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Recent Posts

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25951
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.


from http://www.fortysomething.ca/mt/etc/
25952
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


from http://www.wired.com/
25953
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):

Screenshot - 8_9_2007 , 10_32_02 PM.png
25954
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!


from http://flash.plasticthinking.org/
25955
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).
25956
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  :up:
25957
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  :up:
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!)
25958
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.
25959
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
25960
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.
25961
Living Room / Re: new PC options:-
« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 08:50 AM »
looks like a good computer, congratulations  :up:
25962
Site/Forum Features / Re: compose hotkeys
« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2007, 07:41 AM »
 8)
25963
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.
25964
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.
25965
General Software Discussion / Re: Top 3 programs you use
« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 11:48 PM »

25966
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.
25967
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?
25968
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.  :up:
25969
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.
25970
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.
25971
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.
25972
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
25973
General Software Discussion / Re: WYFCA?
« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 08:21 AM »
i guess i'm old fashioned and a fan of the f letter.  My faves:
  • WTFO
  • STFU
  • RTFM
  • FUBAR
25974
Older Newsletters / Newsletter for August 8th, 2007 - Codename "Summer Slowdown"
« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 07:48 AM »
Newsletter for August 8th, 2007
Codename "Summer Slowdown"


"If you read nothing else on our site, read our BLOG"



1. From the Editor
Greetings everyone and welcome to another edition of the DonationCoder.com newsletter, proudly labeled as non-spam and virus-free by one out of five internet service providers.

It's almost the end of the summer and a lot of people seem to be on vacation this month (not me!), so we don't have any discounts lined up for August.  But we'll be back with discounts next month.

I really wanted to have FARR v2 released in time for this newsletter but I ended up spending so much time on the updater features (which have turned into a full standalone flexible updater tool), that the FARR 2 release has been pushed back another month.  The updater features are important because they allow you to update and install plugins written by 3rd parties easily (like firefox does).  So I hope you will bear with me -- I'm trying to make the FARR 2 release as pleasant and smooth as possible.

Make sure you check out the pictures from the latest DC Gatherings:


2. Our Members Write Stuff
Some people are under the mistaken impression that our site is just for programmers -- it's not!  It's for programmers and non-programmers alike -- anyone who loves the world of software.  But one thing is for sure, the members on our site are busy beavers and they love to create and share stuff..



3. Countdown to FARR v2 Release
After almost a year of solid development, Find and Run Robot version 2 will be released to the public later this month.  It's a huge release for us and supporting members of the site can now download an early release of v2 with lots of great plugins written by coders on the forum.  We're very excited about this release as you might imagine!  We've also released an early version of a new updater tool that will keep you up to date on all of our software.



4. Your Input Requested!
We want your participation on the DC forum! It's ok if you're normally shy and reserved and scared to post questions and comments -- we give you permission to make an exception for these posts.  Some people think our forum is only for expert power users, but it's really a giant mix of users, and we want you to participate, regardless of your background.  So take a deep breath and jump in!



5. General Software Discussion
Above all else, discussion on the DonationCoder.com forum focuses around software, old and new, and finding the best tool for the job.  Have a question or want advice on what program to use? Ask it!



6. Fun and Games
Our readers are obsessed with productivity and time management, but even the hardest workers need an occasional quick burst of recreation and diversion.  Nothing too complicated -- just enough to recharge your batteries.



7. The Wonderful World of the Web
Are you suffering from IOS (Internet Overload Syndrome)?  We thought so.  Have you just figured out what web2.0 means? (get ready because web3.0 is coming soon).  To help reduce your overload, here's a list of some of the more interesting website discussions, debates, and discoveries that have come up on the forum over the last month..



8. Developer's Corner
Don't be thrown off by the name of this section on our forum.  It's not just for programmers.  It's also for people interested in starting their own business and website developers, students and entrepreneurs.  Even if you're not sure whether you belong in that category, you might want to poke your head in and see if there's anything interesting out there that might want you to start up a new hobby.



9. Site of the Month
This month I want to give some special attention to our website of the month, Nirsoft.net, a site that has been mentioned many times on our forum, but is long overdue for some official accolades and recognition from us:

  • NirSoft is doing amazing work.  Their power utilities for windows reach into the very guts of the operating system and do things no other utilities can do.  And they are all free.  Our only warning is that you please don't visit their site unless you have some serious time to kill.
  • Some of the tools NirSoft makes are completely unique and wonderfully surprising.  Some of our favorites include: OfficeIns, ZipInstaller, ShellExView, ShellMenuView,  Volumouse, NirCmd,  SmartSniff, and their newest utility, GDIView.  They also have a ton of password recovery tools, browser investigation tools, and much more.



Thanks to Wordzilla for the help preparing this newsletter.  I'm still looking for someone who might be willing to help prepare newsletters, so let me know if you think you might want to give it a try.
-mouser
25975
Living Room / Re: KenR's health and situation
« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2007, 01:45 AM »
Ken you've been a big presence in the donationcoder irc chat room for a long time. And much to my chagrin you've even invented some terms to make fun of me that i have unsuccessfully tried to squash out of existence  ;)

I think it's good news the surgery was approved.. I know you've been in a lot of pain and at least now your brain is able to know you are taking active steps to alleviate it.  Hang in there ken, and let us know how it goes.  Our thoughts are with you.  And make sure you tell the doctor that the most important thing is for you to be able to travel to the next DC gathering.
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