Messages

26

Developer's Corner / Re: How to divide an image into random sized parts?

« on: May 08, 2008, 06:15 AM »

It's probably not irrelevant but you could print, tear it to size desired then scan. I had to post it lol

-Silverchip (April 23, 2008, 07:48 PM)

I will remember this if there is a table-top version of the game  

27

Developer's Corner / I got an idea for Website / Webservice - comments please

« on: May 08, 2008, 06:10 AM »

Hi,

I got a new display (the wonderfull Dell WFP3008 ). It turns out, that the brightness of it is way better than the one from my old 19" CRT. After working a few hours with it, I had to change all my colorschemes to darker ones. I did this for:

• Notepad++ (HTML, JS, CSS, PHP, SQL)
• PHPEdit (PHP, SQL)
• Eclipse (Java, Ruby)
• Visual Studio (c#, XML)
• e-Texteditor (HTML, JS, CSS, PHP, SQL, XML)

and it took a lot of time...

So the idea is to create a Webpage where users can add their colorschemes, save it in a editor-neutral format and generate colorscheme files for different editors / IDEs. I don't know if anyone would use such a thing, but I would be glad if I had found one

Comments, Suggestions, Yes, No 

28

General Software Discussion / Re: ideas or suggestions for mostly free html editor.

« on: April 14, 2008, 05:09 AM »

Hi vizacc,

just to let you know: when I try downloading the editor, I get an "Overlapped I/O operation is in progress." error...

29

Developer's Corner / Re: How to divide an image into random sized parts?

« on: April 10, 2008, 10:41 AM »

Thanks for your input Ampa. I came to the exact same methode while I was in the shower  It works very well 

30

Developer's Corner / Re: How to divide an image into random sized parts?

« on: April 03, 2008, 06:58 PM »

Good idea Mouser But I think keeping track of only producing rect-shapes will be very tricky. I have to use only rect-shapes, because the puzzle will be jpg + javascript based, so there is no way to overlay other shaped images (because of the missing transparency). I think I will try to prototype this Idea on the weekend - Thanks

31

Developer's Corner / How to divide an image into random sized parts?

« on: April 03, 2008, 06:29 PM »

Hi,

I want to divide an image into random sized parts. I need this for some kind of puzzle game I'm writing with a friend. Dividing an image into even sized parts like this:

[attach=#1][/attach]

is not a problem at all. But how could I divide in into randomsized parts like this:

[attach=#2][/attach]

The algorithm I'm searching must be capeable of slicing any image in a variable amount (which is set by the player) of parts. The resulting images (parts) should not be smaller than X pixels and not larger than Y Pixels. The parts may not overlap each other. I have no idea how to do this.

32

General Software Discussion / Re: Searching a tool to calculate checksums without taking metadata into account

« on: April 03, 2008, 06:05 PM »

Thanks jgpaiva 
Since most of my files are Flac encoded I think I have to search on. Flac provides a switch to write the checksum right after encoding the wav to a flac into an ID3 Tag. Maybe I schould have a look at some opensource media players - they have to get raw audio at some poiint

33

Developer's Corner / Re: Syntax highlight plugins+adons

« on: March 27, 2008, 12:35 PM »

The best Serverside PHP based solution is without a doubt Geshi
If you would like to to it on the client side you can use "syntaxhighlighter" - it's a javascript syntax highlighter which should be easy to  integrate into wordpress (I have no exp. with wordpress, but there is a plugin at http://www.wp-plugin...dpsyntaxhighlighter/ - have a look at the "Similar Plugins" too). I like both of them

34

General Software Discussion / Searching a tool to calculate checksums without taking metadata into account

« on: March 27, 2008, 11:41 AM »

Hi,

I need a little (commandline) tool or library to get the MD5 (or any other) Hash form MP3, FLAC, OGG and Monkey Audio Files. It should provide the checksum for the Audiotrack only, not the whole file. I have the problem of having a lot of playlists and (unsorted) files. When I move and  rename the files, the playlist couldn't find it anymore. To solve this, I wrote a script, which scans my music folder and look for a special ID3 Tag which identifies the track. Then it regenerates the playlist. This basically works, but it involves to many manual steps to get the GUIDs (Global Unique IDs) into the tags, so I would like to replace the GUID with the AudioTrack-Hash. I can not use the whole file for hashing, because I have ID Tags which get updated everytime I listen to it (playcount, last_played). Anyone know such a tool?

35

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for: ToDo List plus Calendar plus Countdown Timer

« on: March 17, 2008, 03:51 PM »

Calimanjaro looks interesting.

-Nighted (May 22, 2007, 12:48 AM)

Just wanna say "Thanks" for this link - I never came across this tool before. In my opinion it is maybe the best Calendar Software on Windows - I totally love it 

36

PHP / Re: PHP Desinging

« on: March 01, 2008, 08:24 AM »

Hi,

1) Switching hosts shouldn't be a problem, as long as you have access to your files. Just backup locally and re-upload it to you new host - this shouldn't affect your php code at all (except for some DB credentials)

2) PHP has a lot of great cms. Which suites your needs best you have to evaluate by yourself. Here the usual suspects:
Disclaimer: I wrote my diploma about a project around typo3, but I tested all the cms on the beforehand.

• Typo3 (www.typo3.org) T3 is not easy to start with, but when you get the concepts behind it, it is most likely the most sophisticated open source cms. It is huge in Europe.
  
• Drupal (www.drupal.org) is aimed on the more "Web 2.0"-ish projects (like Blogs or communities). It is particularly large in the US, and would be my pick if i have to do some "social site"
  
• Joomla (www.joomla.org) - the cms formally know as Mambo - is a multi purpose CMS - aimed at medium sized websites. I personally didn't liked the handling.
  

If you have a Java background you should consider looking at Ruby (on Rails) - cake is heavily inspired by rails - or some Python webframework like Django or Zope - because they are more OOP than PHP5, which should help you to make the transition from Java (they are also open source).

3) You could place the files where you want, as long as you make sure to include the path to your php-include-path. The include path is a list of directories where the PHP interpreter looks for files. My typically Zend Setup looks like this:

[Select]

localhost/
    www/ <-- this is the place where the public accessible php, html, js and css files reside - it's the document root
    app/ <-- there goes my custom phpcode - it's outside of the document root because of security issues
    lib/
        zend/ <-- I put the complete framework here

than I set the include-path in my index.php file (lies in www) with

Code: PHP [Select]

1. ini_set('include_path', ini_get('include_path') . PATH_SEPARATOR . '../lib');

you could also set this setting directly in the php.ini file (which is a better solution on the performance side) but you often haven't write access to this file on shaded hosts.

for Cake I couldn't tell you, because I haven't done a "real world" project with it.

37

PHP / Re: PHP Desinging

« on: February 28, 2008, 08:16 AM »

Q. I was told by someone that XAMPP can be used to create web-app locally and test it on local machine.But i want to create my cms and then i want to upload it to server.IS this possible?

-arunpawar (February 28, 2008, 07:54 AM)

Sure - if you have FTP (or similar) access to your webhost, you can upload the scripts to it

Q. Is there good tutorial for creating small cms or web-apps,using PHP & MySQL?

I dont know a good tutorial, but two good books for beginners
- http://www.oreilly.c...talog/9780596514013/
- http://www.oreilly.c.../catalog/0975240218/

Q. What can i do if i'm uploading large database,is MySQL & PHP enough? or do i need some other langugae?

This depends on your php configuration. If you are running on a shard host, there are typically some limits on file-upload-size (often 8MB max) and script runtimes. If your SQL Export ist bigger than your limit, you have to split it in seperate files. So    basically PHP is enough.

Q. is raw PHP code enough or do i have to use any framework like zend or cakephp?

I personally prefer learning the language first and than have a look at the frameworks. If you just want to get the thing done  you could use a framework like cake or synfony. Both are good frameworks to start with. Zend Framework and EZComponents provide more flexibility in the way how to use them, but less "automated" things like generating backend forms from db-tables (scaffolding) - I see them more as component libraries than frameworks.

bye
Andreas

38

Unicode Image Maker / Some Ideas

« on: January 22, 2008, 06:59 AM »

Hi Mouser,

I searched the web today for a tool but couldn't find anything usefull, but I think UIM could be modified to do the job. I don't know if you are still develop UIM - if not - no problem, I will find something else... OK, the problem is, that I have to do some webdesign work. Most of our clients donut want their email in plain text (because of spam bots) on their imprints (which is mandatory in germany). So I'm sitting here, firing up Photoshop, type the address, save as... close photoshop - starting Photoshop takes about 80 seconds, typing about 5 seconds So my Idea  was to find a tool which allows me to create Images from the commandline (I know ImageMagick - but don't like the results when dealing with text). I think about something like:

[Select]

UIM --text="[email protected]" --font="verdana 12px #000000" --background="transparent" email.png
UIM --text="Demoheadline" --font="verdana 22px #ffffff" --background="#0000ff" headline.png

This should result in 2 images, cropped to the bounding-box of the text, if not different specified. For handling the format, you can use a subset (font, background, width, height, textalign, padding, margin, text-decoration) of the CSS syntax which should be familiar to webworkers and css parser are available. Maybe this whole Idea is a completely new tool, but I thought UIM would be a nice foundation to build up on...

39

General Software Discussion / Re: Searching a commandline NNTP client

« on: January 04, 2008, 08:14 AM »

Hi Ralf,

thanks for the reply.

Are you after binaries, or just text?  Most of the command-line utils (nget) are geared towards downloading huge multipart binaries and assembling them for you.

-Ralf Maximus (January 03, 2008, 06:29 PM)

I only need text - I found nget on Sourceforge and think it is really big into binaries.

Windows PowerShell (a free Microsoft download) has a command-line nntp client.  Since PowerShell is at its heart a scripting environment you should be able to put something together yourself; since the nntp client's in there it *has* to be scriptable.

-Ralf Maximus (January 03, 2008, 06:29 PM)

I use Powershell alot, but never came across nntp-cmdlets. /n-Software offers 3rd Party nntp-cmdlets for 99$ but I think there isn't one built into PS. get-command and get-alias dont show me anything in this direction.

40

General Software Discussion / Re: GrabFS — Screenshots as File System…

« on: January 03, 2008, 08:03 AM »

Hmmm... I cant think of one practical use for this Nevertheless a nice proof of concept for the MacFUSE project 

41

General Software Discussion / Searching a commandline NNTP client

« on: January 03, 2008, 07:52 AM »

Hi,

can you recommend a commandline NNTP client (or simply a script)? It should support downloading the complete messages, not only headers, and store it in a standard fileformat like MailDir, MBox or an DB like MySQL. I want to get rid of my news in Thunderbird and have a way to automatically download it via batch or some other scripting language. Any suggestions?

thanks in advance
Andreas

42

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you archive your Email or MBox2CHM?

« on: December 26, 2007, 08:49 AM »

Humm, I don't really think Maildir is a good storage format for client PCs. It's nice for servers with a small-file optimized filesystem (ReiserFS comes to mind), and it's very easy to do efficient incremental backups of it. But for archive+search usage, I'd prefer bigger bulk files.

-f0dder (December 26, 2007, 08:02 AM)

For searching I could imaging putting a Lucene Search on top of the MailDir Files. But this is all theoretical because I'm satisfied with Mailstore right now

Sounds nice that MailStore uses FireBird, at least you're not going to suffer from total proprietary lockin. I wonder why they use FireBird and not SQLite though, since FB (afaik) is a full-blown client/server database, whereas SQLite was written for being embedded...

-f0dder (December 26, 2007, 08:02 AM)

There is an embedded version of firebird which requires no server on the client machine. Maybe they use Firebird because of the native .Net Data provider (Mail Store is a .NET app) for Firebird. SQLite only offers C / C++ and Tcl bindings as far as I know.

43

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you archive your Email or MBox2CHM?

« on: December 25, 2007, 07:37 PM »

Hi all,

I am coming in a little late here, but I have to ask why you all don't just use Thunderbird's mailbox folders,

-kronhead (December 25, 2007, 09:54 AM)

Because:
1) It is one large File per folder (I lost some folder because of a silly virusscanner which deleted the whole file because of one infected mail). If Thunderbird would use QMail's "Maildir"-Format, I would consider using it for archiving.
2) Cant be searched via Windows (Vista) Search
3) No really good way to keep hierarchies in message-threads (I would like to get a Mail and all follow up Mails without reimporting it to Thunderbird)

I realize I am probably wasting space - but disk is cheap, and my time is what I want to save.

-kronhead (December 25, 2007, 09:54 AM)

Space is no issue to me too

Another altogether different thought is to store all of your messages in a Google Group.

-J-Mac (December 25, 2007, 02:48 PM)

I know this article. It would be OK for new Mails, but I don't consider forwarding the the Mails to Google an option. A lot of this Mails must be encrypted before forwarding it because of some sensible client data - which destroys the searchability completely. I don't like the Idea of storing 10 Years of personal (online) history on Google-Servers (call me paranoid)...

But I didn't claim it was; crono did at the top of the page. Maybe he/she has a lot more?

-J-Mac (December 25, 2007, 02:48 PM)

I have a whole lot more the 15000 Messages in my current Thunderbird. Something around 2.3 Million (I'm on a lot of mailinglists and subscribed to some high traffic newsgroups) - Thunderbird uses ~550 MB RAM on idle. I'm totally certain TB wasn't designed for such a load...

• Either a documented storage format, or a way to output to MBOX. I don't want to be locked-in with a proprietary format. The app itself can be as proprietary and closed-source as it wants to, though.
• Has to have really good searching features, as that's obviously something you'll need for an email archive.
• Easy import from the major players and formats (at least MBOX (thunderbird etc.) and outlook/express.
• One Big File or at least just a few of them.

-f0dder (December 25, 2007, 04:29 PM)

I'm testing MailStore (see above) and it is really nice. The search is OK, it could import from a bunch of Clients (export also). They use a standard Firebird SQL Database (fka Interbase) for storage. - So it is one big file and you can open the DB and log on to it with opensource tools like "flamerobin" and a Firebird standard user (sysdba / masterkey).

thanks for the input
:-)

44

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you archive your Email or MBox2CHM?

« on: December 12, 2007, 06:40 PM »

Every form where I can choose a folder or a file are broken on my machine - maybe it's just Vista. I think its because of their "theming"-component. I just wanted to show a screenshot - but the GUI Bug (buttons are only outlined with no visible content) didn't appear on the Screenshot - I didn't know SC is a Debugger - but ok - nevertheless a really good product. Btw. I'm using the German translation - no problem on that...

45

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you archive your Email or MBox2CHM?

« on: December 12, 2007, 05:19 PM »

Thanks for the suggestions.

I tested ABC Amber and it came pretty close to that what I want (this company is really into the convert-thing ). The Demo allows only to export 10 Messages to CHM. The CHM itself was "OK", but a few things are bugging me:
1) You can only choose between TXT and HTML - not keeping both
2) It loses most of the Mail-header
After all - a good product for many users but a bit to limited for my wants...

Aid4Mail could not produce CHM files. The thing which comes closest are HTML-Archives of the Mails. The result looks like kind of Outlook Web Access with one file per mail. The big big problem with this is, its only HTML - no good way searching it.

MailStore looks really good  (but has some broken Dialog Windows - strange for an DotNet App) - very stylish Interface  . I downloaded the personal edition and imported some folders. The search is really fast (they are using (Firebird) Database in the background). I will try it with all my mails - on the upcoming weekend. Really nice software

46

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you archive your Email or MBox2CHM?

« on: December 12, 2007, 02:56 AM »

Cool - nice find  - I'll give it a try

47

General Software Discussion / How do you archive your Email or MBox2CHM?

« on: December 11, 2007, 09:20 AM »

Hi,

it's already December and I would like to archive my old Emails at the end of the year. I got about 4.5 GB of emails from the last 10 years - which make Thunderbird really slow. I would like too keep all the mail from 2007 in the client and archive older mails in some (still accessible) way. The problem is that Thunderbird keeps all mails in the MBox format what basically means one large file per folder.

I thought about these options:
1) Create a Filter to get all older Emails in a separate folder. This Folder could be compressed and backup'ed right away. MBox is plaintext so it is some way of search able but not really good readable and 100MB+ textfiles are slow when opened in an texteditor.

2) Just like 1) but transform the the MBox into Maildir - which stores mails as individual files. This solves the search and open issue but makes it really hard to find replies and followup's

Both "solutions" lacking the ability to handle attachments

My perfect solution would be as follows:
Create one CHM-File (Help File) per Folder per Year and keep the "reply-structure". CHM provides search, Index and HTML View - which would be simply great. I haven't found a tool to convert the MBox to CHM (only an Outlook Plugin). Does anyone know such a tool or another good solution? If no tool is found, I will go to code one by myself...

48

General Software Discussion / Re: RightLoad: Great Free Context Menu Tool for Uploading Images to Ftp and more

« on: September 12, 2007, 02:54 PM »

Thanks for the info - than it is a absolute must have  

49

General Software Discussion / Re: RightLoad: Great Free Context Menu Tool for Uploading Images to Ftp and more

« on: September 12, 2007, 02:30 PM »

Can it use SFTP or FTPS connections? I dont like the idea my FTP credentials getting over the wire in plaintext

50

General Software Discussion / Re: Searching a "Filesystem based event trigger tool"

« on: September 01, 2007, 09:36 PM »

@all: Thanks a lot for the hints

@nudone: This is great - it does what I want - very nice - thanks very much

@Darwin: I think PaperPorts intent is not the same as mine - its really more the Docs2PDF solution as far as I can tell

@sri: As far as the webpage goes it is something like AutoHotKey - this would be fine for the secondepart of my idea - the triggered skripts - but I dont see how I could start the macros based on filesystem events

@f0dder: This is exactly my Idea - and it hasn't be done lowlevel Win32API-Style - the dotnet Framework provides the filesystemwatcher class which is very nice for this task. I think I add this tool on my "to code"-List, just for the fun writing it

@rssapphire: Yes - this looks really nice, but LogMonitor is free, and does the job