Recent Posts

14951

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder.com NEW SERVER ACTIVATED Dec 17, 2010

« Last post by mouser on December 18, 2010, 05:15 PM »

In case people didn't notice, we also now have a proper validated SSL Certificate, thanks to the awesome StartSSL.com, so you should be able to surf dc with https better than ever before.

14952

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: BlackJack

« Last post by mouser on December 18, 2010, 04:50 PM »

great

i want to say that i think the real value of this is that it includes the source code, so C# coders can play with it and adapt it, etc.  very nice of you to provide that 

14953

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Free 1 year license of Returnil System Safe Pro 2011! [72-hours only]

« Last post by mouser on December 18, 2010, 04:20 PM »

yeah i suppose that thread isn't very useful now that i look at it 

14954

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Free 1 year license of Returnil System Safe Pro 2011! [72-hours only]

« Last post by mouser on December 18, 2010, 02:17 PM »

Hi ashraf!

glad to see you! 

for those who are curious, more discussion on the forum about Returnil: https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=8812.0

14955

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder.com NEW SERVER ACTIVATED Dec 17, 2010

« Last post by mouser on December 18, 2010, 10:00 AM »

and now its f*cked again..

stay tuned it looks like it's not a server issue it's a packet loss problem somewhere on the softlayer network.

14956

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 :: Entry Ideas & Requests

« Last post by mouser on December 18, 2010, 06:55 AM »

Here's a new NANY idea/request:

URL Speed Tracker:

Idea: A utility meant to continuously track the speeds of opening certain web pages/downloading files.

Motivation: It can be important, especially when setting up a new server, to be able to watch the speed and watch for any failures of pages to load.  This program will continuously grab pages and track speeds over time to let you know the health of a server.

• The main interface should be a grid where you can add new urls (of pages or files).
• Then a set of columns for running speed averages, averaged over longer windows (i can elaborate later).
• A button to toggle on/off fetching.

Options:

• 1. how often it should recheck urls
• 2. it should save/load the last set of urls.

With regard to tracking over longer averages:

• A really deluxe version would be able to plot the speeds over time of a given url.
• But short of that, what one wants is some indication of avg speed over different time windows.  So for example it would be nice to know last speed (avg over 1 try), and then over maybe the last 10 tries, then over last 100, over last 1000, etc (the last value would give you a true baseline).
• Rather than keeping track of every download speed (needed if you want to graph), a simple heuristic solution to these would be to keep track of, for each url, a decaying average with a different decay rate.  ie DisplayValue = DisplayValue*Decay + NewValue  where Decay is from 0 to 1, and the lower the value the shorter the time window for averaging.

I could really use such a thing.. any takers?  if not i may code it.

Bonus:
I can see how this would be useful for cross-platform environment, and specifically if it could be run continuously in commandline mode on a linux server.  But for me right now a windows-only version would be fine.

14957

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder.com NEW SERVER ACTIVATED Dec 17, 2010

« Last post by mouser on December 18, 2010, 05:54 AM »

seems ok now.. anyone else getting pages that don't load?

14958

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder.com NEW SERVER ACTIVATED Dec 17, 2010

« Last post by mouser on December 18, 2010, 04:52 AM »

Yeah i can see the server is having some troubles.. some network traffic issues.

14959

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder.com New Server Migration Coming Soon

« Last post by mouser on December 17, 2010, 04:09 PM »

New server up -- post your celebratory post here.

14960

Official Announcements / DonationCoder.com NEW SERVER ACTIVATED Dec 17, 2010

« Last post by mouser on December 17, 2010, 04:01 PM »

IMPORTANT:

We are still experiencing some packet loss leading to pages hanging.. if you experience this please let us know, and we hope to have it fixed. ? seems like a network problem of some sort.

Also, there are things we may need to tweak over the next 24-48 hours, so buckle up!



Issues fixed:

• The server time was also a bit messed up but should be fixed now.
• Switched to UTF8 encoding; might fix some odd characters in older posts
• Attempt to fix UTF-8 problem with ? appearing with double spaces

14961

Official Announcements / DonationCoder.com NEW SERVER ACTIVATED Dec 17, 2010

« Last post by mouser on December 17, 2010, 03:55 PM »

dns propagation seems pretty fast..
if you can read this you are in the new server.

14962

General Software Discussion / Re: Your most used SPECIAL programs

« Last post by mouser on December 17, 2010, 02:32 PM »

very nice.. just another example of how the coolness of "HDR" is 90% just another cool image effect and only 10% the benefit from combining images.

there are going to be cases where real HDR, combining images at different exposures, really does make a difference, when you have really dark and lit areas in a photo that simply can't be adjusted (or not without a ton of manual work) from one photo.  that's when HDR really shines -- when you have half the scene exposed properly in one photo, and the other half of the scene exposed properly in another.

14963

Official Announcements / DonationCoder.com NEW SERVER ACTIVATED Dec 17, 2010

« Last post by mouser on December 17, 2010, 01:11 PM »

damn you.. well i got #2 at least.

14964

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder.com New Server Migration Coming Soon

« Last post by mouser on December 17, 2010, 06:47 PM »

Prepare for server migration temporary shutdown..

14965

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by mouser on December 17, 2010, 04:02 PM »

It's actually an HDR image (though i doubt that has much to do with it except for the fact that the sun doesn't "blow out" the entire image), and a paint-style effect applied to it.

To be specific, the image was shot with a Nikon D300 DLSR that was handed down to me from my father (this camera is pure joy to use and is wasted on me), using Exposure bracketing, with 5 exposures processed by Photomatix in "Painterly" effects mode.

14966

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by mouser on December 17, 2010, 11:30 AM »

Here's a photo of the building (condo) where i live, with some effects applied to it to make it more holiday-like:

14967

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Pledge: ProtoCards

« Last post by mouser on December 17, 2010, 11:27 AM »

Seems like ProtoCards is going to have to wait another year.. CodeByter got wrapped up in other work..

14968

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Teaser: JottiQ

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2010, 08:29 PM »

"Scan with JottiQ" is a tiny bit inaccurate as you say, but i still think it may be the best option.

14969

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Teaser: JottiQ

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2010, 07:51 PM »

Queue in Jotti for virus scanning
Send to Jotti for virus scanning

14970

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder.com New Server Migration Coming Soon

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2010, 07:28 PM »

ps. now that the problem has been solved.. server migration is imminent.  forum may be offline for a bit tonight while we migrate.

14971

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder.com New Server Migration Coming Soon

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2010, 06:22 PM »

we're lucky to have you!

amen -- gothi[c] has spent days working on this.. when he gets his teeth into an issue, he just does not let go until he solves it.  we are *VERY* lucky to have him as part of DC and taking such good care of our servers.

14972

Find And Run Robot / Re: Settings not being saved

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2010, 01:59 PM »

Appreciate all the reports.. i dont know why one should have to run it as Administrator but this is surely a clue of some sort.

For those who are experiencing this problem, I have created a debug version and uploaded the exe only, here:
https://www.donation.../FindAndRunRobot.zip

When you want to do is run that, then exit it so that it will attempt to save your settings.
You will want to run this as NON-administrator or whatever scenario the settings are NOT being saved, as that's what we want to know about.

And then you need to find the debugout.txt file; on windows 7 this *MAY* be somewhere in your MyDocuments area.. or in the application directory, or i guess it's even possible that you will have a hard time finding it if the source of this problem is confusion about the operating system and where such files should be saved by the program.

Once you find the debugout.txt file, send it to me ([email protected]), or open it in text editor and look for the lines with "IN SaveSettings.").

Let's see what it tells us.

14973

Finished Programs / Re: The Mouser Utility - Requested by App103

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2010, 08:40 AM »

You two need to figure out who is to blame for this monstrosity so that i know who to sue first!

14974

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Color Warlock

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2010, 07:35 AM »

Some advanced future feature request ideas to consider:

1. ability to select colors and say: "Add to custom chart.."
2. ability to PRINT a color chart.
3. ability to color pick a color from screen and show the closest NAMED colors in the known charts.
4. ability to filter/search for colors by name or hex in known charts.

14975

Living Room / Re: Host I Can = Steal I Can

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2010, 06:39 AM »

Ashraf is a really nice guy and dotTech is a nice site.  I can see how a cheap shared hosting site might tell someone that the site has too much traffic to host, and ask them to move in the near future, etc., but it sounds like they were completely unreasonable about the way they did it and their behavior afterwards.

Hang in there Ashraf!