WinNc.Net - Norton Commander Clone - Filemanager for Windows

WinNc.Net - Norton Commander Clone - Filemanager for Windows

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Every so often I get so irritated with Windows XP that I search for anything that would help. Something like ... Norton Commander. NC was a DOS 2.1 (maybe earlier) file management application. It was brilliant. Even OS X isn't quite as good for file management ... ok, OS X is better -- but not THAT much better.

One of the best featurse of NC was it built a tree of directories, so one could navigate instantly based on character matching.

Under OS/2 I used FileCommander, an NC clone, but it didn't quite make the transition to Win2K.

Today I came across this Norton Commander clone. I'll give it a try. XP's file manager was never very good, and it's completely collapsed in the face of my hard drive.

Now if only Google toolbar would add the ##@! full text indexing we were promised. (I hear MSN might get there first ...)

Of course Longhorn is supposed to solve all these problems. I'm not holding my breath.

Update: Uh-oh. There's no "norton change directory". The DOS version of NC built a directory tree index, one could navigate to a folder/directory through a dynamic string match (type more characters, jump around the tree. The author of WinNC.net is very responsive --he says they've received few requests for this feature. A classic problem with customer-driven product development -- the customer can't ask for what they can't imagine. NCD/NC was a work of genius.

WCD is a cross-platform text-only command line implementation of NCD. I think it could be nicely integrated with WinNC.Net and I've suggested that. In the meantime I'm going to see if I can figure a way for WCD to drive Windows Explorer.

macosxhints - A collection of tips on accessing Windows file servers from OS X cleints (SMB Shares)

macosxhints - A collection of tips on accessing Windows file servers

The list is a good one, mostly familiar to me, except this one tip of unclear value:

"Set your Windows workgroup/resource domain and WINS server:

1. Find out your Windows resource domain for workstations in your office and local WINS server address. (Ask your desktop computer support people.)
2. Launch the 'Directory Access' utility (in the /Applications/Utilities folder).
3. Click the padlock icon in the lower left of the window and authenticate as an admin user.
4. Select SMB, and press Configure.
5. Set Workgroup to your Windows resource domain, and WINS server to your WINS server IP address, and press OK.
6. Press Apply and wait for a few seconds.
7. Restart your Mac."

macosxhints - About the Lost and Found directory

macosxhints - About the Lost and Found directory Check your os x disk for a lost and found directory. If one exists, read this!

Looks like OS X 10.3.4 has trouble with playing DVDs on some machines

Apple - Discussions - DVD Player and/or drive craps out on DVDs

Interesting discussion. It looks like this might be a fairly new problem -- either 10.3.4 or a bit earlier. On some machines DVD playback stutters about 1/2 to 3/4 way through commercial movies. I wonder about a CD/DVD driver problem. Doesn't appear to be hardware related.

OS X 10.3.4 intermittent system freezes (iTunes, others): VM and HFS issue

MacInTouch 8/3/04

Rohan Lloyd nailed down a widespread Mac OS X freezing problem [discussed in our iTunes reports], which is apparently a known Apple bug, and noted his workaround:

The 'iTunes Freeze' that some readers are experiencing (well described by Jim Pollock) sounds like a problem I have experienced that is not related to iTunes.

I recently started getting system freezes with the same symptoms (system would hang, iTunes would periodically play about 5 seconds, mouse would move but nothing else)

I reported the problem to Apple, they got me to get a kernel stack trace when it happened and confirmed that it was a known problem related to VM and HFS that they are working on.

It's got nothing to do with iTunes, it's just that iTunes has a realtime thread playing audio that periodically runs out of data and has to wait till a non realtime thread fills up the buffer from disk. (at least that's my guess at what's happening)

About the same time I downloaded and tried out hfsdebug. When I look at the Volume header of my root volume:

$ sudo hfsdebug -v -V /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD

I saw that it had 'serious inconsistencies'

kHFSVolumeInconsistent (volume has serious inconsistencies)

After a backup/re-format/restore over a week ago, I haven't had the problem again (fingers crossed).

Apple - Discussions - DVD Player 4.0 skipping and stuttering during commercial movie playback

Apple - Discussions - DVD Player and/or drive craps out on DVDs: "DVD suttering halfway through disk ( msg # 4.: Posted Aug 2, 04 4:24 pm )  New!

I'm using 10.3.4 on an iBook 600. I played quite a few commercial DVDs on this machine using 10.2.x. Yesterday, for the first time, I tried to play a commercial DVD using 10.3.4.

Shrek was fine half-way through. Then it began stuttering severely. It was unwatchable. I never saw an error message. The DVD is fine in a dedicated player.

Any thoughts on how to debug this? If 10.3.4 no longer supports commercial DVD movie playback on my iBook that's a rather severe loss of functionality for me.

meta: jfaughnan, stutters, skips, skipping, play back, playback, Panther, DVD Player 4.0.

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Interesting angle. The kind of thing we used to read PC Magazine for in the old days, when it was a hefty pile of paper. (And a shill for Microsoft before Gates was a bazillionaire.)