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Recent Posts

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34076
Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: auto key hitter
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 11:19 PM »
this sounds like a fantatic idea for adding to DoOver, Skrommels quick macro tool!
how about just an option on DoOver tray menu to engage a timer (whose length could be configured).
34077
Official Announcements / Re: Name and Catchphrase for New DC Logo Mascot - PART 2
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 11:03 PM »
Bird pecking the keyboard
Bird/s on an ethernet wire

nice!!

*You could wrap a message around one of the legs like a messenger bird with binary code showing on the outside of it
*You could have binary code printed around the edge of the face of the coin instead of the dollar sign

nice!!

34078
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Exact Audio Copy
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 10:59 PM »
andre, it's great to see you here posting - on behalf of everyone who uses eac here, thank you for such a great program.
34079
Official Announcements / CONTEST: Win a copy of VMWare with the best VMWare Player Idea
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 04:40 PM »
This is a little contest centering around VMWare Player.

You can learn about VMWare Player here: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

VMware Player is free software that enables PC users to easily run any virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player runs virtual machines created by VMware Workstation..

VMWare Player Forum: http://www.vmware.co...rum.jspa?forumID=123

VMWare Player Faq: http://www.vmware.co...cts/player/faqs.html


Basically the idea is you can use the full VMWare Workstation program to create VMWare Player files, that can be publically shared, that anyone can then run.

A clever example of using VMWare Player can be found in this sample download on the vmware site, it's basically a complete linux distribution configured to run firefox, built as a virtual machine in VMWare Player.  It provides a complete sandboxed browsing experience and so is extremely safe.

Sample VMWare Browser Aplliance: http://www.vmware.co...n/vm/browserapp.html


So..

This contest will reward the most creative, new, and useful use of VMWare Player.

We will run this contest at least through january, but we may keep it open for longer if we don't get a good enough submission by january.

The intention will be that the winner will make the winning VMWare Player application which can be publically shared as freely with others.
34080
Living Room / Re: The Great Firewall Hunt ... frustrating ...
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 02:34 PM »
hehehe.. well
im feeling a little guilty.. as usual my frustration sometimes boils over and i get carried away..
usually jibz can talk me down but when he is not around..

i wouldn't say im retracting that statement - just that the basic featureset of outpost is great, and the interface is great.
it does seem to be to be a bit unstable/buggy.  but many people are clearly happy with it, so it might still be worth a try if you are evaluating firewalls.

i will stop cheerleading for it though, until they get it stable.
34081
Living Room / Re: The Great Firewall Hunt ... frustrating ...
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 12:30 PM »
outpost 3 might be worth a try if you are willing to take a chance; it certainly works for many and it's a nice program if its stable on your pc.
34082
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: DoubleKiller Pro - FAST and great to find duplicate files!
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 11:54 AM »
you didn't include a screenshot of my favorite part, the about box!
34083
General Software Discussion / Re: New Mozilla Firefox user
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 11:47 AM »
we've discussed in this forum how careful you have to be to insure that stuff these programs "find" are really the bad things they say they are.

these programs tend to flag stuff that is good and mistake it for something different which is similar -
just be careful what you let it delete until you are SURE it is in fact the bad thing that the program says it is -
sometimes a similar name can confuse it and you end up deleting something important and harmless.
34084
General Software Discussion / Re: top 10 freeware apps from "snakeoillabs"
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 11:30 AM »
xnview has been annoying me recently when it comes to recentering its dialog and handling multimonitor, something with irfanview always handled perfectly... i'm considering switching back from xnview to irfanview.  maybe ill check out fastone.
34085
Site/Forum Features / Re: About the Prize Optimizer Used in the November Drawing
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 11:10 AM »
:(

you've won in the past and you'll win in the future - just think of it as building the anticipation to make the next win even more sweet :)
34086
General Software Discussion / Re: New Mozilla Firefox user
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 10:34 AM »
i would *not* run multiple *resident scanning* programs at the same time.

it's fine to have multiple programs installed that only scan on demand, but i would disable all but one resident (i.e. running always in the background) spyware/adware scanner, and onlt one resident antivirus, and only one resident firewall scanner.
34087
General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 08:23 AM »
this thread is getting good.

i think crono's link to Tabbrowser Preferences may be the key extension that i like.
[EDIT: actually it was this one i liked, though it seems to be unrecommended(?): http://piro.sakura.n...nsions/index.html.en]
34088
Site/Forum Features / Re: About the Prize Optimizer Used in the November Drawing
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 07:56 AM »
Addendum:

People who won got an email telling them their predicted "happiness."
Happiness is calculated as follows:  Your rating for the prize you won / Your rating for your highest rated prize
34089
Living Room / Re: Atheist group offers free porn in exchange for Bibles
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 07:25 AM »
rofl
34090
General Software Discussion / Re: New Mozilla Firefox user
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 06:57 AM »
coincidentally, betsy just won a copy of admuncher in the nov drawing, so that might solver her problems also.
34091
Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Bug: commas in editbox "Strip trailing stuff"
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 06:53 AM »
great point! that hadn't even occured to me :)
i will add ability to escape out commas (probably ill just let you type ,, to mean strip commas.

ill try to have a new version out this week with an additional feature regarding text formatting that i think people will really like.
34092
Found Deals and Discounts / Re: CHIP Online: a different program for free every day!
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 05:41 AM »
cool!
34093
Official Announcements / Re: Name and Catchphrase for New DC Logo Mascot - PART 2
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 05:37 AM »
It kinda looks like the bird has just pinched the money and made a run for it!

 :lol:  :lol:  :lol:
34094
General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 04:36 AM »
there is only one extension i would consider essential, and that is a TABBED browsing extension; not sure what the best one is currently.
34095
General Software Discussion / Re: Firewalls, What you need to know...
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 04:34 AM »
i also wanted to post an extra thanks to philKC who found an amazing registry key: "SOFTWARE\\Clients\\StartMenuInternet\\" which apparently lists all installed browsers on your computer (works for me!), and will be useful to me for next version of browser tray switch.

ps. i dont know what this registry key does - one way to thwart this attack is to rename that key if its not used for anything important.. the basic attack though could easily use other ways to locate common browser installations.
34096
General Software Discussion / Re: Firewalls, What you need to know...
« Last post by mouser on December 02, 2005, 04:32 AM »
awesome post.

as i was telling philKC on the irc chat, this is the first firewall leak tester that beats me, because it tries to run any non-default browsers it finds on the system, and while i have my default browser blocked, i have others which are allowed to connect through the internet.

the way to defeat this is (and now this is the first demonstration i've seen of why its important) to have security that alterts you to when one program tries to launch another, and allows you to set rules restricting that.  this might still not protect you if the app is already running, but it would save you from most situations.

checking whether your firewalls can block such launches of other programs.  agnitum has some support for this but i have it disabled - i guess its time for me to rethink this..

I also want to comment on the idea of blocking outgoing connections:

I agree 100% with PhilKC that having good outgoing blocking in your firewall is critical - you really do need a firewall with good outgoing blocking rules, but as a layer of protection defense, and as a good way of keeping track of what programs are tring to send information where.

However, it's very important to realize that no matter how good your firewall is, if you actually launch an evil program on your computer, you have lost.

No matter how good your firewall is, launching a trojan on your pc allows it to do whatever it wants and breaching your firewall may be the least of your problems.  Other registry defense and sandboxing tools may help you a little, but basically such a program can do all sorts of damage i think that are going to be hard to stop if the program is truly determined.

To quote from War Games, the only way to win is not to play.

The most important thing is just to not run programs on your pc unless you really trust them.  One exception to this so far is the use of virtual machines, which is making it easier to safely run questionable stuff, since they offer much better sandboxing than other approaches.  In addition to VMWare, there are some free virtual machine tools which may work well enough for this purpose, and it's worth your while to get a virtual machine tool if you do a lot of software testing of questionable files.  See our review here: https://www.donation...alMachine/index.html
34097
Official Announcements / Re: NOVEMBER SOFTWARE DRAWING RESULTS
« Last post by mouser on December 01, 2005, 10:52 PM »
we will be giving out a copy of vmware probably one a month for the next 6 months or so..
but the next winners will be chosen based on some kind of contest or something.

(hehehe - if we have a contest for best use of smilies then you might win cembree... hmm... that's not a bad idea..)


i'll also remind people that the surest way to win a copy of software of your choice is to write a guest review of some software category.
34098
Site/Forum Features / About the Prize Optimizer Used in Our Drawings
« Last post by mouser on December 01, 2005, 09:09 PM »
To give you an idea how serious we took our responsibility to try to do things differently here, and attempt to figure out the fairest way to parcel out the prizes this month, I thought that it might be useful to tell you a little bit about how prizes were assigned.

Rather than just give out prizes completely at random, we asked everyone who entered the drawing to submit a form rating the programs based on how badly they wanted to win each.

A custom program was then written to parse these submissions and search for the best way to assign prizes.  What follows is a brief description of that program.
-mouser


Overview

This program is used to try to find a reasonable way to divide up a number of prizes among a number of users.
It used a simple optimization procedure which iterates through millions of simulated possible assignments of gifts in search of the best pairings.

Users submit a form indicating their preference for each prize; these forms are submitted by a php script over email.

The program parses these email messages and extracts user ratings for each program, as well as user comments and email addresses.

A prize file is parsed which described how many of each prize is available.

It also reads an option file of user weights, which allows us to decrease the weight for users who have won previous prizes, and increase the weights of users who have contributed greatly to the community but have not yet won anything.

Optimization proceeds interactively; at any time it can be paused and the current configuration as well as user preferences, weights, and comments can be evaluated manually.

The program outputs both a list of who has won each prize, and a set of emails, one to each person who has one, informing them of the prize they have won (or that they have not won anything).  These can be imported into a mail program (like thebat!) and sent out en masse.

More on the Optimization Procedure

The optimization procedure is governed by a scoring function which can assign a score to each possible assignment of prizes.  The cost is based on the sum (weighted) "happiness" of each user.  Happiness is a function of the relative rating of the prize the user currently has compared to other prizes they have rated.

The program begins by assigns prizes randomly and then proceeds in iteration loops where two users are picked and their prizes are probabilistically exchanged based on the score differential and some noise.

The noise is decreases over time throughout a cycle and then resets; in this way the optimization process is able to explore some regions of the search space that involve making some non-beneficial swaps before a better assignment is found (i.e. this helps is escape situations where there is no single swap that improves the score, but there is a 3-way swap that does).

At the end of each annealing cycle the best scoring assignment is recalled and the process starts again.

34099
Official Announcements / NOVEMBER SOFTWARE DRAWING RESULTS
« Last post by mouser on December 01, 2005, 08:53 PM »
First of all, thank you to all of the companies and authors who donated copies of their software for us to give away this november (in total we awarded 57 different programs):

Many of these programs are still available with significant discounts to members (though many expire after this week so you may have to act quickly if you intend to take advantage of a discount): https://www.donation...Discounts/index.html


If you have not won a prize this time, do not worry - we've got quite a few prizes for December and the coming months, and everyone will have a chance to win something eventually.  We will also be having some other kinds of "contests" and be giving out more copies of VMWare and other programs so there is a lot to look forward to.


The Winners of the November Fundraiser Giveaway Software Drawing

Winners of 'Website Watcher' (4):
  • angelia
  • brotherS
  • jbg
  • vegas
Winners of 'Local Website Archive' (4):
  • Hypophyse
  • Miles
  • winnaburger
  • xtremesurfer
Winners of 'AM Notebook' (4):
  • dellamartin
  • JavaJones
  • markan
  • Ronbaby
Winners of 'SnagIt' (3):
  • hornet
  • meeow
  • Mr.Fancypants
Winners of 'Camtasia' (1):
  • jazper
Winners of 'BB Flashback' (3):
  • Stefan
  • tsaint
  • wr975
Winners of 'Beyond Compare' (2):
  • kfitting
  • Kniht
Winners of 'UltraEdit' (1):
  • edaeuble
Winners of 'UltraEdit Studio' (1):
  • silverwolf
Winners of 'TheBat!' (3):
  • ark2
  • Dina
  • Mark0
Winners of 'VmWare' (1):
  • Defenestration
Winners of 'Ad Muncher' (2):
  • Betsy
  • Zero3K
Winners of 'Guitar and Drum Trainer' (2):
  • Bill_Cooley
  • bkaj
Winners of 'WinRAR' (3):
  • alexp
  • DeathWolf
  • Innuendo
Winners of 'File Locator Pro' ( 8 ):
  • Donmar
  • elvisbrown
  • GBark
  • GhostWriter
  • jagoldhor
  • pasweden
  • tcorelli
  • venn
Winners of 'Agnitum Outpost' (1):
  • Passivate
Winners of 'Process Lasso' (10):
  • aignes
  • bbqking
  • daver
  • dcm
  • hpitkin
  • jpfx
  • kiwi2b
  • longrun
  • Magic Speller
  • roneill
Winners of 'AcdSee' (4):
  • Chris
  • Josh
  • Kimberly
  • TeeJay



Congratulations to everyone who won. Winners will be receiving emails tonight confirming they have won.  If you do not reply acknowledging your prize within 7 days it will be given away to someone else.  Good luck next month!
34100
Screenshot Captor / Re: Preferences not saved
« Last post by mouser on December 01, 2005, 05:33 PM »
ok i'll fix it in next version.
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