Recent Posts

13376

Living Room / Re: Stop Forum Spam!

« Last post by mouser on June 03, 2011, 12:26 PM »

StopForumSpam works, and is a very useful service 

13377

Little Voice Commander / Re: Latest Little Voice Commander Release v1.35.01 - May 31, 2011

« Last post by mouser on June 03, 2011, 12:25 PM »

A new version has been uploaded (v1.36.01).

In this version if the SAPI speech runtimes are not found, a much more intelligible warning is displayed explaining the problem of the missing SAPI runtimes and instructing how to fix.

And furthermore, the program will then continue to operate with simple keyboard presses instead of speech.

And a new option is present to disable speech recognition features, which will also disable the initial warning.

13378

Little Voice Commander / Re: Latest Little Voice Commander Release v1.35.01 - May 31, 2011

« Last post by mouser on June 03, 2011, 09:25 AM »

right ok, so it sounds like its needing MS speech to be installed even if you try to disable it.  i'll fix that.

13379

Little Voice Commander / Re: Latest Little Voice Commander Release v1.35.01 - May 31, 2011

« Last post by mouser on June 03, 2011, 07:40 AM »

Ah well the speech engine download is only needed for windows xp, and should not be needed if you dont enable speech option in the program.
i'll check and fix it if it is.

13380

Little Voice Commander / Re: Latest Little Voice Commander Release v1.35.01 - May 31, 2011

« Last post by mouser on June 03, 2011, 03:45 AM »

A few quick points:

• You can disable the speech recognition part, and it will just respond to keys tapped on the keyboard.
• The download size is large, but that has nothing to do with the speech support, it's because the download includes a couple hundred images.
• At some point I very well may break up the download into two parts, a core download, and an image pack download.  That would make it easier to update.

13381

Living Room / Website lets you practice using SLR Camera controls

« Last post by mouser on June 02, 2011, 07:41 AM »

I know I'm not alone in struggling to understand the concepts and interactions between SLR camera settings like aperature, ISO, and shutter speed.
This website has a very neat instant simulator of some basic SLR controls, showing how a picture would turn out with the different settings.
Very nice way to come to terms with the relationships between these settings:

http://camerasim.com...amera-simulator.html

from http://www.ilovefree...-use-slr-camera.html

13382

General Software Discussion / Re: who can set up WordPress for me?

« Last post by mouser on June 02, 2011, 06:55 AM »

Do you already have the web hosting account and just need someone to do the actual installation and configuration?

13383

Find And Run Robot / Re: Top 10 Find and Run Robot Techniques Every User Should Know About

« Last post by mouser on June 02, 2011, 06:40 AM »

TIP 1: Scroll Through Your Search History With Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down

Many FARR users don't realize that the Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down hotkeys can be used to scroll through their past search history.

This can be extremely useful in re-running searches that you've run recently.

And most importantly, past search history includes exactly what you typed in the search box which can be quite different from the history of previous launch applications.  As such, it's very useful for recalling previous alias invocations.

Bonus tip for pros: You can actually type: historys in the search box to see a list of your past searches and select from them directly.

13384

Find And Run Robot / Top 10 Find and Run Robot Techniques Every User Should Know About

« Last post by mouser on June 02, 2011, 06:24 AM »

I will update this post with my top 10 tricks and tips in the next day or so.. if you have any nominations send me a personal message on the forum.

13385

Living Room / Re: Microsoft unveils new UI prototype - Windows 8?

« Last post by mouser on June 01, 2011, 07:55 PM »

Looks like a cool interface for a wall mounted art display or a pad-based infotainment device.. and a painfully horrid general interface for an operating system.

All I can say is: I hope it has a Windows 2000 User Interface option buried somewhere in the control panel.

13386

Living Room / Re: General Poll: What should there be more of on DonationCoder?

« Last post by mouser on June 01, 2011, 10:11 AM »

I don't want to bite off too much at once, and there is so much custom smf work on our forum (donationcredits, etc.) so i think we'll keep the smf forum.
But on the other hand, maybe it would not be the best idea to tie ourselves even further to smf by using an smf-specific cms (like tiny portal).
So I think maybe using a generic cms (drupal, for example) might be the way to go.
But let's not have the "which cms to use" discussion on this thread, we can save that for another.

13387

Developer's Corner / Re: Buy & Sell Source Code

« Last post by mouser on June 01, 2011, 08:15 AM »

I want to echo Renegade in welcoming you to the site, and wishing you great success.

It sounds to me like you have a extraordinarily good grasp of the issues, including the reasons why developers often don't try to sell their code (i'd only add the reluctance to commit to providing an unpredictable degree of technical support), the benefits of a service like yours, and the kinds of code that may be hard to sell and why.

We are big fans of kickstarter here, and the idea of another similar service focused on software is a great one -- the more of this kind of group funding for software development, the better.  There are sooo many coders who are not in a position to find funding for great project ideas, and need some help in this area.  The ideas are good, the programming skill is there, but the ability to raise the initial small amount of money to pay for initial development is just not in their skill set.

Please keep us informed about your projects and best of luck to you and your site

13388

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by mouser on June 01, 2011, 07:58 AM »

I'm about half-way through "Behind Deep Blue", the accidental story of the Deep Blue, the first computer chess machine to get good enough to beat the world's best human chess players.  It's written by the engineer who led the team (Feng-hsiung Hsu).

Although there is a lot of hardware engineering that I don't understand, and very little discussion of AI, which i would have really appreciated, it's still very enjoyable reading and is one of those books that makes you want to go out and tackle an interesting scientific/engineering problem.  Lot's of discussion of the human emotions and misteps behind the race to build the world's best computer chess hardware.

13389

Developer's Corner / Re: SWF 2 EXE "open source" release help, please

« Last post by mouser on June 01, 2011, 04:21 AM »

Write your own license and specify what people must do to use your code.  You can put most anything you want.

The "official" open source definition has some restrictions -- mostly that people can modify your code and create new versions.  But you are mostly free to add additional terms like they must link to your site and include a text file that you wrote whenever they share their changes, etc.  Although we don't have many Open Source experts here, i know that many of us here would be happy to read any license text you write and help you improve it so that it suits your needs.

But: When you say have the project hosted on your forum -- what do you mean?  You will have a hard time *forcing* people to use your forum to discuss their versions of the software, HOWEVER I think in reality you will find that they will all WANT to use your forum to discuss it.  There is no motivation not to.  But maybe you have something else in mind regarding what you mean by "hosting" it?

13390

Living Room / Re: General Poll: What should there be more of on DonationCoder?

« Last post by mouser on May 31, 2011, 03:56 AM »

More and more i'm thinking the best first thing we could do for DC health overall might be to move to a real CMS system for the site (leaving the forum unchanged as SMF).

With the rest of the site set up as a CMS, we could easily have a proper download area where authors could update their own entries, providing a logical software organization area, and just in general make it much easier for different people to maintain and update.

I think in terms of moving forward and letting more people participate in creating content -- it's the natural first step since our current handcoded html page setup makes it particularly hard for others to manage the site content.

13391

Little Voice Commander / Re: Adding spoken word option

« Last post by mouser on May 31, 2011, 01:11 AM »

Thanks to Renegade a new version (1.35) is now available with speech option, and includes over 100 speech audio files, one for every image.
Users can also of course add their own custom images and audio files.
See main forum post for more info.

13392

Little Voice Commander / Re: Latest Little Voice Commander Release v1.35.01 - May 31, 2011

« Last post by mouser on May 31, 2011, 01:03 AM »

Version 1.35.01
Now includes over 100 audio voice files provided by DC member Renegade (Ryan Smyth) that can speak each word as it is displayed.  Thanks Ryan!  Users can create their own audio files (as well as their own image files).

13393

Developer's Corner / Re: Buy & Sell Source Code

« Last post by mouser on May 30, 2011, 08:08 AM »

I've written about this so much I must sound like a broken record, but I think I have the opposite impression than Stoic Joker.

I think the Open Source movement/culture has done an amazing amount of good for this world, an astronimical amount of good.  But I suspect that it has done one terrible and lasting harm, which is to instill in everyone the idea that all software code should be free of charge, and no one should pay (voluntarily or not) for any software.  Paying for *STUFF* is still the accepted practice, as long as that stuff is physical or service based -- but the resistance to paying for code has become incredibly high, and i don't think that bodes well for programmers.

[I note that there is nothing irreversibly incompatible with the open source movement and the idea of paying coders for their work -- though having large numbers of collaborators does make that more difficult; that's why i always emphasize the cultural aspect of open source software, and the incredible resistance people have to contributing financially to a project if they aren't forced to].

13394

Living Room / Re: Backup Strategy: "The Threes"

« Last post by mouser on May 30, 2011, 07:18 AM »

Sounds like you are doing things right chris -- i wish i was as disciplined about keeping offsite copies, it's my one weakness.

Another thing that has changed in recent years is that drives are really cheap enough that i think it makes sense to treat them as basically write-once permanent backup media.  That is, I think it makes sense to think about buying a new 1 or 2 TB drive each year to use as a backup and download repository, never erasing anything, and simply placing it on the shelf (or offsite) when it gets filled up, and then buy a new one, leaving the old full drives for emergency restoration should something really go wrong.

13395

DcUpdater / Re: Make_versioninfo.ahk - Generate versioninfo.xml

« Last post by mouser on May 30, 2011, 05:58 AM »

very nice, thank you. 

13396

General Software Discussion / Re: Project Creator Application (but I feel kinda givin' it up)

« Last post by mouser on May 30, 2011, 04:23 AM »

Gonna have a look on them, I promise. Though I'm familiar with PHP and Python, RoR is not my ground, but if it'd solve the problem, then let's go.

you dont actually want ruby on rails stuff -- that's not going to be helpful.  but i believe that some of the ROR inspired *PYTHON* frameworks do use a generic tool for this.  Check out django, pylons, pyramid.  I believe at least one of those uses a generic tool that does this kind of thing.

that's not at all to say it's not worth starting a new project to do this, just that it might give you a better idea of what's out there.

13397

General Software Discussion / Re: Project Creator Application (but I feel kinda givin' it up)

« Last post by mouser on May 30, 2011, 03:02 AM »

• First of all, welcome to the site royaljerry 
• Second, i think this is a great idea.
• Third, there are some tools for this already, though I am not very familiar with them.  And there has been some discussion of this idea on the forum before -- I'll try to find if others don't.  One place you see such tools is in some of the ruby-on-rails style web applications.  They are different from what you are interested in, but some of them use a generic template/folder/project building system.
• Fourth, i do think python is actually a good choice for such a tool; it can support a gui and has nice easy file management stuff, and can easily be extended to do additional things.  Autohotkey could also do it fine on windows.

Look forward to seeing links that others may post and seeing this thread continue.

13398

Find And Run Robot / Re: [Feature request/Plugin idea] add search in dictionary.com

« Last post by mouser on May 29, 2011, 09:34 AM »

Hi Werizon,

Your question is a perfect one for using the webgrab plugin, and ewemoa, the author of the webgrab plugin, suggested the solution to me in a personal message:
You can accomplish what you want using the dosearchontrigger command.

Here is the alias import text; you can go to the alias tab, open up myaliases.alias and right-click to "import" this:

Code: Text [Select]

1. 1000>>>mdict>->search reference.com for "$$1" | dosearchontrigger webgrab http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/$$1 `<div id="rpane">([\s\S]*)<div id="v2" class="sep_top">` `%1` html>+>^mdict (.+)$

Alternatively here is a screenshot of the alias:


Essentially what you are doing here is telling FARR to *perform* the webgrab "search" after the user types something that matches the expression "mdict blah.." and then hits enter; so this acts as if the user had typed "webgrab http://...." with the $$1 replaced.

13399

DcUpdater / Re: Run program after update?

« Last post by mouser on May 29, 2011, 09:23 AM »

a) Is it possible to run a program after downloading an 'unzip' type update? The zip file would contain a program that I want to start after unzipping.

not yet, but i will add it.

b) If instead I use the Run updatemethod, how do i pass parameters to my setup file so that I can run it silently?

hadn't considered that but i can add an option for it.

13400

General Software Discussion / Re: Software recommendations for writers

« Last post by mouser on May 29, 2011, 01:14 AM »

I'm thinking about putting together a page for these things

-caveatrob (May 26, 2011, 05:44 PM)

I think that would be very useful