Recent Posts

851

Find And Run Robot / Moving from Launchy

« Last post by CWuestefeld on December 11, 2007, 11:19 AM »

Another "me too" thread...

I've been using Launchy for quite a while, but I've been converted. Launchy has been great, but FARR has now surpassed it.

There were two main factors in deciding this:

• Transparency of sorting rules. I really like to understand why things come out the way they do, and influence that to some degree.
• The AltTab plugin (and the others) make this more than just searching through files.

Thanks for your work!

852

Living Room / Re: Is the new Zune upgrade really an upgrade?

« Last post by CWuestefeld on December 11, 2007, 09:02 AM »

Continuing to hijack my own thread...

This isn't really much of a DRM hole. In order to make the required change, you've got to start with an MP3 file, i.e., no DRM on the file. If you've got a non-protected MP3 in your hands, than wifi distribution via Zune is only a convenience; you could still post the file on your web site for the world to download, totally independent of the Zune.

853

Living Room / Re: Is the new Zune upgrade really an upgrade?

« Last post by CWuestefeld on December 11, 2007, 08:51 AM »

Which would be fixed by the next firmware, anyway

-Lashiec (December 11, 2007, 08:49 AM)

Why not. It's just one more item added to the list of features removed by the "upgrade".

854

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: DivX Pro holiday download available for a limited time

« Last post by CWuestefeld on December 10, 2007, 08:00 PM »

Why do I want the Pro version? What's in there that's not in the free one?

855

General Software Discussion / Re: Noah is almost fantastic, but what is it?

« Last post by CWuestefeld on December 04, 2007, 11:34 AM »

Although this noah seems to enforce a timeline and topic oriented approach to organizing information, i think the future will look more like a dynamic filtering/tagging system

-mouser (December 03, 2007, 06:03 PM)

I'll see that and raise you one. Even tagging requires too much from the user in terms of anticipating the contexts from which he'll be interested in an item years down the road. I've given up on any kind of proactive organizing or structuring. It must work on the inherent content and metadata itself. This app appears to start down that road:

In Noah you never have to spend hours searching for this stuff again, it's all in one place arranged by date and time. If you can roughly remember when something happened, you can find it with a few clicks, and you will find everything else that was happening during the same day, hour, or minute.

-Noah

But the timeline is only one small aspect of the goal.

I've been working smoothly for some time now using desktop search (Microsoft at work, Copernic at home). Recently my employer "enhanced" the Exchange servers, using a Symantec product called Vault that archives old messages offline while providing a "searchable" (note my scare quotes) index to get back to them. Their idea of searchable is laughable, and this has really thrown a wrench into my ability to organize my work.

856

Living Room / Re: Looking for email SERVER

« Last post by CWuestefeld on December 02, 2007, 07:17 PM »

I found an alternate approach to solve the problem. There's a freeware proxy for SMTP that allows me to intercept my server's transmission and rebroadcast it using a properly-authenticated login (it also proxies POP3, but I don't care about that).

See "X-Ray mail assistant" at http://www.xrayapp.com/xray/.

857

General Software Discussion / Re: Virtual Desktop suggestions?

« Last post by CWuestefeld on December 02, 2007, 04:06 PM »

Following suggestions here, I've been playing with Dexpot for a few weeks now. At first it was just a toy that I wanted to play with and try out, but it's become pretty useful to me, and I thought others might me interested in how I've been using it.

For me, I've found two key advantages: protection from distractions, and protection from mangling due to resolution changes. To take advantage of this, I've set up four virtual desktops: General, Games, and Development. General holds my email, web browser, etc.; Development holds Visual Studio, MSDN docs, and related tools; games should be obvious.

Distractions - When I'm doing development I don't want to be distracted (which is, unfortunately, all too easy (ooh, look, there goes a bunny ). The things that can distracty me, like Outlook or Firefox, are kept away from my development desktop, so when I'm trying to concentrate, I can't notice that an email has just arrived.

Layout mangling - All work and no play makes Chris a dull boy; he needs a game once in a while. Games love to suck the display into all kinds of goofy resolutions, and when they do this, other windows get resized and shuffled around. I'm very anal about my desktop, and this drives my up the wall. By keeping games in a single desktop, and only ever starting them there, I ensure that the serious stuff in the other desktops aren't affected by resolution changes.

So this has been a pretty successful experiment and I plan to stay with it.

858

Living Room / Re: Gamespot Editor Fired for Writing an Honest Review

« Last post by CWuestefeld on December 01, 2007, 10:35 AM »

Keep in mind that CNet may not be legally able to discuss the matter of Gerstmann's dismissal. I have no reason to believe that it may be the case, but maybe he's a boozehound, or has had problems with sexual harassment accusations, or something. Who knows?

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter why a publication writes reviews the way that it does. All that matters is how consonant they are with your own opinions. If their reviews tend to be similar to your own experiences, then it's a good bet to try other products that they review well, and the converse.

Does it really matter whether the reason for a review is the writer's heartfelt opinion or because the marketing department is able to line up advertisers who really tend to have good products? Or maybe they've got a llittle genie that lives in a box and tells them what to write. Who cares? If the reviews work for you, then use them. And on the other hand, even if the reviews are heartfelt, if the reviewers' personal tastes clash with yours, those reviews will be useless.

So ignore the rumors and innuendo. Find a reviewer whose work you agree with, and stick with it. Period.

859

Living Room / Re: Looking for email SERVER

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 30, 2007, 10:30 AM »

it's not an email client (and thus isn't designed to retrieve mail from other servers)

-Ralf Maximus (November 30, 2007, 09:58 AM)

Actually, that's is exactly what I want. My host presents a POP3 mailbox for me. I want to pull from this into a mailbox on my (in-house) server; I use Outlook to retrieve mail from that. In other words, rather than having other servers SMTP to me, I pull via POP3 from a host.

860

Living Room / Re: Looking for email SERVER

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 30, 2007, 09:52 AM »

Thanks for all of the suggestions so far. Here's my score card at the moment:

• SurgeMail - I can't see how to make this retrieve POP3 from my GoDaddy. Also, I'd really prefer a GUI admin interface rather than CLI
• SmarterMail - I can't find any setting to allow me to send SMTP via relay rather than direct. It looks cool otherwise, but this is a deal breaker.

I'm still looking at the other suggestions, Google is next on the list. (And yes, Windows was a requirement).

861

Living Room / Looking for email SERVER

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 29, 2007, 01:27 PM »

I'm looking for a free or very cheap mail server.

For years I've been using the since-discontinued "FTGate", and it has been working well. However, as was discussed in another recent thread, software that's good one day may no longer be satisfactory the next because of a changing technological environment.

(Explanation hidden so as not to hijack my own thread, when I want to talk about email servers rather than DNS)

Spoiler

In my case, it's because the email my server sends out is frequently considered spam by the recipients' SMTP servers, apparently because my DNS entries (PTR record, maybe?) doesn't validate my home IP address as a legitimate sender for my domain. I can't really fix this because (a) I'm too ignorant of DNS, but more importantly, because (b) even if I could get the DNS set, I'd have a problem with my home's dynamic IP address.

The one fix I'm sure of is that, rather than send my mail directly to the recipients' servers, I can relay it through my hosting provider (GoDaddy)'s SMTP server. But their servers require authentication, which FTGate doesn't support.

What I'm looking for:

• Ability to retrieve POP3 mail and put it into the corresponding mailbox locally. Leave a copy on the server for a day so I can see it from work, too.
• POP3 server
• Outgoing SMTP authentication, including the ability to use a username that is an email address (some servers have you input credentials as "username:[email protected]", but can't parse it properly if the username is an email address that itself contains an "@")
• Light RAM consumption

Bonus points awarded for

• IMAP server
• Other means of sharing data in a "public folder" kinda thing
• Web mail, especially WAP
• Remote (web) administration

Can anyone in DC land suggest any free/cheap email server that satisfy these?

862

Living Room / Re: Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 27, 2007, 05:09 PM »

The Guardian article unfortunately is an attack... imagine if someone said something like that about your career for example or something you believe in? Maybe you are the type to smile nonchonantly but most people arent - they get their backup

-tomos (November 27, 2007, 04:54 PM)

At some point even the most reasonable person can't be expected to be patient with people who are sticking their heads in the sand. At some point you have to stop treating them with kid gloves and be blunt.

863

Living Room / Re: Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 27, 2007, 05:06 PM »

Yes, most people seem to associate "theory" with the idea that "hypothesis" is meant to convey. Any theory (speaking currently, not of history) is much more than a guess. It started life that way, but has been subjected to testing to verify its ability to explain the observed phenomena. Sometimes experimentation reveals that a theory is flawed, and it's discarded (e.g., the idea that everything revolves around the Earth, and the invention of "epicycles" to explain the motion of the heavenly bodies). Other times it just needs tweaking, like with Newton's laws of motion: Einstein showed that in some circumstances Newton's laws break down, but they're still good for explaining day-to-day phenomena.

It's simply incorrect to dismiss something because it's only a theory. In the world of science, there is nothing more certain than a theory. Nothing is ironclad, precisely because scientists, at least in principle, are always open to the possibility that something will force them to change their world view.

But the fact is that is that there is very little in this universe that is known with any more certainty than Einstein's or Darwin's theories. Anyone dismissing Darwin in favor of another explanation is, from a scientific point of view, ignorant or attempt to mislead.

864

General Software Discussion / Re: Converting DRM protected music files: software recommendations

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 26, 2007, 03:39 PM »

I use TuneBite to convert Audible.com's audiobooks to MP3 that I can listen to on my Zune. It works well, and unlike other software I've seen, it can convert faster than realtime (that's easy for non-DRM stuff, but it's the only thing I've seen that can get through DRM files this way). And yes, it can convert anything that iTunes or WMP can play. Audible's files go through at 1.8x this way.

(I haven't tried its video processing, though)

865

Living Room / Re: Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 21, 2007, 01:06 PM »

I meant "science" looks at homeopathy "medicine" & says "we cant find anything here because the medicine is diluted too much" (my summary).

-tomos (November 21, 2007, 12:21 PM)

I'm sorry if this is too blunt, Tomos, but that is not what "science" says. The stuff about the concentrations isn't the reason that scientists say that homeopathy is bunk, they say that because of trials of actual treatments. The concentration stuff is their explanation, their theory, of why it doesn't work.

It would be more accurate to summarize the position as follows:

"We have conducted many trials of homeopathic treatments. None of our tests have revealed any measurable effect from the treatments, and thus we find that homeopathy is ineffective as a medicinal treatment. We have analyzed the chemicals offered as treatment, and believe that we can explain why the treatments have no effect. Chemically the treatment chemicals are pure water, and many studies show that pure water has no medicinal value*"

* Except in cases of dehydration 

It is not fair to say that a feud prevents a quest for the truth. The reported phenomena have been well tested, and the results are clear. One group stonewalls in order to keep its followers from seeing that truth.

What might be a fair criticism is the possibility that such "memory effects" are simply unexplained by our primitive understanding of chemistry. But this is true in the same way that evolution or quantum are "only" theories, and might be disproven. Moreover, since tests have observed no such effect to be investigated, it seems like trying to disprove an effect that cannot be experimentally observed is much like disproving the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn (may her hooves never be shod).

866

Living Room / Re: Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 21, 2007, 11:53 AM »

not scientifically proven = doesnt work. Which I find a fairly pathetic "argument"

-tomos (November 21, 2007, 11:44 AM)

Note: I am explicitly not addressing homeopathy itself, in the interest of preserving civility. This post regards the philosophy of science.

Your thumbnail sketch of the argument, "not scientifically proven = doesnt work" is far too nebulous to address. One could mean at least two things by the "not scientifically proven" part: either "never tested", or "tested but could not find any evidence supporting the claimed effect". Only the first of these is a pathetic argument.

The idea that something has been tested, and that those tests have been unable to find any evidence that supports a claim, is very much a valid argument. This is the foundation of pharmaceutical trials involving placebos: if the tested drugs don't do any better than the placebo, then there's no evidence to support their efficacy, and so the drug will be discarded (at least within the boundaries of what was being sought).

If you disagree, you'll have to put up with me talking about the Invisible Pink Unicorns dancing in my walls, not to mention the Flying Spaghetti Monster, because no tests have proven conclusively that these entities do not exist.

867

Living Room / Re: Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 21, 2007, 09:36 AM »

No agnostic here. IMHO, homeopathy is not something to sit mum on. With religious differences, I can't prove I'm right, and I can't prove any harm in believing the "wrong" religion. But following homeopathy really does cause harm when you followed a doomed treatment that at best does nothing positive, and may even cause harm by letting a disease progress to dangerous stages before seeking treatment.

So, here's some info from James Randi, famed debunker of charlatans, in his "An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural "

homeopathy This claimed healing modus is included here because it is an excellent example of an attempt to make sympathetic magic work. Its founder, Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1775?-1843), believed that all illnesses develop from only three sources: syphilis, venereal warts, and what he called “the itch.”
      The motto of homeopathy is “Similia similibus curantur” (“Like cures like”). It claims that doses of substances that produce certain symptoms will relieve those symptoms; however, the “doses” are extremely attenuated solutions or mixtures, so attenuated that not a single molecule of the original substance remains. In fact, the homeopathic corrective is actually pure water, nothing more. The theory is that the vibrations or “effect” of the diluted-out substance are still present and work on the patient. Currently, researchers in homeopathy are examining a new notion that water can be magnetized and can transmit its medicinal powers by means of a copper wire. Really.
      The royal family of England adopted homeopathy at its very beginning and have retained a homeopathic physician on staff ever since.
      The only concern of homeopaths is to treat the symptoms of disease, rather than the basic causes, which they do not recognize. Thus homeopathy correctly falls into the category of magic. And quackery.

More from Randi's publications here, for example: http://www.randi.org/jr/02-02-2001.html, and another article from an MD here: http://www.badscienc.../11/a-kind-of-magic/

That said, it's worth noting that while the efficacy of pharmaceuticals is well established, the success rate of doctors and surgeons themselves really is, from a philosophy of science perspective, purely anecdotal. It's really not possible to do true double-blind studies of, say, a heart bypass. Each case is unique, so we can only talk about statistics, and that only to the degree that the doctors accurately noted all factors.

868

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: RecoverKeys on Givewayoftheday today (November 21, 2007)

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 21, 2007, 09:16 AM »

I tried it, and was completely underwhelmed. Of the dozens of apps on my system (I love to play with new toys  ) the only apps it came up with keys for were Microsoft apps -- including IE, and who cares about that key?

There are heaps of free tools to extract the keys of MS apps, who needs a for-money program to do this?

869

General Software Discussion / Re: Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard?

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 20, 2007, 10:32 AM »

Carnivore is very real, and the us government is doing some really massive-scale data mining with it.

-f0dder (November 20, 2007, 08:56 AM)

Yes, even if they can't read the mail thanks to encryption, there's plenty of data mining to be done for traffic analysis. In it's simplest form, just the fact that you've sent mail addressed to, say, Tony Soprano is interesting. A level beyond that, seeing that you sent more volume of mail to him just before a big "job" suggests even more about you.

And this moves outward from there. Who is Mr. Soprano emailing? At the same time as his activity increases, is there a corresponding increase for someone else? Etc.

However, there's a flip side to this. You can get significant knowledge in this way, but acting on that knowledge tips your hand about what you're watching. If you want to keep getting the info, you can't actually use it, or at least not beyond what would be plausible for chance and good detective work.

This was the case during WWII. The Allies had the Japanese codes through almost the entire war, and the German codes for most of the second half. But if we took advantage of knowing all their plans, they would realize we had the codes, and we wouldn't have the benefit when we really needed it. So we had to pretend frequently that we were ignorant. It must have been very painful for the decision makers to let people die, knowing that an attack was coming but needing to preserve the pretense of surprise (and this is part of the backstory in the novel I mentioned, Cryptonomicon).

870

General Software Discussion / Re: Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard?

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 20, 2007, 08:32 AM »

I think it's highly unlikely that the NSA can crack messages encoded with modern algorithms like Twofish, etc. To do this would require that either their mathematicians or there computers are a revolution beyond what the rest of the world understands. While it's likely that they have some edge, it's hard to believe that they could have, e.g., a working quantum computer when the "public" world has at best built useless demonstrations of 1 or 2 bits.

And as long as you're using some modern algorithms to cover your communications, you're safe from Echelon and Carnivore. With the encryption done on your own machine, the only data they can glean is from traffic analysis. What's holding this back from becoming more widespread is the network effect: no one does it because no one does it; no one will start until they can "jump on the bandwagon" because it's no fun to send encrypted messages when no one is receiving them. It would be cool to start a community that communicated in this way, just to jumpstart the process.

And BTW, for anyone who has any interest in cryptography and related fields and who enjoys sci-fi, I strongly recommend the book Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

871

General Software Discussion / Re: Visual Studio 2008 has gone RTM - free Express downloads, too

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 19, 2007, 07:45 PM »

<sigh> It's just been brought to my attention that LINQ to SQL only has partial support for SQL Server CE. That is, the designer environment doesn't work.

Also, as far as I've been able to discover, the IronPython language is still not integrated. You've got to get the stupid VS.Net add-in SDK to build for yourself the integration components.

872

General Software Discussion / Re: Visual Studio 2008 has gone RTM - free Express downloads, too

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 19, 2007, 04:23 PM »

But I've never had problems with VS2005 on Vista 64... Make sure that if you're consuming any 32 bit DLLs that you have your project set to x86!

-Renegade (November 19, 2007, 04:09 PM)

I wasn't clear enough. It's not that the code produced by my project fails, it's that the VS.Net 2005 IDE itself crashes. This happens most often when I have SQL Server Management Studio running.

For example, I can have VS open and minimize it. Then open SSMS and perform some queries, etc. Within about 5 minutes VS is almost guaranteed to have crashed even though I haven't been "touching" it at all.

I've found some things that decrease the incidence of crashes. For example, turning off the Server Explorer seems to help.

873

General Software Discussion / Re: Visual Studio 2008 has gone RTM - free Express downloads, too

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 19, 2007, 12:55 PM »

IMHO, there are two big improvements in the VS product.

First is its ability to target any version of .Net from 2 on up. This means that I can decide when to upgrade my tools independently of when I upgrade the platform. This is important for me, because we're having huge problems with the stability of VS2005 on 64bit platforms. I can't wait to upgrade the IDE (the new one can't be any worse), but I won't need to upgrade the platform (and thus install .Net 3.5 on my users' machines).

Second is the support for LINQ (and closures, anonymous types, and all the other things that it implies) in C#. Note that this is an enhancement to the compiler itself, and the generated code will work all the way back to .Net2.

874

General Software Discussion / Re: Maybe Vista doesn't suck?

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 19, 2007, 09:30 AM »

I think you're being too critical of the manufacturers. There's a definite advantage to using custom-sized lithium-polymer batteries. Standard AAA batteries force the design into a certain shape and (iirc) the energy density lithium-polymer is higher, so the AAA NiMH batteries would need to be bigger. The custom Li-polymer batteries allow the manufacturers to build the devices smaller (and with a definitive style).

As long as consumers value small size and style, custom batteries will be what you get.

875

Living Room / Re: Is the new Zune upgrade really an upgrade?

« Last post by CWuestefeld on November 15, 2007, 07:57 PM »

the reviews of the Zune 2 left me with the impression the hardware is very much better

Does Zune let you play non-DRM mp3 files?

And do you have to use the sucky client, or can you drag-n-drop like a USB drive?

-Ralf Maximus (November 15, 2007, 07:18 PM)

The hardware may be better, but I have to say that the construction of the 1Gen device is pretty good.

Yes, it plays non-DRM MP3 as well as non-DRM WMA. Also WMV.

Yes, you have to use their sucky desktop software. There is a hack that allows you marginal access to the filesystem, but it doesn't work very well, and I haven't heard yet if it works with the new software.