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6251
Developer's Corner / Re: NetRexx is now free and open source courtesy of IBM
« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2011, 04:28 PM »
@cranioscopical: Yes, quite.

@40hz: If your optimistic thinking and your faith are rewarded in the fullness of time and shown by events to have accurately predicted the future for REXX, then that would run contrary to IBM's past corporate behaviours and strategems.

A brief review of IBM corporate strategy would generally indicate that nothing of commercial value to IBM was given up by or taken from IBM excepting by legal force - e.g., the antitrust legislation used against it in the '70s to force it to exit its monopoly position and sell off its computer bureau services arm (I recall that CDC bought that). For many years, IBM reputedly took out more patents each year than any other corporation on the planet. It would be incorrect to say that those patents were based on philanthropic objectives, or that IBM were doing that out of altruism or for the social good - commercial profit being the statutory driving objective for all corporations. Similarly, pharmaceutical corporations' patents, Monsanto's efforts to patent the food chain, and other corporations' efforts to patent the human genome.
6252
General Software Discussion / Re: Google Docs Sync
« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2011, 02:32 AM »
@paulobrabo: I installed Syncdocs. It worked just like it should have. Very good idea.
I was changing a lot of document names and sharing properties in Google Docs, so I expected  the syncing to be busy - but not as busy at it in fact was!    :(

I couldn't understand how come my bandwidth utilisation was going off the scale, until I realised that that for every "Collection" in Google docs, there is a corresponding Folder created on the client (backup) hard drive. "Collections" are in fact not proper "Folders", but categoristion tags under a different name.
Lots of my docs are/were categorised under various "Collections". So, if a document was tagged into (say) 5 Collections, then syncing caused 5 copies of the file to be dispersed across 5 Folders on my hard drive. Duplication big time.

So I switched the syncing off. Maybe I will only let it sync once a week.
If I had left it on, then it would have blown my bandwidth cap in no time, given the rate I was changing things.
6253
Developer's Corner / Re: NetRexx is now free and open source courtesy of IBM
« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2011, 02:19 AM »
Nostalgic thoughts from having briefly used REXX under MS-DOS/4DOS.
Well done to IBM for giving up yet more superb software to the public domain - even though it is software that is arguably fading  into obsolescence or is already obsolete.
Better that than to just bury it.
6254
General Software Discussion / Re: In search of an alternative to InfoSelect ...
« Last post by IainB on June 14, 2011, 06:05 PM »
@barney:
Currently getting more comfortable with WikeNotes.  It seems to be the most workable of everything I've tried so far, although they've not answered their help form.
Dunno from a cursory read whether it'll do graphics or not - WikeNotes has indeed spoiled me in that respect -

Well, as a result of reading your posts, I tried out WikeNotes.

Conclusions:
  • It doesn't do graphics, as far as I can see, though it looks as though it tries to in html format.
  • It's very kludgy.
  • It offers some novel ways to lose your data for good.
  • I would therefore recommend that you avoid using it.
6255
General Software Discussion / Re: In search of an alternative to InfoSelect ...
« Last post by IainB on June 12, 2011, 08:19 AM »
I've just been reviewing these:
AgendaAtOnce: The latest version - AgendaAtOnce
     Looks like it's been quite improved.
     Could be well worth considering as a possible alternative to InfoSelect.

Tomboy: Uses a WikiWiki-like linking system - Tomboy
     Looks pretty useful. May require you to change your way of thinking though.

Hope these help or are of use.
6256
Living Room / Re: General Poll: What should there be more of on DonationCoder?
« Last post by IainB on June 10, 2011, 08:01 PM »
@phitsc:
"I really think we should look into making the site more mobile friendly. I'm afraid I mean the forums in particular. I see myself use my mobile phone more and more at home instead of the PC. I guess a tablet will replace that once I get one."

You might think that, but is it a valid and general requirement for DC Forum users?

For example, some people might ask the Q "How many DC Forum users:
  • prefer to and do use the DC Forum as it is, on a PC screen, to read or post to the discussions that interest them?
  • prefer to and do use only mobiles to read and post to the discussions that interest them?
  • prefer to and do use a feed aggregator (e.g., Google Reader) to read all DC Forum posts, and only go into the DC Forum via PC to explore interesting threads or to post comments?"

There could be other, similar questions.
If we had some statistical data in answer to those questions, then we would have a clearer view of user requirements in this regard, and we could be in a position to establish with some degree of certainty whether changing things to be "more mobile friendly" would be a productive exercise and an effective use of scarce resources, for the short term and/or the longer term.
6257
General Software Discussion / Re: In search of an alternative to InfoSelect ...
« Last post by IainB on June 06, 2011, 10:39 PM »
@barney: In search of an alternative to InfoSelect
I had exactly the same questions as you, some time back, and gathered a lot of information. It took a lot of investigative work on my part. Here are pointers to the info I gathered, and which might save you some considerable time.
I collected most of the info into the FREE Scrapbook add-on for Firefox. Scrapbook is extremely useful for capturing local copies of webpages (and their URLs).
(With Scrapbook, you can copy just specific things - e.g., images, files - and go several levels deep and scrape off whole chunks of a website if you want.)
This is all Useful information on PIMs (Personal Information Management) software generally (not just InfoSelect).

These links from my Scrapbook could be useful:
This image - a list of PIM-related content - from my Scrapbook directory could also be useful.
PIMs list from Scrapbook directory.jpg

The PIMs I have tried out over the last 2 years are:
  • AgendaAtOnce  
  • Chandler      
  • Compendium    
  • InfoQube      
  • MaplePro      
  • Noah          
  • Omea          
  • orGenta        
  • RagTimeSolo    
  • TaskCoach      
  • TiddlyDu      
  • TiddlyWiki    
  • TimeTo        
  • ToDo + planning
  • TotalText      
  • Wiki-in-a-jar  
  • Wiki-PIMs      
  • Winguide      
  • WireNote      
  • Zoot          
6258
Living Room / Re: Wanted: Electronic/Searchable Holy Books
« Last post by IainB on June 04, 2011, 08:07 AM »
@tinjaw: As a fellow student, I can recommend as the best digital and searchable source that I have come across:
Bahai Research
They have access to just about every religious tome and their various versions, and you can peruse them online or using a downloadable software called "Interfaith Explorer".
Texts are from:
  • Authoritative Baha'i
  • Baha'i Studies
  • Buddhist
  • Christian
  • Hindu
  • Islam
  • Judaism
  • Sikh
  • Tao
  • Zoroastrian

The downloadable Interfaith Explorer comes in various versions - for use on Androids, or PCs using Windows, etc.
The Windows one is here: Windows Interfaith Explorer (Download.com)

By the way, the best hardcopy English translation of the Qu'ran/Koran that I have come across is a Penguin (1959) Koran translation by NJ Dawood. It is very well organised and contains a brief historical context. The chapters/verses/subjects are organised- differently to (better than) most other Korans that I have seen.
6259
Living Room / Re: General Poll: What should there be more of on DonationCoder?
« Last post by IainB on June 02, 2011, 10:49 AM »
If we are thinking about a "CMS", then how do we define that? Might we mean something like Microsoft’s open-source CMS platform, "Orchard"?

That CMS platform has the goal of:
“delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through module extensions and themes.”
6260
General Software Discussion / Re: In search of an alternative to InfoSelect ...
« Last post by IainB on June 02, 2011, 04:22 AM »
@barney: Sorry about making an unwarranted assumption.
I would always recommend you keep your prior version IS and database as a full backout/recovery set for a year before deleting it if all goes well with the newer version.
Yes, paranoid, I know.
6261
General Software Discussion / Re: In search of an alternative to InfoSelect ...
« Last post by IainB on June 01, 2011, 05:49 AM »
@barney: You have my sympathies. I have been following the latest developments of IS. I have stayed at IS version 8 (IS8) as I cannot see that anything terribly useful is going on with the newest version (v10). The gathering of user requirements seems to have been a fiasco.

But as to your data loss, well, shame on you for not:
   (a) having proper backup in place.
   (b) not testing that the backup worked (could be recovered).
   (c) keeping v10 away from your current data and backup, before you had tested it out.

You never know, v10 might have been just fine!
I intend trying v10 out at some stage, but it will only be able to access a copy of my live data.
I have come to the point where I think UltraRecallPro would probably be the way to migrate, having looked at the alternatives listed below, but I have not yet found anything to exactly/easily replace IS8:
  • Chandler - waste of time.
  • Compendium
  • InfoQube - very good
  • MaplePro
  • Noah - hmm.
  • Omea
  • OneNote - I am using this.
  • orGenta
  • RagTimeSolo
  • TaskCoach
  • TiddlyDu
  • TiddlyWiki
  • TimeTo
  • ToDo + planning
  • TotalText
  • UltraRecallPro - looks like this is the best migration path; can apparently import IS database files too
  • Wild-in-a-jar
  • Wiki-PIMs
  • Winguide
  • WireNote
  • Zoot - pretty nifty, but has a steep learning curve.
6262
Sorry, forgot to say that I voted. Got carried away in my earlier post...
+1 for the CMS as well
6263
I'd like to point out that a great many people on DC Forum have repeatedly requested that what we need more of are a lot more adult-rated hot pix and animated GIFs of Angelina Jolie. Research indicates that said pix could increase traffic (visitors) on the site by 122.27%, never mind the other benefits and spinoffs.
I don't know why these people's requests have been steadfastly ignored.     :tellme:
6264
@Curt:
Thanks for your link to this Soluto forum comment.
I have not been to that forum for a while.
By the way, as a tip to other DC forum users: I took the trouble to copy the URL http://community.soluto.com/soluto/topics/ and drop it into my Google Reader, so I can now scan/read all the new posts on that forum without having to go to the forum to read them (that's how I read all the DC forum posts too).

It is interesting to see - from the posts in this DC forum and in the Soluto forum, how the Soluto software seems to be morphing depending on user feedback. I see that users are starting to come out with stated "requirements" now, too! (Users can be soooo demanding!)    :D
This looks like almost random prototyping to me - i.e., with no clearly defined policy or end result, the end result being whatever the thing will be following user experimentation with, and modification of the software ("suck it and see"). A potential developer's nightmare. Development by committee.
I would be interested in seeing the company's business model and the risks they take into account in their funding of Soluto development.
6265
General Software Discussion / Re: Google Docs Sync
« Last post by IainB on May 08, 2011, 08:41 AM »
@paulobrabo: Thanks for the link to syncdocs.com.
Looks VERY interesting.
6266
Living Room / Re: Daily Autohotkey
« Last post by IainB on May 08, 2011, 08:33 AM »
Has anyone here migrated from AHK (32-bit) to AHK (64-bit)?
I tried it and rapidly went back to 32-bit as a lot of my scripts seemed to be broken.
I'd be very interested in any pointers to make the migration.
6267
@sosimple: Many thanks for the explanation of the command syntax and rules.
Where could I find these commands and syntax rules documented please? - I mean for the commands and syntax as used in CHS.
6268
IainB said:
@mouser: Just some feedback on CHS ß behaviour:
 * I notice that if I copy some types of text from MS OneNote, it goes into CHS as an image clip. It doesn't seem to consistently do this, and I have not yet figured out what the criteria are that govern whether it goes into CHS as text (which is what I usually want) or as an image.
 * CHS does not always copy when it is told to - i.e., no copy and no sound. If I go and do something else (clear the keyboard buffer?), then come back to the difficult copy, CHS will usually copy it OK.

mouser said:
IainB, try to open up the CHS options and go to the new Stats tab, and see if you can reproduce the problem and watch how, if at all, the stats change when it fails to copy anything.  Let me know what you discover.

The OneNote text issue: seems to have "gone away".
The reluctant copy issue: seems to have gone away.

I would guess that these issues were probably fixed by other changes in the dynamically changing CHS ß software.

New issue - slow/delayed keyboard and misbehaviour on paste: in navigation, selection and typing of text. I'm not sure whether this is attributable to CHS, but it is a "new" issue. I am running Autohotkey (32-bit version) on Win7 64-bit OS. Paste operations often end up with the pasted text and areas above selected (highlighted), though the pasted text is itself correct.

New issue - sporadic DBISAM errors:  I have worked around these by shutting down and restarting CHS.
6269
Living Room / Re: 5 Reasons to Hate Google - Interesting Article
« Last post by IainB on May 06, 2011, 09:09 AM »
My 10 cents, for what it's worth.
Google is indeed a 12-year old corporate upstart, as Sean X Cummings suggests in his article 5 reasons to hate Google.
It is generally true that history repeats and that those of us who have no knowledge or awareness of the pertinent history will be doomed to act in the repetition.
I would bet that Google management will understand this concept very well.

Empires rise and fall. Commercial IT empires do likewise.
In the early '80s, US anti-trust legislation forced IBM to break its monopoly position and sell off its IBM (Bureau) Services arm. IBM (Bureau) Services was bought by a rising star, the giant CDC (Control Data Corporation), headed by William Norris. CDC was estimated as being the third largest computer company at the time (IBM was 1st., Olivetti was 2nd.). The then IT giants Olivetti, Honeywell, Univac, NCR, Westinghouse et al have either all fallen by the wayside or disappeared altogether.

Though CDC was a giant corporation, whose core business was a series of powerful mainframes and supercomputers (the Cyber range) it had quite rapidly evaporated by the mid-'80s. Hardly anyone remembers it today. It evaporated having exhausted itself financially by diversifying into too many superb products and services (PLATO anyone?) at once and by funding too many HUGE philanthropic projects for the betterment of world populations. It had meanwhile lost sight of its core business and profitability and had failed to see the need to re-engineer/reinvent itself in the changing market. One of the chief designers of CDC - Seymour Cray - went off to found the Cray supercomputer manufacturing company.

Similarly, the huge GM offshoot - EDS - which had seen the need to reinvent itself in the '90s, failed to achieve that end, and started to collapse and was bought out by HP in 2008. HP stripped EDS of its assets and its people and made it into its services arm. HP itself is the result of having gobbled up Compaq Corp. in 2002 and other, smaller companies. Compaq was the result of gobbling up Digital Corp. and Tandem Corp. and smaller companies, etc. How many people know that, in the '90s Digital manufactured arrays of their 64-bit Alpha chips that were the main component of the Cray supercomputer, or that Digital had a 64-bit Alpha PC in the market, which could run either the "Unix-like" OpenVMS or a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows NT?

Having steadily survived and adapted throughout the '70s, IBM stupidly gave away a large part of its own future to the upstart nonentity Microsoft, which produced the DOS OS for the IBM PC in 1984 and the subsequent DOS and Windows OSes. Microsoft systematically diversified in line with their core niche, effectively creating/making the market for PCs and the three-tier client-server architecture - pushing Digital, Novell and others aside in the process. Microsoft effectively led to the market precisely following the growth pattern of Nolan's Model.

Throughout all of this, the giant IBM - which used to create/make the markets and dominate them with its proprietary products and services - has had to progressively adapt and re-engineer/reinvent itself to survive all its setbacks. The setbacks include the collapse of its core market (mainframes), and the Microsoft lobotomy of its PC business, and the failure of its belated defence (IBM OS/2) with which it hoped to take back the market from Microsoft Windows. Despite all its setbacks, IBM is still a major force to be reckoned with.

Google is currently creating and making the markets, and dominating them with its proprietary products and services - it's a Golden Age.  Google management would be looking for the potential turning point when they cease to be able to continue doing that, and trying to prolong the Golden Age as far into the future as possible. When they can no longer prolong the Golden Age, they will need to emulate IBM's adaptability and self-reinvention if they are to survive in the longer term.

This post has barely scratched the surface. If you want to read more about what Google probably has ahead of them, look at the history of computing.
6270
@mouser:
Just some feedback on CHS ß behaviour:
  • I notice that if I copy some types of text from MS OneNote, it goes into CHS as an image clip. It doesn't seem to consistently do this, and I have not yet figured out what the criteria are that govern whether it goes into CHS as text (which is what I usually want) or as an image.
  • CHS does not always copy when it is told to - i.e., no copy and no sound. If I go and do something else (clear the keyboard buffer?), then come back to the difficult copy, CHS will usually copy it OK.
6271
@mouser:
They are standard image files that by default are sorted into subfolders by year/month and named by day.  you can customize this in options.
See the "explore" button on the toolbar when looking at an image clip to jump to the image folder for the image.

Thanks for explaining to me what I should have read (but missed) in the new Preferences/Options settings.
You really have done a nice job with this update.               :Thmbsup:
I noticed the icons of the application (i.e., within which the clips were captured) now appear in the "Quick" CHS clip list. That is a rather handy visual piece of information. I like it.
6272
@mouser:
I reinstalled it, setting in Properties for the .exe file to be run in Compatibility mode for XP SP3, and "Run as administrator" for all users (I had not changed those settings before)  - and it works a treat.
I noticed that the duplication copy avoidance works well too.
By the way, my main browser is Firefox v4.0, but I also use IE9, Chromium (latest nightly build) and Google Chrome (Dev channel build).

Question: Are the images in CHS held as files in a single folder, or are they stored in the database?
6273
@mouser:
ß testing problem: When I right click an image in my browser and "copy image", it goes into the current clipboard buffer OK (and can be pasted from there), but it does not appear or get retained in CHS.

I think I shall re-install the ß setup you give above.
6274
@mouser: I'd be happy to ß test too.
Do you have anything specifically you want to test for, or just general usage?
6275
@f0dder: Yes, I started using CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) in about 1989/1990 - it was built into a superb DOS-based file manager called Lotus Magellan, and I used it in file comparisons and to check for changes to files by programs.
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