Recent Posts

726

Living Room / Re: xev windows equivalent? (detect mouse button presses)

« Last post by urlwolf on July 21, 2008, 01:08 PM »

I tried contacting logitech.
Filled a detailed bug report.
They didn't even bother answering.

Add logitech to the black list.
Good hardware, horrible drivers that are incompatible with other hardware; no support by mail whatever.

727

General Software Discussion / Re: Logitech's Setpoint

« Last post by urlwolf on July 21, 2008, 01:06 PM »

In my case logitech's setpoint seemed to be conflicting with the microsoft keyboard special driver.  my conclusion was mixing the two was not good.

-mouser (January 08, 2008, 11:34 PM)

Same here. Conflicts with my IBM ultranav. Logitech sucks at writing drivers.

728

Living Room / ycombinator list of ideas they'd like to fund (!). Maybe some are within reach

« Last post by urlwolf on July 20, 2008, 04:16 PM »

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

When we read Y Combinator applications there are always ideas we're hoping to see. In the past we've never said publicly what they are. If we say we're looking for x, we'll get applications proposing x, certainly. But then it actually becomes harder to judge them: is this group proposing x because they were already thinking about it, or because they know that's what we want to hear?

We don't like to sit on these ideas, though, because we really want people to work on them. So we're trying something new: we're going to list some of the ideas we've been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms. It may be that recipes for ideas are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn't anticipate.

Please don't feel that if you want to apply to Y Combinator, you have to work on one of these types of ideas. If we've learned nothing else from doing YC, it's how little we know. Many of the best startups we've funded, like Loopt, proposed things we'd never considered.


1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. Something is broken when Sony and Universal are suing children. Actually, at least two things are broken: the software that file sharers use, and the record labels' business model. The current situation can't be the final answer. And what happened with music is now happening with movies. When the dust settles in 20 years, what will this world look like? What components of it could you start building now?

Maybe some are within reach for people here.
I'd love to see you commenting on why you think they are good/bad and what else you think is coming up.

729

Developer's Corner / Re: redmine: website tool for collaborative project todolist/wiki, bugtracking, etc

« Last post by urlwolf on July 19, 2008, 07:11 AM »

Yes, redmine is great... And it evolves fast. It's ruby on rails, and that makes test-writing fast (RoR comes with unit testing built-in). I feel testing makes a clear differece: apps with a good test suit add features faster and are easier to maintain. I think one of the things that made bugzilla stagnate and lose the battle against the newer breed of bug trackers is just that testing is not as ingrained in the perl culture as it is in the ruby culture.

730

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Announcing my new website (superboyac).

« Last post by urlwolf on July 18, 2008, 04:01 AM »

I think WP is the way to go, too... the magazine templates are really nice.
Have you looked at any? I wish I had bookmarked some I found (and cannot find anymore )

731

Living Room / Re: xev windows equivalent? (detect mouse button presses)

« Last post by urlwolf on July 17, 2008, 07:10 AM »

yes, that's exactly it.
I have a conflict between my IBN ultranav keyboard drivers and the logitech MX revolution mouse.
I just can't get the logitech software to see my mouse so I can get the 'advanced features'.

A note to anyone considering this combo: IBM and logitech hate each other. Their drivers are conflicting. Pretty much every piece of hardware made by logitech will not work on an IBM laptop or external keyboard (ultranav). Their forums are plagued with problems reporting this. There's a solution that involved 4 reboots, but didn't work for me.

732

Living Room / xev windows equivalent? (detect mouse button presses)

« Last post by urlwolf on July 16, 2008, 10:54 AM »

Hi,
I need a xev windows equivalent? xev is a program that detects mouse button presses.
Is there such a thing for windows?

Thanks

733

General Software Discussion / Re: What's a good memorization software?

« Last post by urlwolf on July 14, 2008, 06:41 AM »

I like anki

734

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

« Last post by urlwolf on July 12, 2008, 02:07 PM »

i'm still seeking a replacement of onenote for linux

735

General Software Discussion / Re: Vim 7.2 - Vista compatible!

« Last post by urlwolf on July 12, 2008, 02:03 PM »

glad to see that someone else is using vim for ahk

736

Post New Requests Here / Re: bigger screen area than monitor size - with quick scroll features

« Last post by urlwolf on July 09, 2008, 04:41 AM »

I've seen this implemented in something as old as redhat 5 (with some simple windows manager). It seems it's trivial to do in X-windows.

Not that it's very helpful to the discussion

737

General Software Discussion / Lotus symphony (not covered in the giant word processor roundup) released free

« Last post by urlwolf on July 06, 2008, 06:05 PM »

I just realized that Lotus symphony (not covered in the giant word processor roundup) has been released free.
http://symphony.lotu...y/product_ss_pe.jspa

How good is it? Anyone using it?

It has tabs...

738

Living Room / Re: Switching to Linux; how do you not flop back to the world of Windows??

« Last post by urlwolf on July 02, 2008, 12:45 PM »

Yes, the problem is that there are huge gaps in functionality that no linux apps are covering well. There are dozens of pdf readers, but they are awful.

Ok, so it looks like what we have is the following.
(1) if you want the best rendering engine, you have to use adobe's
(2) if you want to annotate pdfs, you need adobe acrobat, which is not available for linux

(3) adobe sucks at implementing their products on linux, more so in 64-bit architectures

Ergo: I'm condemned to use windows to read papers. Or Macs.
This is as dissapointing as it gets.

If you -really- want to use one app, you can fight it up and try to get it working under wine, of course. But then you start paying the linux tax: 25% of your time goes to googling and trying config files, patches, etc, and the end result will probably be not 100% functional or estable. I'm thinking about onenote here. For example, onenote uses windows search to index its contents. Forget about such a service running on linux (too win specific).

739

Living Room / Re: Switching to Linux; how do you not flop back to the world of Windows??

« Last post by urlwolf on July 02, 2008, 07:13 AM »

that's the dilemma that all of us face.
There will always be a tool that you cannot have in linux that makes you go back to win.
pdfs display better on adobe acrobat.
onenote doesn't exist.
etc.
And even doing the leg work to find worthy replacements can be tiresome.

There are hundreds of threads on ubuntuforums with the same questions.

I think you have to go cold-turkey... and this is very difficult because windows is available easily everywhere.

740

General Software Discussion / Re: WPS: the best replacement of MS Office, free for none-biz

« Last post by urlwolf on June 30, 2008, 04:27 PM »

@ urlwolf, there is no *linux version* because it is not needed.
Kingsoft will run on both Windows and Linux.

Kingsoft Office 2007 is compatible with the mainstream operating systems, like Windows98, Windows98se, WindowsME, Windows2000 Professional/server, WindowsXP Home/Professional, Linux and Vista.

-Curt (June 29, 2008, 04:12 AM)

I don't understand. Is this a java app? Is the same code running in all OSes? Heresy I say!

741

General Software Discussion / Re: The Ultimate Music File Organizer

« Last post by urlwolf on June 30, 2008, 04:24 PM »

I have tried tagscanner and wasn't happy with it.
Both MusicIP and winamp offer some sort of tag finding by hashing the songs.
Both work so-so.

I think right now it's not really possible to set loose a machine and expect a perfectly tagged collection. Some (a lot of) human intervention is needed.

Having said that, try iTSfv – iTunes Store file validator. It gets some of the existing tags and matchers that with apple's own store. These guys have an interest in having a complete metadata collection . I think it's probably the easiest way to make sure your tags are ok. You get covers for free. You don't need to be an itunes user, but you may need to install itunes and import your collection. Tags and cover are not intunes-dependent.

Hope that helps...

742

General Software Discussion / Re: WPS: the best replacement of MS Office, free for none-biz

« Last post by urlwolf on June 29, 2008, 04:00 AM »

No linux version, no zotero "cite while you write" support, no deal for me.

743

General Software Discussion / Re: Proprietary media formats — time to get rid of them!

« Last post by urlwolf on June 28, 2008, 04:46 AM »

side-stepping media formats.

I'm right now caught in a vendor-lock-in with the oneNote format.
I have moved to linux permanently, but I cannot take my oneNote notebooks (2 years collecting infromation) with me.

If anyone had that problem before and solved it, please speak up .

I may have to keep onenote around in a virtual machine. that's kind of silly

744

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

« Last post by urlwolf on June 27, 2008, 05:33 AM »

correction: wikipad sucks on linux. Lots of bugs.

745

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

« Last post by urlwolf on June 27, 2008, 04:56 AM »

yes, Wikidpad looks good.
Nowhere near the functionality of oneNote, but it'd suffice.

The problem is to get all the stuff I have in oneNote out of there(!). Vendor-lockin at its best.

Well, opera doesn't know how to cut and paste html, believe it or not. So that's bad... but I have the same problem with onenote.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

746

General Software Discussion / Re: WPS: the best replacement of MS Office, free for none-biz

« Last post by urlwolf on June 27, 2008, 04:52 AM »

do they have a linux version?

747

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

« Last post by urlwolf on June 26, 2008, 03:04 PM »

by the way if anyone has a nice alternative to onenote that runs under linux, I'm all ears.

I wonder what's so difficult to 'get right' in this type of application. But the fact that we have a record-settling thread on this very topic implies that it must be damn difficult.

Features I need:
good outliner (e.g., keep tabs indentation)
No proprietary format
image support
keep format when copying from the web
Fast search

748

Living Room / weird problem: XP install where most shortcuts are broken

« Last post by urlwolf on June 23, 2008, 02:28 AM »

I used firstdefense to go back to a (I thought) clean install of XP and I found a weird problem: most shortcuts are broken. At least, the ones I 'made' manually.

I found this by using FARR (and some other launchers). They use shortcuts a lot. Well, most of the time, they launch nothing. Sometimes you get an error message, but in the case of FARR you get nothing.

I think FARR fails to lauch things that are simple exes too (i.e., no shortcuts).

This is the first time I do anything with Firstdefense; I'm pretty sure this is not how it's intended to work.
Any ideas?

Thanks

749

Living Room / Re: Where else do you go except DonationCoder

« Last post by urlwolf on June 15, 2008, 05:41 PM »

http://news.ycombinator.com/

750

Living Room / SFFS Version 4.20: copying files in parallel

« Last post by urlwolf on June 14, 2008, 10:11 AM »

just got a mail: SFFS Version 4.20 will allow copying files in parallel. Now that's an interesting feature...