Recent Posts

201

Living Room / Re: The little bug who grew up to become a feature

« Last post by housetier on April 10, 2010, 05:49 PM »

Quite a remarkable story of how subtle differences in rules can lead to completely unexpected behavior 

202

Living Room / Re: Deceitful Software Awards

« Last post by housetier on April 10, 2010, 05:47 PM »

1) When in doubt, find it out;

This is what we are for To help people "find out". I think we have very high ethical standards here, and strive more for honest criticism than empty awardiness.

203

Living Room / Re: Donationcoder: How did you find it + What has your experience been like so far.

« Last post by housetier on April 10, 2010, 04:09 PM »

I am came across DC by looking for an encryption tool for xchat and found mircryption, and I liked the forum for all the people going out of their way to be so extraordinary nice and forthcoming. I was suspicious at first whether or not DC could uphold its standard, but no more! For me DC has become one of the nicest places to be.

Here's to my very special place! 

204

Developer's Corner / Re: Command line argument processing

« Last post by housetier on April 10, 2010, 07:47 AM »

When I have to parse command line options, I always look if there is something like getopts, getopt or something similar. It makes paring so very much simpler.

Zend PHP Framework has getopts, bash has it built in; and I am sure there are many free libraries or builtins for many projects, frameworks, and shells.

Sadly, I do not know of such a tool for Powershell, but it would surprise me if you couldn't find a getopt-like thingie for it.

If there is no getopts I try to make someone else code the command line script, because I think it is just too much hassle to reinvent the wheel (of of command line parsing) all over again.

205

Living Room / Re: 10 Pretty Stupid Business Moves

« Last post by housetier on April 09, 2010, 06:56 PM »

hahaha just great! 

206

DonationCoder.com Newsletters / Re: Newsletter for March 8th, 2010 - "March Madness"

« Last post by housetier on March 09, 2010, 01:31 PM »

Time and again I am very glad you folks take the time to show folks like me what they might have missed. The newsletters are a very important err "something" for me to stay in touch with the fine DC community.

So far every newsletter revealed at least two threads that where interesting, cool, important, funny, or in other ways relevant to my interests. These newsletters really add value to our forum (value := chance of interaction).

Thank you Darwin and the other newsletter editors!

207

Living Room / Re: Which is better windows mobile or android os or iphone os?

« Last post by housetier on March 09, 2010, 01:23 PM »

I'll have to come back to this thread when I finally decide to get a new mobile phone. I can't decide yet

208

Living Room / Re: Flattr: New Micropayment System - Gets the Model Right

« Last post by housetier on March 09, 2010, 01:13 PM »

I have given this some thought in the meantime... There might be people who absolutely love the idea of donating a fixed amount each month. My initial skepticism mostly came from my own extremely limited financial resources.

Despite my doubts I want this kind of micropayment system to succeed. Even if only to "show them" it can be done.

209

Living Room / Re: Stephen's Weekly Tech News - Edition 4

« Last post by housetier on March 07, 2010, 10:40 AM »

Thank you for this compilation!

210

Living Room / help me help cryptome.org

« Last post by housetier on March 07, 2010, 09:51 AM »

What is Cryptome

I'll just quote freely from their website:

Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance -- open, secret and classified documents -- but not limited to those.

It is similar to the popular wikileaks. And like wikileaks they accept donations.

What's the background?
The other day I received my first paycheck in a long time and decided to donate small amounts to various organizations and persons: journalists that still are journalists and have not become press release distributors; organizations that help, support or otherwise 'enable' whistleblowers; and of course donationcoder.com!

Paypal does not want me to help them
A person I trust recommended I help out cryptome as well, so I donated 25.00 USD. A few days later I received 2 DVDs in my mailbox. But shortly before that, they seemed to have refunded my donation completely. It seems, paypal no longer wants to work with cryptome

Can you help me?
Now, I still want to at least pay for the DVDs I received. I am looking for someone in the USA to send a check to the person behind cryptome:

John Young, Cryptome, 251 West 89th Street, New York, NY 10024
Checks/Money Orders: Make out to "John Young"

-http://cryptome.org/0001/cryptome-sar.htm

But only AFTER I have sent this someone the appropriate amount in DonationCredits or "directly" via paypal.


I hope someone is willing to help me out here Feel free to contact me via PM or, if you want more privacy, use this PGP-key to protect your email to me.

211

Developer's Corner / Re: Programmers Challenged, Gauntlet Thrown

« Last post by housetier on March 04, 2010, 02:42 AM »

I believe they'll accept our taking up the challenge a little late

212

Developer's Corner / Programmers Challenged, Gauntlet Thrown

« Last post by housetier on March 03, 2010, 02:56 PM »

The Challenge

I hereby challenge all of you. That’s right, I’m taking off my hypothetical still-wish-they-were-in-style white glove and slapping you in the face with it.

 

It goes on with more details about the challenge and comes to

The rules:

   1. You need to write one program, every day. Duh. Any language. You can not duplicate functionality. This means a Hello World in Java is fine, but don’t go and make a Hello World in Python afterward.
   2. You need to post the code online. If it’s an embedded project, post a picture/video of it working. Everyday, I will take the lead on collecting these pictures and posting them the next day online.
   3. The deadline for submission of your code/pic/video is MIDNIGHT that day. The result is posted the next day on our website.

So, if you have a program that is just waiting to be released, head over to hackypedia and read the challenge, then pick up the glove and slap em with your awesomeness

I think it's a good way for us donationcoders to draw more attention to our supergreat community 

213

Developer's Corner / Re: Resources for learning Mercurial?

« Last post by housetier on February 26, 2010, 05:20 PM »

I just stumbled across Hg Init: a Mercurial Tutorial. It looks very fresh and modern.

214

Developer's Corner / Re: What do YOU do to keep your head cold when coding?

« Last post by housetier on February 26, 2010, 05:10 PM »

I put this music on: http://www.themixfil...langle-recyclopedia/

215

Living Room / Re: looking for a title (short story)

« Last post by housetier on February 21, 2010, 03:14 PM »

Amazon doesn't have it in store, and it sells on their "amazon marketplace" for at least 75 EUR wtf!

Is this book such a rarity? Or am I just looking in the wrong book stores?

216

Living Room / Re: looking for a title (short story)

« Last post by housetier on February 21, 2010, 03:07 PM »

Guess I'll have to buy it too, it sounds exciting

217

Living Room / Re: looking for an old science-fiction movie

« Last post by housetier on February 17, 2010, 03:03 PM »

Just want to point you guys to another round of "guess the movie". This one is a little bit harder, but I don't think it is impossible to crack for the absolutely splendid folks here on donationcoder.com 

218

Living Room / looking for a movie: this time with vikingers or so, bearded men for sure

« Last post by housetier on February 17, 2010, 02:59 PM »

After my last quest was completed so quickly, I once again turn to you to help me find an old movie.

This time it will be even more difficult because I only remember one scene: it is snowing, a lot of people (maybe the whole tribe) are in the mountains. They are progressing slowly because the men in front use debranched trees to pack the snow on the path they want to take. The men are standing shoulder to shoulder and lift their trees to then ram them on the snow, lift the tree, advance a tree-width and ram down the trees again. The other men are behind them to switch when one is tired. The rest of the people are carrying lots of stuff.

Maybe they had to relocate because of disaster, disease. Or maybe they are fleeing from war or so. They surely are not taking this trip for fun.

I do not remember on which continent it is supposed to take place. I doubt it's newer than 1995. I also do not remember if it was an action movie, fantasy, documentary, cinema production or b-movie. I still hope you can help me! 

219

General Software Discussion / Re: Why the aversion to .NET Frameworks?

« Last post by housetier on February 17, 2010, 02:08 PM »

I think it is a little provocative to jump from hating a framework and runtime environment to sacrificing a human being, but I'll accept it as a metaphor.

However, .NET is a huge framework that takes time to download, and it takes a lot of time and a reboot to install. It changes things in the windows operating system; changes are not always good.

Then, it is not platform-independent: mono is just not .net for linux yet. So when I say "dot net? no thanks.", it often means "well it does not work on my system". And then there are license and copyright and EULA issues I do not fully comprehend. What little I believe to understand keeps me from considering it, because I do not know beforehand which route a software project might take and want to keep certain freedoms regarding licensing of said projects.

I really like the idea though, but I cannot use it without paying a lot of money for an operating system I deem inferior.

220

Living Room / Re: Stephens Weekly Tech News: Feb 14, 2010

« Last post by housetier on February 16, 2010, 03:26 PM »

Thank you very much Stephen!

221

Living Room / Re: Blog Essay: In Praise of Online Obscurity

« Last post by housetier on February 16, 2010, 01:30 PM »

The essay confirms my suspicions about these social networks. When someone is "over-connected" the connections lose meaning; I think this is because most people instinctively know that someone just cannot have that many 'friends', not even 'acquaintances'. I believe this is not a hard limit, but there clearly is a limit.

If I had to answer honestly how many friends I have, I would say "a hand full at most". All the other people I get along with, I regularly chat with, I meet and work with, I go out with: they are not friends, whom I could call upon at any time for any reason and they would drop everything to hear me out. This might be a dramatic definition of friend, but keep in mind it is not set in stone; it is not easy to draw a line (because I don't really want to).

I like being online and having all my pals there. But seldomly it goes beyond that. Having said that, I do not want to push away anyone! Feelings or sympathies can change. However, I do not expect to become friends with everyone I get along with: There is a difference between trust (if not to say love) and getting along.

So, yeah, I do have a twitter account but it has been dormant since 2007; I used to be on myspace but the software they use is just a pile of crap; I closed my facebook account because I couldn't see the point of having to re-ignore people again who I had avoided in the past. On the other hand, I really enjoy donationcoder.com, but even here I do not know many people.

222

Living Room / Re: Flattr: New Micropayment System - Gets the Model Right

« Last post by housetier on February 13, 2010, 08:49 AM »

Also I do not see how flattr will survive, unless by users clicking flattr's flattr button.

223

Living Room / Re: Flattr: New Micropayment System - Gets the Model Right

« Last post by housetier on February 11, 2010, 05:17 PM »

justice, as far as I understand, there will be no "unused" money by the end of the month: because that is when all the money in the account is divided by all the support clicks you made. And after that you transfer the next batch of money into the account, to be divided by the "amount of support" in the next month.

The only thing that bugs me is that monthly plan. I don't feel like donating every month.

224

Developer's Corner / Re: Free icons for developers: three more sets!

« Last post by housetier on February 11, 2010, 02:48 PM »

I found some more. These are very nice and clean. I especially like Sanscons!

• Iconic
  
  

  Iconic is a minimal set of icons consisting of 103 marks in raster and vector formats — free for public use.

  Download from this page
• Bitcons
  
  

  Bitcons is a pixel icon set consisting of 120 marks, available in various colors/sizes and completely free to use.

  Download from this page
• Sanscons
  
  

  anscons is a CSS-friendly version of Bitcons — allowing you to set custom backgrounds on your icons.

  and finally download this

225

General Software Discussion / Re: OpenSTV - Serious Software for Holding Votes

« Last post by housetier on February 11, 2010, 05:39 AM »

they even explain the various modi of voting!

I wonder if the Liquid Democracy movement in the German Pirate Party knows about this.