Recent Posts

14276

Living Room / Strange subtleties of the Placebo Effect

« Last post by mouser on February 20, 2011, 09:51 AM »

Most people are familiar with the idea of the "Placebo Effect", where a pill with no medical benefits can make people feel better.

But many people are unaware of the deep and fascinating study that has gone into this effect, and the fascinating and subtle discoveries made about how things like shape, color, context, delivery device, etc. effect how well it works.

Here's a great video taking you on a tour of some of the strangeness of it all.

http://www.wired.com...-really-really-fast/

14277

General Software Discussion / Re: Freeware Telephone Support Number

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2011, 06:59 PM »

putting it on a help line is a recipe for anger imho.
most of us might find it funny, but those who need help won't.

14278

Living Room / Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2011, 05:10 PM »

Fascinating article on the recent unmasking and collapse of the security firm HBGary..

On November 16, 2009, Greg Hoglund, a cofounder of computer security firm HBGary, sent an e-mail to two colleagues. The message came with an attachment, a Microsoft Word file called AL_QAEDA.doc, which had been further compressed and password protected for safety. Its contents were dangerous.

http://arstechnica.c...-the-government.ars/

from http://yro.slashdot....ke-Online-Identities

14279

General Software Discussion / Re: Freeware Telephone Support Number

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2011, 04:13 PM »

i dont get it.

14280

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2011, 02:33 PM »

Just to confirm, after the server move at the end of december, we did basically completely lose all forum search engine traffic, resulting in a loss of about half of our traffic.  And it has not improved in the two months since then.

Take that as a warning if you ever have a website and consider moving content.

Google is the almighty god and if you somehow manage to upset it, you will never know why or how to fix, you will just be punished swiftly and silently.

14281

Living Room / Re: Borders Goes Bankrupt - The Death of Print at Retail?

« Last post by mouser on February 18, 2011, 03:11 PM »

I used a scanner on my phone to compare everything to amazon, and would browse there, and order from amazon.  I like the ability to browse a hard copy before buying,

This is where i think the future is going.. There will no longer be different kinds of retail stores. There will be only generic "Browsing Shops" which have very high-tech 3d/tactile setups where you walk into a booth and can examine, feel, and just in general "browse" any product available on the internet.  Maybe some popular items will actually have demos in the store.  But nothing will be "in stock" in the store.  You'll just place your order and have it delivered later, or pay some small "browsing free" and order at home at your convenience.

14282

Living Room / Re: Borders Goes Bankrupt - The Death of Print at Retail?

« Last post by mouser on February 18, 2011, 12:27 PM »

good read, thanks app 

14283

Living Room / A (Shockingly) Short History Of "Hello"

« Last post by mouser on February 18, 2011, 10:13 AM »

Very cool history of the word "Hello" that most of us take for granted..

The Oxford English Dictionary says the first published use of "hello" goes back only to 1827. And it wasn't mainly a greeting back then...

http://www.npr.org/b...ort-history-of-hello

from http://andrewsulliva...istory-of-hello.html

14284

Unicode Image Maker / Re: interletter spacing

« Last post by mouser on February 18, 2011, 07:38 AM »

You're right, it doesn't seem to have any effect.
I will have a look.. though you may be the only person on the planet who has tried to use it.  Is it something you really have use of?

14285

Official Announcements / Re: March 2011 DonationCoder.com Fundraiser Celebration -- Pledges?

« Last post by mouser on February 17, 2011, 11:23 PM »

yes i have prize optimizer randomizer that could be used to pick people for prizes.

14286

Living Room / Re: Was Stuxnet Worm Built to Attack Iran's Nuclear Program?

« Last post by mouser on February 17, 2011, 11:09 PM »

Very interesting new article out today:

The key to unraveling the mystery of Stuxnet is understanding the meaning of a seemingly purposeless act by the attackers behind the malware. Stuxnet was first reported on June 17, 2010 by VirusBlokAda, an anti-virus company in Belarus. On June 24, VirusBlokAda noticed that two of the Stuxnet components, Windows drivers named MrxCls.sys and MrxNet.sys, were signed using the digital signature from a certificate issued to Realtek Semiconductor. VirusBlokAda immediately notified Realtek and on July 16, VeriSign revoked the Realtek certificate. The very next day, a new Stuxnet driver named jmidebs.sys appeared, but this one was signed with a certificate from JMicron Technology. This new Stuxnet driver had been compiled on July 14. On July 22, five days after the new driver was first reported, VeriSign revoked the JMicron certificate.

The question I want to explore is why the attackers rolled out a new version of their driver signed with the second certificate. This is a key question because this is the one action that we know the attackers took deliberately after the malware became public. It’s an action that they took at a time when there was a lot of information asymmetry in their favor. They knew exactly what they were up to and the rest of us had no clue.

http://emptywheel.fi...-second-certificate/

14287

Official Announcements / Re: March 2011 DonationCoder.com Fundraiser Celebration -- Pledges?

« Last post by mouser on February 17, 2011, 08:53 PM »

I pledge to make and send a rare homemade Cody figurine to someone who donates.

14288

Screenshot Captor / Re: For Screenshot Captor "screenshot folder" option

« Last post by mouser on February 17, 2011, 02:53 PM »

Im not sure about that.. but what i could do is have it so you can always only ever have SC save ONE file.  That is, it will always overwrite the last screenshot with the new one.  So you would only ever have one screenshot file (the last screenshot you took).

14289

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mouser on February 17, 2011, 02:51 PM »

I found some interesting settings in the webmaster tools site for donationcoder.com, not sure how they got this way, OR if they have any impact, but given that the topic parameter is what signifies what page of forum posts the user is reading, it seems kind of important.



I've changed them, lets' see if it has any effect.  Of course because this is google there is no way to get a straight answer about if it will have an effect, how long it will take to see any change, etc.

14290

General Software Discussion / Re: anything better than Object Dock 2 Plus?

« Last post by mouser on February 17, 2011, 09:44 AM »

Interesting.. I could take my Launchbar Commander code (which has auto hiding features that i think work pretty well now, and on multi-monitors), and instead of showing a docking bar, show the contents of a standard file explorer view..

However, note that this would be a standard file explorer panel -- not the nice organization of files you show in your screenshot.  Or two panels, one showing folders and one showing contents of selected folder.

Wouldn't be too hard to add some filtering options based on date or extension, but im not keen on writing a whole custom file explorer display interface.

14291

Site/Forum Features / Re: New tweaks to forum - Jan 27, 2011 (apc caching, server load info)

« Last post by mouser on February 17, 2011, 09:02 AM »

The page time displayed on the bottom of the page is how long it took the server to create it and send it to you.  The real time it takes you to get the page and all of the elements has to do with network speeds,etc.  That's basically what I'm trying to point out -- a way for you to tell if the problem is specifically with our server (if the Page time listed at the bottom of forum pages is high), or something else.

14292

Site/Forum Features / Re: New tweaks to forum - Jan 27, 2011 (apc caching, server load info)

« Last post by mouser on February 17, 2011, 08:25 AM »

Remember to look at the bottom of forum pages if you find pages loading really slow for you.

We have been complaining lately to Softlayer (the hosting company) about a known problem on their network which is causing packet loss and real slowdown of page loading for lots of their customers at their Seattle data center.

And the one real way to tell if the slowdown is related to the DC server being slow or a wider network problem is to look at the "Page time" entry at the bottom of a forum page -- it shows how long it took the DC server to create and serve a page.  That will normally be < 1second.  If that is short and it took a long time for the page to load in your browser anyway, then you know the problem is not on our server but on the wider network.

14293

Timns Apps / Re: March Fundraiser Pledge: teaser

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2011, 06:40 PM »

Looks very cool 

14294

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2011, 06:09 PM »

I assume mouser that you didn't really change the robots.txt with the move anyway, so that's probably not the explanation. Yes?

very good point -- although i have played with it a little bit since the move, those disallows were mostly all there before and it didn't affect anything.

/forum/index.php?action=recent
/forum/index.php?action=recentdense

again these are pages that have lists of posts.. i suppose it wouldn't hurt to let the spider go to these pages, its just that it makes no sense indexing them since they change their content every day and just provide alternate ways to get to other pages that can be easily traversed by viewing forum pages from the board index.  though maybe it makes sense to let the spider go to those pages and just put meta tags on them to tell the spider not to save the contents of those pages in their indices.

14295

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2011, 03:20 PM »

sorry if i was inelegant.. what i was saying is that a blank disallow makes the robot walk into the SEARCH results page, and indexing incredible amounts of duplicate content by indexing specific searches.  just image it trying to index 10,000 pages of search results of searching for the term "the".

the disallows are important in blocking the search bot from treating every page of every page of SEARCH RESULTS as an independent content page on the site.

the disallows are important not just for blocking areas that are private (administration areas) but also links that lead to duplicate content that is better indexed on other canonical pages of the forum.

the goal is to have google index the topic pages (of the form https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=13531).


Same can be said for blocking the search indexing bot from drying to duplicate index every page by indexing both its normal form and the identical content delivered by the
https://www.donation...ntpage;topic=13531.0 links that exist for every page.


The insane part is that we go to the trouble of creating a full sitemap for google.. then have a way for web masters to tell them about the sitemap. they have a configuration page where they will test it and report on it.  and then they completely ignore it and have no way of letting you find out why they are completely disregarding it.  brilliant.   it would be comical if it wasn't so god d*amn insanely stupid and frustrating:

14296

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2011, 03:09 PM »

i dont want to upload a blank robots.txt -- bad thinks happen when you do that on the forum -- bots start trying to index pages and pages of search results.

14297

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2011, 02:53 PM »

here's the redirect in our .htaccess: RedirectMatch permanent ^/Forums/bb(.*)$  https://www.donationcoder.com/forum$1

and here's the robots.txt: https://www.donationcoder.com/robots.txt

i have submitted the "request" to reindex the site.

14298

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Journal/Diary Software

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2011, 01:46 PM »

 

14299

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2011, 12:57 PM »

It's now 2 months after our server move.

We used to have posts on the forum being indexed by google so fast that they are in the search engine a day or two after a post,

And now 2 months after our move I cannot find a single forum post from the recent past (i went back many moths before the server move) in the google search engine.

While the main site pages are still indexed, the forum seems to have been basically dissapeared from the google search engine.
our site maps are parsed and judged correct by google web analytics, but completely and explicitly ignored (and there is no way to figure out why).

And i can't find any way to get anyone's attention at google, no idea how to find out what's wrong, no idea how to correct it, who to complain to, etc.

And people wonder why i have a negative view of google.

If anyone can help, knows someone to contact, or is willing to help -- please help.  I am just giving up -- It's just too frustrating for me, I can't handle these kinds of things.

14300

General Software Discussion / Re: Bulk Creating Folders

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2011, 09:36 AM »

I think there were actually a few coding snacks that bulk create folders in different ways..
There was definitely one to do as Ath says, make batch folders based on a text file.