Recent Posts

17676

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

« Last post by mouser on December 05, 2009, 03:21 PM »

I think another feature that all antivirus/antimalware programs should support is the ability to install them alongside other antivirus programs and use them only in an ondemand scanning capacity.  Most antivirus programs may already do this, though most warn you not to install them in combination with other such tools.

17677

Living Room / Re: Nice New Blog by DC member on "Social Computation and Creativity"

« Last post by mouser on December 05, 2009, 01:51 PM »

Alex was just the subject of an article on TechCrunch:
http://www.techcrunc...ck-into-their-caves/

17678

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Outliner/Diary application AllMyNotes Organizer (freeware)

« Last post by mouser on December 05, 2009, 11:20 AM »

ive encounter this problem with chm files before, some kind of security setting -- i think you can right click on the chm file and there is some option there to allow it, somewhere (maybe in properties of the file?)

17679

FlipSuite and Flipbook Printer / Re: cutter

« Last post by mouser on December 05, 2009, 09:43 AM »

no idea, but let us know if you find out.

17680

Developer's Corner / Re: another possibly useful app that builds visual studio files from the win shell

« Last post by mouser on December 05, 2009, 09:39 AM »

neat 

17681

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by mouser on December 05, 2009, 08:21 AM »

this is not the kind of music i listen to but i dare you to watch the video only once.. it is sort of mesmerizing in some strange dance clip way:
http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=r6Js4-krieY



[edit: link updated]

17682

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 - Prize Graphics

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 11:43 PM »

actually i think we are going to have a very fun alternative mug design to choose from this year.. stay tuned

17683

Coding Snack Guidelines / Re: REQUEST: Live Auction App

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 06:57 PM »

good for you scancode -- but this sounds like something that could easily reach above and beyond a coding snack to me!

17684

Unicode Image Maker / Re: Text larger then box not made as image

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 05:36 PM »

 

17685

Unicode Image Maker / Re: Text larger then box not made as image

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 04:26 PM »

the idea is that the image should be excatly what you see on screen -- you can resize the window to get a bigger image.  does that make sense?

17686

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Program Idea Suggestion Thread

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 04:19 PM »

On a related note, I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't already have this program requested in coding snacks and implemented, but what about a super simple program that lets you easily configure a list of [ActivityLabel,Color,WallpaperImageFile] items (has to be easy to edit and add these from a nice gui so it's really quick and fun!), and then lives in the tray where you can right click and choose a new Activity Label from the menu, and changes desktop to that.

I think it could just be useful to help you change what project/activity you are working on at any given time, with some nice visual feedback.

Could add other things to it like showing in menu amount of time spent in current activity, etc.

17687

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Program Idea Suggestion Thread

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 04:14 PM »

Here's a small one:

What about a program that sits in the system tray and lets you configure 2 colors and a numeric range.  Essentially you are setting two ends of a range, a min and max value, and a color associated with each end of the range.

At any time you could double click to type in a new current numeric value, and it would adjust the desktop background color to a blend between the min and max of the range and between the two colors.

The idea: You could set one color like blue that you really like on your desktop, and one, say Red, that you really dislike.  Then you set the range to indicate for example your weight if you are on a diet, or a min and max # of pages you have to read a book each day.  So when you deviate from your goal, the background will be something you really dislike.. might serve as a nice motivation.

17688

Living Room / Re: What annoys you to no end?

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 04:10 PM »

 

17689

Living Room / Re: Good TV series. What do you watch? I used to watch Lost to unwind need successor

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 04:00 PM »

This is a good opportunity for me to plug my thread on hidden netflix marathon-session shows to watch online: https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=20559.0

17690

Unicode Image Maker / Re: Text larger then box not made as image

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 03:15 PM »

can you elaborate a little more, possibly attaching an image to your post?
(or email me at [email protected]).

17691

Living Room / Re: Can there be a free Web if no one makes money?

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 03:11 PM »

And a commenter in that thread questions exactly what I always question: if newspapers (and radio, and TV, and...) have *always* made their money almost *exclusively* from advertising, then why is advertising suddenly not a viable model for sustainable web businesses?

you know that's a good point that i tend to forget.

17692

Living Room / Re: Notepad Fun

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 09:31 AM »

neat and clever
even has an old school animation effect.

17693

Circle Dock / Re: Circle Dock won't start from WinPE bootable disc

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 07:56 AM »

nice find, thanks for sharing that discovery gorancheros.   

17694

Living Room / Can there be a free Web if no one makes money?

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 07:53 AM »

Interesting read on BetaNews today:

Paywall is suddenly a hot topic as free content turns many longstanding businesses -- news among -- to apparent ruin. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is mad as hell, and he's not going to take this anymore. This week Murdoch repeated his call for paid services during a U.S. Federal Trade Commission public workshop. "We need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high-quality, reliable news and information does not come free," he said. "Good journalism is an expensive commodity."

But how is the value of the digital content, whether news or some other commodity, determined when so much of it is free? Bill Buxton, principal researcher for Microsoft Research, briefly addressed this topic during an October talk at the Business Innovation Factory. "When the cost of goods approaches zero, the effective price inevitably for that product goes to zero," he said. "We've seen it in music, and the music pirates -- maybe they were bad, maybe they weren't -- were not causing it; they were just accelerating it. Every single other entity that goes digital has zero cost of goods. So, whatever's happened in music is going to happen in literature, news, cinema, theater and so on."

The prevalent theory is to fund all this stuff with advertising. "But if everything is going digital, going onto the Net, where is the money for advertising going to come from?"..

http://www.betanews....kes-money/1259882572

17695

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

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 07:33 AM »

i dont want to make this about DC -- it should be something that other sites can get behind and support.
i think it should convey a kind of Certification, rather than just another meaningless web site award.

17696

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

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 06:20 AM »

Let's come up with the right name for this award/certification ("Superior Antivirus Award" or "Honest Antivirus Award"? must be something better!) then we can create a standalone website for it and focus on creating a nice logo.

17697

General Software Discussion / Re: Drupal is f*cked

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 05:10 AM »

My impression is that Joomla is less suitable as a development platform than Drupal.  That could just be my lack of experience with it.

There are a LOT of things to be impressed with about Drupal from a coding standpoint -- for example how much effort has gone into the hook system and insuring that Modules can do what they need to do without ever messing with any core files. And there are some excellent books on coding for Drupal, which makes a huge difference for me.

One way to look at my complaints and frustrations about Drupal is simply that Drupal is trying mostly to be a CMS that sites can install and configure and use.  Whereas I am less interested in being able to "configure" it to do custom stuff, but rather interested in writing code to extend and customize it.  I may go back to using a framework like CodeIgniter, CakePhp, etc., I've just been very torn between taking a framework and adding more robust CMS features, versus taking a developer-centric CMS, and building on top of that.  I've not yet found something i'm truly thrilled with.

17698

Screenshot Captor / Re: Shift+PrtSc screenshots are tagged with "Program Manager"

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 04:35 AM »

that's an interesting point.. the application name will actually be the current application that has focus.. OR.. as you've found, Program Manager if it's no application has focus (desktop focus).  i should probably check for that case and use something like "Desktop" in that case.  seem reasonable?

17699

General Software Discussion / Re: FireFox problem.. Downloads with unusual names close instantly dont download

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 03:49 AM »

it's just the actual save that is aborted - the save as box closes as normal after you click "save", but you hear a beep and you can tell (took me a while to realize what as happening) that it just aborted the download completely without any warning.

i'm on windows xp pro x64 and i've noticed the problem for a couple of months.

17700

General Software Discussion / Re: Drupal is f*cked

« Last post by mouser on December 04, 2009, 03:45 AM »

commenting on iphigenie's post, i think one way to view the root of the problem with Drupal is that it is extremely schizophrenic in that a huge part of it is clearly focused on addressing developer's needs, as if it was a development platform, but then another half of it is all about providing these really intricate configuration systems that are designed to bypass the need to do any coding.  It's this part that i find intensely frustrating from a developer's standpoint.

The result of this, at least from this programmer's perspective, is an extremely painful experience where you may set something up and if you come back to it next week you'll have no hope in the world of remembering what exactly you did and why the system is behaving the way it is.

As an example of this, take a look at the Views module, which is seeing widespread adoption and praise.  This is a very very powerful module that is insanely flexible and let's you create all kinds of very intricate configurations all using a very complicated user interface.  Web designers and community maintainers who are not programmers can manage to eventually figure it out, which is fine for a one-time use, but from a developer's standpoint i find it just the completely wrong approach.  This is a case where trying to build something that can be configured to do everything using a user interface that bypasses any coding, results in something totally opaque that becomes unmaintainable.

I feel like there are a lot of things like that in Drupal -- it's like half of the team was/is building drupal for developers to use as a platform, and the other half was/is trying to wrestle control out of the hands of developers and make it something that can be infinitely configured to do a million different things using not just a million options, but options that involve multi-step creation of recursive filter structures using a drag and drop user interface.  Stuff that once you create becomes opaque and undecipherable.

Again, there is much to love about Drupal -- but as a developer wanting to use it as the cms foundation to custom web service creation, i find it frustrating, and likely moving in the wrong direction.  I'd really love to find a more developer-centric cms platform/framework, where the focus was not on making it infinitely configurable through a million options from the online gui configuration dialog, but rather through a programming API.