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9476

Living Room / Re: In rememberance of....The antiquated hardware/software reminiscence thread

« Last post by 40hz on March 08, 2010, 03:50 PM »

SPO actually optimized the intermediate code in TPU files

-f0dder (March 08, 2010, 03:27 PM)

@f0dder - Amazing. Can you imagine somebody doing something like that today? They'd get their butts sued off before they could hit the save key on their compiler. How times have changed...

@crainioscopical - I think that 'rename' suggestion of yours sounds about right even if none of us have been banned. Yet.

@Edvard - Beagle Brothers! You da man!!! What a freekin' absolutely cool company they were. And thanks for that link to their Online Museum website. I forgot how funny these people were with their documentation. That link to Uncle Louie's Q&A column is priceless!

Q. Dear Uncle Louie -- There seems to be nothing of substance in your column. My question is, "Where's the BEEF?"

A. $BEEF is located at address 48879.

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Living Room / Re: In rememberance of....The antiquated hardware/software reminiscence thread

« Last post by 40hz on March 08, 2010, 03:13 PM »

and often had to resort to writing assembly snippets when you needed speed.

-f0dder (March 08, 2010, 02:28 PM)

Too true!  I should have said "...if you didn't want to be writing them entirely in Assembly Language. 

BTW: Is Sally's peephole optimizer the same thing as something I knew as Sally TPU? That came after I stopped doing anything with Turbo. I think 4 or 5 was the last version I used. (It was whichever was the first one to have the 'blue' background.) But I remember how some friends used to rave about it.

After TurboPascal I went to Topspeed Modula2 and from there to Clarion Professional Developer before I mostly stopped coding and got into network and infrastructure projects.

9478

Living Room / Re: In rememberance of....The antiquated hardware/software reminiscence thread

« Last post by 40hz on March 08, 2010, 02:18 PM »

How many of us cut our baby teeth on one (or both) of these two classic development tools?

TurboPascal - long before C or Visual-anything, this was the go-to language for developing "real" PC apps.

Or at least it was if you didn't want to be writing them in Assembly Language.


And for serious database applications, FoxPro (pre-Microsoft!) was the only choice if you wanted power and speed.

9479

Living Room / Re: In rememberance of....The antiquated hardware/software reminiscence thread

« Last post by 40hz on March 08, 2010, 06:33 AM »

...and 16-year-old girls weren't FBI agents.

-f0dder (March 08, 2010, 02:05 AM)

ROFLMAO!

9480

General Software Discussion / Re: alternative to filehamster?

« Last post by 40hz on March 08, 2010, 06:26 AM »

Hm, automated git committing?
...

Doesn't sound like a super good idea to me.

-f0dder (March 08, 2010, 01:43 AM)

I was thinking more along the lines of an enterprise document editing and collaboration where you'd want private or semi-private document automatic versioning, but still have the provision for a more structured check in/out and commit cycle for more formal documents.

An example would be for something like a creative team who is responsible for AV scripts. Each writer has a set of assignments that he or she would like to keep versions of during the initial development phase. They would appreciate automatic version tracking. But once the script went into production, subsequent revisions and changes would require formal review from someone other than the writer before that revision got approved. So at this phase, it would be necessary to manually commit the changed script version. And so it would go as additional revisions were requested and approved.

I could see a combination system being quite useful for formal corporate communications and PR work; large creative team projects; or in the preparation of legal contracts.

But I agree that it's probably a not a good idea for computer code.

9481

Living Room / Re: In rememberance of....The antiquated hardware/software reminiscence thread

« Last post by 40hz on March 07, 2010, 07:53 PM »

Creative Computing was amazing. I remember an article that had a program which could be used as a framework for generating the code for standalone business programs. That was the first time I had ever seen a "template driven application generator" as they later came to be called. Those were eventually replaced by today's more flexible frameworks, but back then appgens were bleeding edge.

And to think they were doing stuff like this on floppies and 64K of RAM.


Addendum:

But I'm surprised you didn't mention 80Microcomputing seeing as you were a fellow  "Trash-80" user from way back.

My sister started her business with a dual floppy TRS-80 Model III (later upgraded with an "amber" monitor and LDOS), Visicalc, Super Scripsit (WP), plus the TRS-80 accounting suite. (And also a copy of Zork if memory serves.  )

This was the TRS-80 crowd's answer to Transactor:

9482

General Software Discussion / Re: tree-style notes - TreeDBNotes - Keynote-NF - AllMyNotes Organizer and more

« Last post by 40hz on March 07, 2010, 07:18 PM »

@urlwolf - that's a pretty brilliant hack using lyx like that!  

Good import/export; designed for structure from the ground up; decent change tracking mechanisms; referencing and citation support built in; and screaming fast. And yes, it is a terrific outliner...

Very cool!  

9483

General Software Discussion / Re: alternative to filehamster?

« Last post by 40hz on March 07, 2010, 07:10 PM »

40hz, do you know any versioning that supports manual and automated committing?

-kartal (March 07, 2010, 06:03 PM)

Unfortunately, no I don't. But that sounds like a really great combination. Basically you have two categories in the version archive. One category automatically "versions" on save. The other category alerts on changes, but doesn't commit a "version save" unless explicitly told to do so.

Almost like a combination of smart sync and version control. Hmmm...

Might make a nice project for one of DC's community of coders to take a crack at.

(Hint?  )

9484

Living Room / Re: In rememberance of....The antiquated hardware/software reminiscence thread

« Last post by 40hz on March 07, 2010, 06:26 PM »

All those great old computer magazines:

Byte

   

Probably the finest general computer technology magazine ever published. And still sadly missed by many of us who are old enough to remember it.


Transactor  



This was a personal favorite of mine. The bible of the Commodore 64 crowd. I used to pore over this mag from cover to cover way back when.

There's an online partial archive of back issues at the following link. Check it out if you're a C64 fan. Maybe even give it a skim if you're not..

http://cbm.csbruce.c...ruce/cbm/transactor/


Kilobaud Microcomputing



Another classic that deserved better.

9485

General Software Discussion / Re: tree-style notes - TreeDBNotes - Keynote-NF - AllMyNotes Organizer and more

« Last post by 40hz on March 07, 2010, 01:27 PM »

AllMyNotes looks promising.

Right now I'm using a combination of apps (CintaNotes, Canaware NetNotes, TreeNotes, WikiPad) and I'd love to just get everything into one place.

9486

Living Room / Re: In rememberance of....The antiquated hardware/software reminiscence thread

« Last post by 40hz on March 07, 2010, 01:16 PM »

Borlands's Sidekick (and later on Sidekick Plus) The Granddaddy of all TSR applications. Combined with an AST Rampage! card and you were one smokin' cool Power User.

Faked multitasking from back in the days of DOS. "When men were real men; women were real women; and those little fuzzy creatures from Sirius were real little fuzzy creatures from Sirius."



Once you got used to using Sidekick it was hard to work on a machine that didn't have it. State of the Art - back in the 80s!

9487

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows XP to Vista to Windows 7 Upgrade advice

« Last post by 40hz on March 07, 2010, 12:50 PM »

@f0dder - I was not aware of that. I'll have to look and see if that's where the problem is. Thanks for the info! Got one of my C++ Ninja friends going over what I did just to make sure I didn't do anything exceptionally stupid when I migrated the apps. I'll mention what you said next time I talk to her. The two of you could probably have some great discussions. She's about as patient as you are with stupid architecture and coding issues.

Thx again for sharing your expertise.

9488

Living Room / Re: Will you miss newspapers when they're gone?

« Last post by 40hz on March 06, 2010, 01:03 PM »

Subscribe to good RSS feeds, not to bullshit. 

-Tuxman (March 06, 2010, 12:58 PM)

I do. That accounts for most of the 10% I don't consider pointless. 

(Nice language BTW. Really gets your point across.)

9489

Living Room / Re: Will you miss newspapers when they're gone?

« Last post by 40hz on March 06, 2010, 12:55 PM »

Daily newspapers are, basically, pointless when you have internet, but weekly magazines are still important.  

-Tuxman (March 06, 2010, 12:53 PM)

Interesting. Especially when you consider about 90% of what's up on the Internet is basically pointless.

9490

Living Room / Re: Will you miss newspapers when they're gone?

« Last post by 40hz on March 06, 2010, 12:52 PM »

It just occurred to me that the cost of owning a gerbil or parakeet will go up sharply once there are no more newspapers.


Sorry Sweetie! No more newsprint.
Time to go walkies!

9491

General Software Discussion / Re: alternative to filehamster?

« Last post by 40hz on March 06, 2010, 12:39 PM »

My main problem with many back up and versioning apss is the network support. Many of those apps work alright in the local machine but they seem to drop watching once in if the watch folders happen to be on a network drive or folder.

-kartal (March 06, 2010, 12:01 PM)

This FAQ may explain why it isn't supported on TrackMyFiles:

Can I track folders on shared network drive?

Currently iternum TrackMyFiles does not support tracking of network drives. The main reason is that it is currently not possible to resolve possible conflicts that might arise when more than one user attempts to track a network share or when user make concurrent modifications to a shared file or folder.

I can't really see an effective way to get around the issue since the alternative would be to constantly invoke a shadow copy every time a document got saved. Probably wouldn't be that big a deal if it were only one person doing it to their own folders. But the minute you go up on a network you almost have to assume there will be multiple users and shared folders.

Most "time machine" type apps get around the multi-user problem by doing snapshots via the ShadowCopy mechanism. Others use some variant of a filebase/incremental 'delta' backup.  Genie Timeline by GenieSoft is a good example of a 'continuous' backup product that does the filebase/incremental thing. But it still works off a timer. And that's not the same as what FileHamster does since FH's doing version tracking based on changes to the file rather than at timed intervals.


I guess that's one fundamental difference between backup and version control systems: how the "commit to archive" operation gets invoked. Time = backup. File change = version control.

 

 

9492

General Software Discussion / Re: alternative to filehamster?

« Last post by 40hz on March 06, 2010, 11:49 AM »

The only equivalent I ever saw for FH's funtionality was a product called TrackMyFiles put out by internum GmbH. ( www.trackmyfiles.com ). I have a client who swears by it.

I bopped over to internum's website. From the looks of it, this program isn't being actively developed since there's no mention of Windows 7 anywhere. Their FAQ specifies WinXP and Vista as the only supported OS versions so I'm also guessing server use is not in the cards.

I loaded up a copy. Looks nice. Relatively small memory footprint (10Mb). Very clean interface. Seems to work as expected, although I've only had it running for a couple of days before I wrote this.

I emailed the developers some questions and also invited them to join in on this discussion.

Hopefully we'll be hearing from them.

9493

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows XP to Vista to Windows 7 Upgrade advice

« Last post by 40hz on March 05, 2010, 07:11 PM »

The fly in the ointment may be if the installed custom software has some copy protection scheme.  It may be simpler just to leave an XP partition on and boot to that to do the work with those apps.

-MilesAhead (March 05, 2010, 06:20 PM)

Also good idea. Fortunately, I was able to pry both programs off the drive. Turned out to be pretty straightforward. Had to manually register a few DLLs, but I got it to work in the end. Fortunately, the only registry entries were easy to find and fairly simple so it went rather well. The only problem is that neither of them will run on 64-bit Win7 no matter what you do. Might just be some sloppy coding since they work just fine under 32-bit Win7.

So it looks like it's a wrap folks!


I want to thank everyone for your comments and suggestions.  

(I told my sister: Let's NOT do this again real soon!)

9494

Living Room / Re: Browser Wars: Why did you choose yours?

« Last post by 40hz on March 05, 2010, 03:13 PM »

I was happy to see joiwind spoke up for K-Meleon. It's a great lightweight browser. especially on older or underpowered machines.

I'm basically a Firefox user. And I have five major reasons why I tend to use FF more than any other browser. In order of importance, they are:

• NoScript
• Ad Block Plus
• Sage
• Down Them All
• Passive Recon

Like CleverCat pointed out - it's the extensions.   At least for me.

I also use IE, but pretty much only when I'm on Microsoft's gargantuan website. A lot of what Microsoft puts up on the web seems quicker and better behaved when you're using IE. (Should that surprise anybody? )

I've got the latest version of Opera up on my system. It's very nice, but I don't personally see what all the hoopla is about. It's also a bit of a "paradigm shift" if you're a longtime FF user. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see enough of an advantage over FF to even think about switching any time soon.

I've tried Safari and: "Dude, I'm like totally unimpressed."

I've declined to try Chrome purely for philosophical and political reasons. I don't really like (or trust) Google very much anymore.

 

9495

Living Room / Re: Will you miss newspapers when they're gone?

« Last post by 40hz on March 05, 2010, 02:30 PM »

I will.

I'll miss being able to cite something "as reported" and not worry about changes being made after the fact.

The NYT itself (the so-called "Paper of Record") has been found to have made changes to articles in its online edition without notice being given to the reader.

(For those who don't see the problem in that, go read George Orwell's classic 1984. "Those who control the past, control the future.")

(Unless, of course, the only copy you ever "owned" was on your Kindle!  )

9496

Living Room / Re: What annoys you to no end?

« Last post by 40hz on March 04, 2010, 07:08 PM »

@Josh:




With thanks to www.toothpastefordinner.com

9497

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows XP to Vista to Windows 7 Upgrade advice

« Last post by 40hz on March 04, 2010, 07:01 PM »

btw:
"LOGIC is no longer an option"
that's great, love it.  

-mouser (March 04, 2010, 01:53 PM)

Glad you liked it. It's my private mantra. 

9498

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows XP to Vista to Windows 7 Upgrade advice

« Last post by 40hz on March 04, 2010, 06:55 PM »

First, I'd try simply "extracting" the installed critical software. you say it's dotNET, it's probably going to be pretty easy, without too much registry/filesystem entangling. If that works, simply do a clean Win7 install on her hardware, problem solved

-f0dder (March 04, 2010, 05:52 PM)

My thoughts exactly. I'm in the process of doing that as we speak. Looks to be done in C++ with a few oddball private DLLs thrown in just to keep it interesting. I'm not a C++ programmer, but I'm pretty good at troubleshooting software installation issues, so I should be OK. If not, I've got a few friends (who are real C++ wizards) that I can call on.

I'd probably still do a P2V of the existing XP install first, just to be on the safe side... sometimes it takes a couple of months before you realize that you forgot backing up or extracting whatever single item.

I'm not that comfortable when it comes to VMs yet (although I plan on budgeting some serious 'lab' time to get up to speed on it before June is over), so just I imaged and cloned the HD to a new one and am working off that. One less layer of abstraction to deal with. And easier since I have a small supply of old 160-250 Gb HDs to play with!

Once I've got things straightened out I'll most likely put her original HD into 'cold' storage and just give her a new one in case she ever needs it back. I'll also archive the drive image as a second backup to be doubly safe.

9499

Living Room / Re: What annoys you to no end?

« Last post by 40hz on March 04, 2010, 05:16 PM »

cucumber-sandwich orifice

-cranioscopical (March 04, 2010, 04:50 PM)

I actually like that one!

Thanks Mr. C. You always make me laugh.

9500

Living Room / Re: What annoys you to no end?

« Last post by 40hz on March 04, 2010, 03:41 PM »

The use of the term "pie hole" or "piehole" when referring to someone's mouth as in: "Shut yer pie hole!" or "Shove it down their pie holes."

Don't know where it originated (maybe a movie or TV series?) but I'm running into it more and more frequently in blogs and web forums.

I don't know what it is about that expression, but it absolutely sets my teeth on edge.

Then again, maybe that's the whole idea behind using a phrase like that in the first place isn't it?