Recent Posts

28501

Mircryption / Re: Norton antivirus false alarm

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 10:13 PM »

It's an unfortunate reality that antivirus programs tend to false alarm on irc scripts.
There is no virus or "IRC.flooder" in mircryption.

The best way to prove this to yourself is to not run the installer but just download the setup program and open it in winzip or any zip compatible program and extract the files manually.  Then have your antivirus programs scan it and examine the files it says have the flooder thing - usually you can see yourself there is nothing bad about it.

Thanks for posting and letting us know about this - it's the first i've heard about this specific issue.  But please keep in mind that it's not so unusual for antivirus programs to falsely identify something as a virus when it's not.

28502

UrlSnooper / Re: Sniffing, but can't smell

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 07:54 PM »

Thanks for the report BBigJ, i've never heard that a firewall could block url snooper from sniffing.  What firewall is it?

28503

Living Room / Re: I wish there was some way to Encrypt my bike so it won't be stolen

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 03:13 PM »

lol all replies 

28504

Living Room / Re: Child's Play I+II - Little Kids Commenting on Yesterdays Games - Funny Stuff

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 03:11 PM »

Loonier, i think if you put these kids in front of one of those text-only adventure games that many of us grew up on, they would plain out cry.

28505

Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - 2.28.06 - DEC 13, 2006

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 08:35 AM »

thanks for the quick report about the dpi bug i will look into it immediately.

28506

Official Announcements / Re: THE N.A.N.Y. CHALLENGE - New Apps For the New Year

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 06:50 AM »

blaster - go for it 

(just remember the program has to be freeware/donationware!)

28507

Living Room / Re: Child's Play I+II - Little Kids Commenting on Yesterdays Games - Funny Stuff

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 06:42 AM »

Those kids sound jaded and burnt out at age 10.. Here's an example - keep in mind these kids are aged 9-12:

EGM: Who's that chick Mario is rescuing up there?
Brian: It's Princess Peach.
Kirk: It's a hooker.
Niko: She looks cut in half.
Tim: Oh wow—she's one of those pole dancers.

28508

N.A.N.Y. Challenge 2007 / Re: Welcome..

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 03:59 AM »

Does anyone want to volunteer for supervising the N.A.N.Y. project?
I think it should be someone who is not participating themself.

Here is what it would entail:
1. Messaging the NANY participants and making sure they are on schedule and still participating; give encouragement and harsh lashing if not.
2. Helping beta test the NANY apps.
3. Helping NANY authors get their posts about their apps corrent when NANY day arrives, and blogging the entries (i'll show you how it's easy).
4. For all your hard work you will be rewarded with one of the NANY cody mugs yourself.

Please don't take this on if you cant commit to it and be around on dec 31-Jan 1 to help out with it..

28509

General Software Discussion / Re: Warning: FireFox renders slow like a turtle in a coma

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 03:53 AM »

i should say i'm still using FF 1.05.08

28510

Developer's Corner / Re: What Programming Language have you USED THE MOST over the past 12 months?

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 03:11 AM »

tinjaw you should let people put in 2 or 3 votes maybe?

28511

General Software Discussion / Warning: FireFox renders slow like a turtle in a coma

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 03:10 AM »

Since i've started using firefox more and more i've noticed that on long forum threads the difference in loading/rendering time for a page seems like it can be hugely slower than rendering in IE (i'm talking like 20x slower).

Now this may be because i have plenty of extensions loaded - i'm not sure, but the difference in painful and not cool.

Does anyone know any benchmarking pages on different rendering speeds of the current crop of browsers?

Before you opera nut jobs post a reply, yes i know opera is fast like a track star.. I may try operat again next..

28512

Developer's Corner / Re: Just plain 'ol "Hard Work" or "MPS" ("Mental Paradigm Shift")

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 02:46 AM »

i have two answers for this, but keep in mind my view is nothing but the uninformed view of someone with no excuse offering opinions on this stuff.

This would have been a simple thing to learn way back when. I am frustrated with myself for not being able to grasp things as quickly as I used to. It's frustrating to see kids that I inspire, pick up a book and 6 months later have more knowledge than it took me to learn in 2-3 years.

not being able to grasp things as quickly - this is part of life and part of the way the brain works, no sense fighting against it.  you are not going to be able to learn new fundamental concepts like programming as fast as you would in your teens.  so be it, that shouldn't stop you from learning and shouldn't stop you from being damn good at it.  just going to take you some extra time.  it's like that with all things regardless of our ages too, some people will learn faster than others.  that's no reason not to travel down that path.

Being realistic, I don't believe I will ever be a good enough programmer to be employable by a company, but I can possibly be good enough in time to be a self employed shareware/donationware programmer and earn enough to cover the necessities of life.

this is where things get more complicated.  first of all there are plenty of companies employing people without much skills, and plenty of highly skilled shareware/donationware programmers who aren't making a dime  (you can forget about donationware right now if you want to make money).

making money programming is something i know nothing about and anyone taking advice from me on how to make money should be institutionalized.

if you just wanted to program for fun, then there'd be no question about it and i'd advise you to just learn slowly and practice practice practies.  programming is 95% practice.  it takes many many years to become an efficient coder, but that's part of the fun.

but if it's about making money, the issues get more complicated.. if you don't love coding it might be a painful road trying to make money doing it, especially with kids coming out of college and high school who are ready to program like the pros..  Shareware seems such a hit or miss thing, i don't know how to advise you on that.  Sometimes people do well just writing custom software for people they know in various industries if you have any connections.

Good luck whatever your decision!

28513

Living Room / New: Google Patent Search

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 01:37 AM »

As part of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, we’re constantly working to expand the diversity of content we make available to our users. With Google Patent Search, you can now search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you.

Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Where does this patent data come from?
A. All patents available through Google Patent Search come from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Patents issued in the United States are public domain government information, and images of the entire database of U.S. patents are readily available online via the USPTO website.
 
Q. What types of patents are available?
A. Google Patent Search covers the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO—from patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006. We don’t currently include patent applications, international patents, or U.S. patents issued over the last few months, but we look forward to expanding our coverage in the future.

Q. How many U.S. patents are there?
A. To date, the USPTO has issued approximately 7 million patents.

Q. How does it work?
A. Using the same technology that powers Google Book Search, Google has converted the entire image database of U.S. patents into a format that’s easy to search. You can search the full text of U.S. patents from the Google Patent Search homepage, or visit the Advanced Patent Search page to search by criteria like patent number, inventor, and filing date.

Q. How do you rank patents in the search results?
A. As with Google Web Search, we rank patent results according to their relevance to a given search query. We use a number of signals to evaluate how relevant each patent is to a user's query, and we determine our results algorithmically.

Q. Is Google hosting the patent pages?
A. Yes. We’re providing an easy way to find and read these patents.
 
Q. When will the product be available in my country/language?
A. Google Patent Search is currently available in English, and it includes only U.S. patents. We’re always looking to extend our products and services to users worldwide, and we hope to continue to expand the patent offices we cover and the language interfaces available.

http://www.google.com/patents

28514

Living Room / Child's Play I+II - Little Kids Commenting on Yesterdays Games - Funny Stuff

« Last post by mouser on December 14, 2006, 01:04 AM »

Here are two long pieces which provide transcripts of an experiment where kids of today (age about 10-13) are allowed to play games from 1970s-1980s and their reactions are transcribed.  Some great stuff..

Donkey Kong is "lame." Tetris is "boring." Space Invaders "needs a superbomb or something." And why play Pong when it's more fun to "jump up and down on one foot"? Hey, save your irate letters--we didn't say this stuff. The nostalgia-nuking commentary is from our original Child's Play story in EGM's November 2003 issue, in which we had kids of the PlayStation generation playtest classic games from the '70s and '80s. Mortified gaming grown-ups wrote in to call it blasphemy--and call these outspoken scamps a name that rhymes with "brittle truckers."

It was our most popular article ever. So we're doing it again, with a new batch of brittle truckers and a new bucket of classic games.

Read Child's Play I..
Read Child's Play II..

from http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/

28515

General Software Discussion / Re: Free 3D Box Shot Maker

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 07:05 PM »

See also:
http://www.boxshotmaker.com/
and
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=6505.0

28516

Official Announcements / Re: THE N.A.N.Y. CHALLENGE - New Apps For the New Year

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 04:25 PM »

great! i was just going to say that online tools count of course 
and remember it doesnt have to be hosted on dc - to count, it just has to get released dec31 or jan 1, and be free/donationware.

28517

Official Announcements / Re: THE N.A.N.Y. CHALLENGE - New Apps For the New Year

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 03:41 PM »

that's very helpfull Ruffnekk!
ok i suggest that on Dec 15 we send out messages reminding and confirming participation.  hopefully not too many people will drop out at that point.

seems we definitely have enough for the mugs though.. i hope cody has been saving up his coins!

28518

General Software Discussion / Re: Double Standards

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 02:39 PM »

I can get mad at Microsoft as good as the rest (see my post attacking IE7 which i dislike more each day), BUT i do agree in the sense that i think the extent to which Microsoft gets attacked for things that others get patted on the back for has entered the realm of the comical.

if you swapped the labels of google and microsoft, and put a google label on everything microsoft did, and a microsoft label on everything google did, nothing would change about the press (same thing if you did it about Apple and Microsoft).  the new "google" would be trumpeted and heralded for creating a groundbreaking mp3 player and changing the world with their devine ribbon and earth shatteringly brilliant Desktop operating system.  Wheras the new "microsoft" would be attacking for releasing so many crappy beta things and engaging in monopolistic practices like pricing their services at below cost to kill the competition.

Microsoft does some good stuff - and i feel bad for them now because they just cannot get a fair break in the public relations world - everyone hates on them, and they are just being kicked down the staircase.  Having said that, I don't think they are helping their case that much with some of their recent mediocre stuff..

28519

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review of Fineprint (Virtual Printer)

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 10:35 AM »

patteo i just made a minor adjustment of your table to make clear in the donation link that you are the author of the REVIEW not the program.

28520

Living Room / Re: FTC Unmasks Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Endorser Must Disclose Link to Seller

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 10:31 AM »

commentary:
http://publishing2.c...ow-an-ftc-violation/

trying to find out who is paying diggers:
http://www.calacanis...ocial-news-scammers/

28521

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review of Fineprint (Virtual Printer)

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 10:21 AM »

here's another thing fineprint can do which just goes to show you how flexible and nice it is:

how often have you printed out something like a web page and noticed that the last page is just junk footer stuff you dont need?  when you print to fineprint you can check the last page, and delete it if you dont need to print it.

28522

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review of Fineprint (Virtual Printer)

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 10:04 AM »

actually i think the paragraph needs changing come to think of it.

perhaps the best thing fineprint can do is lay out multiple pages on one page of paper - that should really be made clear right in the begining.

28523

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: How to find out?

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 09:55 AM »

if you go to the Help -> About menu in the program, it should show your name+email if the key was accepted.

28524

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review of Fineprint (Virtual Printer)

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 07:37 AM »

i agree with mitz, this paragraph of yours could go right up front as first thing:

WHAT FINEPRINT DOES:
Fineprint allows you to intercept your print job if you so choose and after applying any printing enhancements you so choose, send the enhanced output to the physical printer you choose. You can even edit the print job such as inserting a blank page, deleting a page or just print a single page or save to a jpg or tiff etc, combine it and print several jobs all at one go.

28525

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review of Fineprint (Virtual Printer)

« Last post by mouser on December 13, 2006, 07:25 AM »

WOW what a mini review 
(Let's all send patteo a few credits as a thank you!)

ps. I also love Fineprint - it can be a wonderful and essential tool 

[i'm going to contact fineprint people now and see if i can get them to give dc members a discount]