Login with username and password (forgot your password?)

FARR is one of "12 MORE Insanely Essential Utilities For Programmers"!

I use Cashboard, and love it.  It's a web app with a great UI, so I can use it anywhere.  You set up projects and tasks, and assign billing rates.  Entering time takes only seconds.  Generating and sending invoices is a snap.   It tracks outstanding invoices until you get paid, even automatically sending periodic reminders to the client. 

It's not free, but it's almost free.   

http://www.getcashboard.com/

This is a brilliant idea.

You could have some real fun if the stolen computer had a microphone and/or a webcam attached.

I would be glad to help.

Another idea, which might be better than sketchup, would be for you to put your experiment on SecondLife.  Secondlife is another immersable 3D environment, but with more emphasis on social interaction as compared to Sketchup's emphasis on architectural design.

With your experiment on Second Life, people could be anywhere in the world and participate in your study.  (Or you could run your study from any computer in the world)

They have a special deal for educational projects that you might qualify for.

If you want to go off-line for this, I'm setting up a temporary email address that you can use.  (I don't want to post my real address here.)
qwert-at-onepost.net

You might try Google SketchUp.

It supports scripting in Ruby, which might let you load the people dynamically.

[‘Big Brother’ eyes make us act more honestly]

‘Big Brother’ eyes make us act more honestly
00:01 28 June 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Debora MacKenzie

We all know the scene: the departmental coffee room, with the price list for tea and coffee on the wall and the “honesty box” where you pay for your drinks – or not, because no one is watching.

In a finding that will have office managers everywhere scurrying for the photocopier, researchers have discovered that merely a picture of watching eyes nearly trebled the amount of money put in the box.

Melissa Bateson and colleagues at Newcastle University, UK, put up new price lists each week in their psychology department coffee room. Prices were unchanged, but each week there was a photocopied picture at the top of the list, measuring 15 by 3 centimetres, of either flowers or the eyes of real faces. The faces varied but the eyes always looked directly at the observer.

In weeks with eyes on the list, staff paid 2.76 times as much for their drinks as in weeks with flowers. “Frankly we were staggered by the size of the effect,” Gilbert Roberts, one of the researchers, told New Scientist.

...[Read the full article at New Scientist]

So, what effect might eyes in the DonationCoder site banner have?

You might do it with Excel.  Just put =RAND() in a grid 2 columns wide and X rows long, then do a plot graph.  Not fancy, but maybe you can pretty it up with other kinds of markers and colors.

[attach=1]

I know C++ is the language of choice at DC but would you consider opening the contest to other Borland Developer Studio languages?  I might enter the contest if Delphi for Win32 were allowed. 

Another product in this category is AskSam.

I think the feature that sets this apart is the ability to add searchable fields to your documents.

From the site:

askSam is the ideal application organize your information. askSam is a different kind of database - a free-form database designed for users rather than programmers. askSam makes it easy to turn anything into a searchable database: email messages, word processing documents, text files, spreadsheets, addresses, Web pages, and more.

askSam gives you the power of a database without the complexity. No need to program or learn a complicated query language. With askSam, you simply import or enter information, and you're ready to search. askSam users range from individuals organizing email, addresses, and research notes to corporations and government organizations managing meeting minutes, regulations, policy manuals, and corporate databases.

Also, you might take a look at AutoHotKey's hotstrings feature.  AHK is free and open source.

http://www.autohotkey.com/
http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/Hotstrings.htm

Also, be sure to check out the Formula Auditing toolbar (View: Toolbars).  It will draw arrows to and from dependent cells.

[furman87's essential software]

DonationCoder member Furman87 has done some great reviews of Clipboard Help+Spell and Find & Run Robot on his blog:


furman87's essential software
"Great software that you should be using whether you think so or not"

 

Thanks!

And here are some video lectures from the inimitable Richard Feynman:
http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8

Feynman will change the way you think about science.

Check out AviSynth and VirtualDub.

This might be handy for the site:

A coin image generator.
http://www.onlinewahn.de/generator/m-maker.htm

Audioactive Player is a nice, free, simple player with a focus on audio quality.

I like the way Paul Graham thinks and writes.  Thanks for the recommendation.

His article on creating wealth is interesting too.
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

See if you can guess the secret password:

Go here:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/javascrypt/javascrypt.html

Paste this into the cyphertext text area:

#####  Encrypted: decrypt with http://www.fourmilab.ch/javascrypt/
?b64ppoF2Qjx75p53FWQPzt+aMEP+qeGYQkPQY0RozBaF4jskRdOcivqBI0cFEyb
AU5pieatOUaWZCABIlWO3/nGqACqb+x2YGWwuYdqT/qcpro=?64b
#####  End encrypted message

guess the password if you can, and hit the Decrypt button.

(This is my roundabout way of suggesting that javascript might do the trick)

Regular expressions rock my world.  (OK I'm a geek)

The O'Reilly book, "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey E. F. Freidl is a great way to learn about this powerful matching language, and it's actually an entertaining read.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex/

[GMail]

I used to use Outlook for email.  Now I only use online services for email.

GMail (free, ad supported)
gmail.com
I've since gone to GMail, which solves a couple of problems I used to have:

• Quickly searching a large repository of email
• Accessing my email history from anywhere
• Offloading the storage from my hard drive
• Also, Firefox starts faster than Outlook so I can get to my mail faster

POBox (cheap)
pobox.com
POBox solves another couple of problems.  It pre-processes email, mostly for forwarding.  I find this useful because I can tell the world about my POBox address, and then when I want to change email providers, I just reconfigure my POBox account to forward to the new provider.  POBox also provides great (I mean GREAT) spam protection using a combination of filters and black holes, preventing crap from even getting forwarded to your actual account.

Spamcop (free or cheap)
spamcop.net  (Not spamcop.com!)
Before GMail, I used Spamcop as my main email repository.  Spamcop provides some satisfaction to people who are outraged about spam by giving them something productive to do about it.  Spamcop automatically analyzes email headers to expose spammers' tricks.  Once you've identified a spam, you can report it.  Spamcop gathers reports from its users and reports email abuse to the ISPs being used by the spammers, hopefully to get them kicked out of their account.  Spamcop also uses this information to maintain a black hole list used by POBox!

Spammotel (free)
spammotel.com
If you are ever asked for an email address by someone who might spam you later, you should give them a disposable address.  When you register your real email address (or POBox address) with SpamMotel, you can then generate as many disposable email addresses as you want, one for each suspicious recipient.  I've got several hundred of these disposable addresses, but interestingly, I rarely get spam on them.  Maybe "@spammotel.com" deters the spammers.  But I suspect that spammers get email addresses from domain registrations and web trolling.

Here's my favorite little context menu thingy:

Context Magic
http://www.contextmagic.com/menu-extension/

I especially like the "Copy Filename to Clipboard" item.

 

Trillian has a free version and a paid version.  One of the reasons I opted for the paid version was to get access to the plugins and skins.

Maybe this could be a way to offer a free program but require payment to access extra goodies.

I've used Website Watcher in just the way Mouser suggested and it works great.  You can even set it up to check every few minutes automatically and email you when the page changes.

WSW does have a lot of options and features but you can still get a lot out of it without using them all.

There are also a few other sites that will monitor pages for you, like WSW:
http://del.icio.us/search/?all=monitor+page+changes

Lua is the scripting language of the powerful unicode-capable text editor SciTe.
http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTE.html

Some of the stand-out features of SciTe:

• Code Folding
• Syntax Highlighting
• Unicode support
• Lightweight feel (Starts quickly, very responsive)
• Extremely customizable
• Free (if that's a feature)

And here's a good overview for using SciTE for Windows Scripting:
http://dev.remotenetworktechnology.com/SciTE/

Also - you might try typing your tracking number right into Google.

This should work for UPS, Fed Ex, and UPS.

http://www.google.com/help/features.html#number