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21201

Official Announcements / DC-IRLDD Champaign, IL - New Years

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2008, 07:00 PM »

DC-IRLDD = DonationCoder In Real Life Dinner + Drinks

My normal custom is to spend holidays programming, but this new year's it looks as if i'm going to get a visit from dc members Gothi[c] (our intrepid server admin and expert coder), and his wife Della.

And I wanted to warmly welcome any other DC member within driving range to come join us.

It will be a low-key non-eventful event, and i'm not generally very social, so i wouldn't cancel the party you were going to go to where you might have a chance of talking to that girl/guy you have a crush on, but if you are living a geeky solitary life, why not come have dinner with us?  There is plenty of room to camp out in my house for the night.

When: December 31st - January 1st.
Where: My house in Champaign, IL.

Send me a message if you intend to come and i'll send you details.

21202

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2008, 06:46 PM »

wouldn't it be useful if a group of 3-5 people built machines at same time with same parts?  ie get together in groups of 3-5 and come up with the components together and all buy at same time.. then at least you could share experiences, settings, troubleshooting, etc.

21203

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2008, 06:15 PM »

some meta advice:

don't buy a single piece of hardware without looking on newegg for its rating by other reviewers and reading some of their comments.
in particular, look for comments about noise.

21204

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2008, 06:03 PM »

nice looking case cloq, and nice to see that it's not super insanely expensive the way cases seem to be these days.

21205

Find And Run Robot / Re: properties.. menu does not do anything

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2008, 12:39 PM »

anyone else with this problem?

21206

Find And Run Robot / Re: [feature request] Customizeable context menu and score formula

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2008, 12:38 PM »

1) It would be really useful to plugin developers if you we could customize the context menu (per item and globally)

this has now been implemented; just waiting to talk with plugin writers about adding any needed api functions to support this.

in addition to custom context menus for items, plugins can now create custom statusbar icon buttons.

21207

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR window narrows by itself at random

« Last post by mouser on December 16, 2008, 09:41 AM »

i'll have a look and see if i can fix.  i think the narrowing is happening as a side effect to a trick i have had to use to get columns to readjust their size; i can see if really still have to do that kludgey trick.

21208

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: Akete

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 11:12 PM »

IIUC there isn't an easy way to programmatically enumerate the names of variables in User Variables (yet).

i can add this easily in the new version to be released this week.

21209

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR window narrows by itself at random

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 08:50 PM »

can you try a different skin and see if the problem goes away or persists?

21210

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Release: Keyser

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 08:30 PM »

wow that is crazy cool..
let me describe what it does for those who are curious.

keyser knows how to use these standardized "OpenSearch" configuration files which describe how to search certain sites.  OpenSearch is supported by firefox and other browsers.

what the new kstools feature does, which is pretty damn cool, is lets you find new OpenSearch xml files which aren't normally easy to download, and autodownload them into the keyser search directory where they are instantly usable via the keyser "ks" command.

21211

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 06:50 PM »

i've had no problem with usb2; many usb2 external enclosures now also support esata so that's easy to kill 2 birds with one stone.

21212

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 06:32 PM »

But then I still need 2 large drives for my backups (double redundancy).

get yourself an external usb2 enclosure for that -- put a rack in it so you can swap in backup drives and change them out at will. this has many advantages:
1) you can use it to backup multiple pcs.
2) you can swap in and out spare backup drives.
3) you can disconnect the backup drives when not in use -- safer.

21213

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 05:46 PM »

ok id take issue with your drive selection and ram.

i'd suggest getting one top-speed drive for your C drive.  that is not going to be a terrabyte drive, its going to be substantially smaller if you want to be able to afford it.  in fact i would go for 3 drives, 2 superfast 200gb or so drives (10k), and then 1 big drive (terrabyte) which you will use mostly for storage, and dont worry about speed.  alternatively one superfast for C drive and then 2 big slow ones for data.

for ram, 8gb is overkill.  id rather get 4gb of high quality ram for same price.

21214

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Release: JustCloseSomeTasks

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 04:57 PM »

the one set of features that inevitably gets requested in programs that go back as far as a program called "TrayKiller" is the ability to save "Profiles" which list programs to close en mass.  So that you can say basically "switch into game mode" which tells the program to close a big set of optional programs.

21215

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 03:49 PM »

two monitors, no question about it.

21216

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: OCR for conversion of chess diagram to FEN notation

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 03:22 PM »

cool idea

21217

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for small, 4-port USB hub?

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 03:21 PM »

i also have that belkin hub 40hz posted about and i agree with everything he said.  the one thing i can say is don't buy a hub that doesn't have it's own power supply.

21218

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: FARR plugin: FARR Remember The Milk 0.4.4

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 02:34 PM »

one possible avenue is to find another RTM desktop application and see if it has same problem? if not then its something with plugin, if so, then its something on users computer or with rtm api bug.

21219

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 02:05 PM »

i agree with carol's point about avoiding "bleeding edge" -- the prices are premium and the risks are highest.  go for one notch down -- something that's been out long enough for them to work out the bugs.

as for avoiding asus -- my view is that all motherboard manufacturers are horrible.  it's too bad you have to choose to buy from one of them.

21220

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 02:04 PM »

First decision should be, do you want a laptop or desktop.  No point discussing building if you realize you need a laptop.

Second, assuming you want a desktop -- i don't know much about cpus, but i do know that having 2 monitors can make all the difference in the world in terms of productivity.  so the first thing i'd do is budget for 2 good 21" lcds.

21221

General Software Discussion / Re: Bear Bottoms Freeware: A very nice high-quality software site

« Last post by mouser on December 15, 2008, 01:20 PM »

Well this thread got ugly fast.  Not really the kind of thing we like to see on this forum.

Numerous people wiser than I have suggested we not just close but delete this thread.

My inclination with such things however is just to let everyone have their say so they don't feel like they have been censored or prohibited from saying something they feel is vitally important to add to the conversation.

I think all sides of this argument have been made repeatedly (and mostly in a non-productive fashion).  So i think closing the thread was a good idea.  As for deleting it.. let's see if we can just let it alone and those searching for info on the bear bottoms site can come read this discussion and see the differing points of view and decide for themselves.

Speaking personally, I think the first original post on the thread talking about the site is clearly relevant to DC interested in software, and so there is no reason not to leave it on the forum.

The follow up info from silverstein informing people of possible illegal/immoral/unethical activities of the site owner is also arguably relevant to readers, who might want to avoid websites run by people who they view as engaged in activities they find morally unacceptable.  Some people will care, some people won't.

However, i don't think anyone helps their case by having these long drawn out back and forths -- it just makes everyone look bad.

So at the moment my inclination is to just leave the thread locked.. anyone who believes strongly it should be deleted can message me and the forum moderators can discuss whether they believe it would be the right thing to do.

21222

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Cusor Wormhole for multi-monitor setup

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2008, 11:03 PM »

nice team work from everyone 

21223

General Software Discussion / Re: Bear Bottoms Freeware: A very nice high-quality software site

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2008, 10:55 PM »

People are getting pretty antagonistic on this thread -- can i remind the DC regulars that the way we demonstrate tolerance and good manors here, is by acting respectful and showing by example how we expect people to behave, not by going on attack.

21224

General Software Discussion / Re: Bear Bottoms Freeware: A very nice high-quality software site

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2008, 06:35 PM »

well if nothing else, it's interesting reading.
Silverstein can you point us to ACF threads on the issue (ACF=Alt.Comp.Freeware newsgroup for those who don't know).

21225

UrlSnooper / Re: Problem with network adapter

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2008, 05:17 PM »

can you try setting the network adapter manually in the advanced options dialog?