Recent Posts

25451

Living Room / Re: how do you represent 'time' in your head?

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 01:05 PM »

ps1.
just to add a thought to this thread.. as someone whose academic background is AI and brain theory, i'd say the #1 fundamental unsolved issue in understanding how the brain works is understanding the temporal issues in representation and cognition.  it's simply something we have very little grasp on how it's done and it seems to be central to planning and reasoning.

ps2.
if you want to have your mind blown, go read up on einstein's theory of relativity and other more modern thinking on the nature of time.  our intuitions seem to fail us when it comes down to the basis of time and space.  the world does not really work the way you "feel" it does..

25452

Official Announcements / Site experiencing glitches due to high server load - SEP 29 UPDATE

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 12:24 PM »

We are experiencing server hell please bear with us.

25453

General Software Discussion / Re: What linux needs?

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 12:00 PM »

Personally i would much rather wait for a new clean operating system than deal with *nix.

I stick with windows mainly because of the applications available.  But like switching languages, i'd be prepared to switch if i found something nice and clean and elegant.  linux is none of these (imho).  It's a mess and burdened with the baggage of it's history.  Both windows and linux are suffering severely under the strain of age.

25454

Living Room / Re: Internet Cartoon of the Day

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 11:36 AM »

yeah i love this.. in fact this comic actually feels to me like it's telling 3 or 4 jokes at the same time in a wonderful way, really nice.

25455

Site/Forum Features / Re: Donation code contest

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 11:31 AM »

Here's the problem:

The "success" of such contests (and by success i mean the quality and quantity of submissions), is dependent on getting enough high quality people participating.  For whatever reason, this is almost never easy for a small site like ours.

The reality of this world is that two sites can run identical contests and one site will get no participants and another will get 10000.  And the difference will be based on the kind of publicity the sites get, the reputation of the sites, and the existence user base.  For programming contests especially, much of the participation seems to be to be based on the accepted wisdom about the prestige of the site, rather than any details about the contest.

What this means is that for a site like ours, which doesn't specialize in linux, to hold a linux programming contest, is likely to get very little attention and participation.

So while it's a nice idea it's probably not something that we should spearhead.  Truth is google can have a contest on how to build a nice looking simulated dog turd and they'd get 1000 carefully crafted submissions (and the contest would be features on slashdot.org and written up in the new york times -- and the winning dog turds would be installed as widgets on a million websites).  We just don't have that kind of influence.

However, i think it would be nice to have a little mini contest or something just for fun, maybe building a cross-platform firefox extension or something.  Something that has some cross-platform application and might be more narrowly tuned to the interests of users on this site.  And not with big prizes, etc (which are a lot of work to organize), but just some cody mugs or something.

25456

Official Announcements / Re: Brand new web-based live text chat channel interface -- try it!

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 11:20 AM »

NOTE:
the old interface has been restored temporarily while we attend to some server issues, just so we can eliminate the possibility that the irc:cgi chat thing is contributing to the problem.

25457

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: VISTA: Failed to save license key information

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 11:15 AM »

A new version 2.36.03 is now available which as far as i can test and see, now seems to be saving and loading vista license keys fine.  I'd love to get some feedback from you guys if indeed this is the case, as soon as possible.  update is available through dcupdater.

25458

Official Announcements / Re: Brand new web-based live text chat channel interface -- try it!

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 11:01 AM »

try now carol.

nevermind -- i reverted to old java-based chat interface until we can resolve some of these server problems we are having today.

25459

Official Announcements / Re: Brand new web-based live text chat channel interface -- try it!

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 10:42 AM »

great detective work app!

25460

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: VISTA: Failed to save license key information

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 10:11 AM »

d@mn it vista is really wanting to make me hate it.. please stand by for another vista fix update to hopefully kill this problem once and for all.

25461

Screenshot Captor / Re: vista not accepting license key problem in v 2.34.01 through 2.35.01

« Last post by mouser on September 28, 2007, 09:59 AM »

i'm a bit confused about what version is running on your pc -- the updater seems to suggest you have 2.35 installed which would explain the problem.

i'm not sure why the updater is not installing 2.36 for you but you can download the lastest 2.36 from https://www.donation...nshotCaptorSetup.exe

and let me know if the problem persists after you upgrade to 2.36.

25462

Official Announcements / Re: Brand new web-based live text chat channel interface -- try it!

« Last post by mouser on September 27, 2007, 07:44 PM »

not a bad guess carol -- i added code to change spaces to _, give it a try now.

25463

General Software Discussion / Re: Screenshot Captor featured on lifehacker

« Last post by mouser on September 27, 2007, 07:40 PM »

ps. I merged the two topics -- that's why if you click on one of the cross links it will say post not found

25464

General Software Discussion / Re: ScreenshotCaptor on Lifehacker

« Last post by mouser on September 27, 2007, 07:37 PM »

Hey, that's a nice surprise! 

25465

Living Room / Re: Prelude to request for help for distributed pc cycles help from dc community

« Last post by mouser on September 27, 2007, 02:23 PM »

Stay tuned, i hope to have this up and running by saturday.

25466

General Software Discussion / Anyone tried cGeep or similar email encryption helping software?

« Last post by mouser on September 27, 2007, 07:57 AM »

This was suggested to me and it looks like a reasonable tool, though i haven't tried it myself.  Basically it's a wrapper around OpenPGP which is designed to be easier to use and integrate better with MS Outlook.  I don't use Outlook so i'm not sure it's right for me, but might be a reasonable solution for some.  Comes in free and pay versions.

• cGeep Free is a free software made available to all for easy encryption of emails and files alike.
• cGeep Pro is the essential extension of cGeep for a professional use.

• Encrypt your files in 1 click - Integrated to Windows 2000/XP/Vista, cGeep allows you to encrypt your documents and folders in 1 click.
• Encrypt your emails in 1 click - To send an encrypted email, 1 click is enough too! And it works with your usual email client (Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Netscape, Eudora...and even Lotus Notes)!
• On top of that, cGeep ships with cGeep Companion for Outlook Office, a plug-in which offers total integration in the workflow of Outlook Office users.
• In all cases, you keep using your regular email address to send and receive secure encrypted messages. cGeep integrates perfectly in your environment, without changing a thing to your work habits.
• Security and compatibility with OpenPgp - cGeep uses OpenPGP which has been an Internet standard for years. This guarantees not only a strong level of security but also a complete compatibility with other software like PGP.
• Automatic key directory - The free centralised web directory of cGeep users allows for automatic public key retrieval whenever you add a new correspondent - no more lousy search and secret exchange!
• Easy to install and use! - To use cGeep doesn't require any special computer skills or PhD education in cryptography. The software installation is seamless and automated (Windows 2000/XP/Vista) and generates your key pair in a snap.

http://www.cgeep.com/

25467

Living Room / Re: Requesting new organization ideas for fresh windows installation

« Last post by mouser on September 27, 2007, 07:52 AM »

Definitely read this thread on how people organize their "My Documents" folder(s):
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=9647.0

25468

Living Room / Re: Forum Signature Spam: Let's discuss how to handle..

« Last post by mouser on September 27, 2007, 07:51 AM »

i don't think we want to turn off signatures en masse, i think they add some nice flavor, and like tinjaw says, anyone who doesnt want to see any signatures can easily turn them all off.

this isn't a big deal, just something we might be able to improve a little with some suggested guidelines.

and you know we can't help tinkering with things here and discussing the "best" solution to any given problem

the other alternate solution that i think might be a nice little forum modification that let users enable and disable specific user's signatures in an easy way, with the ability to mark certain users signatures as disabled by default.  like just a little + or - button to the left of a signature that collapses it to 1 line hight, and the setting would be remembered forever, so once you collapse someones signature it will remain collapsed *for you* on every post they make until you expand it again, and vice versa.  i just don't know if that's not overkill.

25469

Living Room / Re: Forum Signature Spam: Let's discuss how to handle..

« Last post by mouser on September 27, 2007, 07:43 AM »

i think it's better if any links in the sig is about DonationCoder.com only

i think you were kidding but in case you werent, i'll just say clearly that no we wouldn't do that, we want people to be able to link to their websites and interests.

25470

Living Room / Re: Forum Signature Spam: Let's discuss how to handle..

« Last post by mouser on September 27, 2007, 07:02 AM »

IQLover, I think you should be able to put an image in your signature using this format:
[img]http://www.YOURDOMAINHERE.com/YOURFILENAMEHERE.png[/img]

Having said that.. I wonder if everyone agrees that we should disallow affiliate-type links in signatures?

25471

General Software Discussion / Re: 64-Bit Software

« Last post by mouser on September 27, 2007, 06:49 AM »

If you check out that page the basic conclusion seems to be that unless it's a 64 bit native application, the differences in execution speed are non-existent.

25472

Living Room / Re: Flash Game of the Day: Temple Guardian

« Last post by mouser on September 26, 2007, 10:20 PM »

when oh when are we going to see a Cody Defense tower game 

Cody made me buy a special mug and he put his little duck bird pawprint on it to give as a gift to the programmer but still no game has emerged.

25473

Find And Run Robot / Re: Schedule

« Last post by mouser on September 26, 2007, 09:54 PM »

i've done a really poor job of explaining the delays, and i can definitely understand why people are confused and irritated.

but the bottom line is as lanux says: FARR 2 isn't vaporware, in fact it's being used by tons of people and can be downloaded now.

it's not that FARR 2 hasn't been released -- it's that i've been keeping it as an "unofficial" pre-release longer than planned.  typically with my programs i release the early beta versions publicly and then go on to improve and release as i go.  i thought this time i would try out the approach of keeping a program in an unofficial pre-release state until i was really happy with everything about describing it as in a kind of "final" state, with a new website, tutorial videos, etc. 

that's taking longer than i thought because i've got a few other projects i'm juggling at the same time.

25474

General Software Discussion / Re: 64-Bit Software

« Last post by mouser on September 26, 2007, 06:47 PM »

Well, an extra thing 64bit gives you is a larger number of general-purpose registers (and 64bit in size instead of 32bits), this can help tremendously with computation-intensive applications.

thanks for making that clear -- that's important and makes sense.  so even if an application doesn't make use of the larger memory address space, you could see a big speedup in computationally intensive (especiallying double floating point, etc.) calculations.

it would be nice to see some benchmarks comparing 32bit vs. 64 bit compiled apps that are computationally (but not memory) intensive, like encoding and math benchmarks, etc.  if anyone has any references to such bechmarks it would be fun to see.

25475

General Software Discussion / Re: 64-Bit Software

« Last post by mouser on September 26, 2007, 06:04 PM »

i think f0dder's points are right on the money, i'll just emphasize the points a bit more and ask for some correction if f0dder thinks i'm over simplifying.

just about the only thing that a program compiled specifically for 64-bits is going to get you is the ability to access more than 2gb of memory for that process.

that means that 99.99% of the programs on your computer probably won't show any benefit and may even run slower.

a few programs (like photoshop, or other heavily memory intensive programs) could show a serious increase in speed if the extra memory can be put to use.  for the most part though i don't think you should expect any improvement from most programs.

however, like f0dder says, you might view is as a good sign i think when an author releases 64-bit versions of their programs -- it means they care about performance and keeping up with such things, and are actively tweaking their programs.