Topics

51

Developer's Corner / Basic Excel Skills

« on: April 21, 2018, 08:04 PM »

BASIC EXCEL SKILLS
Now a days, any job requires basic Excel skills. These basic Excel skills are – familiarity with Excel ribbons & UI, ability to enter and format data, calculate totals & summaries thru formulas, highlight data that meets certain conditions, creating simple reports & charts, understanding the importance of keyboard shortcuts & productivity tricks. Based on my experience of training more than 5,000 students in various online & physical training programs, the following 6 areas form the core of basic Excel skills.
GETTING STARTED
Excel is a massive application with 1000s of features and 100s of ribbon (menu) commands. It is very easy to get lost once you open Excel. So one of the basic survival skills is to understand how to navigate Excel and access the features you are looking for.

Marinara Sauce: http://chandoo.org/wp/excel-basics

52

Developer's Corner / The Scala Programming Language

« on: April 21, 2018, 07:58 PM »

Scala combines object-oriented and functional programming in one concise, high-level language. Scala's static types help avoid bugs in complex applications, and its JVM and JavaScript runtimes let you build high-performance systems with easy access to huge ecosystems of libraries.

Sweet Sauce: http://www.scala-lang.org

53

Developer's Corner / Full Stack Python [Tutorial]

« on: April 21, 2018, 07:51 PM »

Introduction
You're knee deep in learning the Python programming language. The syntax is starting to make sense. The first few "ahh-ha!" moments hit you as you learning conditional statements, for loops and classes while playing around with the open source libraries that make Python such an amazing language.

Now you want to take your initial Python knowledge and make something real, like an application that's available on the web that you can show off or sell as a service to other people. That's where Full Stack Python comes in. You've come to the right place to learn everything you need to create, deploy and operate production Python web applications.

This guide branches out on topic because your learning requirements depend on what you're working on. Select one of the buttons below or check out the full table of contents.

Tomato Sauce: http://www.fullstackpython.com

54

Developer's Corner / Free Computer Science Ebooks and Resources

« on: April 21, 2018, 07:49 PM »

C & C++   Calvert, Charlie: Borland C++ Builder 4 Unleashed (Sams Publishing)  |  mirror  |  mirror
Chapman, Davis: Visual C++ 6 in 21 Tagen. Markt&Technik
Eckel, Bruce: Thinking in C++ (1.6 MB)  |  at amazon.com
Heller, Steve: Optimizing C++. Prentice-Hall 1999
Kernighan, Brian W.; Dennis M. Ritchie: The C Programming Language. Prentice-Hall 1988  |  mirror  |  mirror
Oualline, Steve: C Elements of Style (M & T)
Williams, Mickey: Sams Teach Yourself Visual C++ 5 in 24 Hours

(there are wayyyy more than this)

Sauce: http://mic-ro.com/informatik/ebooks.html

55

General Software Discussion / Why do Windows functions all begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction?

« on: April 21, 2018, 07:46 PM »

If you look at the disassembly of functions inside Windows DLLs, you'll find that they begin with the seemingly pointless instruction MOV EDI, EDI. This instruction copies a register to itself and updates no flags; it is completely meaningless. So why is it there?

It's a hot-patch point.

The MOV EDI, EDI instruction is a two-byte NOP, which is just enough space to patch in a jump instruction so that the function can be updated on the fly. The intention is that the MOV EDI, EDI instruction will be replaced with a two-byte JMP $-5 instruction to redirect control to five bytes of patch space that comes immediately before the start of the function. Five bytes is enough for a full jump instruction, which can send control to the replacement function installed somewhere else in the address space.

Although the five bytes of patch space before the start of the function consists of five one-byte NOP instructions, the function entry point uses a single two-byte NOP.

Why not use Detours to hot-patch the function, then you don't need any patch space at all.

The problem with Detouring a function during live execution is that you can never be sure that at the moment you are patching in the Detour, another thread isn't in the middle of executing an instruction that overlaps the first five bytes of the function. (And you have to alter the code generation so that no instruction starting at offsets 1 through 4 of the function is ever the target of a jump.) You could work around this by suspending all the threads while you're patching, but that still won't stop somebody from doing a CreateRemoteThread after you thought you had successfully suspended all the threads.

Why not just use two NOP instructions at the entry point?

Sauce: https://blogs.msdn.m...newthing/20110921-00

56

Developer's Corner / Guide To GIT (Git Magic)

« on: April 21, 2018, 07:43 PM »

No idea when this was written, or if it's still relevant, but I'm on StumbleUpon (Bored out of my mind) and it came up, so I figured it was worth posting:

www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic

Preface
Git is a version control Swiss army knife. A reliable versatile multipurpose revision control tool whose extraordinary flexibility makes it tricky to learn, let alone master.

As Arthur C. Clarke observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is a great way to approach Git: newbies can ignore its inner workings and view Git as a gizmo that can amaze friends and infuriate enemies with its wondrous abilities.

Rather than go into details, we provide rough instructions for particular effects. After repeated use, gradually you will understand how each trick works, and how to tailor the recipes for your needs.

Translations

Simplified Chinese: by JunJie, Meng and JiangWei. Converted to Traditional Chinese via cconv -f UTF8-CN -t UTF8-TW.
French: by Alexandre Garel, Paul Gaborit, and Nicolas Deram. Also hosted at itaapy.
German: by Benjamin Bellee and Armin Stebich; also hosted on Armin’s website.
Italian: by Mattia Rigotti.
Korean: by Jung-Ho (John) Han; also hosted on John’s website.
Polish: by Damian Michna.
Brazilian Portuguese: by José Inácio Serafini and Leonardo Siqueira Rodrigues.
Russian: by Tikhon Tarnavsky, Mikhail Dymskov, and others.
Spanish: by Rodrigo Toledo and Ariset Llerena Tapia.
Ukrainian: by Volodymyr Bodenchuk.
Vietnamese: by Trần Ngọc Quân; also hosted on his website.
Other Editions

Single webpage: barebones HTML, with no CSS.
PDF file: printer-friendly.
EPUB file: E-reader-friendly.
Debian package, Ubuntu package: get a fast and local copy of this site. Handy when this server is offline.
Physical book [Amazon.com]: 64 pages, 15.24cm x 22.86cm, black and white. Handy when there is no electricity.
Thanks!
I’m humbled that so many people have worked on translations of these pages. I greatly appreciate having a wider audience because of the efforts of those named above.

Dustin Sallings, Alberto Bertogli, James Cameron, Douglas Livingstone, Michael Budde, Richard Albury, Tarmigan, Derek Mahar, Frode Aannevik, Keith Rarick, Andy Somerville, Ralf Recker, Øyvind A. Holm, Miklos Vajna, Sébastien Hinderer, Thomas Miedema, Joe Malin, Tyler Breisacher, Sonia Hamilton, Julian Haagsma, Romain Lespinasse, Sergey Litvinov, Oliver Ferrigni, David Toca, Сергей Сергеев, Joël Thieffry, and Baiju Muthukadan contributed corrections and improvements.

François Marier maintains the Debian package originally created by Daniel Baumann.

My gratitude goes to many others for your support and praise. I’m tempted to quote you here, but it might raise expectations to ridiculous heights.

If I’ve left you out by mistake, please tell me or just send me a patch!

License
This guide is released under the GNU General Public License version 3. Naturally, the source is kept in a Git repository, and can be obtained by typing:

$ git clone git://repo.or.cz/gitmagic.git  # Creates "gitmagic" directory.
or from one of the mirrors:

$ git clone git://github.com/blynn/gitmagic.git
$ git clone git://git.assembla.com/gitmagic.git
$ git clone [email protected]:blynn/gitmagic.git
GitHub, Assembla, and Bitbucket support private repositories, the latter two for free.

57

General Software Discussion / GodMode - Windows 10 Tip

« on: April 14, 2018, 10:55 AM »

I went to university today and during class I heard a peer talking about the troubles he was having trying to located a certain setting within Windows. I suggested God mode to him and when the entire class thought I was joking I realized that this "hidden feature" isn't as common as I thought it was so I thought I'd share with imgur and maybe it will help out fellow IT guys and gals! (or even the average user)

First create a new folder

Secondly you are gonna want to name the folder the following
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} (for Windows 10 Creators Edition and above, use the code below

• )

Then press enter

Win 10 Creators Edition and Above

*Update. Right-click desktop, select New --> Shortcut, and paste the text below:


%windir%\explorer.exe shell:::{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

To change the icon, right-click the new shortcut, select Properties, go to the Shortcut tab, click Change Icon, and paste the text below:

%windir%\System32\imageres.dll The icon is the 6th from the left in the third row. Or use any other icon you like.

BOOM, the folder icon will change to a cool little control panel

Open it up and enjoy all the settings windows has to offer!

Hope this helps someone!

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/NTFgg
Author: https://imgur.com/user/IsNice

58

Living Room / [Game] Answer & Ask

« on: April 05, 2018, 08:11 PM »

The rule of this game is very simple...Reply to the previous post by answering their question and then ask a question of your own for somebody else to answer.

----------
I'll start us off:


What is your all-time favourite song?

59

Living Room / Badly explain a movie.

« on: April 05, 2018, 08:06 PM »

Just a bit of a game...

Explain a movie...but badly...try not to give it away too much so other people have to guess what it is!

------

I'll start:

Guy in a metal hat sets up an unlicensed school for dangerous children run by unqualified teaching staff.

60

Living Room / [Breaking News] Prof. Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76.

« on: March 13, 2018, 10:55 PM »

At the age of 76, Professor Stephen Hawking has passed away at home, his family have said.

Full breaking story: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43396008

61

Living Room / Shameless Self Promotion (Patreon)

« on: February 20, 2018, 02:39 AM »

Seeing as mouser told me to make a Patreon page, I figured I'd shamelessly self-promote it here on DC

I'm going to be creating a lot of content for my page (both free and for Patreons only) so I hope you guys will check it out

https://www.patreon.com/kynlo

62

Developer's Corner / Create maps for your board/table games!

« on: February 13, 2018, 07:28 PM »

Just stumbled upon this awesome find:  http://davesmapper.com

Create amazing maps for your table/board games (or even a computer game if you feel so inclined!)



100% free too!

~Stephen

63

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / [Preview] AudioMarker - Learn Languages by Listening!

« on: February 03, 2018, 11:36 PM »

ALL DOWNLOADS AND UPDATE INFORMATION HAVE BEEN MOVED TO:
https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=46583.0

64

Living Room / Looking for a Native or Fluent Italian Speaker

« on: January 25, 2018, 12:35 PM »

Hey!

I'm currently learning Italian (Attualmente sto studiando Italiano!) and would love to be able to speak to someone who is fluent or native. 

Is there anybody here who would be willing to help? lo apprezzerei molto! 

Grazie!

~Stephen

65

Living Room / [Resolved] Looking for Audio Software for "Audio Learning"

« on: January 22, 2018, 04:59 PM »

THIS HAS BEEN RESOLVED - I GAVE UP SEARCHING AND JUST MADE IT MYSELF. - SEE REPLIES TO THIS THREAD FOR MORE INFO


I'm looking for software that works roughly like the image below:



Basically, the reason behind this is I am currently learning Italian, and I am using things like the Pimsleur Learning Course (Audio) - so it would be nice to be able to bookmark (and have it auto-remember my last place) audio tracks - import a library (also with folders) [See below for example]

Unit I
 - Italian I - Lesson 01
 - Italian I - Lesson 02
Unit II
 - Italian II - Lesson 01
 - Italian II - Lesson 02

Etc etc...

Being able to make notes at specific times in each track (IE: "This section is for X" and then being able to do things like writing a list of words/phrases that segment of the audio track talks about), would be hugely beneficial to my learning.

Bonus Points:

If the notes could be exported as html, that would be 10000x more amazing...


So...the question is...does anybody know if such a thing exists? (Freeware would be best cause I'm not rich enough to pay for things haha but I could consider commercial).

Thanks

~Stephen

66

Living Room / The new CMS is now LIVE! - Please report any bugs/issues here.

« on: January 16, 2018, 12:57 PM »

Please report any bugs, issues, missing pages, spelling mistakes etc etc in this thread so we can keep track and go fix

Also...what do you all think of the new site?

~Stephen

67

Living Room / Did you know DoCo has a Facebook Page? You do now!

« on: January 14, 2018, 12:23 AM »

Come like us and keep up to date with everything going on at DC!

https://www.facebook.com/DonationCoder/

All the blog posts are there as well as a plethora of other cool stuff!

If you are thinking about liking us on there, but haven't made the final decision yet...then remember:

68

Developer's Corner / CodePlex is shutting down.

« on: January 08, 2018, 12:15 PM »

So...somehow I missed this news (It was actually announced last March), but CodePlex is shutting down!

https://blogs.msdn.m...tting-down-codeplex/

Almost 11 years after we created CodePlex, it’s time to say goodbye.  We launched CodePlex in 2006 because we, like others in the industry, saw a need for a great place to share software.  Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of amazing options come and go but at this point, GitHub is the de facto place for open source sharing and most open source projects have migrated there.

We migrated too.  As many of you know, Microsoft has invested in Visual Studio Team Services as our “One Engineering System” for proprietary projects, and we’ve exposed many of our key open source projects on GitHub (Visual Studio Code, TypeScript, .NET, the Cognitive Toolkit, and more).  In fact, our GitHub organization now has more than 16,000 open source contributors – more than any other organization – and we’re proud to partner closely with GitHub to promote open source.

69

Living Room / DC on Discord :O

« on: December 03, 2017, 11:26 PM »

So...after months of bugging him, I finally convinced mouser to get on Discord!!! 

If you want to come join us on the DC Discord server - the link is https://discord.gg/9J4mHfF

(Discord is a text and voice chat app, available for all platforms - it's kinda like IRC 2.0)

Lots of features - DC Forum RSS feed, and voice chats with yours truly (and whoever else wants to say hi!) are all part of this

Did I mention it's better than IRC? haha

The link again is: https://discord.gg/9J4mHfF

If you don't have discord, just quickly signup, download if for your system (or even use it in your browser), and then you should be on the server! (If not, after you register, just click the link again!)

~Stephen

70

Mini-Reviews by Members / PokéWorld - Pokémon MMO...On Discord!

« on: November 10, 2017, 08:50 PM »

Well, Discord is aimed to be for gamers, but when it comes to the platform, there is no real way to play anything fun through it...well...that's what I thought!

Bored one night, I was googling around for Discord Bots to add to my server to give me something to do.  After a while I stumbled upon a random one  called PokéWorld.  Now, at first, I thought it was going to be something stupid like "just type a command, get a random pokemon, and go about your day"...but I was wrong...so very very wrong!

Curious..I added the bot to my server, and located the command to start it...at which point I was met with



Hmm...this is interesting...not quite what I expected!...So, l let's get on with it...I wonder where I can choose?



Holy crap...OK...I don't really know what any of these contain, so...I picked a random one!

So...clicking through some more stuff...I finally got to this:



Nice...so I have things!  Oh, and I also got my starter Pokémon too!



Now, I guess it's time to see what the hell I can do!



Hmm, ok, so, I can travel around the areas, fighting and catching pokemon, and becoming the very best, like no-one ever was!

---

I would add more screenshots into this mini-review (or whatever this just became), but...it's kinda pointless...because that bot was Alpha, and they are VERY close to releasing Beta, which, for a Discord bot, is VERY advanced.

The community they have there is fantastic, and the developer (this guy: https://github.com/Bioblaze) is brilliant at what he does!

For those curious about following the development (and maybe playing!), then join their discord here: https://discord.gg/wPxWcXc

Overall Rating: 4/5 Stars (For Alpha) - No rating on Beta due to it not being released yet!

Highly recommended for those looking for old-school text-games mixed with MMO/Modern games!

71

Living Room / Hi strangers!

« on: October 16, 2017, 09:51 PM »

Hey strangers!

How are y'all doing?  Sorry I haven't been very active over the last few months, Uni work has basically taken over my life haha.

~Stephen

72

Living Room / [Breaking] - AI Simulant Discovered Online

« on: June 17, 2017, 07:15 AM »

There has been an investigation launched after detection systems recognized the signature of a rogue AI Simulant within their databanks.

The stimulant in question seems to have free-will, although not much information has been released at this time.


What we know:

The simulant's name (designation) is 'mouser'.  In 2005, after being released into the wild, the simulant in question launched a series of Software projects, seemingly designed to test it's repair and replication processes.  So far, full replication does not seem to have happened, but it could be getting close.

'Mouser' has been determined as an acronym: "Multi-Operational Universal Software Engineering & Replication".

This information came to light after automated systems picked up on a series of events, where the simulant stopped all forms of communication, mid-conversation, for seemingly no reason at all.  This phenomenon has been defined as "mousering" (or "to be mousered").

These 2 acronyms mean the following:

Mousering: Multi-Operational Universal Software Engineering & Replication Is Not Gregarious
      Meaning: "No longer the life of the party"

Mousered: Multi-Operational Universal Software Engineering & Replication - Erectile Disfunction
      Meaning: This is a play on the name of the condition.  It means mouser has/is "gone away"/"no longer active"/"no longer functioning"

Although mouser can be seen as active, randomly at any time of the day (with no discernable pattern), it seems to power down for a minimum of 60 minutes per day.  We assume that this is for self-maintenance, software updates/patches and perhaps a system reboot.

[This Story is Breaking - More Updates To Follow]

73

Living Room / Google Are Taking Up The Fight Against Disruptive Ads

« on: June 02, 2017, 10:26 AM »

Google will introduce an ad blocker to Chrome early next year and is telling publishers to get ready.

The warning is meant to let websites assess their ads and strip any particularly disruptive ones from their pages. That’s because Chrome’s ad blocker won’t block all ads from the web. Instead, it’ll only block ads on pages that are determined to have too many annoying or intrusive advertisements, like videos that autoplay with sound or interstitials that take up the entire screen.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, the executive in charge of Google’s ads, writes in a blog post that even ads “owned or served by Google” will be blocked on pages that don’t meet Chrome’s guidelines.

Instead of an ad “blocker,” Google is referring to the feature as an ad “filter,” according to The Wall Street Journal, since it will still allow ads to be displayed on pages that meet the right requirements. The blocker will work on both desktop and mobile.

Google is providing a tool that publishers can run to find out if their sites’ ads are in violation and will be blocked in Chrome. Unacceptable ads are being determined by a group called the Coalition for Better Ads, which includes Google, Facebook, News Corp, and The Washington Post as members.

Google shows publishers which of their ads are considered disruptive. Image: Google

Read Full Story: https://www.theverge...018-announced-google

74

Living Room / Win10 Creators Update breaks trackpads.

« on: May 20, 2017, 04:38 PM »

Looks like I'm not the only one who has had issues with this.  Just spent the last 2-3 hours fighting with my laptop trying to get my trackpad working, and it turned out that the drivers had been completely removed from my system during the update to "Creators Update" - No clue why or how it happened, and installing the official drivers had 0 effect on anything. 

So...after 2-3 hours, I'm no longer on that update, as I have rolled back.

This post serves as a means to warn other people that this may happen, and if so, pretty much the only solution seems to be "Revert Back" to the previous update (whatever you was on before you upgraded) - The one saving grace here is that Windows 10 makes that very easy, and considering it took several hours to instal Creators Update...it took 10 minutes to revert back...so I can't moan too much about _that_ process

~Stephen

75

Living Room / [Breaking News] Cyber Attack cripples UK NHS.

« on: May 12, 2017, 12:01 PM »

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk...news/health-39899646

A major incident has been declared after NHS services across England and Scotland were hit by a large-scale cyber-attack.
Staff cannot access patient data, which has been scrambled by ransomware. There is no evidence patient data has been compromised, NHS Digital has said.
The BBC understands up to 25 NHS organisations and some GP practices have been affected.
It comes amid reports of cyber-attacks affecting organisations worldwide.
A Downing Street Spokesman said Prime Minister Theresa May was being kept informed of the situation, while Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is being briefed by the National Cyber Security Centre.

Follow Developments Live

Read More: http://www.bbc.co.uk...news/health-39899646