Recent Posts

23726

Living Room / Re: How many people work from home?

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 06:05 PM »

I'd love to see ak_'s version of our mascot Cody one day..

23727

Best Firewall / Re: Discount available for DonationCoder.com member

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 05:06 PM »

My apologies -- ZekeBlue was saying and he is right, that the review didn't have the year on it when it mentioned the discount, so it was confusing.. I've updated the review to remove the discount mention since it's long overdue. Sorry!

23728

General Software Discussion / Re: What kind of free license for a library?

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 05:02 PM »

I don't know an existing license that would cover this but there should be one.. Please do share with us whatever you decide to use since I'd be interested in it as well.

23729

Living Room / Re: Your happiness right now

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 12:41 PM »

being 100% happy might be like getting a perfect score when playing a videogame on beginner setting.. solution is to hit the Reset switch and start over on "Normal" difficulty level

23730

DesktopCoral / Re: Usefullness

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 10:33 AM »

I do have one small problem. I made sure that desktop coral would start on boot. It does but with default settings for width and transparency and not with readjusted settings  as set for my application. Am I doing something wrong?

Known issue.. i *will* release an update in next couple of weeks that fixes this.

Workaround (not sure if this works if you are using vista):  manually exit the program after you have set your settings the way you want, then restart.  Settings should be remembered from then on.

23731

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR Plugin: FCalc

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 08:24 AM »

well in programming languages, % is most often used for the mod operator as herojoker suggested initially.

23732

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR Plugin: FCalc

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 06:02 AM »

ps.
Fcalc is c++ (C++ Builder) and uses the open source muparser engine to do its math calculations.  Anyone feeling adventurous who wants to add some functions and features to muparser, send them to me and i'll rebuild fcalc with them.

23733

Developer's Corner / Re: Latest Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) Column: UI-First Software Development

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 05:41 AM »

Showing the life-looking prototype to the customer or managers can spell disaster. They will percieve "almost finished" application and you can't say or do anything to explain otherwise."

As funny as this sounds, it's true, and it's definitely something to be concerned about.  It also may lead to the client getting fixated on a particular layout or look that may not be the ideal finished product.

23734

DesktopCoral / Re: Usefullness

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 05:29 AM »

martin -- are you asking to be able to put shortcuts in the coral/corral, is that right?

23735

Find And Run Robot / Re: I need simple alias help

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 05:28 AM »

regular expression is optional in the sense that if you make an alias which doesnt take any expressions, you don't need it.
as soon as you want to have it match what you type with some parameters then you need to use a regular expression.

you might think that FARR could simply be smart enough to know that when you type "countdown BLAH" that the "BLAH" part should be treated like a parameter -- but FARR can't tell if the BLAH is supposed to be a parameter or more words to narrow down the search more, which is what it is assuming.

one thing we could add which addresses someone else's request for a way to easily pass commandline arguments is to add a special character meaning everything after this should be considered an argument, like if you type: "notepad & test.text"
then FARR would know that everything after the & should not be used for searching but should be passed as an argument to the triggered program.

23736

Coding Snacks / Re: mouse speed switcher

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 05:23 AM »

nice idea. 

23737

Developer's Corner / Latest Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) Column: UI-First Software Development

« Last post by mouser on April 04, 2008, 05:21 AM »

Jeff recently quit his day job, but thankfully his Coding Horror columns are going strong.

His most recent one is about the importance of prototyping a user-interface design before you start coding.

Before I write a single line of code, I want to have a pretty clear idea of what the user interface will look like first... Of course, UI is hard, far harder than coding for developers. It's tempting to skip the tough part and do what comes naturally -- start banging away in a code window with no real thought given to how the user will interact with the features you're building.

Remember, to the end user, the interface is the application.

I agree completely with the idea of prototyping before coding.  Personally I've found that the best way to design a program, especially if you are collaborating or working for a non-programmer, is to actually imagine the program is done, and walk through its use.

However, I do think something needs to be added.  Speaking as someone who has fallen into this trap before - it's important to realize that although "to the end user, the interface is the application", as a coder you should as much as possible separate the user interface from the guts of the application.  The user interface should be a light wrapper around the main code -- don't let it get its hooks in too deep or you'll find that maintaining the code becomes that much more difficult.  If you approach your program thinking that the user interface really IS the application, you're setting yourself up for trouble.

The "model-view-controller (MVC)" approach is a sound one, it advocates separating a program into a front-end view (the user interface), the main program logic (the controller), and the components dealing with any stored data (the model).

So yes, by all means prototype programs before coding -- walk through them with a focus on how the user interface would actually work from a users standpoint.  Then once you have that done, step back from the user interface and figure out how to code your program in a way that makes the user interface a thin (easily replaceable) layer.

http://www.codinghor...archives/001091.html

23738

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR Plugin: FCalc

« Last post by mouser on April 03, 2008, 08:07 PM »

afraid not.

23739

Find And Run Robot / Re: Another shortcut problem

« Last post by mouser on April 03, 2008, 07:08 PM »

nlite might be the cause.

23740

General Software Discussion / Re: anyone know a commandline tool to add a line of text to end of a text file?

« Last post by mouser on April 03, 2008, 06:45 PM »

i think i wrote a tiny exe to do this called "addnote" which i include with FARR..

23741

Find And Run Robot / Re: Farr cannot find an exe file

« Last post by mouser on April 03, 2008, 06:43 PM »

it's hard for me to think why that would happen, unless you have an alias that is kicking in after you type more letters -- when does it dissapear from the list, only after you type the full word wikipad or at 'wikip' ?

23742

Developer's Corner / Re: How to divide an image into random sized parts?

« Last post by mouser on April 03, 2008, 06:39 PM »

a non-intuitive approach might work well ---
start by imagining a very large grid that divides the entire picture into a grid where each square is X by Y.
now simply REMOVE random edges until you have the desired # of pieces.

(note you'll have to do this a bit differently if you only want rectangular shapes pieces)

23743

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR Plugin: FCalc

« Last post by mouser on April 03, 2008, 02:43 PM »

you can set constants which will be remembered, so just set pi yourself

23744

Developer's Corner / Re: The DC Coders' Breakfast Club

« Last post by mouser on April 03, 2008, 07:29 AM »

Maybe it's time for someone to code a Twitter Plugin for FARR?

23745

Living Room / Re: RAM PROBLEM?

« Last post by mouser on April 02, 2008, 03:59 PM »

it probably doesnt matter what slot 1 stick of ram goes in.
but as carol says, mixing memory sticks of different size and timing is often problematic.

23746

Screenshot Captor / Re: Esc for cancel region grabbing

« Last post by mouser on April 02, 2008, 03:56 PM »

long overdue.. should be fixed in next release coming this month if all goes according to plan.

23747

Screenshot Captor / Re: Request: make freehand annotations

« Last post by mouser on April 02, 2008, 09:51 AM »

thats not a bad idea at all to put it in the system tray and maybe even give it a hotkey.  the tray and hotkey would basically be saying "open the last screenshot in my configured image editor" -- right?

23748

General Software Discussion / Re: Simple web database to keep track of camping sites for Boy Scouts?

« Last post by mouser on April 02, 2008, 07:49 AM »

One of the coders on this site (hamradio) works a lot with boyscouts -- hopefully we will come by and post.

23749

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: I love the Bulk Rename Utility!

« Last post by mouser on April 02, 2008, 06:24 AM »

From the message linked by Abterix:

After many years, Bulk Rename Utility is retiring. It has run its course and is now a reasonably stable product. There may be one more release, to tidy up some loose ends, but that is not confirmed. I WILL be continuing to support it though. Thanks to everyone for the support and suggestions over the years.

Thanks to Jim for his hard work on BRU. 

23750

General Software Discussion / Re: Incomplete Backups - Avoiding and Handling

« Last post by mouser on April 01, 2008, 06:43 PM »

It's a very good point.

One thing you can do is that most of the best backup tools have a "verification" option, that is a bit time consuming but can verify that the backup was made successfully and can be read, etc.

The other thing you can do is as you say, not make a compressed backup but instead use a mirroring mode which essentially makes a file-by-file copy, which is very big but can be useful if you want really fast access and you want to really know that you can get the data when you need it.