Recent Posts

16326

Living Room / Re: The Psychology of the Sale

« Last post by mouser on May 15, 2010, 12:22 AM »

 

16327

Find And Run Robot / Re: Shortcut to launch with admin privileges?

« Last post by mouser on May 14, 2010, 04:35 PM »

thanks for the report -- i'll check -- sounds like i just forgot to handle that case.

16328

Living Room / Re: The Psychology of the Sale

« Last post by mouser on May 14, 2010, 04:05 PM »

Upon reflection i think it would be fair to say that the free software/service community does have something akin to a "sale" in terms of attention -- and that's the "fundraiser" -- and i think it's fair to say that free software developers do get some attention when they have fundraisers.

16329

Living Room / The Psychology of the Sale

« Last post by mouser on May 14, 2010, 03:28 PM »

I've been thinking recently about the psychology of "sales" -- the way we shoppers respond to the idea of getting a bargain -- and what it means for software authors and companies who want to just price their products reasonably from the start, or offer them up as donationware.

Here's an article by Jonah Lehrer, whose "Frontal Cortex" blog is one of the more consistently readable and insightful science blogs on the internet:

• http://scienceblogs....logy_of_the_sale.php

In it he talks about the competing signals sent when things are on sale -- the very strong initial incentive a sale creates in the minds of buyers, even when they don't need a product -- followed by a more complex alteration of brand.

Advertising is an old business, but i think one of the newer aspects that is of some concern and note in the internet age is that on the web it seems that attention is king, and the difference between a company going bankrupt and having record sales (or going broke and having lots of donations) can come down simply to whether other popular sites write about your products and present them as valuable.

And my fear is that this more central role of attention and press in the internet age results in a real disadvantage to software authors in terms of offering their software at low prices or asking for donations -- i worry that an open source game that asks for donations won't get anyone writing about how it's a good idea to support the product, wheras a game that started out priced at $50 but then dropped to $10 will create a huge amount of press and attention and thus a large number of customers.

So.. are we getting to the point where companies have to do these kabuki dances on the internet where they have one normal price that they set quite high, specifically so they can offer "sales" and "discounts" to get attention?  And does this spell doom for donationware authors don't have the ability to have "sales" ("for one week only -- donate half what you normally would!")?

In fairness, free software has its own special appeal on the internet, and gets a fair amount of attention over commercial products by nature of being free -- so that does offset this problem somewhat.  However.. we still have the pernicious problem where most people would crawl over glass to pay half price for an expensive piece of software than make a tiny donation to an equally good free alternative.

16330

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARRFox plugin problem with Opera and Firefox Bookmarks

« Last post by mouser on May 13, 2010, 10:35 PM »

maybe opera has changed their bookmark format?

16331

Living Room / Drunk History Videos

« Last post by mouser on May 13, 2010, 06:27 PM »

I happened on these today.. normally i'd rather get punched in the eye than listening to drunk people talk, but i find these NSFW (language) videos hilllarious.

Basically it's a celebrity who is really drunk, who tells a true (roughly) tale from american history, and then comedians re-enact the story.  It's bit hard to describe but their are real moments of brilliance.  There is quite a bit of cursing that makes it NSFW.

http://www.funnyordi.../drunkhistory/videos

start with this one maybe: http://www.funnyordi...adle-zooey-deschanel

from http://waxy.org/links/

16332

Developer's Corner / Nice video from game designer analyzing camera movement on a platform game

« Last post by mouser on May 13, 2010, 04:56 PM »

This is a nice discussion for anyone interested in the subtleties of controlling the camera view in a video game.  DC server admin Gothic (John) has actually been working on a 2d space game recently and this issue has come up in our discussions about it.

Following yesterday’s analysis of Super Mario Bros. 3, today I spent some time with the camera behavior in Super Mario World. The Free-moving behavior gains some new sub-behaviors, including locking vertical camera movement to the top of the map and locking vertical camera movement relative to Mario’s last standing position on a platform (fixed or moving) or water exit point. Smart.

from http://waxy.org/links/

16333

Living Room / Company releases cracked version of their game rather than recompile it

« Last post by mouser on May 13, 2010, 04:44 PM »

This is hilllarious..

..Jamie noticed a fairly amazing little story about Rockstar shipping a version of Max Payne 2 via Steam that was actually cracked by pirates to remove the DRM. The going theory was that it was easier for them to simply use the pirate group's crack than to actually remove their DRM themselves.

16334

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 :: Announcement

« Last post by mouser on May 13, 2010, 03:48 PM »

That would be great.. it would be wonderful to get out the word early to other programmers who don't know about NANY, and welcome some new people into the process!

16335

Developer's Corner / Re: StCroixSkipper's NTFS USN Journal Explorer

« Last post by mouser on May 13, 2010, 10:07 AM »

Very cool.

16336

Living Room / Re: could two numeric keypads work at the same time

« Last post by mouser on May 13, 2010, 07:15 AM »

 

16337

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Pledge: Mouser App

« Last post by mouser on May 13, 2010, 03:39 AM »

i will be asking for lots of feedback as i get going.

16338

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / NANY 2011 RELEASE: Webcam Video Diary

« Last post by mouser on May 13, 2010, 12:45 AM »

NANY 2011 Release

Application Name	Webcam Video Diary
Short Description	A program to help you quickly record, label, and manage videos and photos from your webcam throughout the day
Supported OSes	WinXp to Win7
Official Web Page and Download	https://www.donation...er/WebcamVideoDiary/
Official Forum Discussion Section	https://www.donation...ndex.php?board=300.0
Author	Mouser

Description
Webcam Video Diary is a program to help you to easily record lots of videos and snapshots from your webcam and keep notes associated with them.

Features

• It can live in the system tray and take videos and snapshots via configurable hotkeys.
• It will auto name files and sort them into subdirectories based on the current date.
• It has a million options to control the format of recordings and the user interface so that you can configure it to work exactly the way you want it to.
• Text notes can be associated with each recording, which are kept in plaintext files matching the media file name.

Screenshots

(more screenshots on official webpage)

Usage
Installation
Comes with installer and has update support.  Setup installer may alternatively be unpacked with any unzip program and the program run portably without using the installer.  You will need to download a free donationcoder.com license key to use the program permanently.

Uninstallation
Setup program has uninstall support; no changes are made to your system or registry.

Known Issues
This is still in very early stages of development, so be prepared for some hiccups in current version.  Make sure you customize the video file format and compression options or you will end up with huge files.

16339

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 :: Announcement

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 11:43 PM »

Thank you Perry for so enthusiastically championing the NANY events!

To everyone on the forum, we asked for your help in figuring out how to improve NANY -- and we took your comments very seriously -- so seriously that we reversed course.  Instead of adding more "rules" and deadlines, NANY 2011 is now simpler and less complicated to participate in.

But now it's time to really ask for your help.  We really would love NANY to be a great experience for both the coders and for the visitors to the site looking for new creations to use in their daily lives.  Please help us make this NANY better than ever before.

If you are a coder and a friend of DonationCoder -- show it by committing to creating a substantial new project to release on January 1st as part of NANY.  My promise is that we will honor your work and celebrate it.  I'd love to see some real showstopper serious applications this time!

I promise to release a new big application, I hope you fellow coders will join me and make this the excuse you need to start on a new project.  Will you?

16340

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

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 09:00 PM »

also this would be a perfect case where pcommand would be useful -- so that one doesnt have to change the search text with restartsearch in order to trigger it.

16341

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

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 08:59 PM »

I think webgrab would have to be modified to optionally display the result in html mode, as it currently tries to display results in memo mode.

<mouser> what you need is an option to allow it to output to html mode
<mouser> you could simply autodetect by looking for one of some common text
<mouser> like
<mouser> <p> <a href or <div or <ul
<mouser> if any of those are found, use the showhtml
<mouser> instead of showmemo

16342

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

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 08:32 PM »

ewe is being modest as always.. it's not "possibly related", it's actually a plugin that ewemoa made that is exactly what you want.

16343

Living Room / Re: Identity Theft OFFLINE - Get ready to be VERY scared

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 08:11 PM »

this goes way beyond the dangers of identity theft, and is so outrageous and could have been entirely foreseen as a huge security risk by copy machine makers..

in fact it reeks of a purposeful "bug" in the system put in place for national security reasons. ironic that it's ending up backfiring on the security/police organizations.

16344

Find And Run Robot / Re: latest update messed up my toolbar?

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 07:31 PM »

depending on how you set your configdir.ini file and what operating system you use, it would normally be either in the FARR directory, or in your MyDocuments\DonationCoder\FindAndRunRobot directory.

16345

Programmer Libs / MwImporter php script - Batch import html site into MediaWiki - v2.0 - 5/26/10

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 07:09 PM »

Official web page here: https://www.donation...wimporter/index.html

JavaJones and I have been working on an Open Source php script thats aid in batch converting and importing an entire directory of html files and images into a MediaWiki site.

Useful if you want to convert your static page site into MediaWiki.

This builds on a number of existing tools, including HTML WikiConverter perl scripts, and the php importing tools that come with MediaWiki.

What it adds is a bunch of nice helper functions that facilitate massaging the html prior to conversion, and wiki text post conversion, handling filename clashes, relative links between pages, and the handling of recursive directories of both static pages and images, using php classes that are easy to extend.

We will be posting a release for anyone who might find this useful soon, though i have my doubts as to whether this isn't the empty set (let me know if not!).


NOTE: I should add that really this is a generic set of php classes for "converting/importing" a recursive directory of files from one format into another, which includes derived classes specifically for converting and importing from html files into a MediaWiki site; but the base classes could serve as a useful starting point for anyone who wants php code to recursively discover and batch process/convert a directory of files from any format to any other format, with helper functions for handling commandline options, temp files, file matching patterns, etc.


DOWNLOAD v2.0 (5/26/10):
https://www.donation...orter/MwImporter.zip

LICENSE: Open Source

AUDIENCE: This code is intended for experienced users who aren't afraid of getting their hands dirty; if you are expecting a super friendly idiot-proof tool you need to look elsewhere (bearing in mind there is nothing else at the current time that will do this stuff).

16346

Find And Run Robot / Re: latest update messed up my toolbar?

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 07:04 PM »

if you exit your farr and restart it, do the new toolbar entries go away?
im thinking it must be finding an old config file or something -- because i can't think of any way an update could mess with your toolbar settings.
so my guess is that somehow when farr is RESTARTED, its starting up a different copy of farr, or farr is starting up and grabbing a different config settings file than normally.

16347

Find And Run Robot / Re: latest update messed up my toolbar?

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 06:35 PM »

shouldn't happen -- is it possible you have a second copy of FARR that is being launched?

16348

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

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 05:45 PM »

is there a way to put only this part in my Find and Run Robot window?

now that is a great question.. the answer is no, and maybe in future.

there is no currently easy way to do what you want.

the ability to specify a regex to apply on a webpage before displaying would make for a great plugin -- i hope someone will make it.  there are other plugins that do this kind of thing internally for specific sites, but what we really could use is a plugin that can be invoked by aliases that do exactly what you are wanting, take a url and a regex pattern to match to build what to display and then display it.

there is also the WebMetaSearch plugin which is infinitely more complex than what you are requesting, and isn't really suited for what you want, but is related so i thought i'd mention it.

16349

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

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 05:32 PM »

two comments:

now i see how to add my own searches:

keep in mind that you shouldn't edit and modify the alias files in the "Installed" subdirectory (like where the Core-Linguistics.alias file is), because it will get overwritten when FARR is updated(!).  If you really wanted to make your own define alias you could first COPY it from that alias file into your own one in the "MyCustom" alias directory, and disable the built-in one so yours is used instead.  It's a bit tricky but it lets us keep the build in aliases updated.

is there any easy way that i can get result page displayed in  Find and Run Robot window?

there is, but you'll have to make your own custom alias for that.  to do this, check out the "igo" alias in the Core-Internet.alias file (note that you can view and edit these alias files from within FARR in the Alias/Groups tab, or edit the files directly with a text editor).

the igo alias uses the following result to show a web page in the internal farr window:
Internal Surf to $$1 | htmlviewurl $$1

so you see all you have to do is specify "htmlviewurl" in front of the url to have it opened internally.

good luck creating your own custom aliases!

16350

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: UltraEdit bundle on Bits du Jour 31st August 2009

« Last post by mouser on May 12, 2010, 05:14 PM »

I'm a fan of UltraEdit, but this is one of those deals where unless you have real use for the other items in the bundle (which you very well may not) you're not saving much money.