Recent Posts

676

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Wrike - the most practical project management tool

« Last post by iphigenie on February 08, 2008, 06:40 AM »

it seems to be a project planning tool for people following agile methodologies, but working with outlook/exchange. Lots of emphasis on capturing user stories and specification etc. which not many tools have.

2 such sites to try in as many days... here goes my weekend!

677

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: ActionThis - Task management for teams

« Last post by iphigenie on February 08, 2008, 06:37 AM »

Oh, something i can manage from outlook but have a fancy interface to show it too...

Looks interesting.

678

Living Room / Re: is someone stealing my bandwidth?

« Last post by iphigenie on February 08, 2008, 06:34 AM »

Yes, if you plan to do something which might get you in trouble it is best to have an open network and then use tor or a chain of proxies and other methods to hide your tracks. Also do it from an old laptop which is not one of your main machines...

If they still trace it back to you then "it wasnt me" remains an option.

679

General Software Discussion / Re: Simple download manager?

« Last post by iphigenie on February 08, 2008, 06:20 AM »

Hmm i fell for the blurb that it did support proxies, somewhere in the config files. Maybe it doesnt or maybe it is not well documented, which is the same in the end.

wget is always a good choice, although I am not sure how to use it with a queue - i always just use if straight from the command line. Although I have used it to mirror entire sites so it can certainly do multiple downloads one after the other

680

General Software Discussion / Re: The definition of "bloat" - RE: Software

« Last post by iphigenie on February 07, 2008, 05:16 PM »

To me bloat is not just about responsiveness and footprint (i never worry about footprint much within reason), it is about confusion/clutter in the interface and operation of the tool.

i.e. the tool has features I couldnt care less about and they get in the way

681

General Software Discussion / Re: Simple download manager?

« Last post by iphigenie on February 07, 2008, 05:06 PM »

most portable does not integrate a scheduler, since they are by nature less portable... and the browser integration often requires some registry stuff. So you lose features if you want fully portable.

That is where the challenge is

I have seen some download managers that can catch urls in the clipboard, and that needs no installation, but you wont just be able to click a link and have a download manager kick in

I know of none that is really portable besides the wget based ones, but the capture of urls is more manual

You could get opera portable or firefox portable with a download manager extension, but thats a bit overkill

I know that some download managers have an "email me a link and i will queue this" feature, and some routers have a download queue feature on the router itself - thats the ultimate portable solution except the files end up in the wrong place if you are away from home.

update: in my mountain of links i find this http://www.webxpace....et/software/#Downldr - i havent tried it much and most of it is controlled via a text config, but it seems to be an "unpack and run straight" type of tool

682

General Software Discussion / Re: Software licences

« Last post by iphigenie on February 07, 2008, 05:54 AM »

The licensed version of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT (single user license) can be installed by the licensee on as many computers he wants, as long as the SOFTWARE PRODUCT is only used by one single person. The use of the software by different users needs additional licenses.

-http://www.aignes.com/license/wsarc.htm

Martin told me that but I managed to misunderstand   

683

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by iphigenie on February 06, 2008, 10:20 AM »

I have currently had an "old school" phase and went to indie games which focused more on gameplay or storycrafting then snazzy graphics.

One happy thought: if you ever go for an eee or one of the subnotebooks, all these old gems will run on them and the low res will not feel too bad on a small screen!

684

General Software Discussion / Re: Software licences

« Last post by iphigenie on February 06, 2008, 10:18 AM »

I have that issue now with LWA - getting tired of storing links for myself that I can then archive off my main machine. But neither do I feel its right for me to step all over the license the developer has set, just cause I think it is inconvenient.
At the moment I am testing if i can use the free version on some machines and the full version on my main machine and sync between them. That or use the DC rebate. Or find another similar product 

Talking about sync, I always find it strange when tools for sync' or remote control have a "per machine" license 

685

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera M2 + Gmail + IMAP = not recommended

« Last post by iphigenie on February 06, 2008, 05:38 AM »

I really like the way m2 allows me to work with email quickly without having to move email in tons of folders.

If they added some form of tagging it'd be close to perfect for my home use 

686

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera M2 + Gmail + IMAP = not recommended

« Last post by iphigenie on February 05, 2008, 01:36 PM »

Actually I have a bug in 9.5 which leaves phantom empty emails/rss entries which cannot be deleted.

And I thought 9.25 was doing really well on imap, didnt notice improvements - I wish they listed somewhere what these improvements are

687

Living Room / Re: This coming year, I am SOO looking forward to __________ .

« Last post by iphigenie on February 05, 2008, 10:24 AM »

After 5 years of working around the clock for peanuts in a company I started, I got "engineered" out in 2006 (and divested of all my investment in it too, long story, and yes i let it happen cause i couldnt destroy the company i had started, and it was a painful choice). 2006 was the year it all crashed down and i realised I had stopped seeing friends and having hobbies due to work work work... 2007 was the year of emerging back from this

I took a long time to get out of it but then in 2007 I first had a very lucrative 6 months contract which turn into a slightly less lucrative but still very nicely paid job, in a setting which is respectful of people, life, time etc.  And having a lucrative job when you learned to live spending very little and buying everything second hand means I am quickly rebuilding financial health and not spending much of it 

This year I am ready to start having a life and hobbies again - and since I dont need to code in my day job anymore (i only coach and manager people who do, from the cto position) I am pondering how to take it on as a hobby again

So I am looking forward to enjoy a stable year with space for things outside work 

In short for me 2008 will be a year of

Regrouping
Get back in touch more with all these friends I lost contact with.
Revive hobbies and projects I have left behind when things got busy - photography, painting, hiking, programming for fun and a few others
Read the books I already have, play the games I own, listen again to all the music I have....

Refocusing
Get rid of clutter and useless things.
Stop wasting time - there are enough good things to get entertained with not to waste time on empty stuff.
Start doing the things I always want to do but never get around to - write a few more things, develop my dusty site, start a more "promotional" site, scan all my photos, and more

688

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera M2 + Gmail + IMAP = not recommended

« Last post by iphigenie on February 05, 2008, 10:00 AM »

I was just saying that in all my tests with M2 if i went to "imap folders" and specifically only left one or two ticked, I only got email from these folders. Ever.

I have used this with several imap servers and never had a problem.

So it is possible it is gmail - i might create a gmail account just to test

689

General Software Discussion / Re: How much email do you keep…and why?

« Last post by iphigenie on February 05, 2008, 09:59 AM »

I tried a few desktop indexers and they cant deal with exchange even when they say they do. Will try lookout, thanks for the tip 

690

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera M2 + Gmail + IMAP = not recommended

« Last post by iphigenie on February 05, 2008, 03:15 AM »

I use opera+imap and its better than almost any other client I tried (2 exceptions are better on some aspects) - so I am curious as to what the problem is.

I just open the imap folder list and tick imap folders I want to monitor and it ignores all others.

We must be talking about different things

691

General Software Discussion / Re: How much email do you keep…and why?

« Last post by iphigenie on February 05, 2008, 03:10 AM »

Actually the email I am having trouble searching is the email i have accumulated on my new job, 10 months only, and that is in Outlook/Exchange - and it is very slow to search/find things. So not a case of keeping too much too long, just less than a year's worth of project emails. 

692

General Software Discussion / Re: Software licences

« Last post by iphigenie on February 04, 2008, 06:43 PM »

I have 2 licenses of some software, although I often will look for an alternative for one of the machines or ask the developer.

I think I have 5 licenses of bitdefender, 3 of no hands backup, 2 of acronis etc. 1+14 of total commander

Although I really like people like wiredplane (sp?) who say "you can use your softwre on your home/work/portable computer", or people who offer a cheap "family pack" license. That certainly biases me towards a product

693

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for finance app

« Last post by iphigenie on February 04, 2008, 10:05 AM »

Apps I am aware of:

open source: I only really ever heard of gnucash (http://www.gnucash.org/) and grisbi (http://www.grisbi.org - grisbi slang for money in 1960's french)

online: lots of buzz around online sites like mint which recently won awards. I find any app which works with masses of data to be ackward online (eg: bookmark management, its to slow to move/edit one by one via a browser. I suspect I would think the same of bank records)

694

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for finance app

« Last post by iphigenie on February 04, 2008, 09:55 AM »

I do all you mention in acemoney - that includes downloading from the banks website. Although one annoyance is that some entries have branch numbers in them (such as STORE754) which I havent found a way to nicely map to one global name (such as simply STORE). I do it manually when reconciling, but it really would help if there was a way for the program to learn these and apply them automatically later....    -- /me is off to find her yahoo login to follow her own "ask the dev" advice--

I dont know how many accounts you can have in the free version nowadays. edit: it is just one. so cant do both a current/checking account and a savings account separately.

I have an account for each of my current accounts (4), one per credit card, one for cash expenses by each person in the household and even a separate one for spending when abroad (euros/chf/dollars) (but i could have all those in one "cash spending"). It supports the multiple currencies etc.

695

General Software Discussion / Re: How much email do you keep…and why?

« Last post by iphigenie on February 04, 2008, 07:29 AM »

I pretty much keep all relevant email

What I get rid of almost immediately:
* offers and most newsletter
* most shopping order confirmations (most shops send 4-5 per order)
* "figuring things out" emails - the emails going back and forth while hammering out what to do next Sunday etc.

What I keep, Personal email:
* messages from friends and family
* 1 shopping receipt per order for a year, later I keep only the ones about software or expensive items (i also clone that to lwa + for software i save a text copy for the "must reinstall system, what now?" CD along with drivers and installation files)
* a small set of newsletters with useful content for reference (i also clone some of that to lwa)
* travel order confirmations. Helps me remember "when did I go...."

Work email:
* all email to/from clients which is relevant (i.e. not the 3 word emails saying "see you then" or "ok ill do that")
* key internal emails and announcements
* emails about any difficult

It is cheap to store email (if you clear big attachments) and that means you can keep it forever

I lost quite a lot of email dating before 1999 when upgrading/swapping at some point. My email before was in a (wonderful product!!!) called "post road mailer" and I gave up on migrating much of that. Dont even know where the files are now.

This is one issue I avoid by being on imap now, I can point a blank email client to the server and tada!

696

Living Room / Re: How do you repair screw holes in computer case after too much use?

« Last post by iphigenie on February 04, 2008, 07:19 AM »

If beauty is no issue, some kind of putty around the holes might work?

I have some spare cases, but wrong continent... I just changed all my machines to use the same case, the antec solo... I can recommend this case as great value for money (http://www.antec.com...ils.php?ProdID=18500) - its an awesome case, solid and quiet. It has most of the good features of the more expensive antec cases, but at a sweet price point ($50 at the moment?). The only downside is no case speaker (so take it off your old case if you need one)

697

Living Room / Re: advice needed: weird lockup/freeze (process/dll/disk/cache?? issue in explorer)

« Last post by iphigenie on February 04, 2008, 07:14 AM »

Using process monitor to creat a log, but boy is there a lot of stuff in there, and lots of errors, and I am not sure which are "normal" and which are worrying

I am at the moment suspecting the following:
* either of the qt bars
* stardocks' resident dll

I'll remove them and see. I have no issues with these on the other machines, but they are the things I can think of having possibly changed in January prior to the problem starting to happen...

Whenever the lock happens open applications remain responsive (cpu low) but there is typically a lot of disk activity which has nothing to do with applications as far as I can tell (thats why i suspected swapping might have something to do with it)

I'm going to run processmonitor on my other machine which has at least some of the same software and no problems, and see if I spot any differences. It's amazing how much stuff goes on in there - constant scoping through the registry, for one...

698

General Software Discussion / Re: Virtual Disc Drive (CD/DVD) that can read all disc image formats

« Last post by iphigenie on February 02, 2008, 07:06 PM »

I havent found one, so I have used conversion.

I have usually been able to find a conversion option within the tool I own, which is ultraISO (http://www.ezbsystem...om/ultraiso/main.htm). But I cannot know for sure whether it supports every format. It tries pretty hard, conversion is one of its main goals (I initially found ultra iso when trying to convert between gamedrive and clonecd/clonedvd but i found many more uses for it)

but there are often standalon free converters, for example:
http://w-shadow.com/...if-to-iso-converter/
http://w-shadow.com/...o-iso-converter-gui/

699

Living Room / advice needed: weird lockup/freeze (process/dll/disk/cache?? issue in explorer)

« Last post by iphigenie on February 02, 2008, 06:31 PM »

I think I am pretty clever with my pcs and I think I have had almost every stupid thing you can have with making windows disfunctional, but this one has me stumped

Lately on my laptop, I am having the main explorer functions (desktop, start menu, status bar etc) just freeze.
As far as the rest of the system is concerned, everything is fine (cpu, performance etc.) except i cannot use anything like the start menu or status bar, but everything else continues to work.

The trigger is always either
- right clicking on desktop icons
- right clicking on an entry in start menu
- (happened for the first time now) selecting and pressing delete over 2 shortcuts on the desktop
but only after the machine has been running quite a while

Now the basic task monitor shows nothing hung up, no undue cpu or memory usage, and all clear.... I cannot use explorer or file managers which were open at the point the trigger happened, but new file managers would work fine... I cannot kill explorer or file managers either.

In the end I cannot properly shut down windows, so I have to do a hard restart.

Looking in the windows task manager everything seems pretty normal except there are a lot of page faults in some places which means a lot of swapping - I suspect it happens when I havent used these parts of the interface for a while and things have been swapped to disk. And they dont come back fast enough... But thats just a wild guess

But how do I figure this out - I am going to dust up wintasks pro see if it helps see something I cant see right now, but what other tools can i use to help me puzzle this out - any better analysis tools? any of the "process juggling" tools (like process tamer) would help? if it turns out to be swapping the problem, is there anything that can be done to protect some things from being swapped out?

Tired of restarting my machine the hard way

700

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Drive Backup at 40% off

« Last post by iphigenie on February 02, 2008, 06:10 PM »

I bought this around November when they had the hard drive manager 3 seat family license on special (backup+boot manager+partitioning) and it is a well crafted package. I havent tested the backup much beyond running it then opening the image (I have a license of acronis on my main machine) but it didnt feel any worse than acronis on the basics (speed etc.)
I think its also quite good on the unix/linux side of things, but havent tested.

I actually like the partitioning tool quite a bit, it just works