Recent Posts

476

Official Announcements / Re: NOTICE: Kernel Upgrade for the Server - brief server downtime

« Last post by Rover on March 24, 2006, 12:53 AM »

Cue the banannas

477

Living Room / Hooray, the server is back up

« Last post by Rover on March 24, 2006, 12:52 AM »

 

DC is back!!

478

Site/Forum Features / Re: The new forum is up!!

« Last post by Rover on March 23, 2006, 08:54 AM »

Sweet!  One click and I'm there. 

Any chance we can get that moved closer to the Subject line?  It seems far away to me.

479

Site/Forum Features / Re: The new forum is up!!

« Last post by Rover on March 22, 2006, 10:29 PM »

I'm not sure if this is *New* or not, but I just discovered the "Down" button.  I usually read DC by showing unread posts since last visit.  I used to scroll down through the threads to find the most recent posts.  Now I just use "Down".  Sweet! 

What about the look?

It's just eye candy!   

480

General Software Discussion / Re: CLCL Clipboardmanager - random discussion

« Last post by Rover on March 22, 2006, 08:23 PM »

lanux it's PERFECT! 

I love it. 

Bring on the Bananna's

481

General Software Discussion / Re: CLCL Clipboardmanager - random discussion

« Last post by Rover on March 21, 2006, 10:41 PM »

hmm.. a vote proposed on my head & i didn't know about it... 

-lanux128 (March 21, 2006, 08:50 PM)

Not your head, just your avitar

You I like.  Your avitar gives me the willies   

482

Living Room / Re: Samsung unveils 32GB Flash-based HDD killer

« Last post by Rover on March 21, 2006, 04:37 PM »

Cool!  I notice there wan't a projected price in the article.  I'm guessing it's not compairble to HDD prices.

The good news is that as Moore's Law takes over, prices should come down and capacities go up.  It'll be good to speed up the data access speeds, especially on laptops.  Right now the HDD is by far the slowest thing in my system.  Even more so on my laptop.  It'll be nice to have good battary life and perfomance for a change. 

483

General Software Discussion / Re: Which Instant messenger software do you use?

« Last post by Rover on March 21, 2006, 04:09 PM »

 I use Verizon Wireless.  It's a voice based message system.  Instead of typing you actually talk to the other person.  It's kind of weird, but I think it'll catch on.  You don't even have to be at your PC to use it.   

484

Developer's Corner / Re: Thoughts about OOP programming

« Last post by Rover on March 21, 2006, 11:09 AM »

Just peeked at the Looonnnggg article on OOP psychology.  I guest the first thing that has always bugged me about OOP is the whole notion that the "Real World" has any relationship to programming.  Every OOP book I've read starts by talking about objects like an apple.  An apple has attributes and do certain things.  It's a little different than an orange but has some similarities.  WHO CARES?!  What does that have to do with business rules, or accepting keyboard input?

I get the idea that objects, classes or whatever your language calls them are self contained, have attributes and methods, can be a subclass of another object or be a parent to sub objects. 

I guess I really fail to see the difference between OOP and a good library.  I used to buy TurboPower units when I was programming in Pascal.  They had UI code, calendar code, file manipulation code, etc. etc.  I could just link it in and start using it.  It was extremely productive.  What I focused on was writing the logical end of things as determined by the business.    I created some units (libraries) of my own to contain general business logic that we used.  What did I miss by not using OOP?

People solve problems differently, and I still think this is all just a preference issue.

I sure can't say OOP is totally worthless... look @ mouser and his productivity.   But I think I can say it's not my cup o' tea. 


Edit: The picture below is from the article mentioned by mouser.  Although I would love to take credit such fine art. 

485

General Software Discussion / CLCL Clipboardmanager - random discussion

« Last post by Rover on March 21, 2006, 12:36 AM »

(note from brotherS: split from https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=2866.0 )


speaking of off topic, can we vote on Lanux128's avitar.  I mean I like lanux's comments and style, it's just something about the smiling bag that gives me the creeps.

Burn the bag:  1
Love the bag:  0

486

Living Room / Re: hard drive resurrection [I'm desperate!]

« Last post by Rover on March 21, 2006, 12:33 AM »

It might be a big deal about the part number.  It might work if you had the exact same drive to try swapping PCB's with.  I actually did that once, but it was with 40 MB MFM drive in the 80's. 

487

Developer's Corner / Re: Thoughts about OOP programming

« Last post by Rover on March 21, 2006, 12:27 AM »

mouser, I know you love OOP, so please don't take offence

I thought OOP was a crock when I first started toying with it in the 90's in Turbo Pascal and C++.  Then I figured I must just be too slow to pick it up.  Now I don't feel so bad.  Many people are telling stories of woe about OOP.

To be fair, I think it's almost a personality type.  I mean some people like OOP because it works the way they think.  Others, like me, don't like OOP because we can think...  I mean because we think different... or something 

488

General Software Discussion / Re: Anyone with Opera having trouble with betanews?

« Last post by Rover on March 20, 2006, 10:30 PM »

OK, I feel totally lost... how long has Mamma been around?   

It look a lot like Google in the early days.. are they a "me too" group?

489

Living Room / Re: Downloading your Gmail Account

« Last post by Rover on March 20, 2006, 10:20 PM »

It's kind of funny in a way.  I have my gmail account set for POP3 download and I read it from Thunderbird 99% of the time.  I just use the gmail interface when I'm away from home. 

So in effect, I use Gmail as the backup and use all of my stuff locally 

490

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by Rover on March 20, 2006, 10:18 PM »

Just installed Evernote.  First impression... Eye candy, mouse centric.

I don't see where to change the basic color scheme quickly, I'll check the manual. 

Shows promise... we'll see

491

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Select Text Using Arrow Keys

« Last post by Rover on March 20, 2006, 09:16 PM »

Just for the sake of clarification, Internet Explorer does the whole word selection, not windoze.  I only point this out because I am using Firefox and when I tried your experiment, it didn't work.  I can start in the middle of a word and select the rest of the sentence, page, paragraph and the highlighting does not chage from the middle of my first word.

$0.02

492

Living Room / Re: hard drive resurrection [I'm desperate!]

« Last post by Rover on March 20, 2006, 09:11 PM »

Is it not spinning becuase the circuits are gone or becuase the motor is gone?  The way to tell is to see if it appears in the BIOS.  No drive in the BIOS probably means the circuits are toasted.  Your kind of SOL if thats the case.  A bad motor can sometime be fixed by .... Freezing the drive.  I'm not kidding.  This is a one-time, back it up now and picth the drive when done solution, that SOMETIMES works. 

Put the drive in the freezer for a day or so.
Get everything set up so you can copy your data off the drive. (have the case open, connectors ready, jumpers set.)
Take the drive out of the freezer, and plug it in.
Boot your system and immediately start copying if you can see the files.
Copy until you're done.

Chances are good the bad drive will never work again after you do this, so make it a last resort.

493

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by Rover on March 20, 2006, 09:02 PM »

Note:  I have not tried Evernote, Zoot, Ecco, etc.

Since this is a brainstorming thread, I thought I'd brainstorm... or at least shower

I've been thinking about this topic since the thread was stared and I think I know what I want, I just don't know what it looks like... so here it goes in words.

As I think of an idea or want to capture a web page or some text or whatever, I really don't want to spend a lot of time describing it to myself.  I think I know what it means and end up giving a bogus description anyway.  It's like finding notes that say "call Bob" and you have no idea which Bob or why you would call.  All I want to do it press a hot-key that pops up a clean window for me to start typing or pasting in.

I'd like a date/time stamp; let me know if it's captured, web, handwritten, whatever; let me create todo just by hitting another key or maybe typing todo:.  I'd like to be able to assign a reminder to anything,  again by hotkey or typing alarm:  3/19/2007 9:15 am (which will remind me that I'm 42).  It should apply to whatever text page I'm currently working with.  I should also be able to pick from a calendar display via keyboard or mouse.

Then I'd like to assign some general associations with note.  Something like work, fun, tech, etc. 

I want it to save everything and go away until I need it again.  I like the concept behind Google Desktop for searching to find documents instead of browsing a tree.  Let me enter some keywords, maybe a date range and pull up a synopsis of everything you find. Again this should be a quick hot key interface.

I guess my point is that I really don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining a database or tree structure.  Just let me find things the way they make sense, and let me assocate some general relationships quickly and easily.  Is that too much to ask? 

494

Living Room / Re: Unprotected Wireless Lans?

« Last post by Rover on March 19, 2006, 07:36 PM »

  Yeah, I see both sides.  On the one hand, I don't want leeches sucking up my bandwidth, so my router is secure.

On the other hand, when my sister-in-law visits, she can connect to the neighbors WLAN and I don't have to set her up on my router.  I would have done so, but the first time she visited I wasn't home so she found a network and just started using it. 

495

Living Room / Re: OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

« Last post by Rover on March 18, 2006, 09:05 PM »

And OOP is something I say when I fall, and classes are for school. 

-Cpilot (March 18, 2006, 07:59 PM)

I can agree with that.   

496

Living Room / Re: Partitioning hard drive - any point?

« Last post by Rover on March 18, 2006, 03:10 PM »

f0dder, you're right.  This is the difference between availability and recoverability.

Availablility - My data is usable right now.  RAID 1,3,5 & 10 all do things to make your data less likely to be lost due to a single drive failiure.  Other solutions allow for multiple drive failes (at the cost of less usable disk).

Recoverability -  My data is not available now (due to some failure) but I can replace (reformat) the failed equipment and RESTORE my data from my last backup.  There are 1.21x10^8 power ways to backup your stuff.  Some will even do continuous backups so that your "last backup" may be only seconds before your system failed.

Backups are also good for keeping various versions of configurations, so you can recover system settings to a point in time.

Availability (redudant sytems & RAID) and Recoverability (backups) are different animals with different purposes.
so:

RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!

497

General Software Discussion / Map a Drive via SFTP

« Last post by Rover on March 18, 2006, 01:31 PM »

Just found this, read some positive reviews and have not tested it myself.  The reviews I read pretty much say that "it just works."  Kind of a cool concept.  WinDrive seems to be the free competetion, but is not on par with reliability and speed.

Map your SSH server as a Windows network drive with SftpDrive. Our SFTP file system network enables all your Windows applications.

Don't drag and drop. Don't transfer back and forth. Just use your network files directly from your applications. Keeping track of which version of your project is on the server and on your PC is annoying. Ease the pain by just editing the project right on your server. Perfect for any web developer or programmer that runs Windows, but relies on Linux. SftpDrive network-enables all your Windows applications by enabling you to map your SSH server as a network drive.

- their site: www.sftpdrive.com

http://www.sftpdrive.com

498

Living Room / Re: American Inventor - Live blog, full recap from Makezine

« Last post by Rover on March 18, 2006, 01:44 AM »

  Great find mouser... saved me an hour of my life by not watching the show.   

499

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by Rover on March 17, 2006, 12:07 PM »

This (very long) thread has taken on a couple of distinct themes that work well together.
1) What I want to do with note-taking software
2) How do I want to interface with my note-taking software

Back in the old days, there were very few rules governing key combinations.  F1 was generally reserved for Help and Esc was generally used to back up or exit.  Everything else was up for grabs and every application used a different scheme.  I well remember the days of WordPerfect keyboard overlays, that would have to be switched out for 1-2-3 overlays when you changed applications. 

The interesting part is that you really only used the overlays for a day or two.  By then you had learned 90% of what you wanted to do and you found the menu display key to help you find the other 10%.  And it was fast.
The brain process worked something like this:
0) What do I need to do now?
1) Print
1.5) unconscious brain process: set context = Word Perfect
2) Print = Shift F7, P

Now the mouse oriented process goes something like this:
0) What do I need to do now?
1) Print
1.5)Brain process: Print is always the same on the file menu
2) Grab mouse
3) Navigate to file
3.5)Brain process: should I use file|Print or the Printer Icon?
4) Click File
5) navigate down
6) click Print
6.5) No I don't need to change any options
7) click OK

I only mention this to say I think part of the frustration we all feel with our software comes from the mouse-centric interface.  We Look for things on the menu instead of knowing what we want and allowing learned associations to take over.

THAT is the power of something like InfoSelect.  I never used the program myself, but I watched a guy who was in love with it show off a bit.  He talked about finding a topic quickly pressed a couple of search keys and started typing his word. (He knew where the cursor would be and that he could type right away; he didn't even look at the screen.  He was a keyboard watching typist.)  Yes the interface is old and ugly, and may not have the features we all want/need, but the concept is great.  I used to know Word Perfect this well. 

I'm all for having some standard shortcuts across the OS.  Alt-F4, Ctrl-C, etc. are great examples.  I do think the common look and feel has gone too far.  Your brain reacts visually and functionally to different applications.  Let it use that context the map tasks to keystrokes. 

Maybe we should start a UI thread?
$0.02.

500

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: PageSpy - A swiss army knife for web-developers

« Last post by Rover on March 17, 2006, 11:17 AM »

Joto,

Thank you for this nice review.  At 50% off, I think this is a tool I'll add to my kit.


Good job