Messages

551

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2006 / Re: Do wallpapers aid your productivity?

« on: February 07, 2007, 06:50 AM »

I have actually found that I rarely get to see my desktop, and thus my desktop wallpaper doesn't matter all that much. However, I really do love artwork in all it's forms, and I really do appreciate a pretty picture to look at every now and then. But most of the time I'm either coding in kdevelop, in a maximized window, or I'm chatting on irc with irssi running in an xterm window, which doesn't have transparency on at the moment (I tried with and without, and i've come to the conclusion that I want my text to be as readable as possible, and thus no transparency->distracting stuff under the text). xterm, firefox, thunderbird, and pretty much everything else I ever run is always maximized, so usualyl the only occasion when I'll see my desktop is when I have just started up my computer...

I'm not sure if the actual picture affects productivity, but I know that looking for new wallpapers does affect productivity (in a negative way)

I have a small collection that I keep ( http://www.linkerror.com/wallpapers ) and I usually switch between those, like every other month. Sometimes I find myself looking for a new one to add to my collection, but it isn't really that often. However, I can imagine that if you're one of those people that need a different one every day, it might become a productivity issue

552

Living Room / Re: Geek squad / Best buy Busted!

« on: February 07, 2007, 04:59 AM »

I feel the same, nudone,...

I've always tried to help people as much as I can with their trouble, and I wouldn't take no money,... I know that I would feel bad if I did. I never had a problem with it until I met a guy that would call me every other day with something. I started spending lots of time there every week, trying to explain him things. He was the kind of person that had to write everything down on paper, because he wouldn't otherwise remember what I had showed. After a while this started to frustrate me a bit, since I would never hear from him, unless there is a problem (which was at the time, quite often). Then I moved to the US, haven't heared the guy in a year, then out of the blew he finds me on msn, messaging me with a problem he has,...

Though, I think, if I would make a career out of it, I'd feel like I were ripping people off. (It would also suck because it'd be 'work' instead of hobby, if that makes any sense at all,... like, I enjoy programming, working on projects I choose; not running around all day plugging in cables people forgot to plug in and charge $1000),..

So, I guess you have to ask yourself, in the first place, if you would really enjoy it if you did it, and if you could live with yourself now that you're charging people money for what you'd normally do for free.

They did give some examples in the movie about the actual price of these services; they are quite high imo.

553

Living Room / Geek squad / Best buy Busted!

« on: February 07, 2007, 03:43 AM »

What I have always suspected:

Inexperienced computer users will call upon a computer repair service such as Geek squad when their computer is malfunctioning. I have always suspected that there must be lots of fraud in that field, since either the 'experts' don't know wtf they are doing,- or they just want to make an extra buck. I've heard stories of people that have worked in the field,... One guy I know said he was called in for a computer repair job, where appearantly the client had forgotten to plug in the power cable. He said he plugged in the cable, then waited 2 hours, when the client came back, he charged $200 for repair. ($100 / hour).

Just today I stumbled upon a news broadcast on youtube in which they use a hidden camera to expose fraud in Geek squad, Best Buy, and some other places.

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=cBvUt2bIQFk

If you're not too knowledgeable in hardware, WATCH OUT!! Try to find a geek friend first.

554

Find And Run Robot / Re: Latest FARR v2.00.42 ALPHA PREVIEW Release - February 4, 2007

« on: February 06, 2007, 04:55 AM »

its unlikely farr will ever be ported to linux, but these launch tools are starting to get popular so i expect linux will have some more good alternatives for linux in the coming year or so (written by others!).

Linux actually already has quite a bunch of them. most run in some kind of panel or task bar though. (or on the desktop). I yet have to see one that launches at a keypress.

555

Developer's Corner / Re: c++ resources for the VB programmer

« on: February 04, 2007, 01:02 PM »

Maybe because C++ compiles to real binary code instead of running on an interpreter or a vm like python, java, perl, .net, etc,.. etc,...

556

General Software Discussion / Re: squeak: new language that looks like an open-source flash?

« on: February 04, 2007, 12:03 PM »

The croquet project is also based on the squeak language.
(see https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=3329.0 )

557

General Software Discussion / Re: Ripoff Britain strikes again ... this time with Vista Pricing

« on: February 01, 2007, 07:12 PM »

329,00 € in Belgium appearantly. Swim the channel?

558

Accessibility Game Contest / Re: Games[CC] recruiting programmers

« on: January 31, 2007, 07:47 AM »

Right, but you could show the sound on the edge of the screen, eg: if it was coming from the left, show it on the left edge, from the right, the right edge, etc,... and you'd still have the sound radar

559

Accessibility Game Contest / Re: Games[CC] recruiting programmers

« on: January 31, 2007, 06:42 AM »

Yes, the sound radar surely helps, I also think it is important to make the distinction between ambient sounds, sound effects, and dialog as shown in the movie.

Something that also might be possible is to actually show the text in 3d space, eg: when a bullet impacts a pool of water, show the text 'splash' on the place of impact, since this helps to better associate which sound is associated with which event, kind of like the old comic book style sound words:



Maybe you could attach a sprite like this(or just stick to plain text) to each sound and show them on the screen in relation to where the sound comes from, in addition to the sound radar.

560

Accessibility Game Contest / Re: Games[CC] recruiting programmers

« on: January 31, 2007, 05:00 AM »

As you may or may not know, we are working on a game engine here at donationcoder.com, while I won't go into the details of the engine, I'd like to tell you that mouser and I had a small discussion about accessibility in the engine before where we came up with the idea to attach a text field to each sound in the game. Something along the lines of:

Code: C [Select]

1. class scSound
2.   {
3.   public:
4.   scSound(std::string FileName="");
5.   ~scSound();
6.   Play();
7.   Stop();
8.   Pause();
9.   Preload();
10.   EnableCaption(bool value);
11.   SetCaptionVolumeAlpha(char value);
12.   SetCaptionVolumeGamma(char value);
13.   SetVolume(char volume);
14.   SetSound(std::string Filename);
15.   // ... etc,...
16.   private:
17.   std::string m_Filename;
18.   std::string m_Caption;
19.   }

Note that this is just roughly how I have it in my head and this is not a real class yet, since the engine is no where near the point where we can start implementing this. In the actual engine this will probably not even take the form as a c++ class since we have our own objects/agents in the game, but it helps to explain the idea,...

If captioning were enabled by the user, the caption strings would show along with the sounds as they are played, for the duration of the sound, or a custom duration, and thus supporting captioning from the very initial design up, by linking it at the lowest level with sounds. SetCaptionVolumeAlpha/Gamma could adjust the caption's opacity/intensity in relation to the volume of the sound being played, Eg: a value of 0 = no sensitivity, do not change gamma/opacity, a value of 255 = no volume is completely transparent/dark and full volume is completely opaque,light.

I'd be VERY interested to hear your ideas of how to take captioning to the next level, so we can adopt more accessibility support in the engine from the initial design up, and even though we are no where near having to worry about this stuff yet, it's good to know what will be needed, so we can keep it in the back of our heads while doing the very initial steps.

561

Living Room / Re: Alleged FBI Cybercrook speaks out

« on: January 31, 2007, 04:40 AM »

... sell access to Paris Hilton's T-Mobile account ...

lol.
+1 for creativity.

562

Developer's Corner / Re: Debugging gems: runtime code profiling in Linux - KCacheGrind

« on: January 30, 2007, 06:08 AM »

Be sure to read the manual to get the most out of it

to produce the output needed for KCacheGrind, run:

[Select]

valgrind --tool=callgrind ./yourprogram

+ any other options you want to pass to valgrind

Then open the produced yourprogram.out.12345 file with KCacheGrind.

563

Developer's Corner / Debugging gems: runtime code profiling in Linux - KCacheGrind

« on: January 30, 2007, 04:27 AM »

I recently stumbled upon the (so far) best FOSS runtime code profiling tool I ever tried: KCacheGrind

It is really a front-end for the common *nix debugging tool valgrind, but the way it visualizes the data makes the valgrind actually allot more usable.

You can navigate through the call graph tree, go into different levels and subtrees, view how much time was spent in each function, detect memory leaks, bugs, etc,...

A nice addition to my debugging arsenal, I thought I would share

564

Developer's Corner / Re: Clash of the languages

« on: January 26, 2007, 01:38 AM »

The bottom list (continuation of the top one) is also pretty interesting,
I can't believe Fortran is listed higher than Bash scripts for example,...

565

Developer's Corner / Re: Clash of the languages

« on: January 26, 2007, 01:29 AM »

About Delphi's declination: I don't see Delphi mentioned in the graph?

It's not in the graph, it's in the first table when you open the link.

I'm not too fond of C# and .net,... for many reasons,
but that's just me

I'll stick to good 'ol C++ for programming, and perl for scripting and cgi, I haven't really done too much python, maybe that's something to look into as well. I tried Ruby and hated it.

566

Developer's Corner / Re: Clash of the languages

« on: January 25, 2007, 04:40 AM »

So you get a zillion not-so-talented fresh-out-of-uni Java coders, what's that really worth?

That is exactly the trend that is worrying me

567

Developer's Corner / Clash of the languages

« on: January 25, 2007, 03:06 AM »

Cool statistics on programming language popularity up to date with long term graphs:

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

Looks like C++ has been on a constant downhill while java remains popular. I don't like this trend. I don't like it at all.

[edited to attach image]

568

General Software Discussion / Re: multi core cpu control - is there a need?

« on: January 22, 2007, 05:12 AM »

I think the results will depend very much on how the application is implemented and how exactly it's using threads (if at all), how frequent threads are created/destroyed and how intensive each individual thread is. It would seem logical to me that with these tools you would be able to gain some (little?) gain for one application while you are slowing down another,...

569

Developer's Corner / Re: SkyIDE - Latest Release Information

« on: January 13, 2007, 01:05 PM »

Mingw isn't Cygwin though. While Mingw is mostly just compiler (minus msys), Cygwin is a complete unix emulation suite for windows, which is Posix compatible, it can have libraries and sources installed 'system-wide'(cygwin-wide if you will), which when you normally run a ./configure in cygwin are detected automatically and can be linked against, that's what I was talking about anyway,...

570

Living Room / Re: Any creative/crazy musicians around?

« on: January 13, 2007, 12:58 PM »

My tracker (cheesetracker) can load .xm but it can't save .xm Maybe I should find another one, but I like cheesetracker since all keyboard shortcuts are similar to Impulse tracker and scream tracker,...
When googling for a converter utility I could find this:

http://www.freedownl...to_XM_converter.html

XM to IT converter is program to convert Impulse Tracker modules to Fast Tracker modules. All instruments and effects convert correctly. Try it.

Sounds nice, unfortionally it's only for windows, so I couldn't test it. I'm a bit confused though, the page title, zip filename and exe filename say IT2XM while the description sais XM to IT,...

571

Living Room / Re: Any creative/crazy musicians around?

« on: January 12, 2007, 10:27 PM »

By the way,...

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Impulse_Tracker
http://en.wikipedia..../wiki/Scream_Tracker

for the curious.

If i'm not mistaking i think there is a few conversion utilities between s3m/it -> xm out there too,...

572

Living Room / Re: Any creative/crazy musicians around?

« on: January 12, 2007, 10:26 PM »

Well, I'd prefer the .xm format since it's tiny and there's some tiny libraries available for playback -

If I do it, it would be in .IT format, or .S3M format (impulse tracker/scream tracker). Just like .xm they are small and there is libraries available that will play it. I'm sure you are familiar with those formats if you are familiar with the .xm format They are after all, all good old module formats

573

Living Room / Re: Any creative/crazy musicians around?

« on: January 12, 2007, 07:36 PM »

I could make you a chiptune, but does it HAVE to be of an existing song (Pink Floyd)?

574

General Software Discussion / Re: Beta Version of Vista Start Menu Emulator

« on: January 12, 2007, 02:53 PM »

Eww. Microsoft sure keeps making their start menus bigger and more bloaty with every release.
Horrible. 

575

Developer's Corner / Re: SkyIDE - Latest Release Information

« on: January 12, 2007, 02:19 AM »

It all depends on how far they want you to go with your cygwin support. Do they want you to detect library paths, include paths from cygwin environment variables etc, or just simple compiling functionality,...?

Either way, since you support bakefile they should be able to compile their projects in cygwin with bakefile/autoconf/gcc already.