Recent Posts

27551

Developer's Corner / Re: Fifteen Commandments of Programming

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 06:54 AM »

great stuff!
ps. redhat you know you are suppose to attach a picture so i can blog more easily!

27552

Official Announcements / Re: Upgrading the forum tonight to SMF 1.1.2 - Possibilities of minor turbulence

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 06:32 AM »

Hopefully the forum has now been upgraded successfully.
Let me know of any troubles.

27553

Living Room / Re: We all need to do some ground work for DC

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 05:13 AM »

Not sure what it means for everyone to "do their part" but i appreciate the sentiment

I'm thrilled with the new help desk area (powered by KnowledgeBase Publisher), and we'll be adding more help entries in the future.

As for being available for contract work or larger freelance projects, please do by all means pass along the info to any people or businesses that you think might be interested in hiring a programmer.

27554

Official Announcements / Re: Upgrading the forum tonight to SMF 1.1.2 - Possibilities of minor turbulence

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 04:25 AM »

Thanks gri, i do understand what you are saying about this.

I actually have a test forum where i test everything first before trying it on our main forum.

Also - i do not install any mods using the package manager for these kinds of reasons - I install them all manually by manually modifying the php files, so i never do any install/uninstall of mods.

The penalty for this is that i have to always spend a lot of time when upgrading to compare my modified files to the new files and update all the new changed manually.

27555

General Software Discussion / Re: virtual install

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 04:03 AM »

Don't forget there are a lot of virtual machine tools: https://www.donation...alMachine/index.html

Depending on how you want to use it, you can make a virtual machine player with vmware and use it in this kind of way.

27556

Official Announcements / Upgrading the forum tonight to SMF 1.1.2 - Possibilities of minor turbulence

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 03:51 AM »

I'm upgrading the forum tonight, so please prepare for some minor turbulence and report any problems.. hopefully you won't notice any downtime but there is always the possibility of large-scale catastrophic maelstroms..

27557

Living Room / Re: One of the better if not best examples of flash based navigation

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 02:24 AM »

can't be bookmarked

really good point - you cant bookmark subpages, etc... i wonder if adobe is thinking about this..

27558

Mini-Reviews by Members / Keeping up to date with DC minireviews

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 01:32 AM »

Let me post this reply here and then split off this off-topic section of the thread.

https://www.donation...bWatchers/index.html

It's in need of an update so you can expect that some of the programs there have improved; i've not seen anything to change my mind about the best though, and i don't think the free tools are anywhere near the quality of the commercial ones (this isn't the case in all categories of software but it just seems to be the case for this type of tool for some reason).

27559

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR Occasional Hangs

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 01:20 AM »

is there a way to have FARR run using a higher process priority

Use my Process Tamer program and tell it that you always want FindAndRunRobot.exe to run as high priority.

27560

Mini-Reviews by Members / Keeping up to date with DC minireviews

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 01:11 AM »

cliff, you might also keep your eye on http://minireviews.donationcoder.com

ps. we will be having a discount on one of my alltime favorite programs (website watcher) in march, which is absolutely ideal for monitoring sites for changes.

27561

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Little Setup Builder Reviewed

« Last post by mouser on February 19, 2007, 12:01 AM »

Cliff, glad to see you are noticing all the great new minireviews people have been writing.

Just in case people haven't see the previous discussion of the idea of excerpting our mini-reviews on other sites, I'll just mention that in my view it's fine as long as credit is given to the author and a link pointed back to the original review with text something to the effect of "read the full review at DonationCoder.com" or something like that.

Cliff's site and newsletter are wonderful so I'm all for it.  And I really appreciate that Cliff always asks the author's permission, just to make sure - very much appreciated 

27562

General Software Discussion / MOVED: PCTools website - 25% discount on all products for 72 hours

« Last post by mouser on February 18, 2007, 09:03 PM »

This topic has been moved to Found Deals and Discounts.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=7508.0

27563

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR Occasional Hangs

« Last post by mouser on February 18, 2007, 09:55 AM »

i've never had farr v1 hang on me, but i have once seen the behavior you describe in v2.  i will try to track it down - right now i'm just getting plugins finished so you may have to remind me.  anyone else experienceing this please keep your powder try and let me keep working on v2 before we start a long thread on this.

27564

Living Room / Re: One of the better if not best examples of flash based navigation

« Last post by mouser on February 18, 2007, 09:33 AM »

very cool and beautiful.

but also horrible in terms of actual functional presentation and navigation.
i'd kill myself if i had to use such an interface to navigate around and learn about a site that way.

27565

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR Occasional Hangs

« Last post by mouser on February 18, 2007, 09:27 AM »

this is version 2 alpha right?

can you explain if this is new behavior or always does this or just recently started doing this.  does it do it every time?

27566

General Software Discussion / Re: Woodbin.com - Woodworking Software Central

« Last post by mouser on February 18, 2007, 07:42 AM »

I just wanted to update this ans say this one page is incredibly useful if you are building bookcases and stuff:
http://www.woodbin.c.../calcs/sagulator.htm

It helps you calculate the maximum span without sagging for different materials.

27567

UrlSnooper / URL Snooper - WIN98/ME Crashes - possible workaround

« Last post by mouser on February 17, 2007, 05:09 AM »

someone just posted on another forum a workaround they found for url snooper crashing on win98:

It involved deleting this registry entry:

[Select]

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Borland\Locales\C:\Program Files\URLSnooper2\URLSnooper.exe

If anyone with the win98/me crashes wants to try that and let us know if it works it would be nice..
meanwhile ill try to find out why and a more official fix.

27568

Screenshot Captor / Re: Screenshot Captor Error Message

« Last post by mouser on February 17, 2007, 04:31 AM »

hopefully i can find a fix for this this weekend.

27569

General Software Discussion / Re: I have lost hibernation ability in my laptop :(

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2007, 11:54 PM »

yes i have experience stuff like this - when doing a clean OS install over the built-in operating system install by laptop manufacturer.  lost my special mouse touchpad functions, etc.  I think the solution is locating the special drivers/software for your laptop.

however there is also power options where you can enable/disable hibernation, check your control panel.

27570

Find And Run Robot / Re: Latest FARR v2.00.45 ALPHA PREVIEW Release - February 6, 2007

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2007, 09:59 PM »

TucknDar:  All your comments i agree with, and will be fixing.  I've been working on my plugin system for last couple of weeks and i've finally got it working (at least the basics) so as soon as i wrap that up ill get back to ironing out all these issues and then we can have something nice

27571

Living Room / Re: How Google Killed Search

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2007, 09:52 PM »

Personally i think there are some good points here.. In the early days of the internet, everyone's goal was to have the most "relevant" results at top.  Now every force in the universe is trying to put the most "profitable" paying sites up top.  There is so much money involved in getting your business to the top of google results that a whole industry has been created from it, and a huge swath of the internet is creating content for the sole purpose of getting high ranking google hits.

Go check out adsense forums and you will see post after post of people discussing what the best kind of content to write about to get high google placement and big money from google ads.  In other words - people who will write about whatever will make the most money, without any regard to whether they have background or interest in the subject.

Google's whole business model is based on advertising money.  What's better for them to put at the top of search, the page with adsense on it or the page without adsense.  They've demonstrated some integrity but they are a big corporation now, i don't for a minute doubt that they would tweak their "algorithms" however they had to to insure a big growing profit.  If it means ranking some non-commercial sites down and some commmercial sites up, so be it.  It's a vicious circle all driven by profit.  Everyone has the same incentive - to milk the most money from driving people to pages where money is going to change hands between the search engine / portal and the advertisers.

We've recently posted some articles about newspapers rewriting headlines and stories in order to get highly ranked on google.  This is where we are headed im afraid - all content being written and massaged in order to please the search engines and sites like digg.  It troubles me greatly.. only im not sure what a better solution is.  I guess my core solution for most of these things is the same answer i have for politics - take the money out of it.  But that's just heresy in the modern age.. No one wants to take the money out of search, they want to "monetize" it more. .

27572

Developer's Corner / Re: Content management solution for a small software site?

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2007, 09:37 PM »

I have done a ton of modifications of smf, BUT i don't think anything important that you might be referring to.  mostly to do with the donationcredits stuff.  most of what you see is smf built in stuff with minor tweaks.  However if you don't have a strong need for the best forum, you might be better off just using one integrated into the cms you choose (drupal has it's own forum for example).

27573

Developer's Corner / Re: Content management solution for a small software site?

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2007, 08:19 PM »

The best way to go insane is to go looking for the best CMS.  Everytime I've tried it I've lost a day and felt more confused at the end then at the begining.  There are just so many different CMS out there.

Last time I checked, Drupal was the one that seemed nicest to me in terms of core organization.  Joomla has a big community but it just never felt right to me.  But there are some new cms out there, including some designed for smaller sites, that seem tempting.  I look forward to more users posting their opinions.

ps1. As someone who has done static html coding as well instead of cms, I've always hoped to find an intermediate solution - a nice cms that works using templates and site menus, but works not from a database of articles written online but by "compiling" content files you write on your local pc and generating a website from them..  We've had some discussion about that here before but it's a lot like swimming upstream.  And although there are a few cms-like things that do something like this, nothing very active.

ps2. We're all excited to hear about your plans.. good luck and please let us know when we should come take a look!

27574

General Software Discussion / Re: SuperboyAC's DC blog #2 (Live Search feature in software)

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2007, 11:36 AM »

please remember to send a credit or something to post authors to support their work.
even if you only send them 0.10 credits (10 cents) it's still a nice thing.

27575

Screenshot Captor / Re: dpi settings not being honored

« Last post by mouser on February 16, 2007, 11:07 AM »

the dpi may not be obeyed in saveas.. let me check and fix in next version if not.