Recent Posts

1676

Living Room / Re: How can we *share* Donationcoder.com better in 2010?

« Last post by JavaJones on January 03, 2010, 07:01 PM »

Promotion aside (as I think we all probably do the best we can without actual marketing, budgets, etc.), I feel like the best thing that could be done to improve DC's visibility and value would be better organization and accessibility of content. The content pages on the main site pointing to most everything in the forums are good, but even once you know about the idea of "coding snacks" and you find the forum area, how easy is it really to find out what apps there are? Browse through the entire snacks forum? A software directory might be an interesting concept to consider, just as one example. Obviously a better way to organize, search, and display reviews is another key...

- Oshyan

1677

Living Room / Re: 2010: Will it be better than 2009?

« Last post by JavaJones on January 03, 2010, 02:47 AM »

I think it will be at least a bit better, for me at least. The year has a lot of potential anyway: I'm starting on a lot of projects I've been wanting to do for years, I'm adjusting my hours at my main job so I'll have more time for this, my girlfriend will be done with school mid-year and she'll have a lot more free time that we can spend together, and money hasn't been that bad for me 2009, 2010 looks ok too... so here's hoping it's a good one, I'm thinking it will be.

- Oshyan

1678

Living Room / Re: RoboKill 2 - A sequel to one of the best flash arcade-style games ever made

« Last post by JavaJones on January 03, 2010, 12:11 AM »

Definitely very impressive and pretty cool. Just wish ledges were a bit more visible. Kind of annoying to be badass killing a bunch of fools only to be felled (literally) by a barely visible ledge...

- Oshyan

1679

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is there no eps plugin for ACDSee?

« Last post by JavaJones on January 02, 2010, 11:30 PM »

XnView will do it with Ghostscript installed.

- Oshyan

1680

General Software Discussion / Re: Quasi Post-It note utility?

« Last post by JavaJones on December 30, 2009, 05:00 PM »

That sounds like an incredibly cool and useful tool. I'd love to know about a similar app today as well.

- Oshyan

1681

General Software Discussion / Re: Batch photo filter software?

« Last post by JavaJones on December 30, 2009, 04:58 PM »

I wonder if XnView and IrfanView are actually doing things but don't have a mechanism to show work/progress when running external filters. Is there any CPU activity when it freezes?

- Oshyan

1682

Living Room / Re: Has SEO ruined the web?

« Last post by JavaJones on December 30, 2009, 04:53 PM »

I certainly share your concerns, though I have ironically been on the other side of things, wanting to try to promote a legitimate business and having to do clearly rather stupid things (from a baseline content standpoint) to try to improve rankings. We never wrote fraudulent articles, thank god, but we've added content or changed wording in ways we wouldn't necessarily have done otherwise. The thing is *some* of these things make sense, using synonyms which reference your product, service, or fundamental purpose to catch as many relevant searches as possible for example. But ideally even that would not necessarily be required. In a perfect world a search engine would find the most relevant content for a particular person's search all the time.

So the question is, how do we get there? Well I see two ultimate solutions, long-term. Either 1: Computers and algorithms get smarter and more human-like, so they can at least make better guesses as to what someone really wants (and even find likely spam and rate it down), or 2: Someone manages to leverage the collective power of actual people rating and reviewing actual content and search results, and turns it into meaningful advice for search accuracy. I think the latter is where things are leaning right now, and given the success of the aforementioned Wikipedia and virtually all things "crowd sourced", I think that makes sense. After all, nobody knows better than somebody what they specifically wanted when they searched, and if they find it they should say so, and if they don't they should say that too. It's harnessing that to meaningfully inform search, not just on a person-by-person basis, but globally, that is the trick. How do you take one person's opinion and extract the deeper intention and meaning behind it, then combine it usefully with other people's opinions? You can't just average it...

Anyway I feel like that's where Google is starting to go with its whole personal search system, and it just might work if they can figure out how to aggregate and analyze it effectively. If anyone can do it I reckon they can.

- Oshyan

1683

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Release: Open Menu Format

« Last post by JavaJones on December 29, 2009, 02:38 PM »

Yeah, that's my sense as well. MenuPages, Yelp, GrubHub and many others would probably appreciate this, if/when it got going. That's the beauty of it is it's fundamentally enabling, not (necessarily) competitive with anyone.

Lack of good tools is often a problem with good standards. There are enough tools that potentially need to be developed that it's probably important to prioritize. Figure out what would drive adoption best and focus on enabling that with the core tools needed.

- Oshyan

1684

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Release: Open Menu Format

« Last post by JavaJones on December 29, 2009, 02:25 PM »

Waiting times will be *highly* variable. I think simple flags like "sit down" vs. "counter" or whatever would be a better indicator of speed. But this starts to get out of the realm of info about the *menu* and get into info about the *restaurant*, which may be more the realm of something like Yelp. At the very least it would be a part of a different descriptor format for restaurants, of which the menu format might be a part, but that starts to get pretty ambitious.

The vegetarian, allergen, etc. info is good. You'll never, ever get restaurants to agree to ingredient lists, at least not most of them, but basic nutrition info is nice to have. Likely you will only ever see big chains having that info anyway.

Incidentally I wonder how this interacts with something like http://www.menupages.com/

- Oshyan

1685

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Release: Open Menu Format

« Last post by JavaJones on December 28, 2009, 06:27 PM »

That's beautiful - create the standard and the site, and let people get creative with how to use the data. Awesome. Well I'll gladly do my part both in local promotion (I live in SF and have some restaurant connections here, plus I work at a culinary school), and in feedback and ideas. I suggest you setup a Redmine account ASAP.

- Oshyan

1686

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Release: Open Menu Format

« Last post by JavaJones on December 28, 2009, 06:04 PM »

Wow, this is a super cool idea! My girlfriend actually works at a restaurant and I've worked with her on their menu design, OpenTable registration, take-out ordering system, and other things, so this subject is somewhat familiar (and of interest) to me. I love the idea of standardizing it all.

My main question is what exactly this NANY entry is. Is it the format specification, the website, an app to edit the menus and save in an open format, or all 3?

I'm also curious how are you going to encourage participation in this by restaurants? This could be a great success if there is sufficient incentive, but without that buy-in it's really going nowhere.

I see right off that it's another way to promote their restaurant, in theory (assuming the site gets popular), but I think if you offer some additional services (which you may already have planned), it could probably be a lot more attractive, e.g. allow restaurants to embed their open menu listings on their website really easily, with easy management through the open menu site, keeping their site menu and the open menu site listing in sync.

For the future a way to actually create templates that can turn into printable menus would be fantastic and probably a very desirable future. A lot of restaurants have trouble keeping their web menu, take-out/to-go menu, and print menu in sync. If you could provide a single, easy to use system for managing restaurant menus in full, with functions to embed on websites, search, and print in high quality with some decent formatting, that would be outstanding. I realize of course that a formatting system would be complex to implement, but I've worked with one that seemed fairly adequate that I think could mostly be translated to the web very easily.

Anyway the other nice thing about this of course is that the format is open, so even if you don't do all the above, someone else should be able to. Just keep your DB standard open, create an API as soon as you can, and let people run with it.

More feedback as I think of it. I'm really looking forward to seeing this evolve!

- Oshyan

1687

General Software Discussion / Re: Questions re Windows 7 Starter on a Netbook

« Last post by JavaJones on December 25, 2009, 04:20 PM »

720P (1280x720) is also "HD". Though still you can't play it at ful resolution on many netbooks.

- Oshyan

1688

Living Room / Re: BetaNews on Google: Simply brilliant business, but is it evil?

« Last post by JavaJones on December 24, 2009, 01:54 AM »

I'd wager Google is at least better in the "driving force of greed" department than other companies, but they are of course still a *corporation*, and a public one at that, so their motivation is ultimately profit. But take for example their professed practice of *not* hiring all the brains in the market to "leave some intelligence keeping the market vibrant" or some such. Could be PR bullcrap, but given how Google does seem to walk the walk in other areas like Open Source I'm not inclined to jump to the BS conclusion. It's just one example anyway - the open source contributions are another. Sure, many benefit Google directly, but many others are so indirectly beneficial as to be arguably more about geek philosophy and cred than profit. Honestly I think Google is one of the only somewhat "geeky" companies of its size - neither MS, nor Apple, nor any other major company I can think of seems to embody geek ideals as much (though *again* they are of course a publicly traded company so they work within limits). Honestly I'd have been happy to never see Google go public - I'd be willing to bed they'd be closer to their "do no evil" ideal in that case.

- Oshyan

1689

Developer's Corner / Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

« Last post by JavaJones on December 23, 2009, 11:32 PM »

Why is legal for paypal to steal your money? And since when a private entity has the right to freeze someones assets without going to court to do so. Specially when is not something to do with a payment.

They are crooks. Glad to know this before doing business with them.

-rxantos (December 23, 2009, 06:53 AM)

Last I heard, Paypal is not considered a "bank" and is not regulated like one. So yes, it's scary, they deal with huge amounts of money and have much less stringent requirements on them. That may not be true anymore though...


- Oshyan

1690

Living Room / Re: BetaNews on Google: Simply brilliant business, but is it evil?

« Last post by JavaJones on December 23, 2009, 11:29 PM »

Honestly I'm not real impressed with Joe. He's quite prolific, in fact he seems to be by far the biggest content contributor on Beta News (and one of my favorite authors Angela Gunn, who was kind of fun is now gone), but he seldom brings much substance with his large quantity of content IMO.

Anyway, I digress (a bit). The question of whether Google is "evil" is legitimate, particularly since they explicitly claim otherwise. But I didn't see anything compelling in this article to make me think they might be. Thing is, just because their business may be putting some other people out of business, doesn't make them evil. Or do you also think Apple is evil for creating iTunes and putting zillions of record stores out of business? Is it sad that record stores (especially small "mom and pop" ones) are going out of business? Absolutely. Is Apple partly responsible? Yep. Are they *evil* for coming up a better system? Hell no. And neither, IMO, is Google.

Success at someone else's expense is not inherently evil. Most successful business "takes" from other businesses - the success of one business almost always means the detriment or even failure of other businesses. That's the way competition fundamentally works. And there are a lot of businesses more obviously "evil" than Google if you ask me. Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and a few others come to mind...

- Oshyan

1691

Living Room / Re: Kickstarter: Fund an indie project or start your own project and ask for funding

« Last post by JavaJones on December 22, 2009, 05:38 PM »

Just found this post while looking for the "Rentacoder in reverse" thread (which I've just updated). It's a shame this didn't get more DC attention and discussion, it's a really cool site. Definitely up my alley. The only challenge now is it takes a lot of time to go through the various projects and find ones I want to contribute to. But I haven't tried searching or sorting yet, just mostly browsing the front page (where there's already a lot of interest).

Anyway just thought I'd see if this one could do another lap around the DC discussion circuit. The site seems pretty successful with $1000's of dollars of donations represented on the front page alone.

- Oshyan

1692

Developer's Corner / Re: Is there such a thing as Rentacoder in reverse?

« Last post by JavaJones on December 22, 2009, 05:32 PM »

Just found this, looks interesting and related:
http://fairsoftware.net/home
particularly: http://fairsoftware.net/publicProjects

- Oshyan

1693

Living Room / Re: How Success Killed Duke Nukem - A heartbreaking story of developer failure

« Last post by JavaJones on December 22, 2009, 03:55 PM »

Good article. I have to say, Wired has some real gems sometimes.

- Oshyan

1694

Living Room / Re: How to stop junk [snail] mail?

« Last post by JavaJones on December 21, 2009, 02:44 PM »

Did you try Google first? http://www.wikihow.c...Get-Rid-of-Junk-Mail

There was actually a great article on this a year or two back, but for the life of me I can't remember where it was from...

- Oshyan

1695

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Teaser: Crush MCP (Master Control Program)

« Last post by JavaJones on December 21, 2009, 02:38 PM »

Hash should probably be optional, but would definitely be a nice and important feature IMO. Thanks for taking our input! I love the evolutionary app design process.

- Oshyan

1696

What's the Best? / Re: Video conversion: What's the best (freeware or shareware)?

« Last post by JavaJones on December 21, 2009, 01:50 PM »

I'm still curious how much money authors get from this. Is it really worth it?

- Oshyan

1697

Living Room / Re: Infectious Greed: Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail

« Last post by JavaJones on December 21, 2009, 01:22 PM »

Hmm, I wonder if you can be legally held liable for the work of an algorithm if no malicious, slanderous, or personal intent could be proven. In other words you code the algorithm without bias to site or author, but by clearly weeding out a class of content/links you see as less "relevant". It's just another search engine. It never targets anyone unduly - it's just part of its algorithm. A new site could arise that perfectly plays against your algorithm's coding, and gets essentially buried in the search results, but you didn't code it knowing of that site, so how is it discriminatory or illegal? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, and some of the things people sue over these days drive me nuts (what am I saying "some" - MOST). But it seems reasonably defensible...

- Oshyan

1698

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Teaser: Crush MCP (Master Control Program)

« Last post by JavaJones on December 21, 2009, 01:08 PM »

I love the idea of an app startup logging program. If you can make hashes of each exe and track last startup, last changes to exe, etc. that would be even cooler. A long-term look at all this info, then make it exportable as a CSV and we can run some analysis on it, get some nice pie charts going and hey presto, unintended (but awesome) result is a graph of system update activity, system app load history, etc. Fun stuff. I like!

- Oshyan

1699

Living Room / Re: I'm beginning my experiment with Linux and other OS's.

« Last post by JavaJones on December 20, 2009, 11:51 PM »

I agree, software makes the platform. I'm starting to tinker with Linux a bit because I've moved to a new web host, vps.net, and it basically demands I "dig in" a bit to get what I want. But it's commandline-only, and the software I'm installing is all to the end of a full-featured web server. It's a totally different need from a desktop. Still, it has piqued my interest a bit in trying the desktop experience again some time (my past experience is basically limited to "Live" CDs). I figure I'll do it in a VM, but then part of me feels like maybe that's not really giving it a full shake, I would never really use it to its fullest...

Incidentally I'm not sure why the "Macs are better for graphics" myth continues. That hasn't been true for a decade or so now. While there are admittedly a few (very few) Mac-only applications for graphics work, the vast majority are cross-platform or PC-specific. In fact as I hear it PC was the lead platform for the latest Adobe Creative Suite...

- Oshyan

1700

General Software Discussion / Re: The DonationCoder "Superior Antivirus" Award/Certification

« Last post by JavaJones on December 20, 2009, 10:57 PM »

There's nothing stopping the creation of 2 awards either. The thread started with a good idea which I'd really like to see implemented, but honest advertising is also very worthwhile to encourage. It's not unique to AV soft though. And, as you said, is a much harder battle.

- Oshyan