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17851

General Software Discussion / Re: Paragon Drive Backup+Recovery 10 Free - good full drive imaging tool

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 10:18 PM »

Very nice  

ps. the author of that article, Ashraf, hangs out at DC 
https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=17560

17852

Find And Run Robot / Re: Program executable suspected as virus by NOD32

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 08:47 PM »

Confirmed that the false positive is gone with the latest update 
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming..

17853

Find And Run Robot / Re: Program executable suspected as virus by NOD32

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 08:44 PM »

Does anyone here want to create a new web page on this issue of Responsible Handling of Antivirus Positives, and create a little award that could be given out to an antivirus company that handles this kind of thing responsibly?  Maybe that would at least provide a way for us to motivate, encourage, and reward an antivirus program that decides to do the right thing.

17854

Find And Run Robot / Re: Program executable suspected as virus by NOD32

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 08:39 PM »

Well I must say I'm pretty impressed by eSet.  Here's an email reply I got about 20 minutes after I submitted the false positive:

>Dear Jesse,
>Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention! It was indeed a false positive of our scanner and it should disappear with virus database update 4621, which was released about half an hour ago.
>We are sorry for any inconvenience this misdetection might have caused.
>Regards,
>Peter Kosinar
>Senior Virus Researcher
>ESET spol. s r.o.

Nice -- that's a pretty fast turn-around for pushing out an updated signature set.


NOTE: There is no way to know how many other people complained before me, about not just Find and Run Robot, but on other programs that may have gotten caught in the false positive.  So we don't know the *real* time it took them to respond to the problem.  But still it seems like a pretty quick reaction.


HOWEVER -- this process of adding a brand new signature, and then immediately reporting to users that the antivirus program is completely certain about an infection and deleting files is totally, absolutely, inexcusably, irresponsibly, WRONG BEHAVIOR.  When a new signature is added to an antivirus database, and it is a heuristic like detection of possibly harmless code -- it is imperative that antivirus companies start being honest and straightforward with users.  The user must be told that this is a completely heuristic guess, based not on the detection of harmful code but on the similarity to some random signature.  The user must be told that the signature is brand new to the database and that the likelyhood of a harmless false positive is very high.  When we find a responsible antivirus company that does this, we will have found a new hero in the antivirus wars, one that is desperately needed.

17855

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

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 08:31 PM »

I know we have lots of coders (of all different skill levels) participating in NANY this year.
Some will no doubt have their own ideas they intend to code.
But I know that others are very interested in hearing ideas for programs they might write as their application.

So I thought we could start a thread where people could suggest ideas, and where coders can request help thinking of ideas in a specific category, etc.

Note that the Coding Snacks Request Section of the forum is a great place to find program ideas -- hopefully this thread and that section won't step on each other's toes.

So, NANY coders if you want help thinking of an idea -- post what you might be interested in.
And requesters who have a good idea for a program -- post your ideas (or link to them if you've posted already in the Coding Snacks area).

And maybe we might even consider inviting people who would want to offer a reward or bounty for implementing a specific program to post here? Just keep in mind NANY is only for software that will be released as free/donationware to the public, so there is no point posting a request for a private program.  And one would want to make sure multiple coders weren't working on the same project at the same time, etc.  Let's remember that NANY isn't a competition -- there are no winners -- it's just a celebration of creating new software.

17856

Find And Run Robot / Re: Program executable suspected as virus by NOD32

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 08:18 PM »

Sorry to everyone suffering with this -- it's out of my hands -- nothing more i can do.
This will be a good test of eset, to see how fast they fix this. 


Anyone who wants to help speed up the process of them analyzing the file and reporting on it's goodness, see how to do so here:
http://kb.eset.com/e...ntent&id=SOLN141

17857

Find And Run Robot / Re: Program executable suspected as virus by NOD32

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 06:34 PM »

I've ranted a lot about the harm these virus companies are doing to developers with their sloppy and irresponsible attitude towards false positives.  Just stumbled on this blog item about it by the folks at nirsoft:
http://blog.nirsoft....to-small-developers/

17858

Find And Run Robot / Re: Program executable suspected as virus by NOD32

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 06:31 PM »

Since I use Nod32 myself i will email them.. usually they are pretty good about correcting these kinds of mistakes promptly.

17859

Find And Run Robot / Re: Program executable suspected as virus by NOD32

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 06:30 PM »

It's a false positive.  Very frustrating since Nod32 is usually good about these things.
As discussed on some of the threads that scancode points to, the thing to do in such cases is upload the file in question to a site like virustotal for a second opinion.
Find and Run Robot on virustotal: http://www.virustota...bdaea01db-1257321247

17860

Living Room / Re: Tricky memory size tuning question

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 10:28 AM »

Sure, but actually they don't buy new machines any longer, or very few.  They recycle within the company...

ok that makes more sense -- so your IT people are not completely insane.

17861

Living Room / Re: Tricky memory size tuning question

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 08:47 AM »

it's incomprehensible to buy a new pc with only 1gb -- it might run ok most of the time, but the fact that you want to keep some big applications running at the same time suggested you could really benefit from the memory.  hard to imagine a cheaper way to improve your pc's performance and keep it usable in the future than getting 2gb instead of 1gb.  this is a no-brainer.

17862

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Accurate Monitor for Search Engines - web ranking tool

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 06:30 AM »

Welcome to the site Dmitry, and thank you for providing a discount for our members -- looks like a pretty cool application 

17863

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Idea: A 'polite' reminder/diary system

« Last post by mouser on November 18, 2009, 01:52 AM »

Also, I'm fiddling with CamStudio now, I can try my hand at a feature tour screencast. I'm kind of a dork, though.

excellent 

17864

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: About signing up to download freeware license keys - READ IN PLEASE

« Last post by mouser on November 17, 2009, 10:28 PM »

Lucrative is not the word i would use

I'm not really all that interested in money -- it would be nice not to live month by month but the main thing for me is the freedom and flexibility I have in choosing projects and working hours (i seem to have a defective internal clock which makes it hard for me to resist being awake at night).

And one of the nicest things about DC for me is that i have some control over how much time i spend on my DC software and when.  In general i go through periods where i work intensely and full time on my DC programs.. but then when i have a paid project i am allowed by the fine people here to take some time off and just do minor updates every once in a while.  It's one of those things that makes DC a joy to participate in.

ps. We should probably wrap up this diversion on this thread since we are getting pretty off topic!

17865

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Idea: A 'polite' reminder/diary system

« Last post by mouser on November 17, 2009, 09:52 PM »

it would be nice to have a screencast of this tool to show it in use.

17866

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: About signing up to download freeware license keys - READ IN PLEASE

« Last post by mouser on November 17, 2009, 09:50 PM »

DC now more than pays for the substantial hosting costs we have (we pay like $370 a month now with our main and member servers), and brings in a steady but small stream of donations, which is actually more than i ever hoped for.  You can read my write up about DC after our first year here.  But as you say a very very very small proportion of users ever donate, post on the forum, etc.  [as an aside, the suffering economy does not seem to have greatly impacted the number of donors, but it has resulted in lower average donations].  I should write a follow up to that article.  Anyway to answer your question -- DC was never meant to be a company that turns a big profit, it was just hoped that it would be sustainable.  While donations on DC help me a bit, i rely on income from freelance programming to pay my bills.  So if anyone ever wants to hire me, drop me a line. .

17867

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: About signing up to download freeware license keys - READ IN PLEASE

« Last post by mouser on November 17, 2009, 09:16 PM »

Welcome to the site nick, and thank you for the nice words -- i hope you'll hang around on the forum and join us in discussion.

Truth be told, I can understand the frustrations of someone who just wants to get back to working on their computer and doesn't want to have to deal with license keys, etc.  So whenever i read someone posting here out of frustration, i feel their pain.. i have a very low frustration tolerance threshold, and as anyone can attest who has heard me cursing on the donationcoder irc chat channel, i sometimes get furious at the simplest things (like misplacing a file, etc.).

DC isn't perfect.. But it's something where I believe our heart is in the right place, and we are trying to do something a little different, and we are trying to be good internet citizens and move in the right direction with our limited resources, and we are trying to have fun doing it, and trying to spread that fun around a bit

Actually it's nice posts like yours, and all the interesting and cool people on the forum and who sometimes write me, that keeps my love for the site growing, and makes this place like a second family for me.

17868

The Form Letter Machine / Re: Bug report: Leading blanks truncated in variables

« Last post by mouser on November 17, 2009, 10:23 AM »

i can fix that.
ps. did you see the new online version (www.tfdocs.com)?

17869

Living Room / Re: Post Your Funny Videos Here [NSFW]

« Last post by mouser on November 17, 2009, 09:30 AM »

about the procedural software used in animusic/autodrums:
http://www.animusic....company/software.php

17870

Living Room / Re: Post Your Funny Videos Here [NSFW]

« Last post by mouser on November 17, 2009, 09:07 AM »

Gilbert, i think posting your videos once in this thread is enough.

17871

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Hound: a grep-alike that searches inside PDFs

« Last post by mouser on November 17, 2009, 03:47 AM »

thats fine, i dont care what the default is -- thanks for pointing it out down there, i missed it the first time  

you might consider popping up a dialog asking the user how they want it set on first use.
this would have the additional advantage of telling people about it, since i suspect most wont realize it's available.

17872

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Hound: a grep-alike that searches inside PDFs

« Last post by mouser on November 17, 2009, 02:41 AM »

you can right-click any folder and press "Hound 3"

i think this gets to what someone said about registry.. i think having an option to put it on context menu is wonderful, but it should be an option.

17873

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR Won't Run Anymore - Error Messages Galore

« Last post by mouser on November 17, 2009, 02:04 AM »

exit farr and delete the plugins\farrtunes and farralttab plugins
i think these are .net plugins and they seem to be crashing.

17874

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Discrepancy Trainer

« Last post by mouser on November 16, 2009, 07:30 PM »

i just did the reverse (21/63) but there are lots of functions you could use, as long as they were heuristics for accuracy.

17875

Screenshot Captor / Re: Auto scroll problem - open with screenshot captor

« Last post by mouser on November 16, 2009, 11:54 AM »

dont look at it yet, i just fixed a bug.. ill do your suggestions next!