Topics

51

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Add a folder to right-click context menu similar.

« on: March 02, 2007, 09:47 AM »

Context menus have been mentioned here in the past e.g.

https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=6411.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=3101.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=3241.0

I gather they are unwieldly beasts to code, not least cause they use COM. But what I was thinking of is small in comparasion to say the suggested ContextMenu Commander so it might not prove too difficult.

Basicially I use a small taskbar menu as a custom start menu organised just how I like it. See small screenshot. What I'd really love is if I could add this to the context menu associated with the desktop, or even all right click menus if possible. Finally the icing on the cake would be if it could be cascaded like the 7-zip menu shown below too.

Note VS and Icons are from areao4.2 if people are interested .

52

Living Room / Meebo.com - instant messaging from absolutely anywhere

« on: February 22, 2007, 05:29 AM »

I hadn't seen this mentioned here before so I thought I'd post something about it. I use it in college where I'm behind a proxy. Obviously there is a security issue with giving out your passwords, but my IM identity really isn't worth stealing. Plus they do have a privacy statement, if you trust it .

meebo.com is a website for instant messaging from absolutely anywhere. Whether you’re at home, on campus, at work, or traveling foreign lands, hop over to meebo.com on any computer to access all of your buddies (on AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber) and chat with them, no downloads or installs required, for free!

[edit]I smudged out my friends emails, not fair to be posting them [/edit]

53

General Software Discussion / Anyone else checking out FireFox 2.0 rc2?

« on: October 13, 2006, 07:30 AM »

I've just recently installed the FireFox 2.0 rc2 build mostly because I wanted to see the inline spell checking in action. I must say I'm impressed with it overall. The new theme is very modern, and the whole package feels polished and clean.

I had intended to revert to the latest official 1.5.* but am so pleased with rc2 that I'll be sticking with it until 2.0 officially arrives (or an rc3 ).

54

General Software Discussion / Ultra Fractal 4, 70% discount on Oct 5th through Bits du Jour

« on: September 30, 2006, 01:16 PM »

Well the title says it all. But I'll quote the email I've just received, someone here may be interested.

This Thursday, October 5, I have organized a special Ultra Fractal promotion
sale in collaboration with Bits du Jour. On this day, you can purchase a
copy of Ultra Fractal 4 Animation Edition for just $39 (US), a 70% discount!

Do you still want to upgrade to Ultra Fractal 4, or to the Animation
Edition? Or would you like to give away a copy of Ultra Fractal as a present
to a friend? This is your chance!

The discount is valid only on Thursday, October 5, 2006 (GMT-5, Central
America time) at Bits du Jour.

To order on Thursday, go to: www.bitsdujour.com

Sincerely,
Frederik Slijkerman

-Frederik Slijkerman

BTW, I'm not affiliated with this product in any way, just a very happy cutstomer of version 3 a while back and must have been on the mailing list.

55

Developer's Corner / The exponential rate at which you seem aquire programming knowledge.

« on: September 20, 2006, 07:10 AM »

Hello, I’ve noticed a trend in the rate at which I’m acquiring knowledge for programming, certainly over the last few years and it seems to follow an exponential-style graph of knowledge.

I better explain what I mean be ‘knowledge’ and this is tricky so feel free to suggest alternative definitions; I’d like to narrow this notion down better. I’d be referring to the planning stage of a new project/feature to existing project whereby you work out, in your head or through ‘cowboy’ programming, what the problems are which you’ll be likely to face. I’m defining ‘knowledge’ to be the cases where you already know a very good solution to those problems. I want to be very general here and so solutions could be something you solved before, or perhaps you know a third party library or maybe you simply know a book or site that will aid you.

The key thing I’m getting at here is the rate at which this knowledge increases. I’ve been programming for over ten years, I started young perhaps but that may not have made any difference. What I’ve noticed is that over the past year I feel like I learned more than in say the previous nine. In the year before that I think I’d learned more than the previous eight.

See what I’m getting at? Anyone else get that feeling too?

56

Living Room / Arachibutyrophobia

« on: September 13, 2006, 01:22 PM »

A friend pointed me to this, his theory, which I'm inclined to agree with, is that the company must have generated webpages for different phobias and this one snuck in; Arachibutyrophobia at Change Thats Right Now.



[EDIT]If anyone here, god forbid, actually suffers form this I'm not belittling it, just that the above page sounds utterly ridiculous in the way it talks about it [/EDIT]

57

Living Room / A List Of Fallacious Arguments

« on: September 07, 2006, 08:12 AM »

I came across this while using Google to check my spelling of agruments (what a handy feature) it's quite interesting.

A List Of Fallacious Arguments

58

Developer's Corner / Mailing lists or Message boards for offering software support?

« on: August 05, 2006, 08:12 AM »

Hi, I'm working on a small project which is approaching a state where it can be released. I am curious as to how I should let people contact me to request help or just ask simple questions. I would be expecting a very low volume of support issues certainly initially while the library is being developed.

The two obvious choices are mailing lists which I can get through SourceForge or setting up a small message board which I can do with my own web space provider. Now personally I prefeer message boards but I get the impression that for low volume support mailing lists seem to be the norm.

So I'm interested to hear opinions from the developers here (ok I suspect you'll be a bit biased towards a forum seeing as how well this one is run).

Thanks, Eoin.

59

Living Room / Origami Paper Cd Cases

« on: August 02, 2006, 07:01 PM »

I came across this ages ago with stumbleupon and thought I'd share it; Paper Cd Cases. I love origami and since coming across this I've haven't used anything else since for holding the multitude of cds I burn .

Now personally I don't bother with creating a printed page from the site, nor do I follow the steps as they're described in the PDF. I simply place a cd on an A4 page to judge the width needed to form the two initial length-wise folds which gets you to step 1  (thats step 1 in the photos, not pdf) everything after that is easily judged, no real guides are needed as the design is very tolerant.

60

Living Room / George Bush singing "Sunday Bloody Sunday"

« on: July 28, 2006, 05:01 AM »

This is quite well done. BTW Sunday Bloody Sunday is a U2 song for those that didn't know.

http://video.google....=6805063692754011230

61

General Software Discussion / Small utility for finding Wireless Networks?

« on: June 27, 2006, 11:26 AM »

Hi all, I'm just wondering are there any nice utilities for discovering wireless networks available or are you limited to the software which comes with the adapter?

I'm asking as my folks are off to USA for a holiday and want to keep in touch with home via Skype. My Dad was just wondering is there a nice app which makes finding available networks quick and simple?

Kind regards,
Eoin.

62

Living Room / Coolest superhero... ever!

« on: June 26, 2006, 01:17 PM »

http://www.captaincopyright.ca/ 

63

General Software Discussion / Looking for advice maintaining a small computer network.

« on: June 08, 2006, 07:28 AM »

I've gotten myself a small contract maintaining a local schools computer network, its nothing too serious, whenever a computer goes down its usually just formatted and setup fresh on the network.

The thing is I know there are better ways of doing this. I'm going to list a couple of techniques which I can think of and would very much appreciate if anyone who has experience could point me to the right software. The ideas I have would be;

• Starting with a fresh machine all setup perfectly and then making a copy of that setup which could be used to restore a downed PC without tediously reinstalling all its software.
• Taking the above a step further and have have the PCs automatically restore from a clean image on every log-on or reboot.
• Well actually I haven't thought of a third idea yet but if anyone can suggest one I'm all ears .

P.S. I not being cheap but I don't think I need the bigger solutions with all the bells and whistles, a simple affordable solution would be ideal. And much more palatable when/if I suggest it to the school management.

I'm eager to hear your ideas, kind regards, Eoin.

64

General Software Discussion / Sorting mp3/audio files into a folder hierarchy based on their tag information.

« on: May 20, 2006, 08:45 AM »

Hello, I've a large music collection which I used to be very anal about keeping in check however a couple of months ago I lost my hard disk collection and had the recover the files from my Nomad Zen (which I then promptly lost but thats another story). I had painstakingly setup all the artist tags when copying the music to my Zen initially and when copying the music back off to the computer it neatly organized files into folders according to artists names.

Since then I been using the excellent musikCube and have been slowly but gradually been correcting album titles, genres, etc. Now I'm wondering is there an easy way to replicate the organization of the tags in the folder structure. For example if a program could look at a file and organize it such as <root folder>\<artist>\<album>\<artist>-<title>.mp3 but ideally this would be customizable.

Ideally this organization would be "in place" such that two copies of the files wouldn't be created but this is not a necessity. Also a level of robustness would be nice such that if a file doesn't have an album tag then it would be placed as follows <root folder>\<artist>\<artist>-<title>.mp3

Anyone know of a program which does this? I could probably write it myself if I knew a neat way of reading the tag information.

65

Living Room / Plasma Pong

« on: May 14, 2006, 10:16 AM »

Plasma Pong is a spectacular new take on the old classic

66

General Software Discussion / Synchronisation tools

« on: April 13, 2006, 12:17 PM »

I thought I’d start up a discussion on available Synchronisation tools as I haven’t been able to find one which I’m happy with.

I’d better explain what I’m looking for first, I want a neat way to backup my programming projects, my ideal tool would perform incremental backups with a possibility to rollback.

Currently I use Synchronize It! It’s nice and has a number of important features which I’m looking for; with a combination of excluding certain folder names and filetypes I can get it to ignore binary files and just back up the source code for example. It doesn’t do incremental backups so currently I just backup to an empty folder which I date, 7z and copy into my backup folders.

Another possibility I’ve considered is running a subversion server on the backup computer at home, this would do the incremental backups I’d like but the current GUIs for subversion leave a lot to be desired. I use RapidSVN for other purposes but it doesn’t feel slick and certainly isn’t intuitive. I’m not prepared to install TortiseSVN as I just don’t want something which integrates with the shell. I reserve that privilege only for apps I use very VERY frequently. More importantly getting it to ignore the binary files is tedious and I don’t have the space to back up gigs of dll and import libraries (thank you Boost ).

I should also point out the Microsoft have release a free SyncToy, unfortunately its very simplistic with none of the advanced features I’m looking for.

Maybe people might like to share their own experiences and post links to any little gems they’ve found.