A. Handbrake is a highly-recommended DVD ripping tool that does not work at all. Originally made for Macs, it evidently needs to stay with them and not pretend to be Windows-compatible.
1. It's default is to save to the desktop. However, even if you tell it to save to the desktop, it simply goes through the motions without creating an output file. The third time I tried, it actually did finally create an output file . . . in its own folder in Program Files. The hell?
2. The file wouldn't even play. All I wanted was an .avi with Xvid encoding and it can't even get that right.
Handbrake thus officially sucks.
B. All Text/Hex Editors suck, because they cannot handle significant but very simple search strings. In my
case, this simply means that I was trying to divine a way to
search-and-replace section numbers out of a large number of text files.
So, let's say this was a fragment of my text:
All I wanted to do was to remove the 23, 24, et cetera so it looked like this:
However, remarkably, this is apparently something that the world's programmers have never considered. Oh, I can remove the digits in one maneuver and then remove the spaces in another, but only at the risk of removing other useful digits in the text (e.g. a line starting with "56 times" or something might have the "56" deleted).
You would think that there would be a simple way to tell a program to find "linebreak-linebreak-digit-digit-linebreak-linebreak" and remove it, but amazingly there is no such thing. Oh, there's an "extended" expression type that makes finding linebreaks a little easier, but you can't find numbers at the same time. The regular expression type won't let you find linebreaks worth a damn.
C. RegexMagic is supposed to help with regular expressions . . . you're supposed to be able to input a bit of text and tell it how you want it parsed, and then it will come back with the regular expression coding for you. I figured it might help me find a way to bypass the absurdity mentioned in B.
However, it did not do crap. I'm a pretty smart guy, usually able to operate even less-than-intuitive software with relative ease, but this was ridiculous. So I spent an hour going over all of the instructions carefully, marking my text precisely, and yet all I found was that the software continued to fail to do anything of value. Its big idea of the sort of regular expression I needed to use was to delete all of the text in the file. Seriously!
Don't waste your money. I'm glad I just used the trial version.
1. It's default is to save to the desktop. However, even if you tell it to save to the desktop, it simply goes through the motions without creating an output file. The third time I tried, it actually did finally create an output file . . . in its own folder in Program Files. The hell?
2. The file wouldn't even play. All I wanted was an .avi with Xvid encoding and it can't even get that right.
Handbrake thus officially sucks.
B. All Text/Hex Editors suck, because they cannot handle significant but very simple search strings. In my
case, this simply means that I was trying to divine a way to
search-and-replace section numbers out of a large number of text files.
So, let's say this was a fragment of my text:
text text text text
23
text text text text
24
text text text text
All I wanted to do was to remove the 23, 24, et cetera so it looked like this:
text text text text
text text text text
text text text text
However, remarkably, this is apparently something that the world's programmers have never considered. Oh, I can remove the digits in one maneuver and then remove the spaces in another, but only at the risk of removing other useful digits in the text (e.g. a line starting with "56 times" or something might have the "56" deleted).
You would think that there would be a simple way to tell a program to find "linebreak-linebreak-digit-digit-linebreak-linebreak" and remove it, but amazingly there is no such thing. Oh, there's an "extended" expression type that makes finding linebreaks a little easier, but you can't find numbers at the same time. The regular expression type won't let you find linebreaks worth a damn.
C. RegexMagic is supposed to help with regular expressions . . . you're supposed to be able to input a bit of text and tell it how you want it parsed, and then it will come back with the regular expression coding for you. I figured it might help me find a way to bypass the absurdity mentioned in B.
However, it did not do crap. I'm a pretty smart guy, usually able to operate even less-than-intuitive software with relative ease, but this was ridiculous. So I spent an hour going over all of the instructions carefully, marking my text precisely, and yet all I found was that the software continued to fail to do anything of value. Its big idea of the sort of regular expression I needed to use was to delete all of the text in the file. Seriously!
Don't waste your money. I'm glad I just used the trial version.
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