Topics

51

General Software Discussion / Writing perfect software

« on: October 24, 2006, 06:14 AM »

It's all about the process, as per the on-board shuttle group, the team that writes the software that control the STS.
Very interesting article here:
FastCompany.com - They Write the Right Stuff

Bye!

52

General Software Discussion / Vista and unknown filetypes

« on: October 21, 2006, 07:55 AM »

A question for whoever have a Vista RC running...

What does it do when the user try to open an file with an extension that have no app associated? Windows XP used to let the user choose if he wanted to use a web service to gather more info, and redirected here: Microsoft Application Search
Does Vista the same?

Thanks,
Bye!

53

Living Room / Forums: pay for posts

« on: October 19, 2006, 02:57 AM »

Just saw a new user registering on my forum today.
Checked the profile's website, and it point here:

Forum Posters

The purpose of forumposters.org is to match forum owners with quality forum posters who want to be paid for posting on forums. Paid forum posting is useful for creating and maintaining a quality forum that attracts users who you want to stay and contribute to your forum as well. Without hiring at least a few forum posters, it can be difficult host a forum that is of any repute and value to advertisers. Forumposters.org does not charge forum posters or forum owners for the service that it provides. Forumposters.org is a free website for matching forum posters with forum owners.

Never heard about something like this before, but... it seemed inevitable. 

Bye!

54

General Software Discussion / Cool Ajax Timeline widget

« on: October 14, 2006, 04:31 PM »

Very nice scrollable timeline. A simple XML file for the events and a few lines to implement the widget is all that's needed:

Link: Lifehacker - Geek to Live: Roll your own timeline

Maybe nice even for showing the changelog of a software...

Bye!

55

Living Room / Amazing VR setup for R/C airplane

« on: September 25, 2006, 10:00 AM »

Simply beautiful:



Link: Google Video - Golf club Royal Bromont

A wireless camera is mounted on a tiltable stand on an R/C plane.
The video is fed to a VR headset, that also control the camera motion.

Bye!

56

Living Room / Broken Windows Theory

« on: June 15, 2006, 08:04 AM »

An interesting post by a MS blogger, about the "inner workings" behind Vista development.

Link: http://blogs.msdn.co...06/06/14/631438.aspx

[...]
Windows code is too complicated.  It’s not the components themselves, it’s their interdependencies.  An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies).  After working in Windows for five years, you understand only, say, two of them.  Add to this the fact that building Windows on a dual-proc dev box takes nearly 24 hours, and you’ll be slow enough to drive Miss Daisy.
[...]

Bye!

57

Living Room / OISV - Organization of Independent Software Vendors

« on: June 09, 2006, 04:13 PM »

Seen this?

http://www.oisv.com/

Bye!

58

Living Room / Creating Passionate Users: Don't give in to feature demands!

« on: June 06, 2006, 10:26 AM »

Creating Passionate Users: Don't give in to feature demands!

The more successful the product or service is, the stronger the pressure to give in to user requests. The more users you have, the more diverse the requests. One user's must-have-or-else feature is another user's deal-killer. And the more popular your product or service is, the more those requests start turning into demands and ultimatums, and finally very harsh criticisms.

Bye!

59

Living Room / Jack PC

« on: June 01, 2006, 12:17 PM »

Link: ZDNET UK - UK firm to unveil wall-socket PC

A little device based on Windows CE, with IE and a RDP client builtin to connect to servers.
Run on about 5W of power.

Bye!

60

Living Room / Vista: how to delete a shortcut icon in 7 simple steps!

« on: June 01, 2006, 04:24 AM »

Almost too funny!

From this news on Digg: Windows Vista - Deleting a shortcut is just a few clicks away....
A gallery of screenshots on Flickr detail the "simple & straightforward" (!) process!

Bye!

61

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Beta new version of TrID file identifier - now with batch scanning & renaming

« on: June 01, 2006, 04:20 AM »

I just finished a new beta (but seems pretty stable) version of my freeware TrID file identifier, for anyone who want to try it.
It bases it's analysis on a library of definitions, that for each filetype lists a series of patterns and uniques tokens, so that it can guess to with a certain file is more similar, irregardless of the file's name & extension.
Here's a typical results:

[Select]

C:\TrID>trid \windows\media\chimes.wav

TrID/32 - File Identifier v1.72b - (C) 2003-06 By M.Pontello
Definitions found:  1956
Analyzing...

Collecting data from file: \windows\media\chimes.wav
 50.0% (.WAV) RIFF/WAVe standard Audio (4008/2)
 49.9% (.) Generic RIFF container (4000/1)

The current/stable version of TrID use a library of XML files for the defs, so it take some time to load & parse them at startup. For this new version, instead, I used a binary container, so that now it's almost instantaneous. Also, now it's possible to scan an entire folder of files:

[Select]

C:\TrID>trid \pbcc\bin\*.exe

TrID/32 - File Identifier v1.72b - (C) 2003-06 By M.Pontello
Definitions found:  1956
Analyzing...

File: \pbcc\bin\CCEdit.exe
 33.6% (.EXE) Win32 Executable PowerBASIC/Win 7.x (235131/25/18)

File: \pbcc\bin\PBCC.exe
 84.9% (.EXE) Win16 NE executable (generic) (34068/22/9)

File: \pbcc\bin\PBRes.exe
 61.2% (.EXE) WIN32 Executable PowerBASIC/CC 3.02 (393928/51/44)

File: \pbcc\bin\PBrow.exe
 38.0% (.EXE) Win32 Executable PowerBASIC/Win 7.x (235131/25/18)

File: \pbcc\bin\RC.exe
 72.1% (.EXE) Win32 Executable MS Visual C++ (generic) (37706/45/16)

Eventually TrID can also rename the scanned files adding the guessed filetype extensions.
This come useful, for example, when you have a bunch of files recovered with CHKDSK, and the type of each file isn't immediately clear.
So if you have a folder with files like:

FILE0001.CHK
FILE0002.CHK
FILE0003.CHK
...

Running something like:

[Select]

C:\TrID>trid \myfolder\* -ae

will rename them to:

FILE0001.CHK.doc
FILE0002.CHK.xls
FILE0003.CHK.gif
...

Here's the download link: TrID 1.72b (290KB)
That include the TrID's executable and a package with defs for over 1.900 filetypes.
Just unpack in a folder, and run.

I plan to publish a stable version in a couple of days on TrID's page, as long as the updated versions of the companion tools (like the one that take the XML defs and create the single package, etc.).
A Linux port is also almost complete / ready, thanks to the migration of the code base from PowerBASIC to the free / Open Source FreeBASIC.

Hope it will be useful to someone.

P.S.
It's and will be free for personal / non profit use, off course.

Bye!

62

General Software Discussion / Free tool to download a complete website

« on: April 24, 2006, 09:35 AM »

Complete, with all the thumbs, linked images, etc., preserving the site structure.
Any suggestion?
If it can be run from the command line, it would be waaay better!

Thanks,
Bye!

63

Living Room / 146$ Linux PC

« on: April 22, 2006, 12:14 PM »

It's the Municator from YellowSheepRiver.



Link: Google Video

64

General Software Discussion / BitmapRip - Bitmap Ripper

« on: March 24, 2006, 06:47 AM »

I quickly coded this simple tool the other day, out of a immediate need.
I tried a couple of tools but no one really worked the way I wanted.


It can extract embedded bitmaps (JPEG, PNG, GIF) from any given file. It search for bitmap's headers / signatures, and create a new file for every data block that "seems to be" a valid image. No particular things are done to "clean up" the extracted images (i.e., remove eventual garbage at the end of the file); if you want to get rid of that, simply open the files with a graphic tools / viewer of your choice and re-save them.

Can also be used as a recovery tool of some sort in certain situations, for example if you have an image file of a compact flash with accidentally deleted photos.

Link: BitmapRip 1.02

Hope it can be useful to someone.

Edit:
Updated the screenshot, and changed the sample file from a PDF to a PowerPoint one to show a little more variety in the extracted bitmaps.

Bye!

65

Found Deals and Discounts / REALbasic free license for Delphi users

« on: February 14, 2006, 06:53 AM »

Link: REAL Software - Special offer for Borland Delphi® Users

Borland has announced it will sell its IDE business, including Delphi. REAL Software is offering Delphi users a new home — REALbasic. From now through February 28, 2006, get a fully functional license to REALbasic 2006 Standard Edition for Windows (and six months of updates!), completely free of charge.
[...]

66

Living Room / Spell with flickr!

« on: January 31, 2006, 04:44 PM »

Awesome!

Link: http://metaatem.net/words/

What is this? Spell with Flickr is a small program that lets you type in whatever you want, then goes to flickr and grabs pictures for each an every letter! It also allows you to change the images that you see, so you can find better images for your word or phrase!





 
       

67

Living Room / Article: Managing a Doomed Software Project

« on: January 15, 2006, 07:15 PM »

A nice read!

When that high-profile project just ain't gonna happen, how can you ensure that your head isn't on the chopping block? Matt Heusser provides some practical suggestions for passing on the bad news without just passing the blame.

Link: Informit.com

Bye!

68

Found Deals and Discounts / PECompact free licenses

« on: January 07, 2006, 01:37 PM »

Just wanting to thanks for the great opportunity!! 

Bye!

69

Found Deals and Discounts / Domains from Yahoo at 2.99$

« on: January 01, 2006, 09:29 AM »

Just saw on Digg:

Domain Name Registration from Yahoo! Small Business

For 1 to 5 years, with .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .us extensions.

Bye!

70

Living Room / CPUShare - The Low Cost Supercomputer

« on: December 19, 2005, 04:59 PM »

Interesting:

http://www.cpushare.com/

Gain CPUCoins selling idle CPU cycles. An interesting distributed computing project. In testing phase at the moment, but in the near feature it will be possibile to even exchange CPUCoins for real cash!

Only Linux client available at present time.

71

Found Deals and Discounts / 25% off Project Dogwaffle & Gertrudis until December 31st

« on: December 10, 2005, 11:12 AM »

Just saw this on the Dogwaffle mailing list:

Only about 20 days left to this year, but we can't wait celebrating.

Do you know a young artist who's been writing to Santa for a copy of
Project Dogwaffle on Christmas? Does your significant other like to
draw? Or can you repeat after me: "I've been good this year, so there!"?

Here's a little promotion:

from now until December 31st, get 25% off on orders of Dogwaffle,
Gertrudis  and Tutorials from the BMT store:

http://www.thebest3d...dogwaffle/sales/#BMT

In order to get the discount, use this discount coupon:  QMR000F8

Other promotions and art tools (3D, tablets,...) will also be found at
http://www.thebest3d.com/hohoho


Happy holidays, and Happy new year!

Bye!

72

Living Room / Pixel fonts

« on: December 08, 2005, 06:29 AM »

For when you are very low on space!



Link: http://www.dsg4.com/04/extra/bitmap/

Bye!

73

Screenshot Captor / Feature suggestion: spotlight

« on: December 07, 2005, 04:31 AM »

I have to say that  I haven't Screenshot Captor here at the moment, so I'm not able to check if there's already something like this. But, as I have just seen this effect on a shot around, I just want to let you know:



Bye!

74

Living Room / IT Project Comic

« on: December 03, 2005, 06:44 PM »

Check this comic strip:

http://bink.nu/Article5445.bink



Bye!

75

General Software Discussion / Remote desktop, session reconnection & timeouts

« on: December 02, 2005, 07:30 PM »

I ask because I'm not experienced at all with this kind of things (or in general with all things concerned with managing a Windows server).
I have a virtual private server / host to witch I can connect trough Remote Desktop.
Before the latest round of installed patches & reconfiguration (done by the hosting company), I was used to connect trough RDP, open some programs (for example, a BitTorrent client), then disconnect (without logging off), and reconnect maybe 10 minutes or 4 hours later and find again the desktop exactly as I had leaved it.

Now, instead, if I reconnect within a couple of minutes, all OK; if I leave some more time passing, I found that I was "logged off", and so my programs where closed with it. It then proceed to a new login.

Not knowing too much, I suppose there are some timeout settings involved, that somewhat have been changed.
I Googled a bit but haven't yet found something useful. Anyone can point me in the right direction / have some hints on where to look?

Thanks,
Bye!