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6101

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 18, 2011, 11:18 AM »

@wraith808:

Warp was not necessarily the best option.  And this comes from someone who used it quite a bit.

-wraith808 (October 18, 2011, 10:03 AM)

Yes, I quite agree. I had to use WARP quite a bit too and have some knowledge of it, but I did not intend for the reader to infer from what I wrote that WARP was a "best" option - that wasn't my point at all. Sorry if I was misleading.

No, my point was that:

...the market winner will not necessarily be the "best" technology or the "best" form of the product

In the table of examples, I highlighted the "winner", but I have no idea what were the "best" options/forms in each case. The criteria for deciding the "winner" seemed to have less to do with whether the winner was intrinsically "best" in any way and rather more to do with extrinsic market factors.

@Carol Haynes: + 1 re what you write - I and my 10-year old daughter had been discussing those same points today.
It will be interesting to see what the upshot of this disruptive technology will be. The limited pricing differential that you describe certainly seems to be all wrong anyway, at present - too greedy. The new technology would probably not intrinsically justify that limited pricing differential. If they keep that pricing, then market preference (demand) could well be divided roughly equally between the two technologies. In that case, for the new technology to "win" and oust the old, some extrinsic market factors might need to be brought to bear on the situation. This is what seemed to happen to a greater or lesser extent in most of the above examples.

6102

Living Room / Re: Beyond Gamification. Designing up Maslow’s Pyramid.

« Last post by IainB on October 18, 2011, 10:38 AM »

One more thing: Am I crazy for thinking about this in product design?

Maybe Nikki Chau could better answer her own question if she did a tiny bit of scholarly research and perhaps a little bit less meditating on the subject?

Because right now it seems that question is equivalent to asking if it's crazy trying to use a paint brush to drive a screw.

-40hz (October 18, 2011, 08:07 AM)

It seems to me that Nikki Chau is not crazy, just normally irrational - and possibly a tad lazy as well, intellectually, for apparently not doing the (any?) necessary research.
I suspect that she might not in fact be able to better answer her own question - even if she had done some research and less meditating.

It is generally true that we think with what we know, and we use language (one of the things we know) to articulate that thinking and communicate it. If you don't know all that much (not done the research) and if you use use poorly-defined or ambiguous terminology both to think with and to communicate that thinking, then you are likely to end up with the sort of sloppy/muddled thinking that seems to be in evidence in Nikki Chau's article - i.e., it is half-baked.

The analogy of trying to use a paint brush to drive a screw conjours up an amusing image, but it's probably not precise enough. A paintbrush is at least a tangible, concrete thing, whereas the idea of using Maslow's hierarchy of needs to drive product design would akin to using an abstract (intangible figment) of our imagination as a screw driver - Telekinesis anyone?

In my book, the potential for critical thinking of anyone who would blog about yoga is arguably suspect anyway.
Excuse me whilst I go and practice my yogic flying.

6103

Living Room / Re: Libel, webmasters and veiled threats.

« Last post by IainB on October 18, 2011, 07:18 AM »

Nice one. Rationally handled. Problem solved (apparently).
I think there is truth in what you say:

...but the minute you target them personally and their own wellbeing is at stake they become way more cooperative.

We generally seem to be better able to comprehend and act on something more rationally/objectively if we are able to accept/internalise the point of view of another person (per Edward De Bono). That was one of the reasons why De Bono said that our societal development was crippled by the value we ascribed to skilled and competitive debate - where the strategy is generally to seek to defeat the other's argument on as many counts as possible.

6104

Living Room / Re: Beyond Gamification. Designing up Maslow’s Pyramid.

« Last post by IainB on October 18, 2011, 07:00 AM »

Well, whilst this might sound like "a great idea", it might not be such a great idea in practice for two reasons at least.

In the first place: "gamification" is just another bullsh*t bingo buzzword. - i.e., it sounds great, but it means nothing except maybe what you want it to (per Tweedledum and Tweedledee), and so lacks definition and is ambiguous. Thus, when used in a rational argument it can contribute to invalidating the argument, so it is a probably a piece of BS best avoided if when attempting to make a rational argument or make some clear communication.

In the second place: even if you avoid the BS and thus risky word "gamification", in business terms there could be a great deal of risk involved for any business attempting to base a marketing strategy on "Maslow’s Pyramid" as a market model.

The latter would be because Maslow's hierarchy of needs is an imaginary thing. It is an artificial theoretical construct in the domain of psychology and apparently is still not necessarily substantiated by any scientific research/proof (since 1943). In fact, the reverse would seem to be the case - i.e., the validity of the theory has apparently been brought into question by some research.

It would therefore seem as though no rational basis exists for believing that Maslow's HON bears much of relevance to actual human buying behaviours.

However, one thing that is certain about buying behaviour is that it is irrational, which is why some of the most successful marketing works - it manipulates people at a deep subconcious level - e.g., you might buy an Apple iPhone or an iPad because (say) you just "like" it or believe it is "just great technology" or worship Steve Jobs/Apple, or all of these things, and then you might only later try to rationalise your decision to buy it.

This would seem to have more to do with people's apparent capacity for irrational belief  - e.g., religion: in an imaginary invisible supreme being - than it does with getting something that supports their imagined (QED) "hierarchy of needs", unless of course you consider that maybe we might all need to believe in imaginary things - e.g., such as fairies (hat tip to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle).

Having said this, there is nothing necessarily wrong in irrationally buying something - e.g., if for no other reason than because you like it. It is quite human! For example, I bought the car I have today because, of the various options I could afford at the time, I really liked this one a lot more than the others. The buying clincher was that I could negotiate a significant extra trade-in discount from the dealer (cost is always a major deciding factor for me).

6105

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 18, 2011, 05:36 AM »

Well, when it comes to "which technology wins" - in this case paper books v. e-books, the market winner will not necessarily be the "best" technology or the "best" form of the product:

For example:
       Loser                      v.       Winner
GM EV1 (1996)                v.   Big Oil.
8-Track cartridge tape       v.   Philips cassette tape.
Betamax video tape          v.   VHS video tape.
OS/2 WARP v4                  v.   MS Windows OS
HD DVD                             v.   Blue-ray DVD
(Sony was rumoured to have paid $500 million to Warner Bros. to drop their support of HD and adopt Blue-ray.)

It looks as though when they remake the movie of Fahrenheit 451 they will probably have to pick a different temperature for the title.  

6106

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 17, 2011, 07:55 AM »

Yes, whatever it is, it portends change, and change usually has good and bad aspects, and I too dread the corporate potential for control of the market through DRM or similar. That's one of the things that already stops me using a Kindle.
In any event, I think it's unavoidable, though the existing Publishers will clearly "not go gently into that dark night".

6107

Living Room / Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 16, 2011, 11:56 PM »

See this post in Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal
I find this extremely interesting - I wondered when it was likely to happen.
In 1996 I carried out a study for EDS (since absorbed into HP around 2008) that looked at the strategic marketing opportunities in the emerging Internet market for B2C (Business to Customer/Consumer).
The principle that potentially could be implemented via the Internet was "Collapsing the Value Chain" by removing links (intermediaries) in the value chain - where such intermediaries added no value to the product.

Amazon and auction sites like eBay were subsequently among the first to effectively implement this in the classic value chain, but did so by improving and automating the chain communication and transaction flow, making them more efficient, and enabling commoditisation of the end product by introducing a relatively more "perfect market", where consumers had relatively good knowledge of the retailers' prices for any given product in the market:
The classic value chain is:
[Manufacturer]-->[Wholesaler]-->[Retailer/Reseller/Distributor]-->[Customer]

Up until now, Amazon's implementation has probably been collaborative and beneficial to all parties (links) in the value chain, with some links in the chain (especially Retailer) being represented "virtually", but no links necessarily being removed/"compressed". The consumer will have benefited from having improved access to products at reduced/minimal product costs.

For books, the value chain would look something like this:
Author-->Publisher-->Retailer-->Customer

However, it looks as though Amazon, having relatively successfully introduced the commoditisation of e-books, is now using its market position and manifesting its latent potential to collapse the value chain. Interestingly, it is not removing Publisher, but assuming that role for itself where e-books are concerned. This could arguably herald the speeding-up of product obsolescence for hardcopy (paper) books, depending on the rate of market acceptance for e-books. Still a bit of risk there.

Reed-Elsevier (now Elsevier) could probably have attempted to do something like this if they had taken early advantage of their position some years back, but they seem to have missed this particular boat by specialising on a niche as a scientific Publisher in the classic model.

6108

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Main window font size

« Last post by IainB on October 16, 2011, 11:02 PM »

I would prefer to use Firefox (my preferred browser), but I have not yet found a similarly useful script/add-on.

-IainB (October 08, 2011, 11:05 PM)

It's easy enough to toggle this one any number of ways. Have you tried and rejected it? It's not perfect.

-cranioscopical (October 09, 2011, 11:51 AM)

Thanks, I knew I could use a a setting like this in FF, but I want to be able to set the colours on the fly, as per this screenshot from my Chromium browser:

6109

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Main window font size

« Last post by IainB on October 16, 2011, 10:43 PM »

That's garish enough to make me feel a bit queasy!
"Custom ugly" is right.
Still, it demonstrates the ability to customise the appearance. Thanks.   

6110

General Software Discussion / Re: Real autocompletion in Microsoft Word

« Last post by IainB on October 16, 2011, 10:21 PM »

@cmpm: Thankyou for providing the link to Auspex - I had not previously been aware of that proggy.
I downloaded it and tried it out.
It looks potentially as though it could be a brilliant and useful tool for cross-application auto-text completion/replacement, but my initial trial appears to have shown a couple of minor bugs and constraints - I shall address those to the author's (@timns) page on the latest Auspex version, when I get a round tuit.

By the way, a similar proggy - Texter v0.6, an AutoHotkey proggy by Lifehacker's Adam Pash - also looked to be excellent for the purposes of auto-text completion/replacement, but it was too flaky and seems to have not been maintained or further developed since 2007. The concept was very good though.

6111

General Software Discussion / Re: Real autocompletion in Microsoft Word

« Last post by IainB on October 16, 2011, 09:29 PM »

After making the above post, I did some more googling. I did this on your behalf and mine. I did not use the AutoComplete function in MS Word 2003, because I used AutoHotKey for that. However, I was curious to know why AutoComplete had been removed and what it could be replaced by in MS Word 2007 - I used to be a "power user" of MS Word 2003, but I don't tend to need to use Word 2007 to the same extent, nowadays.
The googling brought up this post in a Yahoo discussion forum: How to turn on Auto complete on MS Word 2007?
So this is what I did:

Click on the Office Button.
Click on Word options.
Click on Customize.
Change dropdown menu from Popular Commands to All Commands.
Scroll down till you find the Autoformat icons.
Click on the button icon called "Autoformat Dialog". (On mouse hover, this is identified as a command that does not appear in the Ribbon.)
Click on "Add" (this adds the buutton to your Quick Access Toolbar.
Use the up/down arrows to position the button in the order you want it to appear on the Quick Access Toolbar.
Click on "OK".
You should now have the "Autoformat Dialog" button in the position you wanted it in the Quick Access Toolbar.

Click on the "Autoformat Dialog" button.
Click on Options.
Click on the AutoCorrect tab.

You can then type in the part-words you want to be auto-corrected (or auto-completed) and the full string/phrase that you want it to become - e.g., "JSa" could become "John Smith" (note that putting capital letters in the part-word seems to make it case-sensitive).

Having got this far, I have to say that I shall not be using the AutoCorrect feature in MS Word 2007, as AutoHotKey enables me to have this functionality across all the applications where I might be typing text in - i.e., not just in Word.

However, it seems as though there is a lot of extra clever stuff you could do with this and other features in Word 2007, and it might be worth considering these features if you spend a lot of time writing in and using Word. For example, the Yahoo post says:

."..as one answerer has said, just start typing a couple of characters and press F3. Have you thought though of utilising some of the unused keys to put phrses etc into autocorrect so that when you tap perhaps the grave key next to number 1 key (which has 3 symbols on) it can be used to bring in a phrase, a picture, a whole document even, or consign to macros."

6112

General Software Discussion / Re: Real autocompletion in Microsoft Word

« Last post by IainB on October 16, 2011, 08:03 PM »

Looks like you are right.
In the Help for Word 2003, there is discussion of the AutoComplete funtion, which can be turned on or off.
However, in a help article for Word 2007, Create and use content Building Blocks in Word 2007 documents, it mentions that:

Former Word users may be familiar with an AutoComplete tip that displays after typing the first few characters of the AutoText entry. The increased number of built-in Building Blocks also increased the likelihood of inadvertently inserting them into your document, and this capability is now removed. However, AutoComplete is still available for the current system date, months, and days of the week.

But in another Help article for Word 2007, the AutoText functionality is described:

Keywords    AutoText; AutoText entry; replacement text

In Microsoft Office Word 2007, you can add AutoText entries in the AutoText gallery.

Or, if you want to add text automatically when you type a few characters, you add text entries in the AutoCorrect dialog box.
What do you want to do?

    Add AutoText from a gallery
    Add text automatically as you type

I have not used this functionality, but, if you follow the directions under the latter option (Add text automatically as you type), you may be able to do the sort of thing you are looking for.

6113

Living Room / Re: Another Nail in the Coffin for Free Speech

« Last post by IainB on October 16, 2011, 07:44 PM »

It's fine to be in it for the money, but this whole, "I'm going to co-opt language/words for myself and call it copyright/trademark," or "I'm going to co-opt mathematics for myself and call it patent," is just nutty. "Googoo gaga" is common, and I don't see how a court can possibly rule as above.

As far as I can see, it's fine for Lady Gaga to sue like she did as there is no law against being an idiot. However, it's not the job of the courts to be idiots. Somewhere that distinction got lost.

-Renegade (October 16, 2011, 05:57 PM)

Well, as the old saw goes, "The law's an ass.".
Components of the legal system - including lawyers, courts, and judges - have long demonstrated a parasitic and self-serving capacity for complicity in arriving at nutty rulings. This is a "good thing" for the legal profession, as it feeds the whole legal machine with more makework, so that the appeal courts have something to do to overturn the nutty rulings - except that they might come up with alternative nutty rulings too. Then there will be more appeals and paid work for the lawyers. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.

There is no law against being an idiot, but there is probably an unwritten law for lawyers to ensure that where there is an idiot litigant with lotsa money, the two should be separated as expeditiously as possible - "A fool and his money are soon parted."

Anyway, in LGG's case, who knows? For example, it may well be a case of any publicity is deemed as being good publicity - notorious or otherwise. One thing you can be sure of - the lawyers will never be heard to complain.

6114

Living Room / Re: Social Media's Hidden Truth

« Last post by IainB on October 14, 2011, 09:33 PM »

My quote, from above:

(b) Different secular states (e.g., including US, Canada) considering enacting laws to make it an offence to criticise religion or upset the feelings of religious people (this after pressure only from Islamist organisations like the un-indicted 911 co-conspirator CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood). Christians and other sects have been fair game for as long as they have been around, and that is exactly how it should be - e.g. the cases of the RC priesthood's well-publicised penchant and belated recompense for buggery of little boys could never have become so public or have been remedied otherwise.

What a coincidence: US Bishop Charged For Not Reporting Priest's Child Porn To Police

6115

Living Room / Re: Social Media's Hidden Truth

« Last post by IainB on October 14, 2011, 09:30 PM »

@Paul Keith:

Isn't the heat death different from the theory of the Big Crunch and the Big Rip? (Wikipedia has an article called the Big Freeze)

I don't know! I thought "heat death" was something we were all going to die of in 2012, according to the predictions of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Church.
And certainly, I had always thought that a "Big Crunch" was a Cadbury's chocolate bar, and that the "Big Rip" was something to do with surfing - as in the "Big Kahuna".       

6116

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CHS: New Formatting Dialog

« Last post by IainB on October 14, 2011, 09:08 PM »

As a stopgap, this AHK code (below) will paste the last clip you copied to clipboard either with or without formatting. (I think I got this from the AHK forum. It's very handy and I find I use it a lot.)

Tip: If you are using CHS you can do this as follows:

• Crtl+V will paste using windows clipboard, and so will preserve all formatting.
• Press Ctrl+Alt+Q, to bring up CHS quick paste menu, then hit 1.  This works because it uses the CHS quick paste menu which does plaintext

-mouser (October 14, 2011, 07:46 AM)

Thanks, yes, I understood that. I think that, in my haste, I did not make myself clear.
The thing is, most of the time I do not want to paste the text with its formatting, but without it.
Thus, using the AHK script would seem to be a much more efficient and quicker way of achieving what I want.

The constraint is that it can only do this with the last clip copied to the clipboard - sometimes I would like to get an older clip and its formatting, and past that in its entirety - i.e., not just the raw text as at present.

That is why I said:

+1 ... Yes, this is a requirement of mine also.

- in response to @capitalH saying:

12) Unrelated to the formatting presets: I would be grateful for some way to paste a clip with original formatting (for example, pasting bold text in MS Word as bold text)

The implication of the above is that the CHS functionality:

Press Ctrl+Alt+Q, to bring up CHS quick paste menu, then hit 1.  This works because it uses the CHS quick paste menu which does plaintext

- just to get the unformatted text - probably needs to be simplified to a single hotkey activation. If that were done, then the AHK code would be redundant for a CHS user.
You'll see that I used AHK so that:

• Ctrl+V creates an unformatted paste. (This is what I frequently want.)
• Shift+Ctr+V creates a formatted paste. (This is what I more infrequently want.)

6117

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CHS: New Formatting Dialog

« Last post by IainB on October 14, 2011, 07:43 AM »

12) Unrelated to the formatting presets: I would be grateful for some way to paste a clip with original formatting (for example, pasting bold text in MS Word as bold text)

+1 ... Yes, this is a requirement of mine also.
Sometimes I want the formatting though, and sometimes I don't. As a stopgap, this AHK code (below) will paste the last clip you copied to clipboard either with or without formatting. (I think I got this from the AHK forum. It's very handy and I find I use it a lot.)

(AHK code:
$^v::   ; Intercept Ctrl+v to send an UNformatted Paste
   Gosub, UnformattedPaste         ; Unformatted paste - Ctrl-V = Remove formatting from Ctrl-V (paste), unless SHIFT key is also pressed.
   return
;-------------------------------------------------------------------
$^+v::  ; Intercept Ctrl+Shift+v to send a Formatted Paste
   Send ^v             ; Normal paste - Ctrl+Shift+V = just send the regular paste command
   return
;-------------------------------------------------------------------
UnformattedPaste:   ; Unformatted paste - Ctrl-V = Remove formatting from Ctrl-V (paste), unless SHIFT key is also pressed.
   ClipSaved := ClipboardAll ;save original clipboard contents
   clipboard = %clipboard% ;remove formatting
   Send ^v ;send the Ctrl+V command
   Clipboard := ClipSaved ;restore the original clipboard contents
   ClipSaved = ;clear the variable
Return
;-------------------------------------------------------------------

6118

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CHS: Share your custom modification scripts here

« Last post by IainB on October 13, 2011, 10:37 PM »

@capitalH: (Your script.) Yes, rather neat. Thanks. Could be a useful shortcut for testing bits of AHK code.  

@mouser:

IainB: Is it possible to trigger these scripts to run automatically on the contents of a clip, each time a new clip record is captured?

mouser: no, though i suppose i could add such a feature if there was a use for it.

Well, if the feature existed, this is an example of a repetitive task that I would use it for:
What I would like to be able to do is select (enable) a script that automatically inserts a string of text of my choosing into each sucessive clip taken, until I disable it. This would be an optional "run until" model - it differs to the current model which is (if I have it aright) where you manually select a script to "run once" only.

Thus, if I were (say) gathering clips on the subject of Deming, then I could use the string "extract Deming", so that every clip could have the string "extract Deming" appended to it - whether it originally contained the word or not. Then, I could subsequently use an SQL filter to collect all the occurrences of clips with "extract Deming" into a Virtual Folder. Once they were in the VF, I could then do whatever I wanted with them - e.g., (say) concatenate them as a set of contiguous notes, for pasting elsewhere.

Does that make sense?

6119

ProcessTamer / Re: Process Tamer - LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - v2.11.01 - Apr 23, 2009

« Last post by IainB on October 11, 2011, 07:55 AM »

+ 1 from me.
Yes, it's certainly a very useful and rather nifty proggy.   
I don't see anything needing fixing though, and have no major new requirements.

6120

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Hard Disk Sentinel Pro - 20% discount

« Last post by IainB on October 11, 2011, 07:48 AM »

It looks like HDS is starting to prove its worth.
On 2011-10-11 HDS started ringing alarm bells as it gave early warning and reported that:

There are 21 bad sectors on the disk surface. The contents of these sectors were moved to the spare area.
Based on the number of remapping operations, the health of the disk was decreased in different steps.
At this point, warranty replacement of the disk is not yet possible, only if the health drops further.
It is recommended to examine the log of the disk regularly. All new problems found will be logged there.

It is recommended to continuously monitor the hard disk status.

This isn't actually very serious as things stand.
Disk performance was rated still as 100%, but disk health was reduced from 100% to 69%.
The Log showed two problem events:

• 2011-10-11  17:26:15 #196 Reallocation Event Count 0 -> 21
• 2011-10-11  17:26:15     #5 Reallocated Sectors Count 0 -> 21

Real time performance monitoring is not supported on this disk, so it will not be possible to continuously monitor the hard disk status. Therefore I shall need to periodically manually trigger a check.

As soon as I got the alerts, I read the log and then, with some urgency:

• I kicked off a disk image backup  (a standard Windows 7 64-bit feature).
• I kicked off a recovery disk written to CD-ROM (a standard Windows 7 64-bit feature).
• I ran the standard Widows defrag analysis. It showed 3% fragmentation of files, so no action required.
• I initiated CHKDSK with the /F option ("Fix errors") from the command prompt, rebooted the PC, and watched whilst CHKDSK did its thing before Windows started up. CHKDSK reported that it had fixed several minor errors - so nothing major.

I am now running a fresh incremental backup of all main data directories. This was something I used to do on a daily basis, but I have been a bit slack these last few weeks. It'll be back to paranoia for a while now.

I'm not sure whether to wait and see if the disk health deteriorates further before I request a new hard drive under warranty from HP. I have only had this HP ENVY 14 laptop for about 10 months.

6121

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CHS: Share your custom modification scripts here

« Last post by IainB on October 11, 2011, 07:07 AM »

Is it possible to trigger these scripts to run automatically on the contents of a clip, each time a new clip record is captured?

6122

Post New Requests Here / Re: New words/quotes keeper

« Last post by IainB on October 10, 2011, 09:04 PM »

You might look at mouser's own Clipboard Help+Spell, which uses SQL.  If you do, take a look at this thread Feature request: Web clipping, permanent note keeping where IainB discusses how he uses it as a PIM/outliner.

-rjbull (October 10, 2011, 04:11 PM)

Yes, I would see the excellent CHS as being useful for this, amongst its multifarious uses.    
Rather than just Copy the new vocab item (a word or expression) into the clipboard (and simultaneously into CHS), it would probably be best to enter/paste the item into CHS via the "Add a Quick Note" function in CHS (I use the Ctrl-Alt-Z hotkey combination to pop up the small window for this).

The "Add a Quick Note" function would be best because it flags the item as a "Favorite" by default (so it will be retained permanently in the database and not automatically/periodically purged as old data).
If you also entered a term such as, for example, "vocab" anywhere in the "Add a Quick Note" popup window, then that term could be used as an SQL search string in a Virtual Folder in the CHS Favorites treelist.
Here's an example of using it this way:

If - like @rjbull - you don't have the necessary arcane knowledge or patience to fiddle with SQL search terms, then requesting a more user-friendly interface to setting up and using SQL search terms could produce results. It has already been listed as a requirement for CHS, and more people asking for the same function to be added could bump up the priority of this change in the queue.

Though I don't actually use CHS for new vocab items (I recently started using Microsoft OneNote as the place for that), I do use CHS for quotes/quotations, and instead of entering the search term "vocab" I make sure that the string  "quote" or "quotation" is somewhere in the title text or the body text - then I can search for them all automatically using SQL in a Virtual Folder.

6123

General Software Discussion / Re: Is this a worthwhile idea for a program?

« Last post by IainB on October 10, 2011, 08:05 PM »

Still on the tack of trying to understand what there may be to learn from existing wheels, I did a Google search on "Parse and convert numeric text from English to Polish" and got an interesesting list of results. For example:

• Translation Gadgets and Software
• Free Online English to Polish Translator
• Utilities to convert dates and numbers from one human language syntax/format to another - including a Microsoft-provided VBA function for use in Excel.

Hope this is of use/help.

6124

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: RealWorld Paint 2011.1 finally complete

« Last post by IainB on October 10, 2011, 10:56 AM »

@vlastimil: Thanks. Have just downloaded the proggy. Will place some feedback when I have had time to give it a trial.

6125

General Software Discussion / Re: custom reminder

« Last post by IainB on October 10, 2011, 10:50 AM »

@delwoode:

just use Keybreeze - as well as being a launcher like FARR the main reason I use it and have abandoned FARR is because of it's excellent stickynotes/reminder feature just watch the video
keybreeze video

-delwoode (October 10, 2011, 06:59 AM)

Thanks for the link. Keybreeze looked like a really interesting and potentially useful proggy, so I downloaded the setup file.
However, from the contents of that file, it looks as though the development of Keybreeze stopped on 2010-03-01, and from the looks of the website it may have been abandoned (several of its pages are broken).
Do you know whether the proggy has been abandoned?