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Site/Forum Features / About the Basement (Soap Box) Section

« Last post by mouser on July 21, 2012, 06:54 AM »

We have recently created a special section of the forum, the Basement (Soap Box), to hold discussions on matters that we have traditionally said were off limits on the forum (things like politics, religion, etc.).

Update:

I have now modified the forum so that Soap Box posts do not show up on the UNREAD posts page.

The motivation behind this change is that the soap box should be a very minor part of the forum, and that its controversial nature is likely to turn people off and make them less likely to want to participate on the forum.. or at least less likely to be civil and engage in the main subject matter that we'd like to focus on. The Soap Box is something I am still a bit uneasy about, because I feel like it has the potential for disrupting the comity and focus of the site. And I'm uncomfortable with the tone of the posts showing up side by side with the software discussions.

So anyway, this is an attempt to ensure the Soap Box remains a very very minor part of the forum.

I note that this may not be the ideal solution -- it might be better to let people to opt-in to listing new soap box posts in their unread list, for people who do want to follow such posts. For now, if you do want to follow such posts, you need only bookmark the unread posts link but with the board id of 311 specified explicitly:

For example:

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=unread;boards=311 - unread posts in soap box section
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=rtopicsdense;sort=creation;boards=311 - recent topics in soap box section

The long term policy of the DonationCoder forum is to be respectful and avoid topics like religion and politics. We set up the Soap Box so that we would have a place for discussions that became inappropriate for the main sections of the forum. But even with this section, we ask people try their best to ensure that this section does not become their focus on the site -- it's not what we are about. Use this section sparingly and make it a very small part of your stay at DC.

This forum is our home. We work hard to be welcoming and helpful to friends and strangers who hold widely differing views of life. If you are making a post that is significantly at odds with this idea, please consider whether there might not be a better website to make such a post.

[cross-posted in soap box section]

11102

Screenshot Captor / Re: Sending Filename to ShareX

« Last post by mouser on July 20, 2012, 04:55 PM »

That's a good question regarding short version of file name being sent.. I have a feeling it's Screenshot Captor's doing.. but let me look into it and add an option to not do that if it is.

11103

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: licence key did not work

« Last post by mouser on July 20, 2012, 02:36 PM »

Email me ([email protected]) and I can try to help. Let me know what actual error you got.
The most common problem is not noticing that on the free license key page there are different links for different programs, so you might want to try to redownload your license key making sure to click on the link for Process Tamer.

11104

General Software Discussion / Re: SilverStripe - Easy to use open source CMS + Framework

« Last post by mouser on July 20, 2012, 12:00 PM »

I don't have any experience with it but I look forward to hearing more about it from you as you get more experience using it.

11105

Living Room / Re: Need Critique On This Image

« Last post by mouser on July 19, 2012, 07:10 PM »

too busy now, too many blue waves. put back the tree and make it greener.

11106

Living Room / Re: Need Critique On This Image

« Last post by mouser on July 19, 2012, 02:33 PM »

Kind of a press this button to end the world feeling.

agreed

11107

T-Clock / Re: T-Clock 2010 (download)

« Last post by mouser on July 19, 2012, 10:38 AM »

I wouldn't rush off so fast LP -- Stoic Joker needs to be convinced by all of us not to give up on TClockEx -- lots of us love it and he's done such a great job maintaining it.. I hope he will reconsider and maybe keep working on it a little as he has time.. Maybe a short break is all he needs..

11108

T-Clock / Re: T-Clock 2010 (download)

« Last post by mouser on July 19, 2012, 09:06 AM »

I suggest we ignore SJ's comment about not working more on TClock and simply do not let him leave it.

11109

Living Room / Re: new DVD "M-Disc" perfect for archive material

« Last post by mouser on July 19, 2012, 08:42 AM »

nice find.

11110

Living Room / FreewareGenius: Google’s belligerent Panda Hurting Small Sites

« Last post by mouser on July 19, 2012, 08:39 AM »

From our friends at FreewareGenius today, Samer writes about how a recent change to Google's search algorithm has hurt his site's rankings and traffic.

Google’s belligerent Panda: why the way Google does algorithm updates hurts small sites and gives larger sites an unfair advantage

Google’s last Panda 3.8 update which happened in late June 2012 took away two thirds of my traffic, reducing my readership to the same level it was more than 18 months ago, and making the site essentially unsustainable, a personal cash drain that cannot be maintained in the long run. Mind you, it is not that I disagree with their policy; however, the opaque way they go about it, treating good sites like spammers and changing the entire environment in which we have operated for years without notice, is damaging and unprofessional.

But, more to the point, this article argues that these unexpected, sudden changes in the environment have this unintended consequence: that they greatly harm small sites in particular, giving an unfair advantage to larger sites with more resources.
Here’s a quick table of contents:

   Some history: this site and it’s SEO ‘Strategy’ prior to Panda 3.8
   Damage control: our initial reaction to the fall from Google’s grace
   Figuring it out: identifying the reason(s) for what happened
   My relationship with Adsense
   Recommendations: how they should have gone about this
   Why this hurts small sites more than big ones: and is this really what Google wants?

http://www.freewareg...an-unfair-advantage/

Screenshot - 7_19_2012 , 8_20_37 AM_thumb.png

A rant from me:

I have written many times about what I few is an inherently pernicious conflict of interest at the core of Google's business model. While Google may be better behaved than many companies, I think they have mastered the art of sleight of hand, having figured out a way to get massive amounts of free publicity while wrapping their greedy tentacles into every corner of every area of the technology world with the single-minded goal of making it impossible for anyone to challenge their advertising delivery network or escape it's reach.

Google is a massive machine that rolls ever forward opaquely. Trying to scream up at the machine that they have done something that has hurt you risks only being caught under the wheels and crushed slowly.

Now, there is never going to be a perfectly "fair" search ranking algorithm -- it's simply not something with an objective definition. There is no way to make everyone happy. The problem from my standpoint is twofold: first that google is incentivized to do bad things to increase their profit -- and in fact does do bad things to increase their profit (and god help us if google profits or free publicity ever starts to drop because then google is going to start tossing their ethics out the window to please the stock holders); second is that google is too big to care -- if you are a small independent writer/coder/whatever, you simply have no one at google who you can get to care about problems you are having with any of their services.

In many ways Google is our new god -- it works in mysterious ways and it does what it wants, controlling the fate of a great many small writers and entrepreneurs. The successful man does not question why google does what it does -- he simply hires a team whose purpose is to play the game of making the google happy through whatever tricks and techniques the google seems to prefer at any given moment..

11111

Find And Run Robot / Re: What's wrong with this FARR picture?

« Last post by mouser on July 18, 2012, 06:25 PM »

Exactly! I got tired of seeing READ-ONLY and moved ALL the core aliases and icons to the MyCustom folder. Not being able to edit those seemed like having a web browser preloaded with 200 bookmarks that I couldn't modify, and I didn't want to work around it anymore.

The only thing you have to worry about is that the readonly built-in aliases are overwritten when the program updates. So just remember that if you replace the built-in aliases, make sure you dont rely on having to modify the built in alias files -- instead disable the files that you want to replace.

(or of course you can always use FARR portably and not overwrite the alias files).

11112

Find And Run Robot / Re: What's wrong with this FARR picture?

« Last post by mouser on July 18, 2012, 05:19 PM »

i give up, what?

it's overly helpful?

ha!

11113

Developer's Corner / Re: Help me think of a small ipad app idea to code

« Last post by mouser on July 18, 2012, 10:52 AM »

Well no worries, I'll still be making a small ipad app once I think of a little idea. And then yes, Android is on my list for experimentation as well.

11114

Developer's Corner / Re: Help me think of a small ipad app idea to code

« Last post by mouser on July 17, 2012, 04:23 PM »

As a side rant: I absolutely hate the Mac OS approach to having one main menubar at the top of the screen that changes depending on the child window you choose, and the basic approach to having desktop windows that simply vanish into thin air until you can figure out where they went. God help us if people start to copy the way apple does things..

11115

Developer's Corner / Re: Help me think of a small ipad app idea to code

« Last post by mouser on July 17, 2012, 04:11 PM »

A quick report on getting up to speed experimenting with Ipad/Iphone development on a Mac.

My previous experiences coding for Apple products have been quite negative, and I have in general a very negative attitude towards the company and it's approach to nearly everything it does.

So you can imagine my surprise when it turned out that creating and deploying my first test application on an ipad and iphone was a wonderfully painless, smooth, even fun process..

HA! just kidding! It was basically far worse than I could have imagined. Really really a horrible convoluted, unnecessarily complicated and opaque process whose every step feels like it has been designed with the sole purpose of demonstrating the worst case vision of bureaucratic dystopia. Whether it was signing up to be given permission to pay $100 to develop applications for the ipad/iphone (which I am not kidding took about 3 weeks, 10 emails, 5 phone calls, 1 conference call) just to get the apple web site to let me register using a company name (donationcoder.com), which no one could figure out why it wouldn't go through. Or whether it was following the insane procedures for creating Provisioning Profiles, Distribution Profiles, AppIds, registering test devices, or whether it was figuring out how to trick xcode to be willing to build an iphone app that would run on my test iphone 3g (hell i would have been satisfied with a simple error message telling me why it wouldn't run rather than just silently doing nothing).

This isn't a reflection on the devices themselves or the final results, but Apple seems determined to make (getting started) developing on their platforms an honest to god hellish experience.

11116

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: download?

« Last post by mouser on July 17, 2012, 01:06 AM »

We've talked about organizing by category when we move to our new content management system later this year, and it's one of the things we will be doing.

11117

General Software Discussion / Re: Pause/Break Key has never been able to invoke the FARR!?

« Last post by mouser on July 16, 2012, 10:13 PM »

Pause/Break key is the only way to go -- I don't know how people settle for ctrl+space.

Now as to why it's not working for you, I'm not sure.. try creating a custom hotkey trigger in options and choose the Break/Pause(1) Break/Pause(3) or other alternatives.. maybe it's a non-standard keyboard issue.

Are you using a non-english keyboard? What OS do you have? Is it possible another application is blocking the key?

See what the bottom left of the custom hotkey configuration dialog in farr says regarding whether the hotkey is available.

One thing you might try is seeing if you can make the Ctrl+Break hotkey works -- if so that would be evidence that another program might be grabbing the normal break key..

Anyone else have any ideas?

11118

LaunchBar Commander / Re: bug? LBC fails to set starting directory

« Last post by mouser on July 16, 2012, 10:10 PM »

I'll check and fix; I want to release an LBC update this week so this is just one more thing to fix for it.

11119

Living Room / Re: Who's up for a DonationCoder talk show?

« Last post by mouser on July 16, 2012, 10:02 AM »

We are scheduled to have our First Annual DonationCoder Poker Tournament on August 11th, 2012. Perhaps someone would be willing to record a post-game talk show where we could talk about it.

11120

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: iPad 3 and me

« Last post by mouser on July 15, 2012, 09:03 PM »

The problem is the same thing that kept the Macintosh from becoming a useful personal computer until the arrival of the *NIX based OS-X, and that is Steve Jobs' notion that users should not have to deal with files because data "belongs" to a specific application. To my way of thinking, data is content and should exist independently of any application. I want to be able to choose the application I prefer in any particular situation to use on it. Apple deliberately set out to prevent this by not providing a file system to organize data independently of applications.

well said, though i don't think people who have't used the ipad for some time will be able to appreciate how awful this restriction is. it is a very artificial and painful limitation that you eventually come to really resent, and it's a major drawback of the apple devices.

a concrete example to help people understand the issue:

if you want to send some pdf files to your ipad to read, you PICK THE APPLICATION you want to read them with, and send the document files to that application. if you later install a new ebook reader software, guess what -- you cant read those pdf files with that new software, you have to RE-TRANSFER duplicate copies of the pdf files to the new application.

And all of this is done through itunes, a hellishly evil application whose purpose in life is to prevent you from having control over your device.

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