Month: July 2007

WinTabber

If you ever wanted to have tabs for applications that dont support them? Well with WinTabber you can.. in a way

What is WinTabber ?
WinTabber is tabmanager that can add tab support to almost any window under windows 2000/XP. Working with tabbed windows works faster and efficiently.

Basically it gets rid of the title bar of any window you currently open and puts it in the WinTabber application as a tab. You can move through tabs in WinTabber using your mouse or the Ctrl+Tab (or Ctrl+Shift+Tab) shortcut most of us would be used to if you used any tabbed application before (e.g. Opera, Firefox). You can open multiple WinTabber windows to organise different windows but you can’t put a WinTabber window as a tab in another WinTabber window. Tabs can be released to restore it as a window on its own. A good application to help you remove some clutter from the taskbar and boost your productivity.

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101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed

Source
Is it sad that I identify with some of them?

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6. Your source code control system is a series of folders on a shared drive
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9. You start considering a new job so you don’t have to maintain the application you are building
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84. All performance issues are resolved by getting larger machines
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100. You have been 90% complete 90% of the time

P.S 1st Flock post because I am lazy to go to the WordPress dashboard. Laziness is good and expect to see more Tumblelog-esque entries

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Fedora 7 package-less without the Internet?

Ok so I decided to install Fedora 7 on my desktop after receiving an email regarding my post on getting the SMC 2862W-G wireless USB dongle working on Ubuntu. Go through the installation and setup, and everything seems pretty polished and from what I’ve heard of Fedora (previously Fedora Core) product line. During the installation I purposely stupidly left out some packages thinking that I would try to install them later to see how package installation is without an Internet connection. Besides if I don’t have my wireless driver compiled and loaded how can I get online right? (the router is upstairs and I am NOT lugging my desktop upstairs)

System installed and booted up first thing I did click the “Applications” menu, and I see the “Add/Remove Software” so thats where I go. It prompts me for my password and then I see the application starting and then a nice error message informing me that it is “Unable to retrieve software information”. Fair enough, I’m not online so it can’t connect to the repositories. There is a “Details” section which displays the nice message of “None”. So I click on the “Ok” button of this error dialogue box and *poof* the whole application just closes. So how am I supposed to install packages?

I see “Software updater” in the “System Tools” menu and I try that. Same problem. Search online and I get this post. Currently I am reading through trying to familiarize myself with this different side of Linux that I had yet to venture into. I could just use rpm to install some stuff but dependency hell just like dpkg in Debian based distros arise. But fact of the matter is why can’t they just enable installation of files from the CD by default? There is 2.7GB worth of packages in the DVD which is useless to those trying to learn how to use Linux and all.

Found this post that enabled me to update via the GUI installer, pirut, but not via the command line yum. Being curious I got on IRC and join #fedora and asked them about it. One guy asked if I could use rpm and after a bit of dependency annoyances (as with any manual package installer e.g. dpkg) I managed to install one of the dependencies for gcc. So I tried using pirut again and got the same exception as I got for yum. Man this is bad. Yes there are some working fixes that I’ve read, such as copying the packages from the DVD to the hard drive but I want to use the DVD which has shown that it could work with pirut.

I think David said it best in the post from the 1st link above:

Prominent Linux distributions have greatly improved that software installation and update process over the last decade. Both Debian-derived and RPM-based distributions now have good support for accessing large repositories of packages over the internet. If you have good internet access, then you don’t really need the distribution CDs or DVD after the initial install. But I wonder if the emphasis on installation over the internet has seems to have reached the point that distributions are neglecting installation of packages from CD/DVD. I hope that ability doesn’t disappear. Although fast internet connections are widely available now, it’s still quite possible to find yourself without one. And many DSL providers set monthly data limits, so it’s sometimes preferable not to download packages that you already have sitting on a CD or DVD.

Is that too much to ask for?

Application of the Day?: SUPER

SUPER: © Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer. In other words an application that lets you convert videos from 1 format to another. After being mentioned on DL.TV episode 177 I did some searching on it and found a complaint saying that it is in violation of the GPL and LGPL. Despite an odd complaint of this software installs spyware and doesn’t cleanly uninstall. Initially I was wary of the program but after seeing it on Softpedia with the 100% free award which states the following:

Softpedia guarantees that SUPER 2007 build 22 is 100% FREE, which means it is a freeware product (both for personal and commercial use) that does not contain any form of malware, including but not limited to: spyware, viruses, trojans and backdoors.

So that calmed me until now. I should do some testing on the software, I will try do so if I have the time and if I’m using Windows. But despite the controversy I have to say that it does work flawlessly. Simple drag and drop, select output format, click encode (leaving the defaults on) and it starts encoding the file.
Use with caution