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476

General Software Discussion / RapidEE (Rapid Environment Editor) — 64 bit alternative?

« Last post by urlwolf on May 06, 2009, 06:31 PM »

Anyone knows of a RapidEE (Rapid Environment Editor) — 64 bit alternative?

Thanks

477

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Total Commander 7.50 public beta 1 - mini-review

« Last post by urlwolf on May 05, 2009, 10:00 AM »

hmm, it doesn't work for me; I had to remove the entire associations section, otherwise I'd get "file not found" popups.
That's ok, it kind of works now. no port. assoc. but at least I can do work.
I wonder when tweaking apps would stop being useful, and it must be about now

478

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Total Commander 7.50 public beta 1 - mini-review

« Last post by urlwolf on May 05, 2009, 05:19 AM »

anyone getting the built-in file association rules working cares to explain how to do it?
I've tried associating vim to ini files, but TC ignores it.

Thanks

479

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« Last post by urlwolf on May 05, 2009, 05:12 AM »

ivery, just curious what kind of field are you in? Are you dealing with huge hex files, database files

Our systems input text files that have been produced from other systems. They are regularly in the 1-7 GB range.
Granted that it's not often that we would need to actually edit these files [as opposed to viewing and searching them], but in an ideal world the text editor would enable this function. i.e. you would not need to use a separate file viewer. Ultraedit handles this well, and Emeditor isn't far behind it.

-ivery (May 05, 2009, 12:09 AM)

Then, the only sane option is emEditor, I think. It's designed for those cases.

480

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« Last post by urlwolf on May 04, 2009, 06:25 PM »

Emeditor split window (4 ways) is NOT what I'm talking about.
You cannot put a different file in each split, can you? So it's useless to me.

Another must for me is a search that highlights all occurrences and leaves them there while I move. Not many editors have that (notepad, emeditor, hippo). Introduced by vim.

481

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« Last post by urlwolf on May 04, 2009, 05:24 PM »

Two things that I really need and not many editors provide: ctags integration, and split window so you can show two files. Vim does that, but not many others.

Having mercurial integrated would be a plus, too.

482

Living Room / Re: how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« Last post by urlwolf on May 04, 2009, 05:05 AM »

Sorry, one more thought.

At some point, this ties with the idea of measuring reputation online.
With so much bullshit floating around on the net, I'd be very happy to see a measure of reputation emerge so I know who to trust on what topic. That Karma, badges, voting etc may contain the ingredients for a generalized reputation index, that could be extrapolated to other domains if only we knew what it is that makes it work.

I think SO is really worth studying.

483

Living Room / Re: how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« Last post by urlwolf on May 04, 2009, 05:02 AM »

rww covering stackoverflow has a write-up for those not willing to spend 1hr watching the video.

I think there's something fundamentally right about SO, that DC could take, but I'm not sure what it is.

   1. Voting: Copied from Reddit, via Digg, voting allows people to vote up answers they think are good. Stack Overflow tweaked its voting algorithm, giving the person who asked the question special power to select one answer as the official answer that will rise to the top regardless of what the community voted. The second answer, of course is always the highest ranked community answer.
   2. Tags: Tags allow users to specify perspective. For instance, Spolsky explained, "you can add that I'm asking this from a VB perspective, not a C# perspective." Stack Overflow is also customizable with tags, allowing users to specify which technology they are interested in, and typical of most social sites. What is not typical however, is the ability to ignore tags that Stack Overflow has built in.
   3. Editing: Taking a page out of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow allows users to edit both questions and answers; so answers could get better, rather than becoming "this frozen artifact on the Internet until the end of time," which is typical of most forum threads.
   4. Badges: "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon," said Napoleon once upon a time, and so Stack Overflow made the decision to reward its users with badges. Over time, the badges show credibility.
   5. Karma: People are willing to do for free what they're not willing to do for small amounts of money according to Spolsky and by offering karma, Stack Overflow encourages its users to do more. More Karma equals more privileges on the site.
   6. Pre-search: Once you begin typing your question, Stack Overflow's pre-search will do a quick search to see whether the question has been asked before and display the result for easy access and to prevent duplication issues.
   7. Google is UI: Stack Overflow was built around the assumption that people will go to Google which will send them to the right page. Each URL has the name of the question; each URL is permanent and clean, Metatags, sitemaps; anything and everything was done to ensure Stack Overflow's pages looked "reasonable to search engines."
   8. Performance: Ensuring answers are provided super fast was imperative. As a result, Stack Overflow is built on a Microsoft stack. "This entire site is serving 16 million pages a month and we're doing it off of two servers which are almost completely unloaded," said Spolsky. One server is a Web server, the other is running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and both are 8 core Xeon's. While many may assume using an open source stack would be more efficient, Spolsky explained that while SQL Server licenses cost $5000 per box, the Microsoft stack is paying for itself in terms of reduced hardware.
   9. Critical Mass: It's imperative to have critical mass on day one; to ensure people are available to answer questions. "That was one of the reasons I asked Jeff Attwood to be involved in the site," Spolsky explained. Between Joel on Software (Spolsky's blog) and Coding Horror (Attwood's blog), the two had a combined visitor count of 1.3 million visitors per month. Combined with the weekly podcast the two began, they were certain to get at least 20-30 thousand programmers interested.

He also mentions that Q-A type sites were done wrong, and I agree. I also have the feeling that forum software is not the most efficient way to do some things.

484

Living Room / Re: Best firefox addon ever

« Last post by urlwolf on May 03, 2009, 06:40 PM »

try also autopager. Been using it for 2-3 weeks. Works well.

485

Living Room / Re: how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« Last post by urlwolf on May 03, 2009, 04:11 PM »

Agreed on how problematic is to define a fact. A working definition, however, is not that bad: something most people agree on in this day an age?
Wolfram alpha seems to aim at working with those 'facts'. Let's see how it works (to be  released soon, this coming week maybe?).

486

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« Last post by urlwolf on May 03, 2009, 02:55 AM »

@tranglos: incremental search works emEditor 9 alpha.

487

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« Last post by urlwolf on May 02, 2009, 06:37 PM »

Well, I have to correct my statement that emeditor moves slowly.
In fact, 9 beta implements a bunch of new things, including the infamous snippets from textmate. See:
http://www.emeditor....id=1110&forum=12
(go to the newest post to get latest beta).
Seems plenty healthy pace of adding features to me,...

488

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« Last post by urlwolf on May 02, 2009, 01:25 PM »

I just tried hippo and I think it could very well be my choice. It copies emEditor in many ways, and adds some improvements. emEditor will be the best for large files and unicode, though.

Where both are kind of lost is when doing ctags stuff (more IDE-like).

The thing with hippo is that it seems to implement new features a lot faster than emEditor (which is very very slow). It could take the crown easily, I'd say.

489

General Software Discussion / Re: Appnews.net - A new collaboration between some of our favorite software bloggers

« Last post by urlwolf on May 02, 2009, 03:40 AM »

Could this idea be integrated with some kind of multi-installer?
One thing where linux beats other OS is updating software. One command, and all software in your computer is updated. In windows, not only do you need to find the upgrades and download them 'by hand', but also you need to do a few clicks each, and type admin pwd for each (!).

I know there are some attempts for windows to track updates to installed software (can't remember the name now!).
Say that I subscribe to this feed, and there's something installed on my computer that knows how to dl the apps. Then, after review, one admin pwd would install all apps.

Is this setting possible?
Thanks!

490

Living Room / Re: how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« Last post by urlwolf on May 01, 2009, 10:52 AM »

We are sidetracked on whether points alone or some complex feedback measure is better (i.e., huge variety of badges in SO; complex way of getting and losing karma).

There's something more crucial.

I've been thinking about this for a while.
It's the distinction between fact and opinion.
On the web, it'd be mighty useful to be able to tell them apart. And assign a credibilty value to *anything*. Otherwise, we are at risk of being manipulated.

Back on topic of So vs. DC...

When you have fact-like info, I think SO interface is better.
Example: "how do i change font size in eclipse?"
This can be easily tested to see if it works.

Now we all know and love that not all the content here is facts, but opinions. Same on stackOverflow! and it was designed for factual stuff.
Example: "what is the best [foo]?"

Here we are in opinion territory.

Q1: Can humans distinguish between fact and opinion easily? Do they? My gut feeling if that we take advice -even for big decisions- on things that have very little relation to facts or empirical evidence _most of the time_.
Q2: Could machines be trained to make this distinction?
Q3: How about a mix of human and machine?
Q4: Could this be done at web scale?
Q5: Would the system be trustable and reliable enough to have reference value? i.e., can it be gamed? Example: Running shoes. There's a XX billion industry on top of them. However, nobody has shown any effect of expensive shoes getting less injuries to people.

What I'm thinking is really not practical because the marketing depts of the world, who implicitly run the media would tag together and stop this system from being successful.

Game1: next time you see a sentence that is likely to influence your behavior, ask yourself: "How do I know what this is saying is true?".

Game2: Try to assign a trust value to each sentence on any random paragraph. Prepare to be amazed.

491

Developer's Corner / Re: Article Convinces Me To Move To vi(m)

« Last post by urlwolf on May 01, 2009, 10:41 AM »

only on *nix.
Another nifty trick to communicate with the python interactive console is to use screen.
There's a vim script somewhere that automates this.

But I assume we are on  windows?

492

Developer's Corner / Re: Article Convinces Me To Move To vi(m)

« Last post by urlwolf on May 01, 2009, 06:24 AM »

get python shell inside Vim, not possible?

No that I know of.

493

General Software Discussion / installers that assume admin privs: what to do with them?

« Last post by urlwolf on April 30, 2009, 09:23 PM »

I wanted to install emacsW32 but it seems that the installer leaves all files under admin's ownership.

I could change the ownership, but still, when launching it, it tries to write to admin's home (and of course, gets permission denied). My guess is that somewhere in the registry something is assuming that the user who installs is the user who will use it (almighty-user-mode, the standard up to XP on most cases).

I cannot be 100% sure that it's the installer. But even if it's not, the general question arises,... what to do with programs that still use almighty-user-mode?

494

Living Room / Opera: they are dead and they still don't know

« Last post by urlwolf on April 30, 2009, 12:57 PM »

What killed them:
   Not-so-good compatibility with all the new ajax sites. This shows a worrying disregard for the people who are building innovative stuff (startups). All startups push the limits of your browser. And they build and test on Mozilla because it's just more open (plugins), more debuggable (firebug, coincidentally a plugin), and more widespread (so the return for your time and effort is higher).
   
   Even in they get the best grades for compatibility with standards, the real test is the sites out there that fail to work 100% with Opera. My guess is that this is quite a lot, but the Opera user rarely notices unless there's a major borking that makes the site unusable; then they go to another browser, and discover what they missed.
   
   Not so fast anymore. Opera lost the javascript wars
   
   Perceived as too complicated
   
   One misses too much functionality by not having plugins. At a certain point, not long ago, plugins would give you little advantages; nowadays, there's an entire universe of new things that take the form of FF addons. Some of the most innovative software in 2008 was an addon.
   
   

I think they are listening to the users but to the wrong ones

Agreed. And they have lost their sense of what's useful on the web today.
Opera smells like some creative guys (who put out incredibly innovative features) crushed under the weight of horrible management.

I switched from Opera to FF ~ 3 months ago, after being an Opera user since v. 5.

495

Living Room / Re: how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« Last post by urlwolf on April 30, 2009, 11:19 AM »

Sorry abt link, try this one:
http://joelonsoftwar...tems/2009/04/29.html

I'm not sure Karma is the driving force of stackOverflow. I never check there or anywhere else (slashdot?) the karma of the commenter.
What I'm saying is that their CMS seems to solve very well some common problems of mailing lists, wikis, and forums, and some design decisions are very good.

496

Living Room / how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« Last post by urlwolf on April 30, 2009, 08:50 AM »

stackOverflow.com

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ

• Voting to push the best answer to the top and not having to read a monster thread
• Tagging
• Ignore tags: if I don't want to read about php, I put it in my ignore list
• markdown instead of bbedit (syntax highlighting for code)
• You can edit other's answers if they are incomplete (like a wiki)
• There's a points system for reputation that seems to be addictive
• Badges, Karma
• You can earn Karma not only answering questions, but asking interesting ones that get voted up
• You can burn your Karma, and this prevents you from doing some answers
• You can merge different answers into one comprehensive one, and this would give you Karma. No obsessions about ownership (nice property of wikis)
• etc

If you have used it, you probably agree that it's highly usable compared to any forum software, mailing list, group, or wiki.
DC has the advantage that there's actual money changing hands, not only Karma. I wonder how much mileage one could get out of it. The regulars know each other's reputation, but not newcomers.
DC could simply display the DC credits each member has earned as a 'badge' of how useful he is on the community.

Also, having tags would help listing the expertise we have here (which is considerable, but not obvious).

So here's the idea: let's get something more like stackOverflow than a forum.
What do you think?

I could start a poll with features that are most important for you guys.

Is this something you'd like to see?

497

General Software Discussion / filebox on win-64 systems. Working?

« Last post by urlwolf on April 28, 2009, 12:24 PM »

I was wondering if people here use filebox on win-64 systems. How is it working for you?
The feature I like the most is "click-switch file box folder feature." It switches to a folder in the 'open' menu by clicking on say that folder on TC. Killer feature, should come with the OS.
On windows server 2008 64-bit and TC 7.04 that feature doesn't work. Any luck for you?

498

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« Last post by urlwolf on April 28, 2009, 12:08 PM »

Text editing is a solved problem. Vim or emacs are the two only options
(kidding, I have tried most of those editors. I like emEditor the most; I'd still take Vim or emacs for real programming).

499

General Software Discussion / Re: managing file permissions under windows (madness?)

« Last post by urlwolf on April 26, 2009, 12:40 PM »

I've tried Hiren's boot cd and I still get "Missing operating system" :/
Could it be because I have too bootabe partitions?
windows server 2008 is smart enough to offer the two options; but maybe the boot CDs are not so sophisticated.
Should I erradicate my XP partition?

500

General Software Discussion / Re: managing file permissions under windows (madness?)

« Last post by urlwolf on April 26, 2009, 09:15 AM »

2urlwolf

a - archive
r - read only
h - hidden

-Shades (April 25, 2009, 12:21 PM)

One more: s - system

You can also try few plugins like:
- Security Info - http://www.totalcmd....lugring/SecInfo.html
- Attributes: http://www.lefteous....butes/attributes.zip

I think it shouldn't be hard for someone skilled to write better plugin which could display the same info as Properties dialog

-fenixproductions (April 25, 2009, 12:38 PM)

Hi Shades,

Looks like that program doesn't support windows server 2008; I get Missing operating system, and nothing else. I have an XP partition and a windows server 2008 partition.
Do you know of any alternative that works on windows server 2008? If not, I'll keep searching.

Thanks!
@f0dder: in ubuntu, one sudo leaves you with admin rights for a few mins. So you can install a bunch of stuff with one authentification. In windows server 2008, every new thing you want to install will ask you for a passwd. It adds up.

re: speed, my tree was about 24GB, and it tooks maybe 3-4 hours. No idea how fast that'd be under linux.