Recent Posts

901

Living Room / Re: DNA: do you really want to know?

« Last post by allen on March 28, 2006, 09:28 PM »

Going back and forth between my respirator and tobacco   And yeah, the avatar is yours truly.

902

General Software Discussion / Re: this video has been in my head all day.. really affected me

« Last post by allen on March 28, 2006, 09:27 PM »

Wow, that's incredible.  I'm amazed at how effectively he carried the injured one, didn't slow him down much at all!

It's a fact, humans weren't the first to develop social structure and social interaction.  What really amazes me is the insect kingdom -- some of the most complex communities/social/political structures in nature aren't lower mammals, but insects.  Bees, especially.

903

General Software Discussion / Re: Why subscription-models for software suck

« Last post by allen on March 28, 2006, 09:16 PM »

It has always been my experience that individual developers and smaller companies (to my knowledge, JGSoft and the "we" used on their software pages refer exclusively to Jan Goyvaerts) seem to really be mindful of and focus on creating solid, bug free (insofar as it is possible) applications -- while larger companies focus first and foremost on expanding and locking-in their userbase, rather than pleasing it -- always a classic example, Microsoft.

The Bat! is an interesting study, to me -- as they really do seem to care about these things and try to address them but have some fundamental organizational problems and little to no business sense.  Their mail client is great, the most powerful I've seen, but not without its issues (lack of sufficient documentation not withstanding).

904

Best E-mail Client / Re: [The Bat!] How to change displayed email address?

« Last post by allen on March 28, 2006, 09:03 PM »

I'm assuming you've already figured this out, but if not--
Account -> Properties -> General -- change the "From" address, as opposed to the reply-to address.  You can also specifiy unique from/reply/etc. on a per folder, per address-book entry, etc. basis.

905

Best E-mail Client / Re: somone didnt like thundrebird (firefox mail client)

« Last post by allen on March 28, 2006, 07:40 PM »

Sounds like somebody has a case of "Needs to try The Bat!".

906

Living Room / Re: Living for 41 hours in Wal-Mart

« Last post by allen on March 28, 2006, 12:09 PM »

Cool idea, anti-climactic in his delivery.  He should have stuck it out until told to leave.  It's a 24/7 store, he was purchasing the merch he took -- it was all legal.  You need more than 40 hours to make for anything truly interesting, I think.

907

Living Room / Re: DNA: do you really want to know?

« Last post by allen on March 28, 2006, 12:00 PM »

I'd read about these services a few years back in Wired -- the one thing that really sparked my interest was mention of a specific gene -- if you don't have it, you can't/won't get lung cancer -- period.  As a happy smoker, I'd be curious to know if I was/wasn't prone to cancer.

Before anyone says anything, I know -- "if you're worried, quit, then it doesn't matter" -- but I doubt knowing would change my behavior, it's more a matter of morbid curiosity

908

General Software Discussion / Re: Why subscription-models for software suck

« Last post by allen on March 28, 2006, 11:51 AM »

For example ... JGSoft produce EditPad Pro. When you buy EdirPad Pro version 5 from them you get unlimited updates as long as version 5 is being developed but if you want to move up to version 6 when it released you buy an upgrade.

-Carol Haynes (March 28, 2006, 06:27 AM)

A nice aspect of JGSoft in that regard, is they don't absolutely abandon one version when the next releases -- while no new features are added, the previous version does see fixes to significant bugs that are found.  It ceases to be supported in much the same time frame as it ceases to be used -- old versions sort of phase themselves out as users move on to new versions, bugs fail to be found/reported and there's no more need for development.  It's nice to see a willingness to support users who don't need the new features.

In his blog, Jan Goyvaerts discussed this briefly (most of the post is about his EULA, which is rather progressive itself).

I ’m also happy to promise free bugfix releases. They’re essential to keeping customers happy anyway, not to mention keeping them recommending our products to everybody they know. Fixing bugs costs time and money, but not nearly as much as acquiring new customers through means other than word-of-mouth. And those new customers would just be as dissappointed about the same bugs. Yes, it does happen that we can’t resolve a problem. For those situations, there’s my personal money-back guarantee.

909

General Software Discussion / Re: Alertbear - the *different* RSS reader - free!

« Last post by allen on March 27, 2006, 09:33 PM »

Well, I already quoted them above: "We also believe that RSS is not email" - so they are using a different approach. So far, I like it.

-brotherS (March 27, 2006, 03:50 PM)

While RSS certainly isn't e-mail, I've always preferred an email-esque approach to it -- particularly when dealing with lots and lots of feeds.  Filtering is always nice, then.

910

Living Room / Re: browsershots.org - shows you what sites look like in dif browsers

« Last post by allen on March 27, 2006, 05:51 AM »

Neat . . . I'm not pleased that it "rejected" half the browsers/jobs when queueing me up, saying the line was too long.  Naturally, I don't -need- an Opera screenshot, but one should have been given

911

Developer's Corner / Re: A cool portable web server...

« Last post by allen on March 27, 2006, 05:46 AM »

That's pretty neat -- php bundled and all.

I use abyss web server for testing (apache is just more trouble than it's worth for non-deployment testing) -- and it works well.  I'd installed it with php and carried the setup on a flashdrive.  Worked without much trouble.

912

Living Room / Re: BitTorrent - why bother?

« Last post by allen on March 27, 2006, 05:35 AM »

Bit Torren frustrates me some times too -- the biggest problem is that I'm usually looking for something relatively obscure, which is essentially the reason for the slow download -- too few peers/seeds.  It just so happens that that slow download, however, is faster than no download -- and torrents are often the only thing I can find them in.  So it's slow or nothing   Took me over a week to download a 1 gig file.

913

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft Confirms Highly Critical IE Hole March 23, 2006

« Last post by allen on March 23, 2006, 06:11 PM »

Microsoft manages to put together some really awesome security holes.  It's as if they do it on purpose, they're so good at it.  They should be commended for doing what they do oh so well.

914

General Software Discussion / Re: Anyone with Opera having trouble with betanews?

« Last post by allen on March 23, 2006, 01:40 PM »

allen: did you report that to the bugtracker (I did just in case). I believe it may actually be a regression, though the CSS2.1 spec is not entirely clear on the expected behaviour.

-nontroppo (March 22, 2006, 10:23 AM)

I didn't, I knew you'd come through for me.  You rule

915

Developer's Corner / Re: CSS Tweaker for helping to clean up CSS files

« Last post by allen on March 23, 2006, 11:07 AM »

If you select the option to leave your format alone, it won't strip out all the white space.

I was a bit flattered by it -- most of the changes it made were just stripping out comments, which I'd rather leave in there anyway.

I think that this is a pretty cool thing, but I wonder -- short of huge, huge, huge stylesheets -- or stylesheets intended for really slow machines/connections, does this really save enough bytes to make it worth the clicks it takes to do it?

I'd written an optimizer of sorts the focussed less on size and more on combinging elements that shared the same attributes, so as to have as few lines to edit as possible.  Too bad that system bit the dust, too lazy to re-write it:)

916

General Software Discussion / Re: Favorite Text Editor, a revisit

« Last post by allen on March 23, 2006, 10:59 AM »

I've already mentioned it in half a dozen threads, but I'm absolutely stuck on EditPad Pro.  It has all the basic and not-so-basic features you'd expect from a text editor.

Most big text/programming editors have generally the same feature set, the real difference is a matter of subtlety--what you need and/or what you're used to.  For me, the real kickers--what keeps me with the same program--is not so much the features but the editor itself.  It's text editing engine in general really feels like its first and foremost purpose is text processing -- everything else is gravy.  From efficient keyboard navigation to conversion routines to the absolute best regex support on the market. (Regex find/replace features a multi-line text entry area with syntax hilighting, much better than the single <30 char input box most offer) -- and a key thing for me is (optional) persistent selections and inherent add ons to it (ctrl+m to move the selection to your cursor, ctrl+d to duplicate the selected text, etc.).

A few other perks for me -- most of the features are available  settings can be stored in an ini file making the application totally portable, there's an application for making custom syntax hilighting schemes (comes in handy for proprietary data formats I use now and again), syntax aware live spelling, external tools -- and whatever else you might think of.  The few things that weren't there are implemented in the upcoming version 6 -- whose beta is really stable and sexy, right now

Finally, to my delight, the text processing engine for EditPad is also in JGSoft's other applications--which also integrate into one another in a number of ways, making for a great family of familiar applications--RegexBuddy, Power Grep, AceText -- most of which I use ceaselessly, daily.  I feel like a marketeer, at this point . . . I've just been using JGSoft's applications for too long . . .

For quickly previewing text, on the other hand, I usually just use Editor2, which is bundled with xplorer2. TED Notepad is nice, too.  My biggest complaint with minimalist editors -- TED, metapad, editor2 -- they all use the registry to store their settings, which drives me nuts.  I like to have the option to drop it on my flash drive and go.

917

Living Room / Re: How long will it take you to adopt Windows Vista as your OS?

« Last post by allen on March 22, 2006, 08:15 PM »

It's the difference between a real woman and a slattern, I'd much rather look at an attractive woman than be repelled by a skank.

I prefer women that are beatiful WITHOUT makeup, but are drop-dead gorgeous with. Vista is a case of "I can live with this skank when she has a couple of pounds of makeup on".

-f0dder (March 18, 2006, 11:31 PM)

Is it just me that finds these comments slightly offensive? Some of us may not be much to look at but we are human beings with the same emotions as everyone else (and perhaps a little more grey matter than women who spend 90% of the time in beauty parlours, in front of the mirror or having surgery).

-Carol Haynes (March 19, 2006, 05:04 AM)

The difference here, if I may -- not everyone is expected to be drop dead gorgeous, by any means.  And anyone who says one can be measured by their beauty is a fool.  However, in this instance, the product is largely being sold on an aesthetic basis -- and, like the models in the magazines, if you're selling beauty--then we want beauty.  I don't expect my wife to look like a centerfold--and think no less of her if she doesn't--but, damnit, that centerfold sure better look like one -- that's what she's paid for!

Note: I'm probably the last person who should be drawing this analogy, I don't much care for makeup or centerfold types . . . I like my women like I like my operating system: plain and efficient/sufficient.

918

General Software Discussion / Re: IE 7.0 Beta 2: Any takers?

« Last post by allen on March 22, 2006, 07:55 PM »

Well as far as web standards go, much too little too late.

-nontroppo (March 22, 2006, 10:21 AM)

I completely agree.  It's functionally superior to previous versions, but at the end of the day the general attitude seems to be that they don't have to create a superior browser, people will use it anyway.  And for a large chunk of the population, this is still unfortunately true . . . which continues to make life difficult for us developers.

That said, I was refreshed you didn't mention their pitiful ACID2 results -- while seeing a browser pull it off, I get sick of all the ACID, ACID, ACID clammoring. A benchmark, not a priority -- and by no means the true measure of a browser--not yet, anyway.

919

Older Newsletters / Re: VRGRRL Blogs In Live from the Game Developer's Conference in San Jose

« Last post by allen on March 22, 2006, 07:25 PM »

Pay special attention to Nintendo tomorrow, and try to get me a 5 finger discount on a prototype revolution, will you?

920

Developer's Corner / Re: Do you use a good office chair when programming?

« Last post by allen on March 22, 2006, 07:20 PM »

I once read a blogpost after someone bought a 2500 dollar chair -- and their argument was that they spend far more time in that chair than their car and considered it a reasonable investment.  That said, my chair is < 100 dollars and I really, really like it -- I bought it after my back started giving me trouble.  It's perfect for me, as it provides the right about of posture, support and comfort.
That said, it's a balance of comfort -- it's by no means posh, it's a simple piece of wood with fake leather over it -- and I love it.

Black Faux Leather Armless High Back Chair

921

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Buzzsaw - free background HD defragmenter

« Last post by allen on March 22, 2006, 07:12 PM »

The advantage to buzzsaw is that it defrags as files are edited -- realtime defrag. I'd be interested to see how dirms stacks up against other non-realtime defrag utilities -- I don't know enough to draw conclusions, myself.

922

Living Room / Re: Downloading your Gmail Account

« Last post by allen on March 21, 2006, 09:18 AM »

Lycos and TB have some sort of deal/backscratching going on.  As far as actually being a competitor for gmail, lycos isn't one -- the only significant competition I see is Yahoo/MSN -- both of whom are seriously overhauling their webmail clients.

923

Find And Run Robot / Re: typeadrun

« Last post by allen on March 21, 2006, 09:08 AM »

Right now, my problem is with the latest preview of Opera -- with bb running, it crashes -constantly-.  And, yes, this was after installing it as default shell and rebooting . . .

That's pretty crippling, for me If I can get it working right, it should be right up my alley.  First thing I do on a linux install is ensure gnome/kde know they're not welcome.  I usually use fluxbox, actually -- which is based on blackbox.

924

Living Room / Re: Downloading your Gmail Account

« Last post by allen on March 21, 2006, 09:03 AM »

Not terribly important, but Gmail chat doesn't work at all under Opera.  Depending on the version of Opera you use, address autocomplete may or may not work, and also depending on version problems with the draft autosave losing focus of the text box.

With the exception of the latest preview release, Opera 9/gmail are getting better, but it's still imperfect.  I'm not saying gmail is unusable with Opera, it's just often not as usable as with another browser.

925

General Software Discussion / [GER/ENG] CLCL Clipboardmanager Forum

« Last post by allen on March 21, 2006, 05:26 AM »

I vote that I love the bag, but burning would be fun