Recent Posts

25951

Find And Run Robot / Re: Latest FARR v2.00.135 ALPHA PREVIEW Release - July 17, 2007

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2007, 10:09 AM »

if you were installing over a version of farr that is older than say 2.0.100 or so, then you have to exit farr from the tray before installing the new version, since older versions of farr won't exit themselves.

25952

JGPaiva's GridMove and Ahk Tools / GridMove featured on Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror Blog!

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2007, 03:28 AM »

Wow! Now this is indeed an honor!!

http://www.codinghor...archives/000928.html

Congratulations JGPaiva!

thanks to Aurimas for the heads up.

25953

General Software Discussion / Shareaholic: Firefox add to quickly submit links to stumbleupon, digg, delic,..

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 11:19 PM »

Again there are a few extensions to do this but this one looks good (haven't tried it yet!)

The Shareaholic extension for Firefox makes it easy for you to submit the web page you're viewing to digg, del.icio.us, facebook, google bookmarks, reddit and stumbleupon. If you prefer, you can also e-mail the web page to a friend.

Bonus feature: Real-time statistics from digg and del.icio.us
Check whether the web page you're on has been dugg, and how many times it has been saved on del.icio.us. Stats displayed in your browser, at your request.

http://shareaholic.com/

from http://www.fortysomething.ca/mt/etc/

25954

General Software Discussion / Slickr: Flickr Screensaver

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 11:16 PM »

I think there may be other such screensaver tools for flickr, but this one seems quite active.

Flickr screen saver that shows images by:
User - Favorites, Set, Tags, Contacts
Group
Everyone - Tags, Recent, Interestingness
Local
It does OpenGL fading and zooming and is easy on the eyes.

http://www.cellardoorsw.com/slickr/

from http://www.fortysomething.ca/mt/etc/

25955

Developer's Corner / Blueprint: A CSS framework to help you make grids and stuff

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 10:57 PM »

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

Features:

• An easily customizable grid
• Sensible typography
• A typographic baseline
• Perfected CSS reset
• A stylesheet for printing
• No bloat of any kind

Planned features

• Support for PNG transparency in IE5.5+ (js)
• Relative font sizing everywhere
• Multiple versions with different grid customizations
• Liquid layout version
• Compressed versions of the files to reduce load times

http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/

from http://www.wired.com/

25956

Screenshot Captor / Re: how to set the email option in screenshot captor 2.32.02

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 10:35 PM »

Dan, SC actually has 2 ways to send email.

The first is to send it directly using smtp and bypass your normal email client:
The second is to open your default mail client and create a new message (which sounds like what you want):

25957

Living Room / Ball Revamped V Just Released: One of my Fave Flash Game Series

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 10:29 PM »

I've written about Ball Revamped I-IV in the past, I consider it a terrific example of how to make a very addictive game with very simple game mechanics.  Fun and challenging, and hard to stop playing.

Well Ball Revamped V has just been released!

http://www.jmtb02.com/flash/brfive.htm

from http://flash.plasticthinking.org/

25958

Post New Requests Here / Silly Idea? A program that counts out loud

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 10:10 PM »

I had a funny idea today, and although i can't for the life of me think of a real use for this, it might be a fun project for someone looking to mess around with speech synthesis libraries.

Idea is a small program that just starts counting out loud like:
one, two, three, ..., five thousand and fifty four, ...
and so on until you stop it.

Might be interesting to put it on while you are trying to get to sleep.  I think for something like this it would be nice to use a quality voice library or maybe even custom recordings of the numbers (such a limited vocabulary so it should be possible).

25959

General Software Discussion / Re: Is this a way to tame the CSS beast a bit?

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 09:43 PM »

ah i almost missed this -- nice find Joto 

25960

Living Room / Re: OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 09:40 PM »

Beautiful picture Mandork 
Hi Ming-Li, and thank you for that great message.. We are happy to have you join our little family here, just pull up a chair make yourself at home   (ps. I don't think you are the only one from Taiwan!)

25961

Official Announcements / Re: How to punish DonationCoder if you are angry at being nagged to donate

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 04:30 PM »

Guys+gals honestly this thread is not supposed to make you donate!!
We will be running our little fundraiser to try to guilt everyone into donating later.
This thread was just to have fun and remind people about the silly free member kit since i have a bunch all sealed up and ready to send.

25962

Living Room / Re: Comments to this forum: regarding display image

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 11:22 AM »

it's to encourage the use of our inline image attachment feature, which is more well behaved than linking to external images.

so basically you should use the "attachment" feature at the bottom of the new post form to attach your images, and then use that [attach] code to indicate where the images should appear in your post.

more info here: https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=1996.0

25963

Developer's Corner / Re: Is Beautiful Code A Succubus

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 09:45 AM »

Is "beautiful code" the same thing as "elegant code"?

yes.

25964

Living Room / Re: new PC options:-

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 08:50 AM »

looks like a good computer, congratulations 

25965

Site/Forum Features / Re: compose hotkeys

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 07:41 AM »

 

25966

Site/Forum Features / Re: compose hotkeys

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 06:41 AM »

Mouser - how about a NOBBC button in the editor near the Code button ?

hey now that's a good idea.

25967

Developer's Corner / Re: Is Beautiful Code A Succubus

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 12:00 AM »

There is no simple definition -- it might be easier to define it simply as being the opposite of ugly/messy/confusing code.

So beautiful/elegant code is code that is very readable, very understandable, and nicely organized into pieces that are efficient and easy to modify, extend, and test.

25968

General Software Discussion / Re: Top 3 programs you use

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 11:48 PM »

• Website Watcher
• Mirc
• Launchbar Commander

25969

Find And Run Robot / Re: Display Extended Results ?

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 04:16 PM »

choose "add rule for this item"
note that this is just a quick way of adding an item in the pattern score tab.

25970

Screenshot Captor / Re: System tray menu 'artifacts' left on screen during 'Grab selected region'

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 04:15 PM »

parts of what menu? are you not using hotkeys to start the capture?

25971

ProcessTamer / Re: Process Tamer Update Coming -- Express your feature requests here!

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 04:01 PM »

I'd like to be able to create different profiles for PT so that, depending on what I am using my computer for, I can set the priorities for running processes accordingly. Just a thought..

yes, i think this will be in the next version. 

25972

Find And Run Robot / Re: Display Extended Results ?

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 03:57 PM »

some miscelaneous tips:
1) if you have documents in certain locations that you sometimes want to restrict search to, you can add a keyword modifier to certain search directories, for example you might add the keyword docs to the folder with your documents in them, and then when you want to restrict a search to those documents do +docs in your search.
2) you can add pattern scoring rules to do things like boost the scores of all *.pdf files or similar stuff.
3) you can get really fancy and use some of the advanced tricks that nitrix uses to make it possible to type a short string but get complicated results.  see https://www.donation...11.msg69252#msg69252 or just ask nitrix, i'm sure he'd be happy to help if you can describe in more detail what kind of results you'd like to bias up to the top.
4) if its just a specific result or two or 10 that you want to boost, you can either add a specific score to that result (right click and choose "add rule for this item"), and/or just launch it once, and it will right away get a big boost for next time.

25973

Living Room / Re: Software download sites - scrapers and non-scrapers

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 03:11 PM »

nice idea suleika, i like the idea of creating a custom google software search thing which excludes bad sites.

let me say i don't fully understand the objection to software listing sites taking info from public web pages describing the software.  to me this isn't really something i expect to be asked for permission about.

however for me this feature is key:

sometimes no links to the software home pages

this is completely unacceptable to me.  any software listing site that doesn't have a prominent link to the original web page of the program is not one to be trusted.

25974

Developer's Corner / Re: Is Beautiful Code A Succubus

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 08:46 AM »

Beautiful Code - http://www.amazon.co...actice/dp/0596510047

• Chapter 1, A Regular Expression Matcher, by Brian Kernighan, shows how deep insight into a language and a problem can lead to a concise and elegant solution.
• Chapter 2, Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology, by Karl Fogel, starts with a well-chosen abstraction and demonstrates its unifying effects on the system's further development.
• Chapter 3, The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote, by Jon Bentley, suggests how to measure a procedure without actually executing it.
• Chapter 4, Finding Things, by Tim Bray, draws together many strands in Computer Science in an exploration of a problem that is fundamental to many computing tasks.
• Chapter 5, Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order): Lessons From Designing XML Verifiers, by Elliotte Rusty Harold, reconciles the often conflicting goals of thoroughness and good performance.
• Chapter 6, Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty through Fragility, by Michael Feathers, presents an example that breaks the rules and achieves its own elegant solution.
• Chapter 7, Beautiful Tests, by Alberto Savoia, shows how a broad, creative approach to testing can not only eliminate bugs but turn you into a better programmer.
• Chapter 8, On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing, by Charles Petzold, drops down a level to improve performance while maintaining portability.
• Chapter 9, Top-Down Operator Precedence, by Douglas Crockford, revives an almost forgotten parsing technique and shows its new relevance to the popular JavaScript language.
• Chapter 10, The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count, by Henry S. Warren, Jr., reveals the impact that some clever algorithms can have on even a seemingly simple problem.
• Chapter 11, Secure Communication: The Technology of Freedom, by Ashish Gulhati, discusses the directed evolution of a secure messaging application that was designed to make sophisticated but often confusing cryptographic technology intuitively accessible to users.
• Chapter 12, Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl, by Lincoln Stein, shows how the combination of a flexible language and a custom-designed module can make it easy for people with modest programming skills to create powerful visualizations for their data.
• Chapter 13, The Design of the Gene Sorter, by Jim Kent, combines simple building blocks to produce a robust and valuable tool for gene researchers.
• Chapter 14, How Elegant Code Evolves With Hardware: The Case Of Gaussian Elimination, by Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek, surveys the history of LINPACK and related major software packages, to show how assumptions must constantly be re-evaluated in the face of new computing architectures.
• Chapter 15, The Long-Term Benefits of Beautiful Design, by Adam Kolawa, explains how attention to good design principles many decades ago helped CERN's widely used mathematical library (the predecessor of LINPACK) stand the test of time.
• Chapter 16, The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together, by Greg Kroah-Hartman, explains how many efforts by different collaborators to solve different problems led to the successful evolution of a complex, multithreaded system.
• Chapter 17, Another Level of Indirection, by Diomidis Spinellis, shows how the flexibility and maintainability of the FreeBSD kernel is promoted by abstracting operations done in common by many drivers and filesystem modules.
• Chapter 18, Python's Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People, by Andrew Kuchling, explains how a careful design combined with accommodations for a few special cases allows a language feature to support many different uses.
• Chapter 19, Multi-Dimensional Iterators in NumPy, by Travis E. Oliphant, takes you through the design steps that succeed in hiding complexity under a simple interface.
• Chapter 20, A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA's Mars Rover Mission, by Ronald Mak, uses industry standards, best practices, and Java technologies to meet the requirements of a NASA expedition where reliability cannot be in doubt.
• Chapter 21, ERP5: Designing for Maximum Adaptability, by Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat, shows how a powerful ERP system can be developed with free software tools and a flexible architecture.
• Chapter 22, A Spoonful of Sewage, by Bryan Cantrill, lets the reader accompany the author through a hair-raising bug scare and a clever solution that violated expectations.
• Chapter 23, Distributed Programming with MapReduce, by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, describes a system that provides an easy-to-use programming abstraction for large-scale distributed data processing at Google that automatically handles many difficult aspects of distributed computation, including automatic parallelization, load balancing, and failure handling.
• Chapter 24, Beautiful Concurrency, by Simon Peyton Jones, removes much of the difficulty of parallel program through Software Transactional Memory, demonstrated here using Haskell.
• Chapter 25, Syntactic Abstraction: The syntax-case Expander, by Kent Dybvig, shows how macros-a key feature of many languages and systems-can be protected in Scheme from producing erroneous output.
• Chapter 26, Labor-Saving Architecture: An Object-Oriented Framework for Networked Software, by William Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt, applies a range of standard object-oriented design techniques, such as patterns and frameworks, to distributed logging to keep the system flexible and modular.
• Chapter 27, Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way, by Andrew Patzer, demonstrates a designer's respect for his programmers by matching the design of a B2B web service to its requirements.
• Chapter 28, Beautiful Debugging, by Andreas Zeller, shows how a disciplined approach to validating code can reduce the time it takes to track down errors.
• Chapter 29, Treating Code as an Essay, by Yukihiro Matsumoto, lays out some challenging principles that drove his design of the Ruby programming language, and that, by extension, will help produce better software in general.
• Chapter 30, When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World, by Arun Mehta, takes you on a tour through the astounding interface design choices involved in a text editing system that allow people with severe motor disabilities, like Professor Stephen Hawking, to communicate via a computer.
• Chapter 31, Emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop, by TV Raman, shows how Lisp's advice facility can be used with Emacs to address a general need-generating rich spoken output-that cuts across all aspects of the Emacs environment, without modifying the underlying source code of a large software system.
• Chapter 32, Code in Motion, by Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald, lists some simple rules that have unexpectedly strong impacts on programming accuracy.
• Chapter 33, Writing Programs for "The Book," by Brian Hayes, explores the frustrations of solving a seemingly simple problem in computational geometry, and its surprising resolution.

25975

Developer's Corner / Re: Is Beautiful Code A Succubus

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 08:29 AM »

I'm not sure the article really disagrees with the notion as it suggests it does.  Seems to me he's really saying that you can't expect not to get your hands dirty when you work in the real world.  Fair enough, but I do believe that striving for elegant/beautiful code is an important principle in coding.  If it looks ugly, chances are very good that you are doing something in a way you know could be improved.

This quote comes to mind:
"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -- Buckminster Fuller