cellio | Entries tagged with software

We use BitDefender for anti-virus protection. Once it's running I've found that it behaves itself better than Symantec and MacAfee did when I ran them -- less intrusive, more likely to do the right thing, etc. (I've never had to clean up after a virus -- a combination of being careful and being lucky, I assume.) Maintenance, on the other hand, is a pain.

( small rant about sloppy software (and business practices) )

A coworker pointed me to these cartograms illustrating election results geographically. Nifty!

Dear LJ brain trust,

I'm looking for virtual-desktop software for Windows XP with the following properties:

Supports six or more desktops. Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager fails here, being limited to four.
Can switch desktops with a single click on a grid (or something similar); I'm not interested in apps that run only on hotkeys or require cycling. VirtualWin fails here, requiring me to cycle through them by repeatedly clicking on something in the task bar.
Doesn't get confused by multiple windows from the same app being on different desktops. (I usually keep a few Firefox windows around.) Cool Desk appears to fail here; it's making my second Firefox window sticky when I don't want it to. This will probably get some more testing, as the app is otherwise decent (once you swap out the default skin).
Doesn't interact badly with some unknown OS update that landed in the last two months (sigh). JSPager, which I've been using happily for years, is now implicated in unplanned Windows restarts. ("Implicated" is the wrong word in that it's probably not really JSPager's fault, but my attempts to debug it have all failed, including the ones involving hardware.)
Commonly-found features that I care about: can make windows sticky on demand; can send windows from one desktop to another easily; task bar for a desktop shows only that desktop's windows.
Nothing that would obviously bar it from being approved by a corporate IT department (unverifiable executables from Russia or Iran, for instance).

Features I do not care about: per-desktop wallpaper, per-desktop desktop shortcuts, live preview, changing resolution for different desktops, support for multiple monitors.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Dear LazyWeb,

Dani and I have a lot of albums and cassettes that we don't play any more, so we have begun the process of figuring out how to upgrade to digital media (while culling the stuff we don't care about any more). Some albums exist as CDs or downloads; others we'll have to burn ourselves (we have hardware for that). Mostly we're replacing albums, we think, and not just grabbing the "good tracks". But not all albums were reissued as CDs, so there are some individual tracks in our future assuming we can find them. (We're only through "folk, A to C" so far so expectations could change, but this is what it's looking like now.)

Even though most of this is going to end up as MP3s anyway, I prefer to buy physical CDs where we can. Yes, it's extra work to then burn them and we have to store the CDs, but I want both the liner notes and the security of knowing that some digital nanny isn't going to prevent me from moving that album to a new computer or iPod. It's also easier to browse; cover art and location on the shelves are meaningful guideposts for me, and iTunes' "genre" is not nearly rich enough for sorting; I need multi-level catagorization.

First questions: where besides Amazon should we be looking online for reasonably-priced CDs, some obscure? Is anybody beating Amazon on price consistently enough to look into? (I realize that the Amazonians among my readers might not want to answer that. :-) )

Now, about downloads. We haven't bought much music in this form before. We want it to be as easy as possible to play whatever we buy on multiple computes and iPods, including future ones and future tech. Sometimes this is prevented (DRM, I presume) -- I bought a song from iTunes and we were unable to play it on Dani's computer. Other times things appear to work fine -- Dani bought a song from Amazon and I could play it just fine. Next questions: are these typical experiences for those two vendors? Are there other vendors we should look at?

Thanks.

( Read more... )

Maritan Headsets (from Joel on Software) is a long but worthwhile article on software standards -- both not having them early enough, and having them and trying to enforce them. Parts of it made me laugh out loud, like the paragraph containing this passage: "[...] but of course when you plug the headphones into FireQx 3.0 lo and behold they explode in your hands because of a slight misunderstanding about some obscure thing in the spec which nobody really understands called hasLayout, and everybody understands that when it's raining the hasLayout property is true and the voltage is supposed to increase to support the windshield-wiper feature, but there seems to be some debate over whether hail and snow are rain for the purposes of hasLayout..."

Rescue me: a fed bailout crosses a line seems (to this non-expert) like a good analysis of what just happened to the market and the dollar. (Need a login ID? Try BugMeNot.) I am more scared, and more angry, about our government's economic policies than I've been in a while. As someone on my subscription list said (I forget who), the people who actually took personal responsibility and saved rather than spending recklessly are the ones who are going to get hammered by this, while the idiots who bought houses (or corporate holdings) they couldn't afford and racked up tons of debt will be bailed out because we can't stand to say "too bad you were an idiot".

As long as I'm saying "too bad"... too bad, Michigan and Florida. Agreed.

On a lighter note: Garfield Minus Garfield is surreal. And since seeing it a week or so ago, I haven't been able to read Garfield "straight".

Thanks to Rob for solving my MIDI problem. After I posted I started pulling up old files for which I'd made instrument assignments so I could look up their numbers (narrowing the field some), but that only got me so far. Rob found the list. Thanks also to

hobbitblue for pointing out that my new machine might not have come with new drivers.

Continuing the chain of strange technical foo, I just wrote a TIF file (native Windows thingy, apparently) so that I could email it to myself at work, where I can (with luck) distill it into PDF so I can in turn send it to the composer whose song I arranged in the first place, to see what he thinks of it. If he doesn't hate it, I'll give a copy to our cantorial soloist for consideration by the choir.

One of these days I should get myself some better tools. :-)

I just used MeetingMaker to schedule a weekly meeting. It requires that you specify an end date -- or you can just check "ongoing". Doing the latter causes it to fill in an end date of 12/31/2039. (Which is a Saturday, just in case you were wondering. My recurring meeting is on Tuesday, so one could argue that it should have set the end date differently.)

It quickly reported the two dates this year that some attendee isn't available. This made me wonder whether it was, in fact, searching a sparse calendar all the way through 2039, in which case it gets points for speed but maybe not for appropriateness, or whether it has some built-in limit for how far ahead it will search for conflicts.

By the way, the odds are very good that the room in which my 34-year recurring meeting occurs will cease to be available later this year.

I use Encore to typeset (and compose and arrange) music. It doesn't do everything Finale can do, but it meets my needs -- for the most part.

I'm currently arranging a (modern) piece of music for choir and piano. I'm finding there are two software features -- easy to implement I think -- that would make me particularly happy.

(Note: I'm just grousing about my software here. I'm unlikely to change to something else unless an import path better than MIDI exists for all my current music, but feel free to say positive things about other software anyway, if you like. I may switch someday, after all. But this isn't explicitly a call for alternative suggestions.)

First, chords. The composer of the melody line sent me a melody with chords, so the first thing I did after typsetting the melody (he sent me PDF rather than source, which was fine in this case) was to populate a temporary line with block chords so I could hear the melody in that context. (Hey, if the tools are available I will use eyes and ears to arrange, thank you very much. Besides, I am so not used to modern music...) It would be nice if I'd been able to just enter the chord names and have the software fill in the multi-note blocks for me.

The second is the accompaniment line. A lot of choral music provides a piano line that is the union of the voice parts, which the pianist plays during rehearsal. Reading open score is a pain in the butt, so you want to provide that music to the pianist in standard piano notation. I want my software to auto-generate it for me. (Though in this case I'm leaning toward having the piano do something other than mimic the singers, so this would be something only relevant for rehearsal. And maybe it's not critical there? I don't know; I personally find a piano playing all the lines while I sing in a choir to be a distraction, not an aid, but I may be a mutant.)

Oh well. Life isn't perfect. For most of the music I do, neither of these features would be all that relevant. But every now and then I bump into something new. It's all part of stretching, I guess. :-)

At work I've been running an ancient and venerable version of cygwin (Unix shell for Windows machines), designated "B20". Once too often I got annoyed by not having a useful utility available, so I finally decided to upgrade. Not being stupid, I did not allow it to install over my current copy.

The new version (no obvious version number; current as of Friday) breaks for me in fundamental ways. I don't understand why. Yes, I have read TFM.

First off, it doesn't automatically source my .bashrc the way the old version does. Yes, HOME is set correctly (and the old version gets its). Peculiar, but an obvious workaround exists. Perhaps relatedly, it ignores the "start in [directory]" setting in the shortcut definition. (I want it to start in a directory that is not HOME but it won't.)

Second, by default it emits some text in dark green on my black background, bypassing the color settings I've given it. This problem goes away after I source my .bashrc manually. I guess it's doing something strange with the default prompt, which my .bashrc changes to show the current working directory. Wacky, but if it doesn't recur I can ignore that.

However, there are two real problems. First, even after processing my .bashrc, which includes all the usual definitions of environment variables like ANT_HOME and JAVA_HOME and PATH, it can't find ant. When I run ant via an explicit path, it can't find java. I fired up new and old cygwin shells side by side and applied printenv to all the relevant variables; the definitions match. (The new cygwin has added some stuff to PATH and casts everything as "/cygdrive/d/blah_blah_blah", but it doesn't seem to be missing anything.) This is fatal; it does me no good to have the latest Unix tools if I can't run ant or (apparently) java.

And second, noticed in passing, the new version is sloooooowwwww. I issued a printenv command (for one variable, not the entire environment) in the new shell, switched to the old shell, typed the same command, and switched back, and the old one completed several seconds before the new one did. I have no idea what's going on.

I thought cygwin pretty much worked out of the box, but it's not doing it for me. Frustrating, especially when the old version did. I wonder what's wrong.

The Norton personal firewall that came pre-installed on my new machine is interfering with the McAfee anti-virus package I immediately installed. These days, that's just plain bad manners. I guess it's time to shut the Norton firewall down and consider replacing it with McAfee's. (I wasn't previously running with a personal firewall, relying on the router to do that for me. I'm not sure I need it.) The firewall is probably a trial copy anyway; the machine also came with Norton anti-virus, but only for 60 days.

(I prefer McAfee anti-virus to Norton; it does a better job of telling me what it's doing and it doesn't demand to restart my machine after practically every update the way Norton did when I was using it. I have no opinion on the firewalls, other than a sneaking suspicion that it'll work best if from the same vendor.)

Apropos of nothing, I just made an appointment with my vet for "Erik plus one". She wants to see Erik in a few weeks and they're all due for checkups, but I they could only fit in two cats on the target night. So we'll see who I manage to catch that night. :-)

A while back I asked for help recording digital audio from one Windows application to another, and you folks gave me some good leads. The answer, for my needs, is Total Recorder ($11.95; demo available), suggested by

tim_. Thanks, everyone! Installation and operation are mostly [1] painless.

[1] The following is almost certainly not this program's fault. Now that I've installed this and used it to record from Trope Trainer, Trope Trainer is uninterested in sending audio to my speakers -- even though I have reset the sound settings to not use the recorder, and even though all other sound-producing applications work fine. My working hypothesis is that Trope Trainer is somehow grabbing boot-time system settings. (Exiting and restarting the program does not make a difference.) That would be weird. I'll test the hypothesis next time I reboot.

My google-fu is not good enough, it appears. Or rather, my vocabulary for this problem space isn't good enough to generate useful search terms.

Suppose I have some random application that generates sound -- that is, signal to my speakers -- but does not directly support any "save as" options for capturing that sound to disk. Is there any way, either built into Windows or done via freeware/cheapware, to capture that audio and write it to disk in some broadly-understood audio format, so that someone else can get the sound without running the original application?

Trope Trainer has a "play this torah portion" function, and one of my readers has asked for a recording of his portion. I'm looking for improvements on "hold a tape recorder up to the speaker", especially as I don't own a standard tape recorder. (I have one that uses micro-cassettes, but since the other person doesn't, that doesn't help.)

I'd welcome any hints y'all feel inclined to throw my way. Thanks.

The family visit went pretty well this year. And aside from some incompetence at the border on the way back, the trip itself was painless.

We got up there a couple days before Pesach, rather than zipping in the night before (or day of) the first seder like we usually do. This gave us more options for going out for food, though we actually only went out once, and also gave us options for doing touristy stuff because it could be done on days that weren't Shabbat or Yom Tov. One of my frustrations in the past has been trying to do Shabbat/Yom Tov in a place that isn't my own and doesn't contain similarly-minded people, so this timing worked well.

( sedarim )

( touristy things )

( visits and German cars )

( bad software )

( Read more... )

I recently bought Trope Trainer (Kinnor Software Inc) to help me learn torah portions. I'm learning my first one with it now. It's great! ( allow me to be more specific... )

...a tool that will let me banish Outlook from my desktop once and for all.

I'm using Outlook at work through historical happenstance, even though I know it's hell-spawn and I've never actually liked it. I would like to switch to pine, a mailer that I know, like, and trust not to inflict virii and gratuitous HTML and similar crap upon me. The problem is that I have 10 months' worth of saved mail, in folders, that is important. I want to be able to move that mail to pine format. This means converting from whatever internal format Microsoft is using to plain text (no HTML markup), ideally in nicely-formatted lines under 80 characters, and pine-ifying it (inserting the characters that separate messages). Quoted text still needs to look like quoted text, even if the message used indentation rather than explicit demarcation. I want to preserve the existing sets of folders automagically; I'm willing to export one folder at a time and copy the resulting file to the right place in the pine directory structure, but I'm not willing to dump everything in one huge file and sort it out again.

I'm also not really willing to forward all my saved mail to myself, partly because of the one-huge-pile problem and partly because I want From lines to be meaningful. (The latter could possibly be fixed by a different script that would rewrite the resulting files.) Mostly, though, because it would be a tedious manual process.

I fear, though, that I'm going to be stuck with Outlook forever.

Current Mood: frustrated

Somebody finally wrote a plugin for Outlook to get rid of HTML infestations from incoming email. If you're stuck using Outlook, this should substantially cut down on your virus exposure.

I'm not very photogenic (massive understatement), and I don't actually have all that many pictures of myself. The ones I do have tend to be group shots, like the one I'm currently using for my default. I'd like to be able to do some simple tweaking to -- in this case -- edit out the shoulder of the next person over and maybe replace it with more of the leafy green background that's visible in the rest of the picture. But the best tool I've got available is PaintShop Pro, and while I'm sure it's *possible* to do stuff like this, I find I have none of the correct instincts. I'm not even sure what topics I should be looking up in the documentation.

Sometimes the gaps in my computer knowledge are annoying. Oh well.

Word is not my choice of word-processing software. (The magnitude of that statement is comparable to that of "pork chops are not my choice of meal".) But sometimes I need to edit a document that someone else wrote, and 90% of the time it's in Word.

Today's annoyance: there appears to be no way to validate all xrefs in a document. You can go to an individual xref and say "update", and if it's broken (target no longer exists) you'll get an error, but what I *want* to be able to do is check *all* of the xrefs in a document and be told about ones that are broken. What actually happens if you do a doc-wide update is that it inserts error messages into your document where the broken xrefs are but doesn't tell you about them. So you have to page through the blasted doc looking for them -- there's not even a "search for xrefs" command to mitigate.

I just split a document into two separate documents, and this aspect of it is being a bloody nuisance.

Current Mood: frustrated

Monica

a small rant about my anti-virus software

nifty visualizations

virtual desktops?

replacing albums

interviewed by tangerinpenguin

link round-up

music again

meeting-scheduling software

music software

software annoyances

software clash

[Windows] update: recording audio from an app

Windows (2000): piping sound to a file?

trip to Toronto

review: Trope Trainer

I want...

banish HTML from Outlook

image manipulation

I hate MS Word

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