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14376

Official Announcements / Re: March 2011 DonationCoder.com Fundraiser Celebration -- Ideas for Special Events?

« Last post by mouser on February 11, 2011, 09:27 AM »

Some dangerous ideas:

• Could we pull together enough DC coders to do a Coding-Snack-A-Day throughout all of march?
• Could we pull together enough DC mini-review writers to do a mini-review-a-day throughout all of march?

14377

Official Announcements / March 2011 DonationCoder.com Fundraiser Celebration -- Ideas for Special Events?

« Last post by mouser on February 11, 2011, 09:22 AM »

So we are going to have a fundraiser/celebration for DonationCoder.com in the month of March 2011.  The last fundraiser was 2 years ago.

My question is, can we think of any special events or things we could do to make it funner for existing members, and for new visitors who haven't heard of us?

I know giveaways are always popular, but my preference would be things that reflect more the spirit of the site, and are more inviting of long-term participation by new people, etc.  Yes we want donations during the fundraiser, but we'd also like to welcome our arms to new coders and new forum participants, etc.

Any ideas?

14378

Screenshot Captor / Re: Sound: How to turn off beep

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 09:00 PM »

Fix solved on the other thread; locking this one now.

14379

Screenshot Captor / Re: Windows standard beep ("ding") when changing between screenshots

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 08:58 PM »

Yay 

Thanks everyone for discovering and posting about the bug and for not getting so frustrated that you gave up on SC.

And special thanks Bamse for discovering the cause of the bug.  

ps. I actually used to embed this manifest in Screenshot Captor for quite some time -- it has the extra benefit of letting windows Vista/7 theme the controls so it looks more native.  I must have stopped embedding the manifest some time ago though, probably when the location of visual studio resource compiler changed on my system...

14380

Screenshot Captor / Re: Windows standard beep ("ding") when changing between screenshots

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 08:53 PM »

By the way:

For those suffering from this bug -- please don't fix it using the techniques in those articles (yet).

Leave your system as it is so you can help me make sure I fix Screenshot Captor to avoid the bug.

After that you may want to do the fixes or at least bookmark the articles in case you come across another application that suffers from the same problem.

14381

Screenshot Captor / Re: Windows standard beep ("ding") when changing between screenshots

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 08:50 PM »

It seems very clear that the article Bamse found is the root explanation for the beep.

I see more discussions of this problem all over:
http://www.eggheadca...ew-beep-problem.aspx

And official MS bulletin about it:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944150

Furthermore it seems to affect Vista only (or primarily), and all the sufferers on this thread are using Vista.  So this is definitely the problem.

Now I won't comment on the wisdom of sticking with Vista except to say that everyone seems to agree Windows 7 is a huge improvement.

It should be possible for me to fix Screenshot Captor to avoid this Vista "bug" -- if the manifest trick doesnt work i will try something else.

14382

Screenshot Captor / Re: Windows standard beep ("ding") when changing between screenshots

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 08:42 PM »

Ok for the fun of it let's try a version of Screenshot Captor with an embedded manifest (hopefully if i did it right) that tells it to use version 6 of the microsoft common controls, as suggested in that article:

https://www.donation...nshotCaptorSetup.exe

ps. for those of you who recently downloaded from the beta link, please carefully watch when the installer runs and make sure it says in the first page of the installer that it is installing v2.90.01 -- otherwise you have cached version of the download.

let me know if that miraculously solves the beep.

14383

Screenshot Captor / Re: Windows standard beep ("ding") when changing between screenshots

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 08:19 PM »

What process is searching for that file?  I am totally confused.  Is this happening because your Windows System sounds configuration is messed up specifying to use a sound file that doesn't exist, leading windows itself to try to conduct a search for a missing sound file?  Or is something else happening?

And I still don't understand if we're saying that the fix to this problem is to fix a bad configuration in your System Windows Sounds, or if we're saying there it something that Screenshot Captor is doing that is causing windows to get confused about what sound to play, etc.

14384

Screenshot Captor / Re: Windows standard beep ("ding") when changing between screenshots

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 08:16 PM »

An interesting comment in that thread is:

That's actually a bug in the v5 common controls.  If your app is manifested to use the v6 common controls it won't happen.

So i might be able to fix it by adding details to manifest of screenshot captor.

14385

Screenshot Captor / Re: Windows standard beep ("ding") when changing between screenshots

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 08:10 PM »

That article is a really nice find Bamse, it seems to suggest that the beep has to do with a general windows setting in any file explorer.

You guys suffering from it could confirm that it's not screenshot captor specific by opening up windows explorer and selecting items through it.

However i don't understand the screenshot Bamse posted or what you are saying about what you were searching for, etc.  Could you explain?

14386

Screenshot Captor / Re: Non-english characters changed to underscore when renaming a screenshot

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 06:59 PM »

f0dder has it right -- in this case the conversion is simply happening because my code is being overly paranoid about trying to clean up the filename before saving it, getting rid of not just known illegal filename characters but any characters that seem out of the ordinary.  I should be able to fix it simply be relaxing the conversion rules -- look for an update in the next few days.

14387

Screenshot Captor / Re: Windows standard beep ("ding") when changing between screenshots

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 06:56 PM »

If you exit SC and restart it, does the beep on select start happening right away when you start selecting files?  or does it only start happening once youve been using the program for a while?

If you look at the statubar on screenshot captor, do you see any text there that seems unusual when you select a file?

14388

Developer's Corner / Re: How did WordPress win?

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 06:15 PM »

This part really jumped out at me, as relevant for free software developers:

What resonated with customers first and foremost however was not WordPress' license, but the fact that it was unambiguously free. Back then no one knew that much about open source, much less the GPL, but what they did know was all that mattered: open source means free. Period. Forever.

The fact that Movable Type was in all reality free for the vast majority of people using it was irrelevant because it was never clear when Movable Type was free and when it was not. And what users feared most of all, is a repeat of exactly what happened the day Movable Type announced its licensing change: one day waking up to the realization that you owe some company hundreds, if not thousands of dollars1 and not being able to afford or justify the cost monetarily or on principle.

But then this shocked me:

One thing rarely cited by the outside world, probably because it was not visible or apparent to anyone, was the systematic targeting of high profile brands to switch from using any competing platform to using WordPress.  In fact, in the four years I was at Six Apart, if I had a dollar every time a significant and loyal TypePad and Movable Type customer confided in me that an employee of Automattic cold called them to encourage and entice them to switch to WordPress I would have quit a rich man. Automattic would extend whatever services it could, at no expense to the customer, getting them to switch. They would give away hosting services. They would freely dedicate engineers to the task of migrating customers' data from one system to another. They would do whatever it took to move people to WordPress.

I continue to feel like a naive idiot whenever I hear about some open source software company being so aggressive about trying to grab marketshare in order to make money in the long run.. My brain just can't quite wrap around open source as a cut throat business model.

14389

Developer's Corner / How did WordPress win?

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 06:11 PM »

Interesting article from Movable Type, a blogging system that was once as popular as WordPress but lost the popularity contest..

Believe it or not, members of the Movable Type community often wonder the same thing. Most recently someone in the ProNet community, frustrated by their experience with WordPress, asked the question: how on Earth did WordPress win the battle over Movable Type?" The question was rhetorical, but sparked a very interesting dialog in our community.

In the past I have refrained from answering such questions, or if I did, I would not respond publicly, for reasons I can only attribute to a mentality that was beaten into me while I worked at Six Apart.. This time however, "to hell with it" I say. Let's talk about this. Let's see what lessons can be learned from WordPress so that others seeking to build a successful product can learn from it.

http://www.majordojo...id-wordpress-win.php

from http://www.gadgetopia.com/

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Non-english characters changed to underscore when renaming a screenshot

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 02:45 PM »

Finding a unicode compiler is not so much a problem.. but where do i trade my old out of date brain in for a unicode brain?

14391

Screenshot Captor / Re: Non-english characters changed to underscore when renaming a screenshot

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 02:03 PM »

i should be able to fix.

14392

Screenshot Captor / Re: Windows standard beep ("ding") when changing between screenshots

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 02:02 PM »

you shouldn't be hearing any beep? what version of screenshot captor are you using?

can you see if it happens with this version: https://www.donation...nshotCaptorSetup.exe

14393

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Snap DB

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 08:51 AM »

Just a friendly normal reminder to people -- if you like what a coder on the site is doing, consider making a little donation to them to say thanks.

14394

General Software Discussion / Re: Axialis License Key Frustrations

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 06:17 AM »

Lest we seem ungrateful I think we might want to repeat:

THANK YOU TO AXIALIS for being so generous to donate copies of IconWorkshop, which is a fantastic program  

(and we should consider that maybe one of the reasons that the giveaway of copies might have been a bit confusing is just because giving away copies is a bit unusual, compared to mailing out a customer their info once they purchase it.)

14395

Official Announcements / Re: Expect some final server hiccups this weekend (2/5/11) - final fixes

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 04:57 AM »

it was so hairy we had to put it off for a week, but after a day of high stress panic, i think we finally figured out the original cause of the character set problems, and a final fix that should make everything perfect going forward.  forum should be down for a few minutes on thursday while we do the final tweaks.

14396

Living Room / Re: A question for Google -- why are you so desperate to have me switch to Chrome?

« Last post by mouser on February 10, 2011, 03:52 AM »

Lots of speculation in this thread.. I tend to think along the same lines as vlastimil, though i wouldn't be surprised if google doesn't have an offensive use planned for Chrome as well as a defensive use.

But still.. I'd really like to know what Google themselves say there reasons are for spending so much money pushing Chrome.

14397

Developer's Corner / Re: DNS Propogation Checkers to Check DNS Propogation Status

« Last post by mouser on February 09, 2011, 04:51 PM »

 

14398

Developer's Corner / DNS Propogation Checkers to Check DNS Propogation Status

« Last post by mouser on February 09, 2011, 06:21 AM »

I didn't even think about the possibility of such utilities but i can certainly see why they would be useful when moving servers:

As written up on the ilovefreesoftware.com site:

http://www.ilovefree...pogation-status.html

Here are 5 DNS Propogation Checkers to check DNS propogation status of your website. These tools are helpful if you have recently setup a new domain, or have changed nameservers of an existing domain. DNS propogation normally takes 24-48 hours, but these DNS Propogation checkers will tell you exactly what is the current status of DNS propogation

14399

Living Room / Re: which is more important, system ram or video ram?

« Last post by mouser on February 08, 2011, 08:36 AM »

A simple traditional benchmark is not going to show you the real effect of RAM or having fast/multicore cpus.  You will really see the effect of such things when you start using multiple large application on your pc, or when you start having many tabs open in your browser.  That's when applications start competing for memory and cpu, and where the inability to keep all of the needed memory in ram will start to dramatically slow things down.

14400

Multi Photo Quotes / Re: Add video panels to MultiPhotoQuotes?

« Last post by mouser on February 08, 2011, 08:05 AM »

well give the current version a try and see if you can figure out what kind of features would be useful.

right now you can't do the kind of micro-managing you seem to be interested in -- it's much more focused on showing random items (though you can say things like i always want at least one photo, one text quote, etc., and if i add video you would always be able to say things like i want one and only one video frame, etc.).

as for audio -- i think we are definitely drifting further away from the intended use as a screensaver thing.. but i'm always open to the possibility of other uses.

however it does need to be said that you are the only person in 6 months to express the slightest interest in this so it's not exactly high on my priority list..