Questions & Answers

# Questions & Answers What Operating Systems are supported by MJ's CD Archiver (MCA)? Any OS supported by Eclipse Foundation's SWT and Sun Microsystem's JRE 1.4 or higher. This means Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Linux, Unix flavors including AIX, Solaris etc. and Mac OS X. However, MCA is developed on Windows 2000/XP and Linux, therefore MCA is extensively tested on these OSs. We already have Windows file search (or find on *NIX), why make this archiver? For two major reasons: 1. With Windows files search or find, you can only search what is on hard drive or the CD/DVD currently loaded in the CD/DVD drives. You cannot search your whole CD/DVD collection for a file you want to find. 2. MCA is also orders of magnitude faster than Windows file search or find, delivering results instantly on hundred of thousands of files (no more waiting minutes for results to come back). Other important reasons to use MCA over other OS-default search or other softwares include that MCA has more powerful search options than Windows search, allows searching previous search results to further narrow down the search, allows one-click re-performing previous search, stores search history/results, provides convenient highlighting and more sorting options, among others. MCA also allows for automatic update of archive so that you could search for changed/added files/folders as recently as you set the auto-update to be. What does each color in the search result highlight function mean? A dark blue folder icon means there is a file/folder directly under the highlighted folder that is a search hit meeting your search criteria; A light blue folder icon means there is a file/folder somewhere down the directory tree (but not directly under the highlighted folder) that is a search hit; A yellow background on the file/folder name indicates that this file/folder name matches the keyword given. I found that after I updated a folder, the search highlight on that folder does not work any more? This is by design, because once you updated the content of a folder, chances are the search results involving this folder would become obsolete, so the highlight is also turned off. This serves as a reminder that once you updated a folder, you should perform the search again to reflect the new update; A light blue folder icon means there is a file/folder somewhere down the directory tree (but not directly under the highlighted folder) that is a search hit; A yellow background on the file/folder name indicates that this file/folder name matches the keyword given. When I sort files and folders by clicking on the column head in the right pane, what do those icons indicate? Arrow pointing upward means it's sorting in ascending order, with folders always displayed before files; Arrow pointing downward means it's sorting in descending order, with folders always displayed after files; Arrow pointing upward with a letter “D” crossed by a red line means it's sorting everything in ascending order (folders and files are sorted together instead of being sorted separately); Arrow pointing downward with a letter “D” crossed by a red line means it's sorting everything in descending order (folders and files are sorted together instead of being sorted separately); Note that the size of a folder is the sum of the sizes of all of the files and subfolders it contains. Why does my search using Chinese character not return results as expected? If you enabled “regular expression” for search keyword in “advanced options”, then the Chinese unicode characters are treated as regular expressions and perform unpredictably. As a result searching using DOS-styled wildcards like "*" and "?" most likely will fail for your unicode search too because they are implemented using regular expressions. Right now we did not build in unicode support for regular expressions, therefore I suggest you turn off “regular expression” when you are searching with a language using and do not use wildcards (wildcards can be avoided by using partial word search and further filtering of previous search results). We will note in documentation if in the future we provide unicode support for regular expression search too (note that regardless, even in current MCA version you will be able to search correctly using unicode characters if you turn off “regular expression” option). Why sometimes my search was performed on all of the archived CD/DVD/HDs while other times it was performed on only the ones I selected? Please see here for the reason. I had archived a folder twice under two different root folders, I noticed that when I used Windows shell integration command “Update to last archive file”, only the folder under the top root folder got updated? Yes. This is because while technically it is trivial to find and update the same folder under all different root folders, this is not necessarily the desired behavior. For example, if one keeps a list of all files a month ago under one root folder while another list of all files now under another root folder to be able to compare the two, updating only the current archive (by default the top one) is desired while updating both is not. Why can I not see some of the icons in the tree view on my Linux machine? It seems that some versions of Linux with some of the libaries MCA depends on have some bugs such that some of the folder icons of MCA does not display. However, other (newer) versions do not have this problem. We will try to make MCA backward compatible on these versions in the future. Why make a donateware not a freeware? The reason's simple – if there is only one license type better than free, that's the donateware model that we are using, where users donate to charity instead of paying or donating to software authors. This is the only way where everybody wins – Poor chinese kids who eventually receives your donation can finally have a chance to get education, MCA users like you can have the tax benefit (consult your tax advisor to confirm) of cash donation in addition to the satisfaction of doing something good and using a nice software legally, while we as the software authors get the greatest satisfaction in that we helped the kids as we always wanted and are finally able to make this happen. In fact, it is our hope that more and more software comes out and uses our special donateware model. Freeware is good, but donateware like ours is even better. Why the Project Hope of P.R.China? Because we believe that the only way to get China, the authors' native country, richer is through eduction. Also because we are fathers and we understand how painful it is for parents to not be able to afford to let kids get even the basic education, all the while knowing that this might be the biggest chance that their kids cease to be so poor. We hope to contribute as much as we can to help Project Hope, the Chinese project that helps poor kids get the education they need. Can I donate to another charity? Right now, not yet. Because we provide license key only to fresh donations, we would need to set up donation notification arrangements with any given charity. Depending on the success of MCA, we could consider setting up arrangement with another charity. If that happens, I want to note that we strongly favor charities that help needy kids because they are our future and that they need our help the most. Every day I look into my son's eyes and I feel so lucky that I am able to provide what he needs for his well being, education and entertainment. I can easily imagine how painful it is for parents to not be able to provide the basic education, medicine, or even food that their kids need. For charity suggestions, please email to mingyiliu@yahoo.com. Can I deduct my donation when I file tax? I believe so, because you are making cash donation to a USA-registered charity (NACEF). The charity will notify us of the payment and we will provide the registration key for you for free. However, to confirm that the donation is eligible for tax deduction, please consult your tax advisor. Do you accept credit card payments? Yes. Please follow the link in our Registration section. Where can I download the latest version of MCA? Read Download section. If I want more features for MCA, can I send my request to you and will it be answered? Yes, you can always send a request to me at mingyiliu@yahoo.com. Do you support full text search? Currently no. We do not have plans to support full text search in the near future as there are excellent full text search tools available already. Do you support CDDB to search music CDs? Currently no. It is not in our plan to support it either because music CDs are easy to search, no software assistance is needed. Do you support mp3 and other media file search? MCA searches the file names only. So if the mp3 or media files have informative file names then MCA would be a perfect tool to search them. But if the mp3 files have generic names like 1.mp3, etc. then MCA won't yield good search results because MCA currently does not extract artist/album etc. information from mp3 files. However, futurer versions of MCA may support media file information extraction, depending on demand. I paid for one personal license, can I put MCA on all of my computers? Yes – as long as you own these computers, they are for personal usage not for work, and that they are all located in just one of your residence. There is no restriction on Operating System used on the computers, and we deliberately make it such that our software accepts the same key on all Operating Systems. I paid for one business license, can I put MCA on all of my computers? No, unless you have business site license, in which case you can put MCA on all computers on one corporate site. What Operating Systems are supported by MJ's CD Archiver (MCA)? Any OS supported by Eclipse Foundation's SWT and Sun Microsystem's JRE 1.4 or higher. This means Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Linux, Unix flavors including AIX, Solaris etc. and Mac OS X. Can I use the icon files in MCA package for my projects? The icon files are copyrighted and can only be used with permission from author Mingyi Liu (mingyiliu@yahoo.com).