Recent Posts

36926

Find And Run Robot / Re: Anti-Naffness Request?

« Last post by mouser on June 10, 2005, 06:32 AM »

to clarify..
hopefully the program is still super happy.. we're not removing its happiness.  we're just removing that from the name of the program

36927

Find And Run Robot / Re: Anti-Naffness Request?

« Last post by mouser on June 10, 2005, 06:31 AM »

the super happy has already been mostly removed.. where is it still?

36928

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Annoying toy

« Last post by mouser on June 10, 2005, 04:01 AM »

its not designed to harm anything, except you might cause someone to be miserable and spend a week trying to fix their computer, so i'm not sure i'd call it malware, but it sure could cause some pain in the wrong hands.

it would be a funny joke if you told your friend after 30 mins of their suffering, but if you left it on someone's machine for a week that would be cruel and inhuman.

i'd prefer joke ideas that weren't so easily mistaken for a buggy computer..

36929

Living Room / Re: Upgrade cycles — How often is too often?

« Last post by mouser on June 10, 2005, 03:55 AM »

there are really 2 issues here, right?  one is regarding charging for upgrades, and when and how.
the other is the issue where some companies release new version for publicity (but dont try to charge customers to upgrade).

the second case is not nearly as bad but it still gets annoying after a while.

some people get annoying with companies that release lots of betas..
i sympathize, but as long as they dont keep the program in beta for 6 months, it doesnt bother me.

36930

Living Room / Re: Upgrade cycles — How often is too often?

« Last post by mouser on June 10, 2005, 03:52 AM »

i think scott and tenseiken hit it exactly on the nose.

time-limited periods of free upgrades are complete bullshit and should be outlawed.

i agree with tenseiken, ideally a program should be free upgrades for life, and thats a good way to build a good rep.

but if you make serious major improvements, then it may be reasonable to charge a small some for upgraders.
upgraders should get a minimum of 50% off upgrades, though i think 75% off would be more reasonable.

furthermore, this has to be contingent on the idea that serious bugfixes in old versions have to be fixed.  you cant verywell come out and say, our old version has this security hole, and you have to pay us to upgrade to fix it.

the bottom line has to be that if you are going to charge existing customers for an upgrade, it has to be 1) optional and 2) a real increase in functionality and 3) substantially discounted.  if it cant meet those 3 criteria then you are ripping off your customers, who should move to a company that cares more for its customers.

36931

Finished Programs / Re: DONE - IDEA: change wallpaper at specific time - not timed intervals.

« Last post by mouser on June 10, 2005, 01:19 AM »

im trying to remember the value it uses for midnight but..
we dont want to have two redudant entries, we should just pick one..

i see in the sample file it uses
24-24 for midnight

but ive not confirmed that works..

i could change that to 0-0 for midnight if you think that would be better, since the data file format uses a 24 hour clock.

36932

Finished Programs / Re: DONE - IDEA: change wallpaper at specific time - not timed intervals.

« Last post by mouser on June 09, 2005, 09:07 AM »

thx wr975!

i was hoping that we might be able to share some good commandline conversion/processing calls..
i will keep a list of them and make them available in a readme in future releases.

i'm open to the idea of adding stuff so you can
1) specify a series of commands to run, not just the one
2) specify per-theme file commands for conversion

and in this way be able to do some fun stuff.. i'm sure with some cleverness we could make it dynamically overlay calendar, clock, datestamp, etc over the image..  and border effects, etc.

36933

Cheat Sheeter / Re: New Program Idea: Cheat Sheeter

« Last post by mouser on June 09, 2005, 12:53 AM »

sounds cool ovehal, i look forward to hearing more about your system;
sounds like the kind of things that it might be useful to implement in find+run robot.

36934

Living Room / fun links to cool tools and stuff

« Last post by mouser on June 09, 2005, 12:02 AM »

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/
originally found from another cool site: http://boingboing.net/

36935

Mircryption / Re: EncryptString / DecryptString no longer exported from the dll

« Last post by mouser on June 08, 2005, 11:45 PM »

you're right, seems they werent in the .def and that explains the strange name mangling in vc6 and lack of export in .net 2003.

i've uploaded new source (also includes prebuilt .dlls) with the proper .def file, and thus proper exports:
http://mircryption.s...ryption_xchatsrc.zip

36936

Mircryption / Re: EncryptString / DecryptString no longer exported from the dll

« Last post by mouser on June 08, 2005, 11:21 PM »

it seems that the main dll in the current downloads doesn't export EncryptString and DecryptString, because my .net2003 builds are somehow not exporting them.

i understand that the beta dll and also the dll in the visual studio (vc6) release subdir of the current full suite download does export them, so use either of those (or you can recompile yourself, the functions are there and the code does export them).

and they also do support already cbc mode, just add cbc: to the front of the key specified to encrypt/decrypt in cbc mode.

is call EncryptString or DecryptString with key "cbc:test"
would say encrypt or decrypt with key 'test' in cbc mode.

36937

Unfinished Requests / Re: CTRL - Enter or CTRL - doubleclick file in Explorer opens file in predefined app

« Last post by mouser on June 08, 2005, 07:11 PM »

i commonly open files in text editor like you,
i solve it by having buttons on my file explorer that i can drop files onto; this is one of the main reasons to use a 3rd party file explorer.

all of them will do this, powerdesk, directory opus, etc.

36938

Finished Programs / Re: DONE - IDEA: change wallpaper at specific time - not timed intervals.

« Last post by mouser on June 08, 2005, 04:45 PM »

Temporality Screens has been updated.
It no longer uses Active Desktop, and instead makes a commandline call to ImageMagick to convert files to bitmap before setting them to wallpaper.
This also makes it easy to do further image processing automatically, including adding date/time to images, etc.

36939

Cheat Sheeter / Re: New Program Idea: Cheat Sheeter

« Last post by mouser on June 08, 2005, 01:58 PM »

i too was thinking it would be smart to build in support for user profiles.

36940

Cheat Sheeter / Re: New Program Idea: Cheat Sheeter

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 11:41 PM »

i'm working on this and hope to have an early alpha to test and let people make some "cheat sheets" by monday.

there are just so many things that can be added to this app that i think we are going to have a lot of fun with it - maybe even some contests/prizes for people who make good sheets to share.

it's definitely expanded from just provided a quick list of hotkeys to a way you can get various info, like hotkeys, or a page of urls that could be relevant (links to forums, both official and not, movies, howtos, etc.)

i think it needs a new, more friendly name.  any ideas?

i was thinking something with the word "Advisor" in it maybe...

like "Friendly Advisor" or "Application Advisor"

36941

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Small roll out exe script.

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 10:36 PM »

i think there are programs that do this, made for sys admins, but i don't really know the field.  maybe someone can enlighten us..

Prism Deploy comes to mind, but i don't have any experience with it.

36942

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 09:02 PM »

it seems to me that this is a very good idea -
a key logger who's primary purpose is to maintain a kind of backup log.
i can see not just being able to exclude windows, but maybe just to specify a few select applications where such logging would be desired.

there are a lot of keylogging tools out there, it seems to me that one of them is likely to already be suitable for this.  this is probably a program a little outside of scrope of a coding snack once you get into all the extras and stuff, but its not a huge project (though i can see all the little details taking a lot of time to get right).

it might be something that we would write, if we really knew that there isn't a tool to already do this, which i suspect there may be somewhere..

unleash the google experts and softoholics!

36943

General Review Discussion / Re: Next two-week review

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 02:24 PM »

the more i think about it, the more i also think we need to alternate between power user specialty tools and general tools.
i consider screencasting a "specialty" tool, (and so is something like whois) and i'd like the next review to be more general.

maybe add things like: image viewer, file finder, file explorer, clipboard tool..
( i think all of those above other than file finder are bound to be controversial)

36944

General Review Discussion / Re: Next two-week review

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 02:21 PM »

dragonrider,

i definitely do not think that reviews have to be as long as some of the ones i have done; god help us if they did.
but, i am a little concerned that whois tools might not be "meaty" enough for a full review.

also, if you are only looking at freeware tools, that might be a bit of a problem for a full review since our reviews are supposed to encompass all programs, including but not exclusively freeware.

i think a related subject that would be worthy of a full review would be network information suites, that inlcude whois, ping, traceroute, etc.
but thats a pretty involved review and i'm not sure you really want to get into all that.

we definitely want to draw a distinction between our full main reviews, which give out awards and are expected to be long(ish), and have a somewhat consistent style and approach, and mini member reviews, which can be whatever our members want them to be; so my comments are just about trying to strike the right balance there.

36945

General Review Discussion / Re: Next two-week review

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 02:17 PM »

As long as the author isn't involved, it really isn't a problem.  This of course excludes mouser for all of his programs, but then again, he needs a rest.

i think this is still going to be problematic..
up until this point i have been heavily involved in all the review.  and whoever does the review would feel some pressure i'm sure to be nice to my programs.

this might just be one of those cases where the best thing to do is simply not review these kinds of tools, and leave it for another site; let's not be so deluded to think that there aren't other good review sites that can cover these things

would see what's out there besides the DC one, which eventually might inspire you to improve upon your own program

absolutely, i'm certainly not saying that people on the forum shouldnt point out good ones, recommend ones they like, point out flaws in my apps; hell by all means do so.  most of the apps i make i like to improve to make them as good as the best app in their class, if i can.  certainly a program like Find and Run Robot i have every intention of making the best in its class, and would love to hear about features that should be added to make it so.

i try to add a page in the help files of all my programs listing similar apps, and i encourage people on the forum to talk about programs that are similar/superior to mine.

i'm just suggesting that a forum review/award might be a bad idea.

36946

General Review Discussion / Re: Next two-week review

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 10:48 AM »

a review of such tools would be very useful, but problematic.. for the very reason you suggest, because of Find and Run Robot.

i haven't really considered how to handle such a situation where one of our programs would be a candidate in a review.

if a donationcoder.com does not win an award for its category, there is no problem.  the problem is if we published a review that said our program was best, i think it would be met with some skepticism..  so maybe it's best we avoid such reviews until we are sure we aren't going to win the award

36947

General Review Discussion / Re: Next two-week review

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 09:34 AM »

usenet newsreaders or rss feed readers?

usenet newsreaders definitely deserve a review, but thats going to be a hard one and its a bit specialized so lets save that one for later.
rss readers is also quite specialized though i'm guessing less difficult to review.

36948

General Review Discussion / Next two-week review

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 07:35 AM »

anyone want to volunteer to do a guest review next?  i need to check myself into a mental health clinic to recover from that last review of screencasting tools.



remember we have a two-week process now so it gives you a bit more time.

June 13 - part one, overview and table of software in that category with short descriptions and screenshots.
June 20 - final review

id be happy to help a lot and i'm sure others here would be too, and maybe we can choose a category that won't be quite so contentious..

screencasting was another specialty tool with a high price; might be nice to do a more general tool at a reasonable price next..

how about best password manager, or form filler? or weather tool for your tray?

36949

Official DonationCoder.com Reviews / Re: What's next?

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 07:24 AM »

it would seem this would be the logical place to ask - but there is actually a special section for discussions about what to review (the members-only "ASRT:Advanced Software Reconnaissance Team").

36950

Best ScreenCaster / Re: what an outstanding review.

« Last post by mouser on June 07, 2005, 07:21 AM »

btw, i just checked and camtasia DOES have the ability to add hotspots that when clicked can trigger a url.