop their pants as Microsoft have done with Vista's DRM.

415

General Software Discussion / Re: firefox vs. opera: FF is slow when hitting 'back', opera just uses cache

« Last post by nontroppo on August 13, 2007, 04:37 PM »

Note, Opera has slowed down its RAM cache a bit in recent builds for sites who use onUnload Javascript and some other heuristic triggers (to allow AJAX history navigation to work etc). You can regain Opera's phenomenal speed by setting:

opera:config#UserPrefs|HistoryNavigationMode to 3

Then, using Site specific preferences you can enable compatible mode only for sites like GMail that benefit from it.

Firefox's recent history cache is still both slower and much more memory hungry than Opera's. I've tested this by opening Google Image Searches for Picasso, Magritte and Dali (20 images per page). Then navigation through ten pages (thus 200 images per tab and 600 images total). Firefox fails after 5 (default settings) back navigations in total. Opera can render *all* of the 30 pages and 600 images immediately using some 40% less RAM!

kimchii — that Proxo filter will not stop Firefox from having to rerender web pages. You probably have Fastback enabled in Firefox. Your filter *will* stop sites forcing you to revalidate HTTP resources, though will make forums etc not automatically update unless overridden.

416

General Software Discussion / Re: Learnin Javascript

« Last post by nontroppo on August 11, 2007, 01:25 PM »

I used these online tutorials to learn the basics:

http://www.howtocrea...utorials/javascript/
http://www.croczilla...ipt_guide/index.html

and this to understand more:

http://simon.incutio...roduction-notes.html

Though without knowing a bit of HTML, understanding the DOM will be tough, so you may want to make sure you know the basics there too...

417

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux or Mac: Which is the better alternative to Windows?

« Last post by nontroppo on August 11, 2007, 01:19 PM »

Darwin: yes, I can drag-n-drop between desktops, or copy-n-paste text etc. One can set up shared directories or share the entire drive via each OS during VM use transparently. Parallels even allows you to set up universal default apps, so you can get Mac Photoshop to open .psd files but Win IrfanView to open .TIF files for example! Some Mac users have actually complained at how unified the two OSes have become, mostly due to security fears of Windows.

There is little data that is really locked to any OS, i interoperate with my Windows using colleagues without issue. And some applications are just stunning on OS X (I'm looking at you Scrivener), that my work routine has been radically improved.

Gothi[c]: Indeed I partly raised that above. To be honest though, my Macbook is the most beautiful laptop I've owned. I love little details about its design, and given a choice I would aim to buy Mac hardware again. As I said above, for workstation-class machines, Apple have better deals than Dell who we have to buy through at my University, so for us, the benefits far outweigh the negatives (and Mac Pros have a fantastic chassis).

However what exactly do you mean by "freedom"? OS X supports a majority of open-source software, so data is not locked in any way into OS X unless you choose to e.g. buy iTunes songs. The kernel of the OS is open-source, and currently there is none of the horrible DRM system that Vista is built on. So freedom means what in practical terms?

418

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux or Mac: Which is the better alternative to Windows?

« Last post by nontroppo on August 11, 2007, 04:13 AM »

Indeed, I have only used Intel Macs, where Windows support is native. Actually, Parallels and VMWare Fusion have an amazing mode where the guest and host OS windows live in the same space. You can use Word 2007, Mac Photoshop CS3, IE7 as if it was the same OS, weird but useful; you have to see it to believe it! But most Mac apps do what I need anyway (and CS3 works faster on Mac than PC ATM), apart from Matlab, which although Intel compatible in the latest release is quite clunky (it is derived from the Linux version).

Oh, lots of open-source stuff from the *nix world makes it onto OS X, and indeed there are two large repositories of OS *nix utilities available; including most X Apps via Apple's X Server.

Darwin: definitely worth dual-booting Ubuntu, good fun to play with, but boy does linux drain time trying to get everything working ;-)

419

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux or Mac: Which is the better alternative to Windows?

« Last post by nontroppo on August 09, 2007, 04:21 PM »

After we evaluated Vista, and after I had fought on and off with Linux, several of our university department have moved Mac-ward bound. With University pricing, workstations are cheaper from Apple than Dell (strange-but-true), and as we have a sitewide Microsoft licence, Bootcamp turns them into dual-boot workhorses easily.

I *love* Apple's superior typography support, system-wide ligatures :-) However I suffer iTunes

. Overall, I spend as much time as possible in OS X, as once the switch-shock wears off, I really like it. The unix base makes tweaking lots of fun and I disagree about feature set icekin - there are lots of settings and advanced technologies in OS X, and the freeware scene is very active[1]. I have Ubuntu on my old laptop, and I had a terrible time failing to get wireless working, and it still doesn't understand widescreen laptop screen resolution without hacking xserver configs. My problem with Apple is lock-in. I now really respect OS X overall and would love to have it run on any hardware. The rest is irrelevant - mouse keyboard, screens - one can use anything, but legally running OS X anywhere isn't possible.

----
[1] I love tweaking, and did so extensively in Windows. I indeed tweak the hell out of my browser. I have not missed anything with OS X, if anything, the technology base (much better systemwide scripting support and automation baked into the core OS, including hooks into the *nix base) makes tweaking endlessly pleasurable.

420

General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« Last post by nontroppo on July 27, 2007, 06:00 PM »

zridling: yes, that article is a mandatory must-read before migration to Vista IMHO. The problems being that MS is forcing all hardware vendors down that road, and so no matter what your OS at some point you are screwed. I've seen defensive return articles from MS and further rebuttals by Gutmann, and he has so far wiped the floor with them. Impressive stuff from Peter but nevertheless a a chilling note for the future...

421

General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« Last post by nontroppo on July 25, 2007, 11:50 AM »

After several different people in my department evaluated Vista[1] (all PC users since DOS days), they went and bought Macs

On educational discount you can get a faster workstation-class machine than through Dell (again discounted for University) for the same money. And so we are all slowly moving over to OS X running XP virtualised (Vista is horrible for virtualisation, huge performance issues). XP runs like a frenetic speeddemon virtualised on 4-core Mac Pro's, even faster when booted natively through bootcamp. Geekbench benchmarking shows even virtualised, XP runs faster on Mac Pros than on dual-core Dell Precisions from last year. Vista is about 20% slower on that platform. OS XXP all the way!

----
[1] Reading Peter Gutmann's article was hardly inspiring either: http://www.cs.auckla...pubs/vista_cost.html

422

General Software Discussion / Re: a honest review from someone who went full-time mac and came back to windows

« Last post by nontroppo on July 25, 2007, 07:35 AM »

...and not a single one for Macs (Pathfinder follows the finder too closely for my taste).
-alxwz (July 23, 2007, 02:19 PM)

Have you tried Forklift? http://www.binarynights.com/ -- the best thing I've found so far (SFTP/FTP support is critical to me). muCommander is the next best (free) alternative.

But there are also some applications that provide elegant solutions for real productivity problems where I can't see equivalents on Windows. Like Tinderbox, Omni Outliner, DevonThink, Packrat, Mellel, Scrivener and others. Merlin, maybe.
-alxwz (July 23, 2007, 02:19 PM)

Ah Scrivener - :true-love: - I've tried endless programs for writers on the PC and they are so flaky in comparison. I wonder what it is about Mac as as a platform that provides the basis for such elegant software (Quicksilver is another example)?

423

General Software Discussion / Re: a honest review from someone who went full-time mac and came back to windows

« Last post by nontroppo on July 23, 2007, 12:50 PM »

alxwz: imho a lot of his points were pretty valid... especially at a user level (some of them I had to shrug a bit about being a programmer). It wasn't just the usual "wasn't able to deal with something that's just different." thing, he pointed out a bunch of flaws.
-f0dder (July 23, 2007, 08:24 AM)

His first set of "flaws" were the same ones I had when I recently switched. WTF doesn't this program close!? But that was just confirming the massive cognitive bias I have after using PCs since MSDOS 6. As soon as you replace application for document space it is suddenly intuitive. He simply refused to think in any other way than his biases predicted. The majority of his UI issues were in the same vein (not having a delete key on the Laptop keyboard aside - he wrongly confused the problem though correctly ientified the underlying frustration). His point on font corruption is a known issue, though it has never happened to me. But what he didn't mention is the OpenType support is native through the OS - this is simply

-- I can use ligatures and proper typography everywhere -- for someone who purports to do lots of graphics work, this is the real deal.

Networking: I have as many problems with my Desktop PCs reliably sharing in workgroups as I have getting my Mac to -- networking sucks irrespective of vendor. No problem printing to two network shared printers running on an XP host.

Conclusion: it was much closer to a pissing content than an "objective" review (using allen's lovely categories)

424

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: NirCmd Setup, a guide of sorts

« Last post by nontroppo on July 23, 2007, 12:10 PM »

There is something annoying though (been a while sonce I've been using FARR so I may just be rusty).

I type "cmd st" - gives me Nircmd standby command as the first entry - I just want to press F1 or [ENTER], but that replaces the text with Standby and I have to press F1 or [ENTER] a second time. I assume this is to do with the alias list having two repeated aliases, but when I press F1 I simply want that one to run.

425

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: NirCmd Setup, a guide of sorts

« Last post by nontroppo on July 23, 2007, 11:59 AM »

well done jgpaiva!

There is a bug in the standby command - it exits windows instead!?

Wow, FARR 2 is looking damn fine overall, alias system changes are very welcome. :beer: to mouser

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