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401

General Software Discussion / Re: Program to beautify crappy exports from other applications?

« Last post by Armando on February 26, 2011, 01:55 PM »

Shades' emphasis is appropriate as this is exactly what I meant : maybe too much work for not much result. Certainly not a 20/80 situation. 

If it can be  done relatively fast with little XML and features learning and only a few templates, cool, as timns says. Otherwise... Not so sure. of course, I'd be the kind of person choosing the 105/90 solution, but I consider that a problem.

(Note that AndyM's idea could work too, depending on what you want exactly... But you probably already tried that over and over.)

402

General Software Discussion / Re: The Bat: Great program, terrible documentation and support

« Last post by Armando on February 26, 2011, 12:52 PM »

I understand too the need to have all data locally. I do exactly the same.

But what do you need to do with your email, apart from classifying, sorting, filtering, searching and finding info in it?

Like many others I have my Google account (and others) synced with Outlook 2003. Never have a problem. And I back up my pst file everyday.

I use Windows Search to index my outlook stuff. I find everything, anything... in a flash. Same for my contacts, calendar etc. The cool thing when using Outlook is that you can also more easily use several handy features, like the "mail merge" function in MS Word (a great and not known enough feature), using your various outlook contact lists.

Oh, and everything in Outlook is easily exportable. You could even export all your emails to Gmail via imap (e.g. : for online backup purpose, if you trust Google).

403

General Software Discussion / Re: Program to beautify crappy exports from other applications?

« Last post by Armando on February 26, 2011, 12:34 AM »

In theory, I like timns' solution. However, Stylus Studio -- even if great -- is at least 99 $... A tad expensive if all you want is to a few xml exports here and there. I also wonder how much energy and learning it would take to learn XML's basics and design nice templates in Stylus. It doesn't seem that hard, but... all that is very relative.

404

General Software Discussion / Re: The Bat: Great program, terrible documentation and support

« Last post by Armando on February 25, 2011, 03:44 PM »

[slightly off-topic]

"Windows coders" (whatever that means) are basically a tad stupid and incompetent, while "Apple coders"  (whatever that means) are superior beings who magically just know how to do elegant and intuitive things right.


Since we're sharing anecdotes, I'll share a few of my own.


----

I remember using the calendar app on my gf's mac a few years ago. I felt severely limited. It was also slow and ugly (to me... obviously... others might feel differently).   I was so happy to get my Outlook 2003 back. So flexible and powerful, speedy and relatively light on resources (yup... and I'm well over 1 GB pf data). Not perfect, of course.

----

There's one application I really dislike but which I need to keep because I own an ipod Touch (which I like, btw) : iTunes. It's slooooow (semi-objective statement). It's heavy (semi-objective statement). It does a million things (objective statement... heck : I can install apps using itunes, buy stuff on the web, browse, etc.). I have to image my whole C: drive everytime I update the monster in fear that it'll break something (it does almost everytime, believe it or not). And yet... it's from Apple, king/queen of elegance and intuitiveness (according to marketing and forum posts here and there). Frankly I don't like it... Your opinion may vary.

----

Don't get me started on intuitiveness and elegance in general. Hard to define buzzwords. You see, I find my coffee cup elegant, but you might not. And my girl friend certainly doesn't either. And, you know what, while I find her quite elegant, I wouldn't drink in her cup either...    Absolutely no pun intended. Please.

----

The grass is always grayer on the other side.

[/slightly off-topic]

405

General Software Discussion / Re: DVCS ?

« Last post by Armando on February 20, 2011, 11:24 PM »

It's a bit long but this part from the Mercurial manual gives interesting info, particularly in relation to this thread. Of course it might be a bit subjective... :

1.6.1. Subversion

Subversion is a popular revision control tool, developed to replace CVS. It has a centralised client/server architecture.

Subversion and Mercurial have similarly named commands for performing the same operations, so if you're familiar with one, it is easy to learn to use the other. Both tools are portable to all popular operating systems.

Prior   to   version   1.5,   Subversion   had   no   useful   support   for   merges.   At   the   time   of   writing,   its   merge tracking   capability   is   new,   and   known   to   be   complicated   and   buggy   [http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.branchmerge.advanced.html#svn.branchmerge.advanced.finalword].

Mercurial  has  a  substantial  performance  advantage  over  Subversion  on  every  revision  control  operation  I  have benchmarked.  I  have  measured  its  advantage  as  ranging  from  a  factor  of  two  to  a  factor  of  six  when  compared  with Subversion 1.4.3's ra_local file store, which is the fastest access method available. In more realistic deployments involving a network-based store, Subversion will be at a substantially larger disadvantage. Because many Subversion commands must talk to the server and Subversion does not have useful replication facilities, server capacity and network bandwidth become bottlenecks for modestly large projects. Additionally, Subversion incurs substantial storage overhead to avoid network transactions for a few common operations, such as finding modified files (status) and displaying modifications against the current revision (diff). As a result, a Subversion working copy is often the same size as, or larger than, a Mercurial repository and working directory, even though the Mercurial repository contains a complete history of the project.

Subversion is widely supported by third party tools. Mercurial currently lags considerably in this area. This gap is closing, however, and indeed some of Mercurial's GUI tools now outshine their Subversion equivalents. Like Mercurial, Subversion has an excellent user manual.

Because Subversion doesn't store revision history on the client, it is well suited to managing projects that deal with lots of large, opaque binary files. If you check in fifty revisions to an incompressible 10MB file, Subversion's client-side space usage stays constant The space used by any distributed SCM will grow rapidly in proportion to the number of revisions, because the differences between each revision are large.

In addition, it's often difficult or, more usually, impossible to merge different versions of a binary file. Subversion's ability to let a user lock a file, so that they temporarily have the exclusive right to commit changes to it, can be a significant advantage to a project where binary files are widely used.

Mercurial can import revision history from a Subversion repository. It can also export revision history to a Subversion repository. This makes it easy to “test the waters” and use Mercurial and Subversion in parallel before deciding to switch. History conversion is incremental, so you can perform an initial conversion, then small additional conversions afterwards to bring in new changes.

1.6.2. Git

Git is a distributed revision control tool that was developed for managing the Linux kernel source tree. Like Mercurial, its early design was somewhat influenced by Monotone.

Git has a very large command set, with version 1.5.0 providing 139 individual commands. It has something of a reputation for being difficult to learn. Compared to Git, Mercurial has a strong focus on simplicity.

In terms of performance, Git is extremely fast. In several cases, it is faster than Mercurial, at least on Linux, while Mercurial performs better on other operations. However, on Windows, the performance and general level of support that Git provides is, at the time of writing, far behind that of Mercurial.

While a Mercurial repository needs no maintenance, a Git repository requires frequent manual “repacks” of its metadata. Without these, performance degrades, while space usage grows rapidly. A server that contains many Git repositories that are not rigorously and frequently repacked will become heavily disk-bound during backups, and there have been instances of daily backups taking far longer than 24 hours as a result. A freshly packed Git repository is slightly smaller than a Mercurial repository, but an unpacked repository is several orders of magnitude larger.

The core of Git is written in C. Many Git commands are implemented as shell or Perl scripts, and the quality of these scripts varies widely. I have encountered several instances where scripts charged along blindly in the presence of errors that should have been fatal.

Mercurial can import revision history from a Git repository.

406

General Software Discussion / Re: DVCS ?

« Last post by Armando on February 20, 2011, 06:55 PM »

This is very good info and I appreciate it tremendously. Thanks to you 3 for your generosity.  

With that said: Do get some kind of VCS!

-Ath (February 19, 2011, 02:59 PM)

get some version control, right now. Even if you're never going to collaborate with other people, you'll learn to appreciate it. VCS serves as part of a backup scheme, it's easier to find particular versions of your source code than dealing with timestamped copies, and once you become disciplined and write proper commit messages and commit at a proper granularity, you'll see you have some powerful tools at hand to search history, track regressions, managed branches et cetera. It does take a bit getting really used to VCS and reap all the benefits, but it's worth investing time in it.

-f0dder (February 20, 2011, 05:39 PM)

Yes, I will get it, right now. The idea of building my own versioning system when more powerful, accurate, flexible, etc. systems exist... Felt stupid. My only fear was that it'd overkill. But you guys said what I needed to hear :

If I were starting from nothing, I think I'd consider Mercurial over SVN - it seems less complex than Git and seem a bit more Windows friendly. [...] I'm considering converting my personal SVN repository to Mercurial, and hosting it on https://bitbucket.org/ where you can have free private repositories.  

-mwb1100 (February 20, 2011, 04:32 PM)

And...  I'm going to aim for DVCS and will first try Mercurial + TortoiseHg.

basically, All of the points f0dder brought forward, and a few others, completely convinced me to go this way.
Here are these points...

1- Speed and efficiency :

* Fetching the entire Notepad++ Community Release wia Git via my 20mbit ADSL is faster than grabbing fSekrit with subversion on my gigabit LAN. Nuff' said?

-f0dder (February 20, 2011, 05:39 PM)

* Since dvcs store all files locally in addition to the (optional) remote repository, switching branches or datamining history is lightning fast. With subversion, even on a gigabit lan some operations can be painfully slow.

-f0dder (February 20, 2011, 05:39 PM)

   

2- "Cleanliness", robustness, reliability :

* Subversion stores it's info in ".svn" folders in each and every subfolder of your project. This is ugly, it means you have to use "svn export" to grab/export a clean subtree, and if you forget to do this and copy subfolders around in your svn-managed project, you can screw things up majorly. Both Hg and Git use a single top-level folder per project.

-f0dder (February 20, 2011, 05:39 PM)

   

* Even though subversion has metadata scattered in all those .svn folders, you don't have the full project history locally - so if your remote repository goes AWOL, you're screwed. With Hg and Git, your own machine has a full local copy of all history.

-f0dder (February 20, 2011, 05:39 PM)

3- Useful flexibility

* Subversion doesn't treat branches and tags specially, but just as part of the filesystem. This does, kinda, give you some flexibility, but it's flex you don't need, and it can cause a lot of clutter and fuss if you aren't very disciplined with how you arrange stuff.

-f0dder (February 20, 2011, 05:39 PM)

* Branches in svn always go to your repository, meaning they're slightly slow operations to perform, they "pollute" the namespace, etc. Thus, with svn, you think a lot before you make a branch, especially on a multi-dev project. With Hg and Git, you can do local "feature branches" to work on without disturbing other people, and merge those to the current working branch before pushing your changes upstream. In other words, YOU have a lot of flexibility on your own machine, without necessarily cluttering things for everybody else. Even on single-dev projects, it's nice being able to take a break from adding a new feature to fix a bug, and then merge it all together.

-f0dder (February 20, 2011, 05:39 PM)

4- Adaptability, reusability...

And if you stay clear of svn, you won't need to muck around with converting your repositories when you feel like ditching it at some later point

-f0dder (February 20, 2011, 05:39 PM)

I'm considering converting my personal SVN repository to Mercurial, and hosting it on https://bitbucket.org/  where you can have free private repositories.  If bitbucket ever goes away, that's not a big deal since any workspace I have is essentially a full backup of the repository.  Moving my hosted SVN stuff was a bit of a pain when my 1st hoster dropped their free plans.

-mwb1100 (February 20, 2011, 04:32 PM)

407

General Software Discussion / Re: DVCS ?

« Last post by Armando on February 20, 2011, 04:18 PM »

Thanks for taking the time to answer. I was thinking of getting acquainted with Tortoise SVN (as I said, it's already installed on my computer, etc.). But then I read comments (mainly from f0dder) about GIT, Mercurial and the like... and how annoying SVN could become in some contexts.

Since all these version control systems seem to take a fair number of hours to get truly familiar with their mechanism and features, I just want to make sure I don't uselessly invest time in a one of them to discover I should've invested energy in "the another one".

So... From what you say ("If working alone or in a small local team (in the same office)"), I should just start working with I've got installed : tortoise SVN. Does that mean that GIT or Mercurial aren't good for these contexts (or not worth the effort) ?

408

General Software Discussion / Re: Freeware Telephone Support Number

« Last post by Armando on February 19, 2011, 04:35 PM »

I guess it depends what the software does, and why I'm calling. E.g. : lost my data and want to know if it's recoverable VS I like the tray icon and want to know who designed it. I'd be angry in the first case, maybe, and laughing in the second.

409

General Software Discussion / DVCS ? (All about Git, Mercurial-Hg and the like...)

« Last post by Armando on February 19, 2011, 02:39 PM »

DVCS : what system to you use... And why ? I'm also generally curious about the context in which you use it (e.g. : working alone or in a team ? purely for code  ?)...

===

Some background info ?

There's been several discussions about version control systems here, but only a few about DVCS and its open systems (Git, Mercurial...). I admit I installed Tortoise SVN a while ago and never used it. Instead I rely on a few different tools like AutoVer, time stamped backups, notes, etc.

I'm currently working on a coding project (my first "real" one in fact), and am wondering if I should be more rigorous about version control etc. But since I have perfectionist tendencies and tend to loose time on details and unnecessary stuff, I want to avoid getting into something that might be very interesting (no doubt...) BUT that will slow me down for months without giving me any concrete benefits. So... if you have any advice concerning that matter... Thanks.

410

General Software Discussion / Re: Well, actually... or... What you need to understand is...

« Last post by Armando on February 18, 2011, 06:19 PM »

The whole article is great. But, to me, one of the funniest part is :

In the office, we have lots of talented engineers and at one point or another one of us will interject a well placed "well, actually" at an innapropriate moment.

These days we are fully aware of this social disease and we strive to avoid it. When someone interrupts a discussion with a well-actually you can hear someone say:

    "Did you just well-actually me?"

Which is basically a way of saying "That has nothing to do with the topic, but thanks for derailing us" without having to go into the explanation and getting lost on the tangent.

"Did you just well-actually me?"... In French it's hard to find an equivalent that's as nice without sounding completely awkward.

411

General Software Discussion / Re: Well, actually... or... What you need to understand is...

« Last post by Armando on February 18, 2011, 06:08 PM »

Nice.  

Couldn't find a link to the full article in your post.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html

-cthorpe (February 18, 2011, 04:51 PM)

Ah! This is ridiculous... Sorry about that. I'm adding it right now.Thanks

412

General Software Discussion / Well, actually... or... What you need to understand is...

« Last post by Armando on February 18, 2011, 08:44 AM »

Just thought it was both funny and quite "accurate" (BTW, the "Why you are not getting laid" subtitle has nothing to do with the essence of the article). Interestingly enough, I had a conversation on exactly the same subject with a friend a couple days ago.

Your mileage may vary... Well... actually...

413

Living Room / Re: Never Defragment an SSD ?

« Last post by Armando on February 17, 2011, 11:29 PM »

Thanks for the contributions. So... 1-defragmenting an SSD in the "traditional way" would not be a particularly brilliant idea ("limited amount of erase-cycles of the flash cells"... windows 7 defrag system skips SSDs for that very reason), 2- the fragmentation that'll inevitably occur will somewhat affect performance. 3- According to f0dder the only "defraging" remedy would be to

create a disk image of it to a mechanical drive, defrag that image, do a single-pass wipe of the SSD (to let the drive know all sectors blocks are blank, useful for the reallocation algorithms), then transfer the defragged image back.

414

Living Room / Never Defragment an SSD ?

« Last post by Armando on February 16, 2011, 08:58 PM »

I found that article interesting. The author, Jan Goyvaerts, is the developer behind "Just Great Software" (RegexBuddy, EditPad, etc.) -- he also wrote several great books.

415

General Software Discussion / Re: Alternative .chm readers?

« Last post by Armando on February 14, 2011, 11:07 AM »

I've been using Ultra CHM for a while. It's certainly more flexible than others. However... I find it unbelievable that this is... It. Rea...lly?

By comparison, Pdf viewers have a lot more convenient features... and are much more configurable (in terms of shortcut keys, editing, etc.). Which leads me to always try to find a pdf alternative to any CHM document.

Sorry... Complaining but don't have any good solution... But am periodically looking for one. I guess one day I'll have to buy something super expensive like Help And Manual and create my own pdfs out of CHMs.

416

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.1.0

« Last post by Armando on January 30, 2011, 09:30 PM »

Nope... I guess I haven't been rough enough before. I was able to crash it, eventually, without any plugins loaded. Sorry about that.

I got both errors : eaccess, and the oleaut32.dll one.


It seems somewhat more stable though.

417

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.1.0

« Last post by Armando on January 30, 2011, 09:25 PM »

Yup, got the EAccess violation again. Will deactivate Farr Alt Tab again and see if Farr Windows Search is still as solid.

418

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.1.0

« Last post by Armando on January 30, 2011, 09:20 PM »

That was quick. I re-enabled Farr Alt-Tab... Used farr windows search a few times (intensively)... And farr just vanished... Not even an error message.

More later.

419

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.1.0

« Last post by Armando on January 30, 2011, 09:17 PM »

Ok, good news : no crash for the last 2 days.

I'll guess I'll start re-enabling plugins one after the other. Maybe one every 2nd day.

420

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.1.0

« Last post by Armando on January 28, 2011, 10:38 AM »

It's a bit drastic but I guess it's the best way to find out if there's some other plugin involved. I'll try that.

421

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Writing Outliner for MS Word

« Last post by Armando on January 28, 2011, 09:41 AM »

Any comments on your purchase, wraith808 ? Are you satisfied ?

422

Site/Forum Features / Re: New tweaks to forum - Jan 27, 2011 (apc caching, server load info)

« Last post by Armando on January 27, 2011, 08:28 PM »

I've been missing that feature.

-Stoic Joker (January 27, 2011, 07:39 PM)

Just tried... it works. I've been missing it too !

 

423

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.1.0

« Last post by Armando on January 27, 2011, 06:34 PM »

Here's what I get :



Note that this happened once when I was using Farr Windows Search, and and it also happened rather randomly when I was doing something else (browsing the wen, maybe) : farr crashed with that error. I wonder what that means.

424

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.1.0

« Last post by Armando on January 27, 2011, 06:31 PM »

Ok, seems to work better, but I got an "EAccess violation" error after a short while.
Reported earlier in the thread :

https://www.donation....msg201385#msg201385

The dialog says to contact mouser...?

425

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Windows Search 0.1.0

« Last post by Armando on January 26, 2011, 09:02 AM »

Thanks ! I think that's what I also did last time -- without success. But will try once more.