Recent Posts

376

Developer's Corner / Re: Skynet meets the Swarm: A fascinating article about AI.

« Last post by worstje on January 20, 2011, 08:25 AM »

That was an awesome read.

And I guess I can see how it is a bit obtuse, but in all fairness to the authors of the article they gave quite decent summaries of concepts. I saw explanations on the basic race differences, global overview of tactics (mess with resources aka gas-steal/worker-kills, hit-and-run, etc), basic uses and effects of different units (tanks, mutalisks, archons, templars) and in the end, I think that's about as much as one might expect.

After all, in an article discussing Deep Blue's tactics, would you expect to see indepth explanations of the way a horse jumps and how it works with other units? Far less so than that a discussion on how to set up proper two-pronged attacks over the course of several moves which is more AI. Likewise, you wouldn't expect to see the details of castling or promoting explained, if it came up at all in the article.

Summary: great article. If anyone else has gotten slightly curious about Starcraft but not necessarily from a playing perspective, hit up youtube. And do not worry about the graphics of SC1 you see in the article: with Starcraft 2 having been released watching videos is ten times the fun as it drags the game into this age once more. It's a bigger sport than one might expect at first glance, and there's a fair number of people casting games from crap to the highest professional tiers while discussing their tactics and all that.

Personally I find it far more entertaining than soccer, baseball and the sorts. So, if anyone is interested, let me know and I'll collect a bunch of links to good casters.

377

Developer's Corner / Re: C# GDI+ Problem with byte[] and Bitmap - Memory Issues

« Last post by worstje on January 20, 2011, 07:28 AM »

Mind you common sense is telling me to shutup ... But I just gotta ask...

In lines 37 - 43, why is hwi.CompareExactImageData being evaluated (basically) twice?

...

Wouldn't that tend to spike the work load?

-Stoic Joker (January 20, 2011, 07:22 AM)

It's unclear code. Unless it is a property with very expensive processing behind it, it will do next to nothing except cost a few more processor cycles. And I somehow expect the CLR to be smart enough to recognise that case.

378

Developer's Corner / Re: Rock physics math-thing [PHP]

« Last post by worstje on January 20, 2011, 07:17 AM »

To put it really simply, ^ (english: to the power of) says how often something needs to be multiplied with itself.

x^1 = x
x^2 = x * x
x^3 = x * x * x
x^4 = x * x * x * x
x^5 = x * x * x * x * x
x^6 = x * x * x * x * x * x
etc

Of course, with negatives (x^(-2)) and non-whole numbers (x^pi) it isn't as simple or intuitive to demonstrate, but the same principles apply mathematically. However, negative powers can be rewritten like this:

x^-y  = 1 / (x^y)

At least, I hope my math isn't failing me as I haven't used this stuff in a while.

379

Developer's Corner / Re: C# GDI+ Problem with byte[] and Bitmap - Memory Issues

« Last post by worstje on January 20, 2011, 05:28 AM »

That makes no sense to me, sorry. FromFile() constructs a new bitmap object and returns it for as far I can see. If it weren't ever constructed, then how could you ever use the image you loaded? Unless I am a really big noob at .NET, there is no such thing as a reference to an object that isn't constructed. There's just 'null'.

380

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Sagelight Image Editor - pay what you want promo (Apil 2010)

« Last post by worstje on January 20, 2011, 04:31 AM »

I am not a user, but I just want to say it is awesome how supportive you are of your users. A few days back I took a bit of a gander over your website and the product, and I think that you and Sagelight are an excellent example of the way software is supposed to work. If I hear of family or friends needing a photo-touchup tool, I'll definitely give a pointer towards your product.

Keep up the good work. 

381

Developer's Corner / Re: C# GDI+ Problem with byte[] and Bitmap - Memory Issues

« Last post by worstje on January 20, 2011, 03:40 AM »

I can't really test it, but assuming fragmentation is your problem, I think I see the problem you are dealing with. Mind you, I do not usually use GDI+, especially not in .NET, but I assume you have a good reason for using GDI+ as opposed to the System.Drawing classes. Hell, I have no clue how the GDI+ stuff is defined in that context.

Anyhow, on to what I think causes your problem. On line 29, you create a new Bitmap of 1x1 dimensions. The moment you go into the try {} block, you immediately call Bitmap.FromFile() and re-assign the value. In other words: you are creating an object you never use, and the garbage collector only collects that stuff when it feels like it - but at the same time extra objects mean less available continuous blocks. You do not need to create a Bitmap object in order to call FromFile as it is a static function. (See MSDN.) So, the solution ought to be as simple as initializing bmp to null.

I am not sure what all of your GC calls and the likes do. However, GDI+ is not managed, so I doubt tuning/prodding/abusing the GC will do very much for you in this case. But I could be wrong - I'm no .NET expert.

382

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: JottiQ

« Last post by worstje on January 19, 2011, 04:54 AM »

I'm starting to feel all embarrased with all the attention, y'know! But I am really thankful for it never the less , and hope people will find the tool useful for all sorts of things.

383

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Problems with attaching an attachment to a post...

« Last post by worstje on January 19, 2011, 02:48 AM »

I myself have noticed pages timing out or connections resetting since the server move. It is very infrequent and I can't find any pattern, and at first I thought it was my internet being screwy.. but re-reading this topic, I have to conclude that this sort of behaviour has only been happening for my on DoCo pages and not other websites. :/

384

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: A piece of Sh**

« Last post by worstje on January 18, 2011, 09:00 AM »

Yeah, I think mouser 'fixed' it at one point in December.. and then we suddenly had a 'random questionmarks bug' when editing posts. I know I had that problem when putting in my readme.txt posts, which really got butchered by that since I use spaces for indentation in those.

So he had to undo the change since apparently spaces are used a bit more often than foreign languages (with non-standard latin characters) around here.

385

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: That NANY badge

« Last post by worstje on January 17, 2011, 01:49 AM »

Hrm, there's another idea.

Which brings me to something that might sound silly... but would that be in years of participation, or amount of apps released? More apps in a single year doesn't mean that there's any less effort involved per-app, after all. Especially with the 6+ months-lasting NANY event we had this time I think it might be fairer to not just move stuff in terms of participating, but also in the fruits of the effort.

Sure, someone could game it and release 10 apps in a single year, but I doubt that'll happen or we'd already be getting very questionable NANY entries just so people could get a badge as-is. (Which we aren't last I checked.)

Of course, I can kind of imagine people from previous years disliking such an idea a bit as it kind of 'devalues' their older entries. Likewise, one might wonder about going that number-in-badge route with normallisher Coding Snacks.  But in the end, I think that if we start using a number to indicate an amount, or even 'amount of times participated' instead of a general badge or yearly badge, rethinking the right thing to 'count' in the first place might be a good idea.

386

General Software Discussion / Re: The software awards scam

« Last post by worstje on January 17, 2011, 01:21 AM »

3. Softpedia.com

- definitely worth it being listed on this website. they review very useful software free of cost but I'm not sure how big is their queue of software to be reviewed and I also don't know how big is their team to handle them. You don't want your version 1.01 to be reviewed when you're ready to launch version 6.0
- they award many software with these awards : http://www.softpedia.com/awards/ (they also used to have 100% Safe and Secure Award by Softpedia which is not listed on this page)
- developers can also advertise their product(s) : http://www.softpedia.com/advertise/

-adi_barb (January 17, 2011, 01:13 AM)

My experience with them is limited to JottiQ, which got reviewed in less than 2 weeks after its release without me needing to prod them or anything of the sort. (Then again, JottiQ did get a lot of attention thanks to NANY.) Process Tamer also got reviewed a few days later, so I kinda have the feeling a/the person doing the reviews stuck around on DonationCoder for a while, and thus that a lot of those reviews are individually driven (reviewer-wise) as opposed to requesting from some sort of backlog.

387

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: That NANY badge

« Last post by worstje on January 16, 2011, 07:59 PM »

I prefer the old style (is that hamradio's?) as it is very iconic and simply breathes nany to me. It is styleful and as much an identity of NANY as Cody is of DoCo.

The gradient variety is unreadable to me, sorry, and I completely vote against it. DoCo blue, while nice, doesn't come through nicely in an image that size and all I saw was ugly cyan, a color I personally hate and that also makes for hard-to-read text if said text is anything but black.

I am with mouser and CodeTRUCKER both regarding the badge colour thing. I mean this in the sense I think different shades are a great idea, as the current state of certain peoples badges (you know who you are!) are just spammish in nature and more of a 'let me show off' thing rather than a 'look I competed here and there and there'. It's the same reason why more than one successive emoticon drives me crap. See?

The idea of different colors per year is great, and I think different shades per entry status are also great. However, I don't think we need an 'admin' badge since they're unattainable for most people. After all mouser is already in a category of his own, no need to add 6 more. Likewise, the 'helper' is a bit unclear as to what it would mean. Helping organise? Helping bug test apps? Etc.

However, I think two badges per year should be the total top ever. One for entrants, and one for 'alternative participants'. I haven't got much of a clue for it, but the idea is that app writers can simply nominate people who made a useful contribution to their app (beta testing, etc) and that these people deserve this badge.

The biggest change I think is needed is that instead of  having '01' on the current awesome NANY icon, it needs to become the last two digits of the year. It simply makes way more sense and will do more to distinguish different badges than anything else.

388

Developer's Corner / Re: Executing a file from a link

« Last post by worstje on January 16, 2011, 10:37 AM »

Would it be useful? Perhaps. Would it be a gigantic danger? Hell yes. That is why all sane browsers will redflag it and make the user confirm at least once they really want to do some action that falls out of the scope of the website, might be dangerous, etc.

Suppose for a moment it would work without any issues. Calling arbitrary applications just means you open up a can of worms known as scripting for attackers. Even if they can't put files on your computer to call such as batchfiles, cmd.exe can be used to execute simple things without much trouble. Powershell would be even worse.

Do not forget it is trivial for a webpage to have links click themselves or otherwise get executed.

The best way to go about it is to run either your own webclient control like you are doing atm, or to have the webpage be served by a sort of builtin webserver inside your program. That way, calling the link can just load something on this internal builtin webserver which executes the action. This is how the Visual Studio help system works.

389

ProcessTamer / Re: Links to Review and Comments - Add yours!

« Last post by worstje on January 16, 2011, 06:30 AM »

It isn't my review, but I came across this Softpedia review while looking over their list of reviews and thought it deserved pointing out.

Nice job.

390

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: JottiQ

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 08:59 PM »

Hmm, removing them temporarily didn't help? Got any other Bitstream fonts installed? Maybe it is something with stuff from that vendor.

Edit: I have tried to reproduce the issue with the fonts you included on both W7 and a XP SP3 pc, and had no success. So it is indeed not these fonts, or it is a wholly different issue. Is there any chance you can spend a bit of time removing fonts from your Fonts folder to try and figure out which is causing it? (Of course, back them up somewhere else!)

If you can figure out which one is causing it and attach it (try using the Procmon tool that link I posted earlier talked about), then hopefully I'll be able to reproduce the issue with said font. After that, if we end up excluding font-issiues as a complete possibility, we might be able to figure out what else could be causing this. Sadly, the stuff Windows logged on your PC isn't too helpful in itself.

391

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: JottiQ

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 08:11 AM »

The fact you confirm that you have Deja Vu makes me suspect that one is indeed the culprit here and I doubt visiting IRC will be needed at this time as we narrowed it down a bit. I am not sure when I can find time to work on this issue as I am heading to have a busy saturday, maybe even busy sunday depending on the state of affairs. To boot, once I get down to working on it, I am not fully sure I will be able to reproduce the error and/or find a way to work around it.

Could you zip up all the DJ fonts that you have and attach them to a post? Alternatively, if that's not possible, you could also email them to jottiq-support [located at] whitehat.dcmembers.com. (Fix the parts in square brackets with the appropriate sign first, of course.)

That way I have a set of testing files that are known to have the issue as I suspect newer releases of these fonts have this issue fixed. And while I can just tell people to upgrade/delete the fonts because I can't reproduce it, I'd much rather deliver a proper fix. Expression Blend could fix/work around it, so hopefully so can I.

Thank you very much for the bug report, jCat. I appreciate it!

392

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Auspex - a Windows Productivity App

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 08:05 AM »

Very true. But in case he didn't and just grabbed them from some site listing free icons (which tend to randomly spider icons from all over the web), now he does know a bit more detail. Either way, I am sure timns appreciates you bringing it to his attention.

393

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: JottiQ

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 07:31 AM »

That's indeed quite the message. And it baffles me even more-so than your original report.

For as far I can tell (but it is a bit vague) it seems to imply that when I try to show a dialog it read a file of which the format borked everything to high hell. Which is amusing as I do not read any external files except for stuff passed, and especially not in the privacy-agreement window I suspect it refers to. .NET has the craziest bugs for me to work around I tell you.

Can you tell me anything about your Language/Regional settings? Some things I read on the web suggest it might somehow involve character sets and whatnot, and tbh I am grasping a bit at straws at present. (Although I won't rest till I find the bugger.)

Edit: Can you come to the chat per chance? I might have a build or two I'd like to run by you to see what happens if you have the time.

Edit2: Do you per chance have a font called Deja Vu Sans Mono installed? Or other Bitstream fonts? They cause these errors in some other WPF applications, and it is said removing them fixes it for those. (Hardly a good solution, but at this point it seems to be a WPF/Microsoft thing that I don't think I can work around, although I'll look into the matter if this does prove to be the issue.)

Edit3: It seems to come along with Open Office. This discussion seems to have information on how to figure out what font causes it (if it isn't the Deja Vu one) and work around it. Sadly, it does not tell how to 'fix' it for me, which is a bit much of a bugger.

394

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: JottiQ

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 06:58 AM »

Hello jCat, welcome to DonationCoder!

Thanks for trying out JottiQ. As for your problem.. I am unsure what is causing the problem as I haven't heard of this issue before.

When starting up, JottiQ checks for an already running instance and if it finds it activates that old instance and kills the new one, but that shouldn't trigger here at all. So I am rather confused at this time. You never saw the window asking you to agree to some terms regarding privacy etc, right?

Did you per chance get a crash message or something noted in your event log? I think that's where program crashes get logged if XP doesn't explicitly tell you. You can find it in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer, and then on the left Windows Logs -> Application.

Otherwise, if you come to IRC (#donationcoder @ irc.efnet.org, or try the chat link at the top of these forums), perhaps we can talk a bit more directly which might help to narrow down the problem. In the worst case I can try to send you some debug builds to see if it might narrow it down some, as it is obviously something quite unique to your situation.

395

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Auspex - a Windows Productivity App

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 06:28 AM »

He does? Point out which icons, please? I'm curious as I really don't see it. 

396

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Auspex - a Windows Productivity App

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 06:08 AM »

If you want to make sure, look here at the showcase of all of FamFamFam's Silk Icons.

397

Official Announcements / Re: January 2011 Giveaway is open for entry

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 05:55 AM »

It's a good thing I used an if in that sentence then. Means I don't have to make my post have most of its contents magically disappear on us.

398

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Auspex - a Windows Productivity App

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 05:34 AM »

By the way, you seem to be using FamFam icons. You should give credit, where credit is due!

-Merrylic (January 14, 2011, 05:24 AM)

Where? I looked over the various images and the screencast, and don't see any of those. I like to think myself an expert since I spent quite some time pouring over the various FamFamFam Silk icons while writing JottiQ, which uses those icons, and all in all I think the Silk icon set is a lot more polished in my eyes than whatever Auspex seems to be using. (Then again, sadly enough, Silk is also over-used so maybe that's really a good thing.)

399

Official Announcements / Re: January 2011 Giveaway is open for entry

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 05:13 AM »

Personally I think that if the giveaways were meant for NANY entrants, they're the wrong give-aways. Don't get me wrong - these are wonderful programs, and much praise to their developers and their willingness to throw a license of them up for our giveaways.

Generally, those partaking in NANY are the coding types. Those that see a (technical) challenge and like to solve it. This is imo in part the reason why so many entries also end up unpolished or unfinished: once the most interesting thing has been solved, and it works, the drive and motivation needed to finish and polish up is no longer there.

In contrast, the prizes are more geared towards the artistically inclined, or even the.. uh, what's the word... very 'customer'-minded individuals by lack of a better description coming to mind. We've got an icon editor and a graphics editor, which are quite wasted on people like myself who can't draw something remotely non-horrifying to save their life if it depended on that. We've got a pair of screencast softwares, which generally require a microphone, good command of whatever language, the ability to properly formulate ones thoughts and generally convince people: again, not something the coding types are generally gifted with. Finally, there are the documentation and manual authoring tools, which.. uhm... let's just say a good majority of coders struggles with sane comments in their source code, which they spend all their time in - any sort of documentation almost always comes as a last, hurried thought.

Pretty much all of the above are true for me (not-so-random shout-out: thank you vlastimil for the icon, you were a life-saver!), and while I don't know many other people on DoCo nor presume to know their skillsets, I do know other coders and friends of mine. Personally I guess I am probably a bit more technically inclined in my entries than most participants, so of course what would be on my list would differ from others.

In future NANYs, I think it would pay to inform way before-hand what kind of coders we have, what kind of prizes they might appreciate, and so forth. And of course I do not mean this exclusively - all the current prizes are great for all the other non-coder NANY participants and are great to make a return - but more variety in the prize pool would be very nice as well. Mugs are awesome, and I will love my NANY mug to a porcelain death (ok, not death I hope, but yeah) whenever it comes, but there would be plenty of long-term joy involved in ending up with a tool that expands on what one already loves doing.

400

Developer's Corner / Re: "competitive upgrade" - is it ethical?

« Last post by worstje on January 14, 2011, 02:37 AM »

So. Just me thinking. But is it illegal to publicize an example order-confirmed page, or example invoice on your webpage, then post that over a place where your competitors potential customers gather?

'Hey, check out my software, but in the case you don't think it fits your needs, please have a look at these invoices and such to get the product of my competitor. They make a somewhat nice product and offer special discounts if you buy my software, and I don't mind supporting them one bit.'

They can't tell fake confirmations from the real ones which you of course could, and then they'll either end up having a lot of cheap sales or they'll end up withdrawing the offer.

Maybe it isn't a super nice tactic, but hey, might as well let their own competitive pricing bite them in their butt, yes?