Recent Posts

31201

Screenshot Captor / Re: v2.15.01 bug? auto select active window...

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 01:31 PM »

that's a good point - those settings are a bit confusing.  maybe a combo box with various choices would be more intuitive as opposed to two checkboxes.

31202

Official Announcements / Re: Cody's Haiku Mug

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 08:53 AM »

looks like you caught cody in the lastest wall street scandal, backdating of stock options (http://accounting.sm...tpros.com/x53383.xml).

31203

General Software Discussion / Re: Help requested for a Win XP hidden file option problem

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 08:51 AM »

is it possible you are only setting one folders properties? in xp you have to say "apply this setting to all folders" if you want it to remember the setting across all folders.

31204

Official Announcements / Re: Cody's Haiku Mug

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 08:47 AM »

corrected from June 4th to June 14th 

31205

Official Announcements / Cody's Haiku Mug

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 08:26 AM »

Ok Cody has instructed us to give away some of his mugs.



This mug will be awarded for a haiku poem about Cody.
This mini contest lasts only 24 hours!
It will end June 14th at 9am NY time.

Just post your entries as replies to this post; you may enter multiple times.
Those who have already received cody mugs may NOT enter.


from http://www.kidzone.ws/poetry/haiku.htm

"Haiku" is a traditional form of Japanese poetry.  Haiku poems consist of 3 lines.  The first and last lines of a Haiku have 5 syllables and the middle line has 7 syllables.  The lines rarely rhyme.

Here's a Haiku to help you remember:

I am first with five
Then seven in the middle --
Five again to end.

31206

Living Room / DonationCoder Receives 100 Trillion Dollars in Big Bird First Round Financing

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 05:56 AM »

every day i read about some obscure web2.0 startup getting some insane number of millions of dollars of funding, with some special venture capital angel investor type description (see http://www.ventureworthy.com/).

ok, so we didn't receive 100 trillion dollars in Big Bird First Round Financing, but we did get a $20 donation yesterday - and we don't have to come up with any hair-brained schemes to get rich quick 

31207

General Software Discussion / Re: A tool to correct microsoft installer annoyances?

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 05:17 AM »

msi has been an utter nightmare for me in some cases - i hate it.

31208

Developer's Corner / Re: Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 05:16 AM »

people always hate on the "teach yourself x in y days"

personally i don't have any problem with such books, but i advise people to treat them like candy - you could read through one quickly to get a taste and get started, but then throw it away and get yourself a real book as soon as you actually get started.

31209

Living Room / Re: Another article on google adsense worries

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 04:41 AM »

here is the problem some of us have been raising:

google has very strong reasons to sweep this click fraud under the rug, because they are making a fortune off it.  there have been lots of below-the-threshold rumblings that a huge proportion of ad clicks are fraudulent.  if google came out and admitted this they might in fact owe back 75% of their profits to their customers(!), and start losing 75% of their revenue.. scary thought..

as these issues start to become public, google may have a competing incentive to get it all out into the open and transparent to avoid the bad rumours, etc., so that may help combat the incentive to bury this all under the rug eventually.

speaking of which, i think i'd like to move donationcoder.com off of google ads eventually if we can find a simple way to arrange an alternative system that we have more control over. 

31210

General Software Discussion / A tool to correct microsoft installer annoyances?

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 04:23 AM »

from http://ask-leo.com/

It's deja vu all over again for me. I had a very similar problem - whenever I tried to scan something, upon completion, Windows Installer would run attempting to install some additional HP software component. Cancelling that worked ok, but it was an annoyance I had to face with every scan.

And it's an annoyance many people face with every reboot.

The good news is that there's a free tool that might help.

http://ask-leo.com/w...very_reboot_why.html

31211

General Software Discussion / webshot - commandline web thumbnails

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 03:30 AM »

looks nice if you have a need for this kind of thing

http://www.nathanm.c...creenshot-capturing/

from downloadsquad.com

31212

DonationCoder Projects / Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 02:19 AM »

this is very close to the concept, and you've grasped the main idea.

to be more specific, the idea is to have:
1) a Content Directory Tree, which is someplace not in public_html
2) a set of Template and Site Building instructions, again not in public_html
3) a tool for BUILDING (regenerating) the html site from the content+templates

so it wouldnt be a dynamically generated "wrapper" but rather a way of building static html (or php) pages on demand when they need updating, from a set of content pages and templates.

so for example if you changed the header/banner, you could say "rebuild the entire website now" and it would rebuild all the static pages with the new header, footer, etc.

in more advanced cases, you could say, this page should contain the text of these posts; so when one of these posts change, this page needs to be rebuilt. so there has to be a kind of table telling it what needs rebuilding and when.

the tool also needs to provide some nice functions for things like a navigation bar/menu (which means it has to scan the directories and discover the tree structure of the site from the content directory, and then make this into a nice menu system).  but yes the key idea is that the content directory tree IS the site layout.

the advantages are:
the final result is superfast static pages.
the content pages are all outside the public_html directory and can be made safe (ie you can dissallow php,etc), which means its easy to give random people ftp access to "their section" of content.
it lets you write page content easily by hand in flat files
it still allows for the possibility of a more sophisticated wsywig/gui/usermanagement cms front end to be layered on top, creating content pages in the content directory (as you mention above), thought this is not my immediate concern.

31213

Living Room / Re: Microsoft Backtracks on phone home WGA ...

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 02:11 AM »

i think this is a good example of why we should be thankful for all the people who raise hell at these drm/privacy/datacollection/phonehome things.

even though you might think they sometimes get carried away and scream bloody murder about issues that you might think "hmm.. that's not so bad, i can live with that", i think it's these little fights that keep us from being overrun with this stuff.  without these small fights i can only imagine how far the line would have shifted by now in the other direction.

31214

Developer's Corner / Re: Why software sucks (and what to do about it)

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 02:06 AM »

nice find.  here's another article of his i spotted while checking it out:

...
#51 -Attention and Sex
By Scott Berkun, March 21, 2006
There isn’t a single great work in the history of civilization, no novel, symphony, film, or song that was completed as a 1/5th time-slice between e-mail, IM, cellphones and television. Despite the modern drive to consume things made by others, time will always be our most finite resource and it crumbles when split into tiny little pieces. And it’s up to us to choose how much of life is spent passively (consuming, waiting, watching) vs. actively (thinking, debating, feeling, doing, making). Whatever we choose, when we die, we have no one to blame but ourselves for where our time, and attention, went.
...

http://www.scottberk...m/essays/essay51.htm

31215

Developer's Corner / Re: Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 01:22 AM »

here's his first piece of advice which i think makes sense:

Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.

this mirrors my advice to people learning, and to the strategy of learning, which is to recognize that the hard part is motivation.

whatever approach you take - it should focus on the fact that you can't just read and learn how to program, you actually have to program. a lot.  so the key is to follow a path that will keep you motivated and enjoying it as you code, especially in the begining.

31216

Living Room / Re: Seriously?!! I can't hardly believe this

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 01:14 AM »

today was an amazing day of games at the world cup, i must say.

31217

Living Room / Re: Has any one seen this site?

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 01:13 AM »

Shall i post more site's?

give us a moment to enjoy these first!

annoyances.org - great site. look at the image on their front page:


virtual plastic - great site for people who love skinning apps etc.

extremetech - nice hardware site

another set of winners!

31218

Living Room / Re: Another article on google adsense worries

« Last post by mouser on June 13, 2006, 01:06 AM »

All this also ignores the state of the 'net before Google came along. Search was infinitely worse (I was there using the 'net, I remember it well), click-through ads still existed and massive fraud still plagued adverstisers.

i think this is a very good point and well worth remembering.

any complaints or worries about google have to be balanced against the fact that they seem to be orders of magnitude more conscientious and honorable than their competitors.

31219

Screenshot Captor / Re: Option to NOT save to file?

« Last post by mouser on June 12, 2006, 04:10 PM »

yeah - it definitely has to be made easier to discard screenshots..
maybe a quick delete button.

youll find in the moveto menu a choice saying "delete all images in screenshot directory", so this is what i generally advise people who use sc for temporary stuff, just capture a bunch, and when you are done with the screenshots, choose that option.

31220

Living Room / Re: Collection of funny signs (high-res!)

« Last post by mouser on June 12, 2006, 01:10 PM »

wasn't on purpose - i used fireworks.
i probably imported the png of cody in a strange way or exported it with too few colors.. let me check and upload a new one.

31221

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: copy a row or column from an html table on a web page

« Last post by mouser on June 12, 2006, 09:15 AM »

nice! that could come in quite handy as well.

31222

Find And Run Robot / Re: Wish: When the mouse is moved away, hide main window by closing

« Last post by mouser on June 12, 2006, 08:51 AM »

interesting idea..
the only confusion i have is that it's often triggered not using mouse, so mouse is never "in" the main window..

ps. you know you can hit hit escape to close it (or the trigger key (break,etc))

31223

General Software Discussion / Re: Are free web hosting services legit?

« Last post by mouser on June 12, 2006, 07:41 AM »

im sure people will know better than me, but my understanding tends to be like this:
1) yes, they are "legit"
but
2) they are usually designed to show ads and so
3) they dont want people just downloading files from your site without visiting it and seeing ads, so
4) they will only allow downloads from the actual page, not let you just link to the files from offiste, and
5) they have limits on bandwidth and size of files, etc.

31224

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: copy a row or column from an html table on a web page

« Last post by mouser on June 12, 2006, 04:45 AM »

brilliant   

firefox is now my browser of choice.

31225

PHP / PHP Coder needed for mini cms for dc

« Last post by mouser on June 12, 2006, 04:21 AM »

see:
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=3689.0