Best desktop search tools (reviews - NetworkWorld, July 2010)

 

I’ve been flat out and haven’t had a chance to work on my Searching for Desktop Search blog for ages and ages.

I thought that I’d mention that NetworkWorld has recently published some desktop search reviews:

Best desktop search tools

• Windows 7 Search might be all you need
• dtSearch Desktop, Version 7.64
• X1 Professional Client, Version 6.7
• Google Desktop, Version 5.9
• ISYS Personal Edition, Version 9.6
• Exalead Desktop, Version 4.6

I’ve tested many (at least a dozen) desktop search programs for Windows over the last five or more years, including X1 and Copernic search, and I could really tell some stories about them!

But at the moment only have dtSearch Desktop installed on my 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate. Currently, I’m actively using only Windows 7 search (when I migrated from Windows XP as soon as Windows 7 was released in August last year, I discarded some of the other desktop search programs).

While Windows 7 search has many good features, one thing that I really dislike about it the ability to readily enter advanced searches (with Boolean search arguments, etc), as  you can using dtSearch like this:

All that Windows 7 gives you is this:

or this inscrutable nonsense at the top right of Windows Explorer:

What Windows 7 desktop search badly needs is an approachable query interface, say like Google’s “Advanced Search” form:

But one distinct advantage for Windows 7 is that it’s built in, and the indexer works unobtrusively and continuously in the background. I find its performance impact to be unnoticeable, and due to the continuous “on the fly” indexing you can query documents added just a few seconds ago.

More about this, and the some distinct advantages of dtSearch, some other time when I have a moment or two to put down my findings.

Technorati Tags: Desktop Search,Windows 7,dtSearch Desktop,X1 Search,Google Destop Search,ISYS Personal Edition,Exalead Desktop

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Laptops in Love – Portables Amoureux

A classical tale of love, hardware-wise, in the French style. … “L’amour toujours” as experienced by two laptop computers.

It’s been out at YouTube for a couple of years, but is quite cute and worth a view. Be forewarned that the tragic conclusion may cause a little weeping!

Catch it here or watch it below:

Technorati Tags: Portables Amoureux,Laptops in Love,Humour,Humor

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What’s Good Enough for Goldilocks?

There’s a “Goldilocks Principle” as Dr. John Sorflaten describes at Human Factors International. [Link corrected, thanks Kevin]

Goldilocks went into the three bears’ home and tested their chairs, beds and porridge, until she found what for her was “just right” (or so the fairytale goes).

His article fits in very neatly with the theme of my “Leave good enough alone” blog. Go take a read of it there, and find out how to apply the Goldilocks Principle to design.

Technorati Tags: Design,Just Right,Goldilocks Principle

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Upon what premise do you not say ‘upon-premises’?

Crikey, mate, and stone the flamin’ crows! Even we Aussies in our antipodean backwater, an island far from the birthplace of the English language, know the difference between ‘premise’ and ‘premises’ so there’s no excuse whatsoever for you northern hemisphere dwellers to mangle the English language like you keep on doing!

I’ve been extremely interested in spoken languages since I started learning French and Latin at the beginning of my high school years. Since then I’ve dabbled to a greater or lesser extent in other tongues: German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese (Mandarin, or Putonghua). Apart from any practical use – during a visit to a country, or meeting foreign visitors your own country -- when you find out even a few words and phrases of another language you begin to better understand and appreciate the peoples who speak it.

And I know that spoken languages are ever-changing and adapting, with old words or word usages continually being changed, extended or dropped.

Apart from their distinctive pronunciations, Australians, New Zealanders and (?) South Africans tend to use British variants, while our North American friends often have diverged. As the saying goes, we’re "separated by a common language."

I’ve written about this before, please refer to We landed momentarily, upon a premise … Cloud computing? Phooey! Since cloud computing is being increasingly discussed, I’d like to reiterate the distinction that I made there, this time adding a bit of colour (color, if you prefer):

So, you might implement a cloud computing solution based on the two premises that it would firstly save you money and secondly be faster to implement than an on-premises, or in-premises, solution (one located on your organization’s data center, for example). But it would be incorrect to say “on-premise, or in-premise” solution.

I’m a bit disheartened when I hear the incorrect ‘premise’ usage so often. But on the other hand I’m heartened by IBM peoples’ proper usage. for example in the announcement IBM LotusLive 1.3 adds e-mail services for both new and existing Notes Domino customers and Ed Brill’s blog posting LotusLive Notes: Open for business! … However some very naughty people commenting on Ed Brill’s posting used the incorrect ‘premise’ attribution.

Oh how so much I’m whingeing about presence or absence of a single letter “s” – but I’m a pedant, a “language nerd” … and proud of it!

Technorati Tags: Spoken Languages,Words,Word Usage,Cloud Computing,Pedantry,Premise,Premises

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A comment on: Ultra-fast broadband will be slow on overseas links (The Australian)

Australia’s NBN (National Broadband Network) has just had its first point-of-presence officially opened in Tasmania, with the chance that the whole NBN visionary infrastructure project might be canned by the Coalition (Liberal-National) parties if they assume power after next Saturday’s federal election.

There have been many threads or streams of discussion about the politics, business case and technologies of the NBN. One of the various threads argued by the politicians has been about the link speeds involved: Why we need a uniform 100 Mbps network (and in the last couple of days, the fact that tests have shown the NBN will actually support 1 Gbps, which is no surprise to anybody up with technology but caused appalling incredulity on the Coalition leader).

Anyway, a little to my surprise,The Australian newspaper had this article by Sturat Kennedy the other day: Ultra-fast broadband will be slow on overseas links which will be news only to the naive, but I suppose for their sake is worth an airing.

Then across at the NBN Australia group at LinkedIn there was this commentary on the above article. This article won’t be publicly accessible, I guess, so I thought that I should repeat my contribution to this NBN group discussion below, for public view.

- - - - - - - - - -

I’ve been closely following IT technical issues, such as systems performance and communications technology developments, with all their twists and turns, for decades during my career at IBM and afterwards as an independent consultant.

It's been well understood for decades that the overall performance of a service (such as accessing a web site) is dependent on the individual performance of each of the sometimes many steps that contribute to that service.

In this case, the performance of the local device (desktop PC, laptop, smartphone, or whatever), the various communications links (wired, wireless, satellite), and the remote-end service (usually a web server). Understanding and correcting or tuning performance can be a very complicated art.

Queuing theory can be applied to the individual steps an you can come up with a good estimate of the overall performance behavior as well as that of each individual step (each "link" in the chain). There's a queue at each step, and the overall total service time can be estimated by summing the service times of all the individual steps.

Behavior of queues at times can be rather strange and unexpected, such as on a freeway at certain busy times of the day -- see a fascinating "shockwave" queuing example at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13402-shockwave-traffic-jam-recreated-for-first-time.html (and be sure to watch the video).

It's been well understood for decades that the overall performance of a service (such as accessing a web site) is dependent on the individual performance of each of the sometimes many steps that contribute to that service.

In this case, the performance of the local device (desktop PC, laptop, smartphone, or whatever), the various communications links (wired local wireless, satellite), and the remote-end service (typically a web server). Understand and fixing/tuning performance can be a very complicated art. Queuing theory can be applied to the individual steps an you can come up with a good estimate of the overall performance behavior as well as that of each individual step (each "link" in the chain).

For a specific session (such as connection to a local or overseas newspaper web site) it's not much use having one very fast link unless the other links are similar in performance, so a balanced series of steps is optimal for both performance and cost reasons. Or, looking at it in reverse, it's not much point having lots of fast and expensive links if even one link is much slower (and some local country sites can be poor performers, it's not just overseas links and web sties that are slow).
Coalition leader Tony Abbot says that Labor's NBN is like getting a Ferrari when a GM Holden Commodore is all that's needed and affordable.

This affordability argument is oversimplistic. A better analogy would be a fleet of ambulances that, suppose, is measured over a period (weeks or months) to be running at an average speed of 55 Km.hour. It'd be a false economy to purchase a fleet specifying that ambulances only need a top speed capability of, say, 70 Km/hour since much higher speeds are often needed.

Russell Yardley [a respondent in the LinkedIn group’s discussion] mentioned other reasons for having high speed, such as for cloud services. Consider one such service, off-site backup. You might have tens of Gigabytes to be backed up regularly, perhaps daily. What broadband characteristics make this feasible?

Currently most Australian ISPs don't offer high enough upload speeds for such backup to be realistic even if carried out entirely with the country, much less across the Pacific where there are many providers of such a service. Very high speeds for upload -- as well as download, for the recovery phase -- are essential, and it's here that the Holden Commodore analogy breaks down. (Not to mention that Australian broadband plans all count traffic, making such a backup/recovery service unjustifiable in terms of cost as well as performance.)

I could go on and on ...

Technorati Tags: Broadband,NBN Australia,Network Performance,Queuing Theory,Shockwave queue

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Broadband antics Down Under, with the looming 2010 federal election

I’ve been closely following communications technology developments, with all the twists and turns, for decades during my career at IBM and afterwards as an independent consultant.

I'm an example of the lucky few here in Australia with a cable broadband choice of both incumbents, Telstra and Optus. Lots of people can get only one or the other (but many Australians unfortunately can get neither).

In Australia, cable has so far generally been available mostly at the level of DOCSIS 2 modem standard. I used the Telstra service for two years, then cancelled it once the contract had expired because Telstra refused to hook me up to their 100 Mbps DOCSIS 3 cable offering. This is typical of Telstra's tendency to "play funny buggers" to use the vernacular, no more so than during the reign of former CEO Sol Trujillo. Acting like this has been their wont, to the intense annoyance of many customers and prospects, and perhaps still is -- although their stance seems to be softening just a little with new management -- fellow ex-IBMer David Thodey get in touch with me if you want a few tips!

Therefore I dropped Telstra cable and switched over to iiNet ADSL2+ with Annex M (the latter only offered to their business customers) which at 1.3 Km from the exchange gives me reliable speeds of 17-18 Mbps downstream and 2.0 Mbps upstream. So while most ISPs offer ADSL only at a maximum of 1 Mbps upstream, double this speed is easily achievable via Annex M if your ISP offers it (same ADSL2+ modem at your end).

iiNet has recently launched what they term "bonded DSL" which requires a second copper line and a special dual-WAN-port modem. This supposedly can almost double downstream and upstream speeds (for me this would be something like 35 Mbps/4 Mbps). My initial reaction is that, for me, it's a bit messy to set up and on the expensive side, but for others it could be their only way currently (pre-NBN)to achieve tolerable speeds.

For me it was a fortunate coincidence that just as I reached my 2-year contract end with Telstra cable iiNet became  the first non-Telstra ISP to offer ADSL2+ (rather than just the slower ADSL1) on my local exchange, Burwood in Melbourne. This exchange is in the heart of suburbia but was deliberately held back from the higher 2+ option for two or three years by Telstra, again playing "funny buggers" to the disservice of its customers.

Running a software consulting business from home, and not being a "leecher" or movie downloader, I've found the  downstream 17-19 Mbps to be quite adequate for my needs 99 percent of the time. I've been carrying out network performance testing all along, and find that iiNet's ADSL2+ is perfectly capable of transferring at close to the nominal 18 Mbps whenever the remote site allows, but this is probably less than 5 percent of the time. Many remote sites, generally those outside the country but including  lots of in-country sites, are not capable of reaching and maintaining more than a few Mbps. I found even the Telstra DOCSIS 2 service rarely connected to sites at anywhere near its nominal 30 Mbps, with few sites reaching even 16 Mbps and most averaging just several Mbps.

However, there ARE occasions when you want/need very high transfer speeds, such as downloading a movie or (in my case) uploading large software files to my web sites. It is beyond question having the choice of operating at high speed is an essential operational requirement -- that is, a "business" case can be made for it (whether the operating environment happens to be commercial, government, or private).

To make an analogy, suppose that a fleet of ambulances is measure over a period of weeks or months to be running at an average driving speed of 55 Km.hour. You'd have to be crazy to try to save  investment  monies by specifying that the vehicles fleet only need a top speed capability of, say, 70 Km/hour because their are times when high-speed travel is of the essence.

In other words, when you want speed you REALLY want it!

False economies like this are to be avoided, at all cost so to speak. This is why the Coalition's piecemeal 2010 broadband policy with its stated target of 12 Mbps "minimum peak speed" (whatever exactly they mean by this) is quite unsatisfactory, if not naive.

Queuing theory informs us that once the a resource is utilized about 60 to 70 percent of its nominal top speed, then its behavior typically becomes very erratic, and that's why a broadband network needs to have far higher nominal speeds than the average user wants to run at and pay for. So, our NBN has been designed and engineered to run very fast: initially announced at 100 Mbps, but with much higher speeds possible (and just the other day a speed of 1 Gbps was announced, easily achieved with current communications technology).

Certainly not everybody requires the very fastest broadband speeds, and it's heartening to see that pricing so far announced by several ISPs for the pioneer NBN roll-out in Tasmania begin at relatively inexpensive rates for a 25 Mbps low-end package. (Packaging and pricing surely will follow the trend of becoming even cheaper as the NBN is rolled out across the nation and economies of scale kick in as well as ISP competition increasing.)

Talking about competition, Optus seems to have been doing their homework and investing sensibly in infrastructure, and they've just announced (for their Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane cabled regions) what they call "Supersonic Broadband" running at DOCSIS 3 speeds (up to a nominal 100 Mbps downstream and a useful 2 Mbps upstream), for a very reasonable $20/month on top of current cable rates. Thus far, Telstra has announced this only for Melbourne, and they seem to have gone quiet on this anyway so they'd better watch out!

We use Optus Cable at home, and for those of us lucky enough to be in Optus-cabled areas this is a serious option for getting NBN-style speeds (until the NBN makes it way across the nation, or definitely if the Coalition wins next weekend's federal 2010 election and do away with the NBN). ... Here Down Under we're living in interesting broadband times indeed!

Technorati Tags: Broadband,Australia,NBN,Telstra,Optus,Performance

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Embarcadero Developer Survey July 2010 – and for the Lotus Notes developer community?

I just stumbled upon a recent report from Embarcadero Technologies (July 2010), which is interesting enough in its own right:

Developer Survey Report - Embarcadero Technologies July 2010

The web-based survey was conducted during June/July 2010 with responses from “a wide array of application developers” worldwide.

The largest group of respondents identified themselves as software application developers with 89.6% of the responses, it says:

Naturally enough it talks mainly about Embarcadero’s constituency, and in particular looks into development on Windows 7 and there some interesting results for this (go read the full report for yourself).

Here’s one chart that caught my attention:

This set me wondering -- if ever IBM were to conduct such a survey with the Lotus Notes/Domino development community -- what sort of statistics and charts would arise.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Embarcadero,Developers,Programmers,Survey,IBM Lotus Notes,IBM Lotus Domino Designer

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A great Lotus Domino admin tip (from Clippings newsletter) -- UPDATED

I really HATE administration in all its shapes and forms, and much prefer doing application design and development. But none of us can escape doing admin, so every little thing that helps reduce the burden is worthwhile knowing,

Nevertheless, I just wanted to broadcast the tip that’s just been published in the latest Lotus Clippings newsletter (August 9, 2010 edition, which hasn’t made it yet to the Clippings website but probably will soon).

GURU TIPS
The following tip is provided by Warren Elsmore, Senior Architecture Consultant for BE System, based in the UK. He's been working with Notes and Domino since release 3 and is a regular conference speaker throughout the world, including Lotusphere. His expertise covers Lotus Notes, Domino, Sametime and Quick Administration and especially mobile devices.

Domino Server Properties Box

This tip is really simple - in fact so simple that you I guess you’ll either have been using this for years - or never knew it was there!

In the Domino Administrator, open the properties box without having anything selected. Or open it and use the dropdown to select ‘Server’.

What you’ll get is the properties box for the server. OS, CPUs, RAM, physical drives and disk space, even user figures and transaction figures as you see below… All in one place - simple!

Nice one, Warren. The only issue is that there weren’t any images in the Clippings newsletter – stingy, they be! So I had a peek at my main Domino server and took the following snapshots:

Basic:

    

Disks:

Cluster:

Ports:

  …..

Advanced (corrected image):

Technorati Tags: IBM Lotus Domino,Administration,Server Properties

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A great Lotus Domino admin tip (from Clippings newsletter)

I really HATE administration in all its shapes and forms, and much prefer doing application design and development. But none of us can escape doing admin, so every little thing that helps reduce the burden is worthwhile knowing.

Nevertheless, I just wanted to broadcast the tip that’s just been published in the latest Lotus Clippings newsletter (August 9, 2010 edition, which hasn’t made it yet to the Clippings website but probably will soon).

GURU TIPS
The following tip is provided by Warren Elsmore, Senior Architecture Consultant for BE System, based in the UK. He's been working with Notes and Domino since release 3 and is a regular conference speaker throughout the world, including Lotusphere. His expertise covers Lotus Notes, Domino, Sametime and Quick Administration and especially mobile devices.

Domino Server Properties Box

This tip is really simple - in fact so simple that you I guess you’ll either have been using this for years - or never knew it was there! 

In the Domino Administrator, open the properties box without having anything selected. Or open it and use the dropdown to select ‘Server’.

What you’ll get is the properties box for the server. OS, CPUs, RAM, physical drives and disk space, even user figures and transaction figures as you see below… All in one place - simple!

Nice one, Warren. The only issue is that there weren’t any images in the Clippings newsletter – meanies, they be -- so I had a peek at my main Domino server and got the following snapshots:

Basic:
    
Disks:

Cluster:

Ports:
  …..
Advanced:

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Reveal the error, for crying out loud!

The Eclipse-based Lotus Domino Designer certainly throws up some weird error messages at times, does it not?

I usually find it best to ignore the message, just click OK and try to get on with life as if nothing ever happened. The errors never have affected any subsequent development work that I’ve done, so “let sleeping dogs lie” seems an acceptable pragmatic approach (though in a perfect world I’d be supposed to spend hours or days trying to establish the nature of each such error and get in touch with IBM to report it and/or get the problem fixed).

Today’s little “Reveal Design Element” gem appeared before me, for the first time ever,  when I launched the Designer:

Crikey! No comment necessary.

As a general observation, I find that the Eclipse-based Designer puts out far too many dialog boxes that display internal workings of the Designer (informational things such as copying this or that internal object) and in my opinion are unnecessarily exposed to you, taking up time, causing the screen to flicker, and then disappearing after some seconds. These are things that the legacy Designer wouldn’t waste time showing you, and are part of the reason for the new Designer being distinctly less snappy.

This is part of what I regard as the lumbering, spasmodic and inconsistent behavior of the Designer (especially in comparison with the speedy legacy Domino Designer).

So according to my own experience the new Designer can be very off-putting and unproductive at times, and this becomes very inefficient especially when in the course of work you have to carry out the same design steps many times in succession. I’ve found that previously simple tasks such as copying forms, views, scripts (and so on) can behave quite erratically, appearing to have happened but not always being accomplished, causing rework. I could say a lot more about this, but will leave it for another time. If anybody at IBM ever wants to discuss this Designer aspect with me I’m happy to oblige.

However, I must be fair and state that some of this erratic behavior might be at least partly caused by the sometimes erratic way that I’ve found Windows 7 to work (with regard to the painting of screen contents, for example). I push my Windows system really hard at times, and it’s far from being as robust and dependable as I’d like. So the fault might lie in both IBM and Microsoft camps. All that I can say is that my overall experience is worse compared with when, prior to August 2009, I used to run Domino Designer Version 7 (or earlier) on good old Windows XP.

Not too encouraging, considering that these days I run 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate on a fast quad-core desktop machine with 8 GB or RAM (which never all gets used up) and multiple disk drives with oodles of free space. Hey, I’ve been a performance specialist (nerd, if you prefer) since the 1970s and should know what I’m talking about.

To continue on my merry theme, I’ve also been big on usability since the mid 1970s, once again courtesy of my time as an IBM systems engineer.

Therefore I’m intensely irritated by the generic “See error log for more details” dialog that the Eclipse-based Domino Designer spits out all too regularly:

In this example, at least there was an attempt made to describe the nature of the error: “Data does not have correct format for type.” But it’s a pretty lame attempt, wouldn’t you agree? There’s enough space in the dialog box to indicate in brief the nature of the “data” and also the expected format and the type, is there not? Knowing this could obviate a visit to the error log, so be more informative in the dialog box itself?

Of course, I’d better add that lots and lots of other software is riddled with shoddy messages like this, I’m only using these two examples from Domino Designer since they happened to me earlier this afternoon.

Don’t make things so hard! We don’t all have to be Eclipse gurus, do we? Since you designed the code that wrote the log file, obviously you know where it’s located, so tell me precisely where it is. Even better, why not provide a button or hotlink which I simply need to click so as to have the log opened?

‘nuff said … Or maybe, too much said by this grumpy old man!

Technorati Tags: IBM Lotus Domino Designer,IBM Lotus Notes,Eclipse,Performance & Scalability,Error Message,Error Dialog,Usability

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NotesTracker Guide Version 5.2 now online at Docstoc

You can now read the Version 5.2.00 edition of the NotesTracker Guide at Docstoc.

Read or download it here:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/49044581/NotesTracker-Guide-Version-52

 

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,IBM Lotus Notes,IBM Lotus Domino,Usage Tracking,Auditing,Compliance,Asia/Pacific Computer Services

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SDMS Version 4.5.10 for Lotus Notes released (03 August 2010)

The very popular free Lotus Notes application SDMS (a Simple Document Management System) was released today (3rd August 2010).

SDMS has been upgraded to incorporate NotesTracker Version 5.2 which itself was released only yesterday.

There’s also a fix for the Category and Sub-Category fields (the drop-down list was being blanked in edit mode).

It was one of those simple bugs that was “staring me in the face” and for some unknown reason I only just twigged to it a few days ago. … Duh!

Go get your free copy of SDMS Version 4.5.10 either here (Dallas server) or here (Sydney server), and ENJOY.

Technorati Tags: SDMS,Simple Document Management System,IBM Lotus Notes,IBM Lotus Domino,Freeware,NotesTracker

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NotesTracker Version 5.2 released (02 August 2010)

NotesTracker gets even better with the release of Version 5.2 and you can find out where to download the evaluation edition and the NotesTracker Guide Version 5.2 from the companion blog:

NotesTracker news and tips

One of the new features is the ability to track attachment changes (filenames and sizes), for example:

This example shows that one attachment was removed (circled in red) from the Notes document, and one was attached (circled in green).

So read all about it at NotesTracker news and tips

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,IBM Lotus Notes,IBM Lotus Domino,Usage Tracking,Usage Metrics,KM. Knowledge Management,Compliance,Auditing,Privacy

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