Recent Posts

3976

Living Room / Re: questions for programmers

« Last post by app103 on March 14, 2008, 02:14 AM »

gally...you are never too old to learn.

I didn't start programming till about 4 years ago, at the age of 38. (self-taught and still have a lot to learn)

So if you ever want to give it a try, don't be afraid. 

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Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Specialized anti-idle and 'modem booster'

« Last post by app103 on March 13, 2008, 12:56 AM »

With the exception of the one I suggested in the pink noise thread, do any of them make 'silent noise' that won't be heard at all? The one I suggested in that thread would be perfect for the sound part except for the problem that it doesn't run on 9x so I can't even try it on this machine.

I am not sure how much data needs to be transferred, which is why I wanted to be able to specify the url to a file myself...so I can play with it and find out what the lowest amount required is.

I know just simply pinging some server will not work because I am pinging tons of them with no results as far as keeping my connection alive. I have been pinging a different time server every 15 seconds for the last 8 years, connected to 2 IRC servers, connected to an ares chat server, all involving pings to keep me connected to those...but none of it keeps me connected to the internet itself...ISP doesn't consider that valid activity.

If you wanted to do only one part of this or do it as 2 separate tools, the sound generation would be the part I am mostly interested in.

I can do the file downloading utility myself, and I even have all the code for it already, that I can recycle from another project I was working on. It's the sound generation I can't do.

I was going to do this project myself by looping a 10 second wav file with the 25hz tone, but that didn't work out too well for avoiding the pc freezing. It was good for about 2 hours after a fresh reboot but then it kept freezing up when the wav restarted. (just imagine your pc freezing every 10 seconds and you will have some idea of what it was like)

The only reason why I requested a tool with both all in one, is because I thought it would be better and a little lighter if a single app could do both rather and 2 separate apps running in the background all the time. With the very limited resources this pc has, every little bit saved can make a noticeable difference in total performance of this pc. I also figured that if someone that knew what they were doing could do this in c++ that it would automatically be lighter than anything I could do in Delphi.

3978

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Free Downloads ALL EPISODES IN TREATMENT from HBO

« Last post by app103 on March 12, 2008, 12:48 PM »

Yes the pages look the same to you, but to amazon's servers they don't look the same.

In the first link you provided, the owner of dealnews.com is getting credit for the referral and a percentage of the total purchase you may make while on the site.

You may think they aren't making anything if the item is free, but if you get something else that isn't free while you are there along with the free videos, the owner of dealnews is making money off it.

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Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Specialized anti-idle and 'modem booster'

« Last post by app103 on March 12, 2008, 12:25 PM »

Do you basically always keep the dialup dialed-in, or do you sometimes disconnect? (In other words, should the app blindly try to access an URL, or should it query the telephony API for connected status?).

-f0dder (March 12, 2008, 09:03 AM)

No, it has to check connected status first, before attempting to download the file. But the sound should be continous whether I am online or not.

I don't understand the sound bit, but could you do the http:// part by launching any old download manager, and setting its scheduler to download a non-existent page or file from a Web site that does exist, repeating as often as needed?

-rjbull (March 12, 2008, 09:37 AM)

In theory that could work, but in practice it doesn't. This morning the site the lyrics plugin uses was down and because winamp's minibrowser couldn't load the page the ISP's nag popped up and I was kicked offline because I wasn't in front of the monitor to answer it.

I have to actually download something over http for this to work. I plan on downloading a small text file from my website and I will play with it to find what is the smallest file size that works.

This is a pc with very limited resources. I really don't want to run anything that is overloaded with features I won't be needing for this purpose. I'd like to have something left to actually run some programs I want to use.

For a keep-awake utility, I used Caffeine by Zhorn Software, much better known as the maker of Stickies.

-rjbull (March 12, 2008, 09:37 AM)

You might have misunderstood what I meant by locking up. It's not that kind of lock up. What I am referring to is when everything freezes up for a few seconds and you can't use your pc...nothing will work till it unfreezes. Maybe it has been so long since you have experienced similar problems...think back to about 10 years ago...your Win95 days, maybe? (that's how old this pc is)

This happens every time a sound plays on my pc, like the alert sound when I get a new voicemail, playing my voicemail messages, instant message sounds, some dialogs, the hourly chime in my clock program, etc. It freezes, unfreezes and plays the sound and life goes on...of course it was locked up just long enough to cause a disconnection from internet. 

The only way to stop this freezing from occurring is to have some kind of sound going through the sound card at all times. I have tried just about everything over the last 8 years and this is what works. Now I just need a tool to do the job...both jobs....without using all my pc's very limited ram & cpu power.

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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Free Downloads ALL EPISODES IN TREATMENT from HBO

« Last post by app103 on March 12, 2008, 10:53 AM »

And here is the link WITHOUT the affiliate/referral code:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0015GF4FO/

3981

Living Room / Re: What Are Your Favorite Science Blogs?

« Last post by app103 on March 12, 2008, 10:05 AM »

Gene Expression - Mostly genetics, evolution, and history 

3982

General Software Discussion / Re: The lazy user's guilt

« Last post by app103 on March 12, 2008, 09:40 AM »

Someone once told me something about the thinking and behavior of the average person when it comes to learning features and how to use them. It was related to watches and cell phones, but I think it probably could apply to software as well. It goes something like this:

When you get your brand new gadget, you will spend at most, 3 days (a weekend) learning what it can do. You will spend about an hour reading the instructions on how to configure it and learning how to use various features. You will spend the rest of the time playing with whatever you learned in that first hour. If you didn't learn it in that hour, to you that feature doesn't exist.

So you have this watch or cell phone for awhile and some new one catches your eye...a new watch or cell phone with a particular feature, and you will buy it just for that feature and chances are the old one can already do it but you just never discovered it or learned how to use it in that first hour, when you first got it. 

3983

General Software Discussion / Re: False Positive on Software (Generic.Dx) by McAfee Today: McAfee Response and

« Last post by app103 on March 12, 2008, 09:09 AM »

Sometimes I wonder about these daily updates issued by most antivirus vendors.

How possible is it that most antivirus vendors only issue protection from new threats once a week and spend the rest of the week issuing fixes for all the false positives from them?

The attitude of the antivirus vendors is that a false positive is better than a false negative, and to a certain degree I would have to agree with them on that, but when a certain particular antivirus has a track record of more false positives than just about any other and it's a big name that is trusted & used by so many, it creates a situation where users believe the alerts and it can ruin a coder's reputation in a single day, especially a young one that hasn't released much yet.

About 3 years ago, a kid from my chatroom that was just learning C created a really cool little utility and I released it on my group's site. There was nothing wrong with it...it was clean.

About a week later, people came flooding into the chatroom accusing my group of releasing malware, and this kid in particular. All of them had something in common...they were all McAfee users.

I sent a copy of the file to McAfee, along with the source, and never heard from them about it beyond an email confirming that I had sent them the file and that they would look into it.

This kid had no idea what in his code could have set off the false positive so he had no idea how to fix it. What ended up happening is another member of my group created their own version of the utility, an almost clone of the original, and we replaced the one on the site with that one. Sad, really, because to this day I feel the original is the better version. I wish I could have left the original on the site, but McAfee doesn't care about fixing their crap to protect the reputation of an unknown beginning coder.

Mouser, consider yourself lucky that they responded and issued any kind of fix at all. It means they think you are important enough to the world of software to do so. If you were a complete unknown and LBC was your first release, you'd be waiting a long long time.

3984

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Specialized anti-idle and 'modem booster'

« Last post by app103 on March 12, 2008, 06:02 AM »

I need a utility to act as a specialized 'keep alive' for my old 233mhz, 64mb ram, WinME pc that has a 33.6k dialup connection.

I have a combo soundcard/modem that requires continous sound in order to work properly, otherwise my internet connection becomes unstable because if a sound plays on the pc, it locks up just long enough to kick me offline.

Additionally, the ISP will disconnect me automatically after a lenghth of time without any http internet activity.

I have tried other keep alive utilities and none have worked. The most effective way to kill both birds with one stone has been to run Winamp with a looped playlist, 24 hours a day, and a lyrics plugin that downloads a web page with lyrics when the song changes.

As long as I do this, I can keep sound flowing through the soundcard/modem and beat the ISP's idle timer at the same time, staying connected for up to 7 days straight.

But this is an extreme waste of my pc's resources to run something as bloated as a media player with a built in browser, all the time. Additionally, after awhile, the changing of the songs from one to another will cause a freeze up of my pc that lasts just long enough to cause me to be disconnected, defeating the purpose of the whole reason I am running Winamp.

And if I am working on this pc at night, I have to keep the speakers turned off so people can sleep, meaning I can't hear any other sounds like various alerts.

So basically, this is the small utility I need:

1. has to accept a url to a file as command line parameter.
2. produce a continous tone at frequency of 25hz (something my cheap speakers can't produce, so it will be 'silent noise') You can NOT loop a wav file for this, it will not work to produce the results I am after. The application must generate the sound itself.
3. test for an internet connection every 10 minutes, and if connected download the file specified in the url given as command line parameter, overwriting the old one that may exist from a previous download. (I plan on downloading a small txt file from my website for this)
4. sit in my tray and not get in my way
5. work on 9x
6. be light as a feather and use as little resources as possible to accomplish the job. (this means no .NET!)

Now, if you want to attempt this, I'll help you a little bit by providing this link to some info on how to produce the tone needed: http://www.codeproje.../SoundGenerator.aspx

I would attempt this myself but I only code in Delphi and that isn't a Delphi project...and I don't understand it enough to be able to do it in Delphi.

If you can manage to create this little tool, every person that still has a really old pc on dialup with an Aztech Sound4 combo card will love you for it. 

3985

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm looking for a Pink Noise Generator for Windows

« Last post by app103 on March 11, 2008, 01:14 PM »

Simple, bare bones application meant to generate soundwaves of pink noise, white noise, pure test tones and frequency sweeps...meant for the 'burn in' process of headphones. Please be careful with this, as some of the pure tones it can generate can be harmful to human ears.

Burninwave Generator

Read the main page about headphone  "burn in" to understand why this app was created.

3986

Living Room / Re: the award for most clueless pc user ever - my candidate.

« Last post by app103 on March 10, 2008, 11:06 AM »

I will never forget the time my husband came home with a black & white printout of a page of one of the sites I made. (it was for the company he worked for)

A customer had told him that they found the website doing a google search, printed it out in black & white, and handed him the copy of the page.

My husband came home all upset, thinking that google had stolen my work, and even worse...messed it up by removing all the color from it. He wanted me to sue google. Now his boss isn't much brighter, suing was all his idea, and he was actually going to find me a lawyer.

I had to go to my husband's job, sit the both of them down, tell them to stfu and listen (they were yelling, hopping mad)...and gave a lesson on what a search engine is and does, assuring them that nobody stole the site and that nobody had ruined it. I had a tough time convincing them that people coming in because they discovered the place through a google search was a good thing...that the website was serving its purpose.

As new customers came in mentioning how they found the site on other search engines, I had to repeat this process for each different search engine that was mentioned.

3987

Developer's Corner / 7 Day Roguelike Game Coding Challenge

« Last post by app103 on March 07, 2008, 10:07 PM »

Rogue Temple is running their annual 7DRL (7 Day Roguelike) Challenge from March 8 to March 16, 2008.

The challenge is to announce that you will create a roguelike game and then from that point you have exactly 7 days to code a playable game.

The idea behind 7DRLs is forcing developers to finish a showable product instead of adding features endlessly to their grandiose, never to be released projects, a common pattern in the roguelike development world.

7DRL Challenges are NOT about being a /fast/ coder, but rather proving you can release a finished, playable roguelike to the world. There is no winner of the challenge, but rather all those who finish are honoured for their work, the criterion is completeness.

Roguelikes are old school rpg dungeon games, mostly text based, similar to the 1980 game called Rogue.

For those that are not familiar with what exactly a roguelike is, please refer to this wikipedia article.

For full rules and details of the challenge, please refer to their site.

http://www.roguetemple.com/7drl/

ps. Here is where most discussion of the contest seems to be, and where you should post if you want to enter:
http://groups.google...lopment/topics?hl=en

3988

Official Announcements / Re: The site is now back online (March 6th, 2008)

« Last post by app103 on March 06, 2008, 10:55 PM »

YAY! It's great to be home. I really missed the site. Thanks mouser & gothic!

 

(I would add every happy dancing smiley we have to this post, but I don't have the patience to wait for that page to load)

3989

Living Room / Re: Comic Strip Generator (and March Caption Contest Announcement!)

« Last post by app103 on March 06, 2008, 10:20 PM »

I think we all now know what the conversation was:

Cody: It's ok to put the DCserver root password in my AOL email signature, right?
Mouser: Oh bother..

-mouser (March 06, 2008, 07:59 PM)

 
That's not fair...you aren't allowed to have such a great caption. What if yours wins? It's going to be hard to beat that one.

3990

Living Room / Comic Strip Generator (and March Caption Contest Announcement!)

« Last post by app103 on March 02, 2008, 01:38 AM »

I was doing a little research on what is available in the way of tools to create your own web comics, easily. I found a greate site that was sort of along the lines of what I was thinking of.

Strip Generator lets you create your own comic strips with drag & drop ease, with lots of characters, props, creatures, shapes, talk & think balloons, etc.

It's a lot of fun to play with.

http://stripgenerator.com/

And now for the contest...

While playing around with some of the stuff there, I saw a few familiar things that reminded me of this site and created this little single frame comic:



All you have to do is fill in the talk/think bubbles with the conversation that took place between mouser & cody, during this little visit.

Mouser will be giving away a prize of a mug to the winner...with the winner's captioned image printed on it! (how cool is that?!)

Deadline to submit your captioned image is March 21, 2008.

Good luck! I am really looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with. 

3991

Coding Snacks / Re: IDEA: Sex Sells Spider

« Last post by app103 on February 29, 2008, 09:32 AM »

There was an old quote from one of the chatrooms I am a reg in (don't know which one, which is why I can't find it) that said something like...

you can't show real pics of real people doing what really goes on behind internet sites. Nobody would want to buy anything from a site that featured a pic of a fat ugly geek in his underwear.

3992

General Software Discussion / Re: Stage6 closing for ever on Thursday

« Last post by app103 on February 29, 2008, 09:03 AM »

They are still up, through today. I am there now downloading old classics and documentaries while I still can.

next on the list: The Brain That Wouldn't Die

3993

Living Room / Re: Anyone any idea how to make an IP appear to be in another country?

« Last post by app103 on February 26, 2008, 06:30 PM »

There is instructions for doing it to access pandora.com from outside the US, with tor, here:
http://openpandora.b...ing-openpandora.html

Probably will work for what you want, Carol...just replace the 'www.pandora.com' in the tor.pac file with the site you want, instead.

3994

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: InstantBoss - For those of us which require motivation to work

« Last post by app103 on February 26, 2008, 04:45 PM »

I'll try. That was one of the things I wanted to do.

3995

Living Room / Re: Hi I am a software addict, I need extra gb's, can anyone help my problem?

« Last post by app103 on February 26, 2008, 03:31 AM »

Check your recycle bin. I may have hidden some space in there for you. If not, I might have hidden it in Add/Remove programs. 

3996

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: InstantBoss - For those of us which require motivation to work

« Last post by app103 on February 24, 2008, 09:38 PM »

This isn't going to be easy for me to fix.

I can fix the part about the enter key dismissing the alerts, but there is issues about the reliability of the alert windows, in regards to them staying on top.

I am trying to think of other options for alerts so you will have more choices in how you are alerted. I figure giving you a combination of options might be the best way.

I am thinking of flashing tray icons (suggested by another user), tray balloons, taskbar button flashing...all that stuff I personally hate. 

If I allow you to choose the ones you want, then I am sure this could work out a lot better, allowing you to set it up with something that works best for you..

3997

General Software Discussion / Re: Download Cheap software on http://softwarebackups.org, a Scam ?

« Last post by app103 on February 23, 2008, 02:34 PM »

the way these sites operate is that they send you for example photoshop cs3 cd/dvd but without the serial numbers or registration codes, as they are sold as backup copies. So in essence you are paying $60+ for a backup copy of software you supposedly already own. and that is the only way these copies are legal.

-PaladinMJ (February 22, 2008, 06:53 PM)

Actually, taking a close look on the site, I get the impression that they don't ship any disks to you. They give you download links. I am also getting the impression this is common cracked warez they are selling.

Looking at the customer testimonials, I am also getting the impression they offer 'customer support' for using their supplied cracks.






And if you email them to say anything nice that they want to use on the site, they are likely to advertise your real name to the world as someone using their cracked software.

3998

Living Room / Re: What annoys you to no end?

« Last post by app103 on February 23, 2008, 12:52 AM »

losing things that i know i just put down somewhere.

-mouser (February 22, 2008, 10:59 AM)

<mouser> you know.. something is just plain wrong about spending 30 minutes searching for my book on how to get organized

-Mouser in IRC channel

3999

General Software Discussion / Re: How many active DC member are there? 150? (Dumbar number)

« Last post by app103 on February 22, 2008, 12:14 PM »

Why are you checking the supporter yearbook when you should be checking the full forum member list sorted by post count?

188 members with 50+ posts (check page 4)

-app103 (February 22, 2008, 11:38 AM)

Because I don't have permission to access that list

-Lashiec (February 22, 2008, 12:12 PM)

You mean I am special? I had no idea. 

4000

General Software Discussion / Re: How many active DC member are there? 150? (Dumbar number)

« Last post by app103 on February 22, 2008, 11:38 AM »

Mouser, how many active users does DC have (Users with more than 50 posts)?

-Josh (February 20, 2008, 05:33 PM)

The Supporter Yearbook says... 160. Add to that those posters who clog the forum, but don't donate anything *cough*

-Lashiec (February 20, 2008, 06:07 PM)

Why are you checking the supporter yearbook when you should be checking the full forum member list sorted by post count?

188 members with 50+ posts (check page 4)