Messages

176

General Software Discussion / Mailbird

« on: December 23, 2014, 03:43 AM »

Anyone using the Mailbird Email client and can recommend (or advise against) it?

http://www.getmailbird.com/

177

N.A.N.Y. 2015 / Drawskrit

« on: December 19, 2014, 03:43 PM »

My NANY contribution for this year is a simple description language for drawings and diagrams (which I've named Drawskrit). My main goal is to be able to describe diagrams with text. The description language should be natural and simple (I don't want a diagram programming language).

Its current state is experimental. I have a JavaScript implementation that demonstrates the current specification. I'm afraid it's not very useful yet though. I'm not sure I'll ever get it to a state where it'll be powerful enough to specify real-world non-toy diagrams without becoming a complex monster language.

A few of the current obvious shortcomings:

• needs more shapes (e.g. arrows)
• current text alignment sucks (specification bug)
• dotted/dashed looks horrible with thick lines (implementation bug)
• needs more documentation (e.g. layers)
• JS implementation needs to be decoupled from the HTML demo page

If I ever get it to a state where it's actually useful, I'm planning to implement it as a cross-platform tool which can be integrated into an automated build process.

A non-formal specification (i.e. a description) and the JavaScript implementation can be found here:

https://github.com/phitsc/drawskrit

Drawskrit is open source.

If someone wants to play around with it please direct your browser here:

http://rawgit.com/ph...er/js/drawskrit.html

As a first example, paste the following text into the big text box on the left of the above web page:

[Select]

orange background filled shapes
_
small blue circle small green circle
tiny purple square big red triangle tiny purple square
small olive smile

==
fat navy huge empty dashed circle

178

General Software Discussion / Re: Farewell, Dr. Dobbs

« on: December 17, 2014, 01:24 AM »

I always found  Andrew Binstock's articles outstanding.

What I find interesting: I can still remember the shock when I held the last print edition of C++ user journal in my hands, and my subscription turned into a Dr. Dobb's print edition subscription. Then that ended as well. And now not even the online edition is sustainable (which, I must admit, I did not subscribe to). I could well imagine that this will happen to many other ad-based services in the not so distant future.

179

Developer's Corner / Re: Visualization of Algorithms

« on: December 08, 2014, 07:48 AM »

another one:

http://visualgo.net/

180

Living Room / Re: New square monitor (27" 1920x1920)

« on: November 30, 2014, 03:56 PM »

I'll take two in 6 months then 

181

Living Room / Re: New square monitor (27" 1920x1920)

« on: November 29, 2014, 07:40 AM »

I think these would be great for programming and I'd very much like to have a pair.

-phitsc (November 28, 2014, 05:21 AM)

That's what they said about pyjamas!

-cranioscopical (November 29, 2014, 12:08 AM)

Until you realise that you can simply program naked and do less laundry...

-Renegade (November 29, 2014, 05:08 AM)

But only in Australia

182

Developer's Corner / Re: Experimenting with Other Programming Languages

« on: November 28, 2014, 08:30 AM »

The main reason I never made an Android app is because of my profound dislike for Java (which I know is absurd). I've investigated alternatives (e.g. Scala), but they all seem to be more than sub-optimal (especially for novices of the platform).

I'm planning to check out one of the cross-platform solutions one day though.

183

Living Room / Re: New square monitor (27" 1920x1920)

« on: November 28, 2014, 05:21 AM »

I think these would be great for programming and I'd very much like to have a pair. I'm very curious to learn what they'll cost.

184

General Software Discussion / Re: NSA Backdoor Exploit in Windows 8 Uncovered

« on: November 25, 2014, 02:01 AM »

Your reading and interpretation of the translation is correct mwb1100.

185

Developer's Corner / Re: Is it wise for amateur to invest time in NET Framework languages?

« on: November 21, 2014, 10:07 AM »

What other languages can you advise me to learn? I considered Java but it's looks too hard.

-dmytron (November 19, 2014, 12:51 PM)

I don't think C# is simpler to learn than Java. I'd say they are comparable in size and complexity, both the languages and the accompanying libraries.

186

Developer's Corner / Re: Is it wise for amateur to invest time in NET Framework languages?

« on: November 21, 2014, 10:04 AM »

The big drawback to .NET is people won't try your program if they have to install yet another framework.  It tends to make you use what you figure most people already have on like .NET 2.x features.

-MilesAhead (November 21, 2014, 09:24 AM)

That might have been a consideration at one point... but that point is pretty far gone.  You can plan on .NET 4 at least currently (and that's what I code to).

-wraith808 (November 21, 2014, 10:01 AM)

If you want to target Mono as well you need to check what's available there though (e.g. no WPF).

187

Developer's Corner / Re: Is it wise for amateur to invest time in NET Framework languages?

« on: November 21, 2014, 08:17 AM »

If the question is about learning a programming language which is useful for a hobby programmer, I would not recommend learning Eiffel. While Eiffel is being used for production applications it is nevertheless mostly a niche language used primarily in academia (and probably only at ETHZ). Eiffel has interesting concepts from a computer science point of view (primarily its strong support for design-by-contract, and lately its verification support through AutoProof), but the useful ones have already found their way into more common languages.

188

Developer's Corner / Re: Announcing .NET 2015 - .NET as Open Source, .NET on Mac and Linux

« on: November 14, 2014, 03:00 AM »

I'm a bit surprised most of the discussion is about the legal implications, instead of the technical implications of this announcement, here on donation lawy.. ähm coders.

189

Developer's Corner / Re: Announcing .NET 2015 - .NET as Open Source, .NET on Mac and Linux

« on: November 13, 2014, 05:43 AM »

We didn't get any gifts at all at the above mentioned event

190

Developer's Corner / Re: Announcing .NET 2015 - .NET as Open Source, .NET on Mac and Linux

« on: November 13, 2014, 01:37 AM »

Wow! I think this is the most surprising, most amazing, most everything announcement from MS I have seen in my whole career!

I was at a public MS PR event just yesterday where there was no mention of this whatsoever.

191

Living Room / Re: android app to set my vibration mode on specific hours

« on: October 22, 2014, 01:54 PM »

This is because I set it to set my sound profile to silent, from 9am to 5pm when I am at work, and it didn't restore it at 5pm to 'normal profile'!
How can I do this?
Do I have to set another event trigger to set my phone to 'normal sound profile' each weekday after 5pm?
Same with WiFi, while it disabled wifi while I was at work, it didn't re-enable it, at 5pm.
Any hint?

-kalos (October 22, 2014, 11:09 AM)

That is exactly how you should configure that. Create another trigger running from 5pm, to restore earlier settings. The standard provided triggers actually pointed me in that direction from the first time I looked at it...

-Ath (October 22, 2014, 12:28 PM)

And Llama actually tells you to do that (in a bubble popping up at the bottom for a short moment).

192

Living Room / Re: android app to set my vibration mode on specific hours

« on: October 22, 2014, 02:47 AM »

I'm also using Llama to set my mobile phone to vibrate when I have a meeting in my work calendar, and I'm actually at work

193

General Software Discussion / Re: DVCS ? (All about Git, Mercurial-Hg and the like...)

« on: October 20, 2014, 03:46 AM »

Anyone knows any good git videos / talks?

I've seen https://www.youtube..../watch?v=1ffBJ4sVUb4 on the weekend, which was kind of boring. While I liked the presenter's idea to visualize with children's toys how the repository builds up, his presentation style (screen switching) and the many questions during the talk really broke the flow of the presentation and made bad use of the 90+ minutes. I really think he should have used two projectors instead of switching back and forth between his computer screen and the camera. And I also think that he should have instructed the audience to only ask questions at the end.

194

General Software Discussion / Re: The AVE

« on: October 15, 2014, 01:48 AM »

Just how appropriate is x16wda's sig? 

vi vi vi - editor of the beast

-Renegade (October 14, 2014, 07:19 PM)

Good one. Took me a few seconds.

195

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for a EXTREMELY basic Multi Clipboard software

« on: October 07, 2014, 01:58 PM »

I'm still using the one mentioned by kunkel321 (although abandoned).

196

Developer's Corner / Re: Random electronics projects

« on: October 01, 2014, 03:57 PM »

The SmartScope indeed looks very cool! I would be surprised if you find anything cheaper than that.

197

Developer's Corner / Re: Is your editors color theme too dark?

« on: September 18, 2014, 08:39 AM »

Very interesting. I have often wondered why these themes don't come with a darker background resulting in better contrast!

Thanks for the heads up.

198

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for desktop calendar software that can sync with Google Calendar

« on: September 15, 2014, 02:39 AM »

I've been using gSyncit mentioned above to sync google calendar with Outlook for years. It's working really well and I would recommend it. Updates come fairly regularly (mostly bugfixes).

199

Developer's Corner / Re: CLION: A new (cross-platform, commercial) C++ IDE

« on: September 11, 2014, 01:27 PM »

The video demo indeed looks impressive. I can't try it myself though as it requires a JVM

200

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: N.A.N.Y. 2014 Release: Text Inspection & Manipulation Utility

« on: September 10, 2014, 03:58 PM »

I've uploaded 0.16 which adds 'Lines - Remove duplicates & count unique'