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16601

Site/Forum Features / Re: NANY 2011 :: A New Concept -- Have your say!

« Last post by mouser on April 19, 2010, 05:15 PM »

I hear ya.. though i guess what i had in mind was still preserving the mad dash for people to create new programs at the end of the year.. while still recognizing those who had created stuff earlier in the year, and celebrating them all at an end-of-year wrap-up.

16602

Living Room / Re: Stephen's Weekly Tech News - Edition 9

« Last post by mouser on April 19, 2010, 03:56 PM »

Excellent news this week -- thank you!

I would LOVE to get to that museum.  Maybe a good place for a dc gathering

16603

Site/Forum Features / Re: NANY 2011 :: A New Concept -- Have your say!

« Last post by mouser on April 19, 2010, 03:15 PM »

Let's not worry about driving traffic.. let's worry about making the event worthwhile for participants and potential users of the programs.

We could do 2 "contests" a year, one for nany, which is a no-winner thing, and one for larger applications where we have prizes for winners (as we have done in the past).  Nany is a regular thing, the other has been ad-hoc.  We could make it a more regular things once per year.

Or we could just have one contest celebrating all of the new applications released in the year, and give prize to the biggest and best..

16604

Best Archive Tool / Re: Versions??

« Last post by mouser on April 19, 2010, 02:33 PM »

These points are well taken.. keeping the reviews updated and making version information clearer is one of those things we didn't grasp the importance of when we started doing these big reviews.  It might seem obvious in retrospect but at the time we started doing them we didn't anticipate what would happen after a few years passed and features change, etc.

It's been a long time in the planning but our goal is still to have a completely re-vamped review system eventually, which directly addresses the issues of keeping reviews current, etc.  so stay tuned for that.

Until then, the best option is to check out the date of the review in the upper left of the page, and use that as a guide to how out of date some of the discussion may be.

16605

ProcessTamer / Re: Unreported bug in Process Tamer (v2.11.01)?

« Last post by mouser on April 19, 2010, 02:18 PM »

is it always the same process that the program is lowering the priority of?
i'm trying to think if there is some reason it might not be matching against the application name and thus ignoring the ignore rule, so to speak.

16606

Jibz's Tools / Re: Dina in TTF format

« Last post by mouser on April 19, 2010, 01:15 PM »

Another thread praising Dina and discussing ttf dina:

http://blog.barrkel....font-for-vs2010.html

16607

Site/Forum Features / Re: NANY 2011 :: A New Concept -- Have your say!

« Last post by mouser on April 19, 2010, 12:15 PM »

I have real concerns that trying to do 2 similar events like this wouldn't spread ourselves too thin.

Another alternative we've discussed is for NANY to be an end of year celebration of ALL the new applications created over the last year by DC members.. this would include coding snacks and large applications, anything created in the last year.  It would be more of a showcase and celebration of what members have created.

One advantage of this is that it doesn't exclude things arbitrarily based on date, which can happen with our normal NANY.  And it still wouldn't stop a final month push for people to create new stuff.

16608

Find And Run Robot / Re: alias help needed

« Last post by mouser on April 19, 2010, 12:06 PM »

normally the process is to name the group what you want to type to activate it.. it's ok if alias groups have the same "name" -- which i can see is a bit confusing.

either way, the best solution now would be to name the group "admin" and type "admin" to see all the entries in that group, or "admin ping" to filter to just ping.

so in general the way to do it in farr if you want to be able to just type ping, is to create an alias named ping.

BUT

i recall that we had this discussion at one point, and i may have already added a way to do what you want, i just cant remember.. if not, i can add something somewhere that can be used to tell farr that the contents of certain alias should be checked against as if each one was an individual alias no matter what user types.

16609

Find And Run Robot / Re: alias help needed

« Last post by mouser on April 19, 2010, 11:05 AM »

this is actually a bit of an interesting question.
do you mean that you want the items in the group to be always matched against what you type?

16610

Site/Forum Features / Re: NANY 2011 :: A New Concept -- Have your say!

« Last post by mouser on April 19, 2010, 12:25 AM »

NANY = New Apps for the New Year

For more info see past years summaries:

• https://www.donationcoder.com/nany/
• https://www.donationcoder.com/nany2008/
• https://www.donationcoder.com/nany2009/

16611

Living Room / Re: Pure Boredom Post: The 3 Word Story Game

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 10:15 PM »

destroy the robots

16612

Site/Forum Features / Re: NANY 2011 :: A New Concept -- Have your say!

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 06:00 PM »

So essentially.. the new new idea is: Make NANY much simpler.. less rules, less deadlines, less stress.
BUT.. try to provide the support and encouragement and testing for those that want it.

16613

Living Room / Re: stackoverflow-like site for DC. Would it work? Now free

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

agreed, this is something that could be improved on all forum sites.. but it's really more in the line of trying to figure out a way to improve search results, perhaps by doing some tagging of posts and adding ways to better retrieve and filter information that is already on the forum.

16614

Living Room / Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 03:48 PM »

Kind of outrageous that they won't unflag it (or don't have the ability to do so) as harmful once notified.

Companies these days seem to pretty much have a careless and carefree attitude these days regarding telling people that other sites are "dangerous" and "harmful" based on almost no justification at all -- pretty outrageous really considering the damage it can do to a site's reputation.  Maybe a few lawsuits will change their mind.

ps. Also, seems like some blame should be laid at the feet of any twitter client that is re-shortening already short urls.

16615

Unicode Image Maker / Re: no text in the image

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 09:13 AM »

i just tested it in my windows 7 and it worked fine.. strange.

One request, when you say things like "I could not save any text as image" it confuses me.. just to confirm, the problem is that no matter what you save, the image file appears black, is that right?

can anyone else with windows 7 confirm that they do or do not also have this problem?

16616

Living Room / Re: Apple Attacks Adobe

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 08:40 AM »

i don't know.. that open letter is not so much about apple opening up its products/APIs/etc., it seems more about people wanting press access.

16617

Unicode Image Maker / Re: no text in the image

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 08:29 AM »

I thought the red background might apper on the image vewer (I use the standard Window image veiwer), but it did not.

right ok thats a big clue -- that suggests the problem is with the capturing of the image.

this is going to sound crazy but.. you aren't using ZoneAlarm security software by any chance are you? can you try disabling any security program you might have and then saving the image again?  it seems there are some security programs which block other programs from taking "screenshots" (see here).

meanwhile i may try to do another build of UnicodeImageMaker and test on win7 again.

16618

Unicode Image Maker / Re: no text in the image

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 06:46 AM »

Ok well it sounds like you are trying to use it for something that it should work on, and it sounds like you are using it correctly.

When you save the file, by default Unicode Image Maker wants to save the image as a PNG file with transparency.

Can you try instead changing the image file type to .jpg or .bmp from the Save dialog that comes up when you hit save.

See if that makes a difference, and let me know.

You might also try changing the background color to something other than white, and view the image in an image viewer other than your presentation software and see if you can see it.  (i'm not saying you need to use a dif color, i'm just trying to help us identify what the root cause of your problem is).

16619

Site/Forum Features / Re: NANY 2011 :: A New Concept -- Have your say!

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 06:21 AM »

Lotus, i realize your intentions may not be to come across in an antagonistic way, but it's hard not to get that impression from the way you are writing.  Whatever your motivations are, it doesn't really seem to me personally like you are trying to be helpful and supportive (you say you donated to the site -- maybe you feel like your donation has not been earned or was wasted -- if so just email me and i will refund it).

Let's try not to get distracted about other issues not related to NANY on this thread -- if we want to start a new thread about general issues on DC we can do that. I'll just say that you talk about the lack of new software on DC -- one of the most delightful surprises about DC has been the explosion of the Coding Snacks section of the forum which has seen the creation if literally hundreds of new, useful, free utilities written by members of the site based on nothing more than a request by someone on our forum.  There is always room for improvement of the site and we're always happy to discuss areas where the site can be made better.

But really let's not let THIS thread devolve into a discussion about something other than NANY.

Rather than having everyone who loves DC start to respond and feel like they have to defend DC against your negative statements, maybe the best thing is just to look past some of the language you are using and just focus back on the issue of NANY and the best way to move forward on it, and take your criticisms of it as a valid opinion of one person.

People please keep focused on suggestions about how we should do NANY this year.

16620

Site/Forum Features / Re: NANY 2011 :: A New Concept -- Have your say!

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 05:32 AM »

Back to NANY (but not unrelated to the latest tangent), I am becoming a convert to the Simple-Is-Better position advocated in this thread, which is a bit of a reversal from my position at the start of this discussion.

It is my view that we should encourage more DC members who are coders to work on more substantial applications for NANY -- to use NANY as motivation to start a new programming project they've been putting off.

But I think now that rather than trying to codify that in the rules/deadlines/etc., we should try to keep the procedure for participating in NANY as simple as we possibly can, and do this "encouragement" informally.

16621

Site/Forum Features / Re: NANY 2011 :: A New Concept -- Have your say!

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 05:23 AM »

I think we can take some comfort in DC not feeling like we are in a rat-race to grow bigger.. If we continue to provide a fun family for each other, and a place that is of occasional value to the rest of the internet, and continue to produce an occasional surprising gem, that is something to be proud of.  I think DC has always had a bit of an ebb and flow to it, and if you're not feeling particularly impressed with DC lately, lotusroot, hopefully that will be just a temporary thing

16622

Living Room / Re: stackoverflow-like site for DC. Would it work? Now free

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 05:15 AM »

Is there a non-manual way to do a wiki from forum material? Otherwise you're heading toward a more CMS aren't you?

This is getting into a topic of deep importance for the web that i think is ripe for some big thinking, and there are some very tricky issues that don't have obvious solutions.  There is a huge degree of overlap between things like a wiki, a forum, a q&a thing, a blog, and a cms, and it's extremely hard to figure out a way to combine the features without fracturing information and ending up with duplicated content everywhere..  There is just so much overlap in functionality.  Both blogs and wikis that have lots of comments start to become like second-class forums.  Forums which try to provide articles and stable content become like second-class blogs and wikis.  I think it's possible that one way the web may move forward into the future is a much more robust and pervasive way to have different "views" into an information source.. That is -- a way to have a site like DC that can be "viewed" and interacted with, as if it was a Q&A site, a blog, a forum, or a wiki, without fracturing and duplicating content.

16623

Unicode Image Maker / Re: no text in the image

« Last post by mouser on April 18, 2010, 04:47 AM »

I am unable to save any text as image.

Could you explain a little more what you are trying to do and what doesn't work as you expect?

16624

Programmer Libs / JrDebugLogger -- issue with default writing to app dir on vista/win7

« Last post by mouser on April 17, 2010, 01:05 PM »

One thing that needs to be fixed in JrDebugLogger is that by default if you just tell debuglogger to write to a file, it will try to create that file in the application directory.

That worked fine on XP, but with VISTA and Win7, MS "virtualization" will cause the file to be written to mysterious hidden directories.

Of course you can always specify a full path for the debug log file but this is much less than ideal.

What i was thinking of adding is some windows-specific code that would kick in if you are building on windows, which would put the file somewhere like Documents/JrDebugLog/appname/filename IFF running under vista/win7 and no explicit file path is provided.

Does that seem like the best solution?

16625

General Software Discussion / Re: Process Tamer speeds up my games & internet speed!

« Last post by mouser on April 17, 2010, 12:26 PM »

hehehe i think this was a joke post of some sort.. it certainly is proving amusing