Recent Posts

2901

General Software Discussion / Re: Google creates a URL shortener, but it's limited

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2009, 07:44 AM »

Why can't Twitter and any other service using URL shorteners switch to something more sensible like, you know, those fancy brand new hyperlinks? Just saying

-Lashiec (December 17, 2009, 07:03 PM)

Because, in fairness, that makes the actual message longer than those ~160 characters. Dunno whether any device using Twitter is actually limited to a single SMS-length message, though

2902

DC Gamer Club / Re: Microsoft is giving away Tinker for free

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2009, 07:42 AM »

I just wish steam would have slightly better pricing, and that all the competitors would die off.

-f0dder (December 17, 2009, 06:07 PM)

Erm, what? o_O

-Lashiec (December 17, 2009, 06:43 PM)

Might sound slightly counter-intuitive, I know - the sentence is really meant as two points, not a "point B follows point A" . I find it drop-dead annoying that some games are available through service foo and others through bar, forcing me to have several game distribution platforms installed... especially when some of those platforms SUCKS (EA Download Manager, for instance)... STEAM is the most non-intrusive, easy-to-use and nice platform I've seen so far. Problem is that pricing is too high (for the major games at least, the various discounts and indie game prices are OK) - I feel I should pay less for an electronic distribution, since the distributors don't have the hassle of shipping physical goods.

2903

Living Room / Re: Would you buy this milk?

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2009, 06:10 PM »

My copilot and I both used these during our "daily grind" transcontinental flights from San Diego to Minneapolis. We had to modify them a bit to fit snug against the instrument panels (when we bought them we didn't realize the planes we fly don't have steering wheels!), but in the end it did the job. With our laptops firmly in place we were able to focus our attention on what really mattered, participating in raids with our WoW clan. During our last flight we were so immersed in trying to take down Eranikus that we overshot Minneapolis by a full hour and a half before some annoying flight attendant interrupted us, babbling something about "FAA and F16 fighters."

...obviously that one is a fake (still funny though!), but pilots are insane beasts. Friend of mine lives with one, after seeing the condition he's sometimes in when he heads for work - eek.

2904

DC Gamer Club / Re: Microsoft is giving away Tinker for free

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2009, 06:07 PM »

Dislike. There's enough game services already... another competitor, along with another stupid game manager, isn't going to be any good.

I just wish steam would have slightly better pricing, and that all the competitors would die off.

2905

Living Room / Re: The Great Aussie Firewall to Go Ahead

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2009, 06:05 PM »

Helmets are required for bicyclists here, but not for motorcycles.

-Stoic Joker (December 17, 2009, 05:25 PM)

That sounds pretty insane :-s

2906

General Software Discussion / Re: Google creates a URL shortener, but it's limited

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2009, 06:04 PM »

For SMS-length messager services like twitter, it's almost an absolute must, though.

-zridling (December 17, 2009, 12:36 PM)

Just say no to that kind of brainrot

2907

Living Room / Re: The Great Aussie Firewall to Go Ahead

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2009, 11:09 AM »

Innuendo: you haven't had a forced-seatbelt-use law until a couple of years ago? O_o

Still, while I do find that seatbelt use should be mandatory, whether you're just doing a 1km trip to shop groceries (in which case you really shouldn't be taking the car anyway, but I digress), I'm not a big fan of the way politicians always sneak stuff in through the back door; it's despicable

2908

Living Room / Re: Yet another 0-day pdf exploit in the wild

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2009, 09:10 AM »

And if I were Adobe, I would ship next major version of Acrobat with JavaScript disabled. If a PDF really needs such function, the program usually warns you, so...

-Lashiec (December 17, 2009, 09:09 AM)

Doing so would be admitting defeat, though - probably not something they want to do

2909

fSekrit / Re: fSekrit has a new website!

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2009, 03:21 AM »

Hey nice f0dder 

It's very black and white, or maybe charcoal and white?

-Perry Mowbray (December 17, 2009, 03:17 AM)

Something like that, I wanted simplistic and clean

2910

fSekrit / Re: fSekrit has a new website!

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2009, 02:18 AM »

Oh, and thanks a lot to Gothi[c] for fixing the HTTP redirects I asked for

2911

fSekrit / Re: fSekrit has a new website!

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2009, 02:13 AM »

Thanks, Jammo, link fixed

2912

General Software Discussion / Re: Alt-tab replacement ?

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2009, 10:49 AM »

Personally, I prefer switcher²... it's an exposé clone so a bit different from your regular Alt+Tab, but I find it's a lot more convenient when you have boatloads of windows across multiple monitors.

2913

Living Room / Re: Yet another 0-day pdf exploit in the wild

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2009, 09:54 AM »

Yeah, it's a big mistake... I've always hated any kind of in-browser document handling anyway.

2914

General Software Discussion / Re: Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2009, 09:47 AM »

sinum: hm, the trick with taskplanner doesn't work?

Anyway, those programs should be rewritten to do admin-server/user-gui split... time to put pressure on the developers

2915

Developer's Corner / Re: Can Buttons be Dynamically Moved, Resized, etc. in Your Language?

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2009, 09:39 AM »

but I have been considering the trade-off of the quickness of production in a visual IDE versus the intimacy the coder gains with the textual-type syntax/logic

-CodeTRUCKER (December 15, 2009, 08:03 PM)

Save the "real programming" for where it matters, not using visual designers for your GUI code is a waste of time... trust me. (I still do some of my GUI coding in raw Win32 API, so I know what I'm talking about )

Sounds like a somewhat weird thing you want to design, btw

-f0dder (December 15, 2009, 01:17 AM)

Hmmmm...  that sounds like something that was probably said to Mr. Galilei, Leonardo, Thomas and Orville.  

-CodeTRUCKER (December 15, 2009, 08:03 PM)

2916

Living Room / Re: Win7 Bug - New windows/notifications do not get focus

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2009, 06:00 AM »

Focus-stealing is just about never ever legitimate - I, for one, welcome any steps taken to prevent focus-stealing. Unfortunately, at least on XP and below, it was possible to hack around the anti-stealing measures, and fscktarded coders who think they know better are doing that. I think the Windows Update box is a perfect example of something you don't want popping up & stealing focus.

But even "non-fatal" popups are doyc-damn annoying, especially for touch typists who aren't looking at the monitor, and find that they've spent the last minute not typing in their text editor or IDE.

Oh, and legitimate uses like getting focus on hotkey press after application has been hidden are possible.

2917

Developer's Corner / Re: Can Buttons be Dynamically Moved, Resized, etc. in Your Language?

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2009, 01:17 AM »

Java is nice and all, but oh god the development environments I've tried (Eclipse and NetBeans) have their quirks - especially when it comes to GUI designers, which are quirky beyond reason... an the debuggers absolutely suck compared to what Visual Studio has. The refactoring support is nice, though, and possible because Java is so much simpler to parse than C++.

Since you've done VB, well, I'd say go for that - it's pretty darn fast to do GUIs in. Sounds like a somewhat weird thing you want to design, btw

2918

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 — first impressions

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2009, 01:05 AM »

Writing lousy code - a great excuse for charging customers for a new upgrade

2919

Developer's Corner / Re: This is interesting ... LoseThos Operating System

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2009, 01:04 AM »

My biggie was a program I wrote (in FORTH supplemented with some assembly code) that let you use an inexpensive Casio keyboard to play musical notes directly through the SID chip.

-40hz (December 14, 2009, 06:31 PM)

MOS-6581

2920

Living Room / Re: Win7 Bug - New windows/notifications do not get focus

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2009, 01:03 AM »

I personally have no issues with it but my wife, on the other hand, does :-/ And as any married man knows, when your wife is not happy, you aren't happy either.

-Josh (December 14, 2009, 06:50 PM)

As any married man should know, when your wife is not happy, stuff her with Valium.

2921

fSekrit / Re: fSekrit has a new website!

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2009, 02:34 PM »

Update: added forum feed integration. Looks like crap, but the main code (including feed caching, should the site ever be slashdotted ) has been done. Chose to roll my own to get some PHP experience, turned out to be pretty easy.

This post is mostly to check the caching etc

2922

fSekrit / fSekrit has a new website!

« Last post by f0dder on December 13, 2009, 07:07 PM »

I've finally gotten around to setting up a "proper" website for fSekrit; mouser gave me a dcmembers.com account quite a while ago, and it didn't have anything but a half-arsed page for my Notepad++ plugins... until now. Behold f0dder.dcmembers.com, the new and much improved¹ site for fSekrit and the Notepad++ plugins

When Gothi[c] gets around to fixing it, the current page should redirect smoothly to the new site... until then, this post will hopefully help search engines pick up. Redirects are up and running, thanks plenty to Gothi[c]

In order to not be an entirely self-promoting post, I'm going to ask you guys for feedback. Anything goes - design, content, grammar, splellelling, you name it! Current list of known this-could-be-done-betters:

• Main page is rather boring
• Space is needed between icons and text in sidebar.
• Latest forum posts in fSekrit page not implemented yet.
• Use donationcoder favico for DoCo sidebar link.

#1: thanks to scancode for pointing me to Free CSS Templates, otherwise the new site would still look like crap

2923

Developer's Corner / Re: Free, non-sucky UML software?

« Last post by f0dder on December 13, 2009, 03:45 AM »

mwb1100: Enterprise Architect looks nice from the screenshots and feature-list at their site, but it's definitely outside my price range, and has way more features than I'll ever need... I only really need class diagrams (but the ability to manipulate them fast & efficiently; I don't even need them to look super-pretty, see attached screenshot for how Astah looks - it's not superpretty, but it's good enough).

Sequence and State diagrams could also be useful, use-case diagrams with decent textual description tables would be a bonus, and code generation would be the icing on the cake... but I'd trade a lot of that for an efficient UI with good keyboard support

As for the file format, it's not *that* much of an issue, I just don't feel super comfortable having too much vendor lock-in for something as important as source code related files. While there's probably no decent interchange between the various UML tools, at least something XML based gives you the possibility to waste a couple of weeks writing your own conversion tools, without first having to reverse engineer a binary format

Would've been cool if there was a decent tool producing non-bloated XML output, though - would integrate a lot better with subversion (or other source control) than various binary formats.

2924

Developer's Corner / Re: Free, non-sucky UML software?

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2009, 06:08 PM »

*bump*!
Why is it that all the free UML software sucks?

Today I gave both ArgoUML and JUDE (now Astah) a try... both look semi-decent, but have absolutely horrible keyboard support. ArgoUML doesn't seem to have any (documented, anyway) methods of adding operations/fields, whereas Astah does but often ends up with focus in the menu bar.

Are all the normal UML users mouse goons? How on earth do you have any kind of productivity if you constantly have to switch between mouse and keyboard to accomplish anything?

I looked at the WikiPedia List of UML tools, but wasn't really encouraged to try anything else - the other (free) choices seemed to be either outdated, sucky, or both.

So far the lesser evil is Visual Paradigm. It's bloated and has bugs, but at least it's managable and has (compared to the other offerings >_<) half-decent keyboard support. It produces terribly bloated output files, but at least it's zipped XML which should stand some chance of being interpretable by other software, whereas Astah for instance produces a zipped binary memory dump of Java Serializable objects.

2925

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 — first impressions

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2009, 10:21 AM »

Carol, AuthentiCode already lets one do that - afaik it's the same process as SSL certs (plus a bit more?), CAs are definitely involved.