General Discussion

No, this isn't another demand for instant updates by John, but more a friendly notice to the users here. Gaim 2.0.0 beta 3 is available, and is the first version which doesn't crash on any of my machines (GTK problems).

I've not been able to find a changelog from beta 2 to beta 3 (odd?). If anyone can let me know what's actually changed, that would be handy.

Oh, I like the new "psychic mode" plugin which sends you a message when someone is typing to you - before you've started your conversation: "You feel a disturbance in the for

Hello all,

I'm just wondering, is Audacity truly portable? They have a zipped distro of v1.2.4 for use in labs where you may not have Admin privlidges and can not use the installer, but does it leave reg entries? If so, is there any way to remove them?

I know a batch file could do it, but I have no idea where to begin. I'm just learning batch programming in college and we're nowhere near there yet (unfortunately, cuz I think the class is too darned slow, and am easily bored going over something a billion times).

I use it not-quite-often but somewhat, and it would be handy to have with me. If anyone uses it and knows, please reply.

As part of moving forward, I'm going to begin to add in some of the more-useful portable apps and utilities that are available. I'm planning on keeping a similar app description layout to the existing apps.

The first app I added in is XAMPP, which is a full portable server package (think Apache, mySQL, PHP, FileZilla FTP, mail and anything else you can think of), which I started playing with a little while back after seeing it recommended in a couple blog posts. I did the page layout similar to the other pages. What I'm wondering is... is there anything else someone new to an app might want to know directly on the main page? Is the layout easy to follow? Important info easy to find?

Again, not portable app related, and I usually don't do forums, but I like this one.

Anyone know of a good windows xp skinning site? I'm tired of all my skins and am looking for some new ones. Not StyleXP cuz thats for wimps.

I'm looking for a site with the actual .msstyles files.

I was exploring and I saw that JTH has a blog (looked at his profile). I changed the URL from portableapps.com/blog/2 to various other numbers, and I've discovered over 15 (as yet unused) blogs. EDIT: Make that over 1,500.

What's the story, and can I have one?

~nm35
» http://www.portasoft.org

I figure you peeps are pretty smart, so I'll ask my question here.

I'm wondering if any of you can reccommend a good cms. (Content Management System)

I've notice that John uses drupal, but I dont really like drupal, after fooling around with it for the past few days. I've ben looking at exponentCMS and Joomla.

Exponent is from my Unix instructors company. (no kidding, OIC Group, in Central Illinois, my Instructor's company wrote it. But the head dev guy just left and I'm worried about support and new features. Doug, my instructor says they're having trouble filling the spot.)

Joomla I've played with on a local machine to test and its easy to set up and to use, but I'm worried about performance. I'm not expecting a heavy load, but I wonder if anyone has experience with it or anything else.

Anything wrong with using subst.exe to remap your usb drive letter (which may change) to a consistant drive letter (like u:)? This way the apps that need absolute paths in their config files will always find themselves at U:\PortableApps\.

I realize it might not be in the true spirt of Portable Apps, but it would solve a couple headaches of mine. (Tillian and skins for a couple media players come to mind)

So, any drawbacks? I realize you'll end up with two drive letters for the USB. Also, if the target computer already has a U:, the command will fail. I'm not saying this would work for everyone, but I think it will work for me. I use my USB and PortableApps to have a consistant experience between my two desks at work, my laptop and my computer. I just dont want to go down this path if there are some other issues with subst.exe that I'm not thinking of.

How can I use µTorrent on a USB key or other removable drive?
Simply copy settings.dat (located in %AppData%\uTorrent ) to the same folder as uTorrent.exe, and you're done.

http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#How_can_I_use_.C2.B5Torrent_on_a_USB_key...

I started with that info and worked off it from there. The specific files you need to copy are located in "C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\uTorrent" These are the specific filenames: dht.dat, resume.dat, settings.dat. There may or maynot be .old versions of those files as well.

You can save the uTorrent.exe file from http://www.utorrent.com/download.php on your USB, then copy those files to the same directory.

Since it's supposed to be a good thing to not have programs which muck around with the registtry. Why wouldn't we just use all the portable apps on our primary computers also?

I just got a email newsletter from Linspire. They just released an Ajax word processor. Go to www.ajaxwrite.com and you have a fullfeatured word processor in a browser window. This is nothing new except for you can open edit and save Microsoft Word documents.

From the newsletter:

ajaxWrite is a powerful word processor that can read and write Microsoft Word formatted documents. Anytime you need a word processor, need to open a .doc file or edit a .doc file, simply point your Firefox browser at www.ajaxWrite.com and in seconds a full-featured program will be loaded. For 90 percent of the people in the world, the need to buy Microsoft Word just vanished. This won't make Microsoft happy, but software users should be very excited that software just got cheaper, immediate and modern.