Recent Posts

4051

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: PC game launcher/organizer/frontend

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 02, 2012, 03:50 PM »

Alpha release soon, with only the Core Library functionality implemented.

-Epicmaster (April 02, 2012, 03:17 PM)

Per OP's question, how many hours has it taken you so far to get to your Pre-Alpha? And would you call this a "Coding Lunch or Coding Dinner"? (Imagine this on a scale of say 1-5, those are levels 2-3, level 4 would be a full strength big app, and 5 would be an enterprise package module.

4052

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: PC game launcher/organizer/frontend

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 02, 2012, 03:48 PM »

I have searched high and low for a simple PC game launcher, but to no avail.

...
I have no idea how difficult it would be to make an app like this. If it's an unreasonable request, then let me know. If not, I would love to dig in and beta test whatever comes out!

-garbanzo (May 05, 2011, 07:14 PM)

This hits my musings on Coding "Snacks" vs "Coding Lunches and Dinners". My hunch is it's well out of Snack Territory, much like my ideas in other threads were. So I'm also interested in anyone's very rough time estimates (I know, multiply by 10 for debugging and polish!) It's that middle ground where I feel it would deserve a cash commission to anyone working on it based solely on the request. See my murmurings elsewhere for my opinions all over that.

4053

General Software Discussion / Re: Program to control program

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 02, 2012, 02:04 PM »

Hello Curt.
I have problems with ClickOff I don't understand. So I am looking for alternatives.
I haven't seen the possibility of create a sort of "Sandbox" with ClickOff.
Is resident all time.
 

-Contro (April 02, 2012, 01:51 PM)

There is a "scan windows" button that you can toggle on and off - does that help?

4054

Living Room / Re: Those "Boy's Own" type comics from the 40's & 50's

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 02, 2012, 09:52 AM »

I used to read "Highlights" as a kid... Sounds like some of the tone was similar.

-Renegade (April 01, 2012, 09:15 PM)

Many decades (!!) ago I used to be able to play the Highlights arrangement of Sheherazad on the piano.

4055

Official Announcements / Re: I want to try an experiment on the site for March 2012

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 02, 2012, 09:48 AM »

I also think companies need to take a risk and let users mash up ads. Ads are in a weird category. Every other type of content is supposed to be "Demand Pull, don't share" with all the copyright wars. Ads are "Supply Push, and please watch it as much as you can stand." So just a rough example, Coca Cola, Inc, might be smart enough to let people play with the Coke Polar Bears mashed up on the Star Trek Enterprise, with Heavy Metal Music going.

-TaoPhoenix (March 05, 2012, 11:39 AM)

I closed the loop on this theme today by offering both to "dogfood" it by using DC as our own test case, and offering a second donation to get some raw materials to mash up.  Sadly I don't have a lot of imageshop skills, but that's what mashups are, you need to accept having a base of beginners and a "bodycount" so that the experts rise up and become celebrated.

Eventually I plan to ask a few other companies if they would donate/permit some similar raw materials for mashup ads. All my efforts are meant to be respectful and promote the site/product involved, I don't plan any trolling. The only mistake I'd make is if I mistimed a joke and it went sour.

4056

Official Announcements / Re: The DonationCoder 2012 Fundraiser Has Begun!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 02, 2012, 08:44 AM »

Nice idea.
NOTE: If anyone is not seeing the thermometer at the top of the page, force your page to refresh to get the new banner image with thermometer (thanks as always to Nudone for making such a beautiful banner with the image of Cody our mascot).

-mouser (April 01, 2012, 04:55 AM)

Okay, in a mashup of my earlier request in another thread, what if we made our own DC themed materials? I have an idea brewing that I could have fun writing a few cartoons such as "Cody's Attic" and "Adventures of Cody" with an extra specialty of promoting Creative Commons. So here is a new offer from me: I'd pay $50 for a set of Cody pics of different poses and sizes ready to drop into comic panels. I'm not aiming for realism - more like a cross between Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics, and xkcd. It would also be fun to compose some funny DC ads.

4057

Official Announcements / Re: The DonationCoder 2012 Fundraiser Has Begun!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 02, 2012, 08:32 AM »

Yes.. Actually last week I finally chose a CMS platform to try to move DC too (Wordpress of all things -- yes i know it's more of a blog platform than cms platform, but it still seems like the way to go), and the idea is to move to that AND a proper software directory/repository this year, finally.

Fundraiser funds will help offset the time we spend transitioning, as always.

-mouser (April 01, 2012, 12:14 PM)

Hi Mouser.

In my senile old age I forget these things, but weren't you writing your own CMS "for programmers"? (Or am I confusing you with someone else?)

Presuming that was you, what led you to not use that for your own site?

 

4058

Official Announcements / Re: The DonationCoder 2012 Fundraiser Has Begun!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 31, 2012, 09:22 PM »

How far back do donations count? I just donated after lurking for some 5 months. I'm feeling that I should have waited to be counted for the fundraiser. : (

4059

General Software Discussion / Re: scroll down to next picture

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 30, 2012, 02:32 PM »

-your request defeats the very purpose of writing a blog.

Maybe you want an easy download-all-pictures-on-this-page application?

-Curt (March 30, 2012, 11:35 AM)

In Firefox, and prob other browsers, you can do this as File/Save As Webpage Complete. Then you go to PageName_files and all the pictures are in there. Then any photo viewer would work.

4060

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Gmail Notes (Sidebar add-on for Firefox only) - Mini Review

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 28, 2012, 07:33 PM »

Thanks @TaoPhoenix.
As for alternatives:
There are several app-aware sticky-note type applications that can attach notes to particular windows.
I had tried out Anand's StickANote (which I think is great). but uninstalled it when it didn't seem to be any different to other app-aware sticky-note things.
Gmail Notes seems to be unique in that it enables you to attach a note to a particular email in Gmail - which you can't seem to do with any other tool that I have come across so far. And that's all it does.

-IainB (March 28, 2012, 06:38 PM)

I think I disagree, unless I am misunderstanding you. Generic Sticky programs "just make notes and sit there". I haven't tried many "app-aware" versions of sticky programs since Tom Revell's Stickies does pretty well for me.

But Anand's program does seem to be able to attach to a specific email because it grafts to a "window title" such as "Email to Iain, please try my chocolate cake". I may have at most three of those because soon I "edit the subject title" to "Iain likes busty women at parties, note to self, hire that girl I met last summer."

I tested it on a couple of emails, and only stopped using it because the emails decayed too fast and it wasn't worth making notes, the RadioActive tag was enough.

4061

Living Room / Re: Ad Tracking Company Explosion

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 28, 2012, 04:48 PM »

Warning: Refactoring Required!

-Stephen66515 (March 28, 2012, 04:39 PM)

Yuk, I'm dull today, I missed your joke! (Was it?)

4062

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Gmail Notes (Sidebar add-on for Firefox only) - Mini Review

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 28, 2012, 04:45 PM »

Good effort Iain, I vaguely remember looking at this, and not liking that it requires an external server. My general approach to Cloud-y things is to minimize the trend of using seductive "use our server" services with third parties.

My response to this is Anand's StickANote. Since most of my emails are titled differently from each other, Anand's program seems to usually find the right window most of the time. But it's local to me, and not floating around with a "sign in". I know, that means I can't see my notes on other machines, but I only look at work email at work.

However, even broader, I just use Google Superstars and tag "decayed emails" (where it once was a typical email but some portion of it or the attachments turned out to be wrong and contain mistakes), I just mark that email "radioactive". So that when it turns up in a search for some topic, I just know to go back to basics to recreate that topic and not to trust the email. By that point if I am caught up there is a better copy of all those documents on our company server.

4063

Living Room / Ad Tracking Company Explosion

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 28, 2012, 04:33 PM »

 
Courtesy of Ghostery-

Skipping the big players like Google & Facebook, *two* news articles on the net produced the following trackers:

List 1
AddThis
Clip Syndicate
LiveRail
Outbrain
Quantcast
Quogo AdSonar
Unica
Vibrant Ads

List2
Audience Science
BlueKai
MSN Ads
Scorecard Reseach Beacon
Tynt Insight

Who ARE these people?!

That's the trench view of people selling you as a product.

4064

Living Room / Re: JustCloud.com: It's All Lies

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 28, 2012, 12:49 PM »

Anyone looking for classical webhosting under a Gig, fire me a note. I ran a study of free webhosts and came out with some recommendations.

4065

Living Room / Re: JustCloud.com: It's All Lies

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 28, 2012, 11:59 AM »

"Clouds come in various sizes - ask any legit weatherman".
It's okay to store your stuff on remote servers so that you can access it later. That's called file hosting.

So instead of "in the cloud" just go look for quality hosts.

How much data do you need to store? If you're talking about backing up your entire machine, sure, it's going to cost money. But if you just want this month's important stuff, you can get at least a Gig free in a lot of places. But yeah, their first screen is sneaky.

4066

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 27, 2012, 04:40 PM »

http://www.madsci.or...rap/~lynn/jardin/SCG
The Surrealist Compliment Generator

Your wit, your teeth, your pasty reflection can but incorporate freely into the powerful surface of a disintegrating mirror set afloat upon a swarm of locusts.

Your dashingly colored toupee twists my right boot into a state of ennui with the speed and dexterity of many lemon meringue-coated conquistadors.

4067

Living Room / Re: Cool Video: News report from 1981 about the Internet.

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 27, 2012, 04:31 PM »

"But he doesn't get ads."

Nope. Not the internet! 

4068

Developer's Corner / Re: PL101: Create your own programming language in Javascript

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 27, 2012, 06:50 AM »

Sounds like fun. But someone already made LOLCODE, so, kind of been done already for me.

Then again... <devilish grin creeps across lips />

-Renegade (March 27, 2012, 03:12 AM)

It would be really funny if some legit business either wrote themselves/outsourced the top to bottom dev of their software stack and did great, won performance awards, etc. Then later they get interviewed and written up, and it turns out their entire codebase is LOLcode.

4069

Living Room / Re: Old Hard Drives

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 26, 2012, 02:57 PM »

What to do with older HD's?

I am slowly building up a random collection of 74, 160, and 300 GB sata HD's. They are probably 3~7 years old.

I really don't feel comfortable in giving them to someone who will then use it and probably blame me when it fails.

Wish there was a place that would give you a small discount for recycling them.

-Cloq (March 25, 2012, 07:27 PM)

The 300's are still fine for "casual users". I think there is a small market for "My First Linux Machine" for like $100 because it's old everything. I know, I know, support hell, but if you label it "Radioactive - Sold As Is - No questions Asked", I'd theoretically buy a junk comp like that for $100.

4070

Living Room / Re: I'm Going to Build a PC. Suggestions?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 26, 2012, 02:50 PM »

I had a buddy build me my custom project machine, so here are some thoughts.

1. Consider skipping 3 meals a week/haircuts/etc to boost your budget to about $1500. There's a bit of a "quality slider" effect where useful upgrades across the board are always $67 away.

Supposing you "copied" my setup from my project machine, with the passage of time my $1800 price at the time might be down a bit/ a lot.

1. I thought ahead and got the first generation Quad Core all the way back in 2006. You're right, Dual is for Dogs now. (Though not all programs can find the spare resources properly.)

2. Check with your buddies/the net about the types of little components that tend to fail when Dell / etc skimps on quality. My message is all about the $67 upgrade effect to get more/better years out of the comp beast. (You said you wanted to game, right? That says you'll be pushing the limits for hours, so you don't want an "office-spec'ed" comp where the maker cheats and banks on worker bees only typing text all day long. Get a better fan, better internals, etc.)

3. It's the Media Age, and Media is Big. I got 1.75 Terabytes of storage. It works pretty well for me to put all the apps on C: and use the spare drive for media sorting.

4. Misc upgrades. For your gaming, does it make sense to get a Graphics booster of some kind? As an example, I realized I like to do a lot of sound file encoding, so I had a special extra data encoding mini-chip added to my setup that almost doubles stock encoding speeds.

4071

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Swift To-Do List 7 Standard FREE today 2012-03-26 Only on BDJ

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 26, 2012, 10:58 AM »

I'm pretty old school when it comes to lists. I live by a mix of stickies, repurposed office calendars which become "pencil spreadsheets" and "task packets" paperclipped to cardboard backers, and notepads/journals.

4072

Official Announcements / Re: So we gave up the March Ad Experiment Idea - What about a 7day mini fundraiser?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 26, 2012, 10:19 AM »

These are all very real issues!

The Net is grappling with "second generation users" by which I mean that everyone opens up a Free As In Beer service/site, and everyone has fun with it for a year. But one of my minor specialties has been studying Durable Value on the net. Somewhere between that 1 year and up to about 3, half the site owners go looking for that quick money conversion to sell out or get out.

So once something becomes a Good Thing and builds up the fan base to start seriously costing for hosting, the strain begins to show. I just finished a study over at FreeWebSpace.net (FWS) studying the limits of free hosts. Do you feel okay giving us some quick stats on total site size and bandwidth that jumps the price up to that $420ish per month?

Just to really get everyone thinking, there's a site called Crosswinds/cWahi (different divisions) which annoyed FWS for advertising "Unlimited Bandwidth", and that's on the Free Hosting division. I know, "there's no such thing as Unlimited", but the owner has done a good job, and I haven't yet seen anyone "bust his bandwidth". So quick idea is you could cut your costs in half depending how much he would charge for a commercial account.

As for money, y'all have some nice discussions, but by itself that isn't worth $100/year to me. My current problem is that once stuff gets out of the Snack range, it drops off a cliff. While I misfired a little here and there, by now you've seen the type of custom apps I like and their approximate depth of features. I think there's a funny mindset shift between Volunteer and Working for coding. Volunteer is all about "of course I'm not making a dime, I'm doing it for the love of it all". Then when it comes time to make money, it shifts to "I want to be paid my going rate", except that goes through the roof on price.

So unfortunately, for personal niche apps, DC's competition is places like vWorker(Rentacoder) and oDesk. That's where I'm headed next for my next couple of projects, because I can't figure out how not to sound insulting here when the sweet spot price range for the value is between $50 and $100.

4073

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: 'Sale' at Daz3d.com - most main apps free until the end of March!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 24, 2012, 05:53 AM »

This does look pretty neat, and it can't hurt to test it out! They require a newsletter signup, but I have a special email for such things.

Meanwhile my connection is kinda slow, so I am setting up the downloads and then I'll go do something.

Edit: They put downloads in a "profile", but they offer multiple versions, so pay attention to the 32-bit and 64-bit vs PC or Mac! I almost wasted time on a Mac version until I canceled it.

4074

Living Room / Re: Employers asking job seekers for Facebook passwords

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 23, 2012, 04:42 PM »

If that question comes to me, I'll walk out. Seriously, I have done that before when asked too much personal questions and that too during recession time. If my family members asks me for social network pass of my account, I'll deny, sorry but that's how I play.

Recruitment doesn't mean revealing your personal details too much just for the sake of job. In that case prostitution should be glamorous corporate job.

-mahesh2k (March 23, 2012, 09:41 AM)

Isn't it actually against the terms and conditions of Facebook itself to give out your password? - It's certainly not recommended by ANYBODY to EVER give your username and password to anything!

-Stephen66515 (March 23, 2012, 04:02 PM)

It sure is, and Facebook had a response that they're pissed that anyone would even think of this, so they're coming back hard, trying to get a new law to help.

4075

Finished Programs / Re: DONE: Right Click any file and create New Folder by its Name

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 23, 2012, 02:44 PM »

Much Better. Hooray!

It's good to have this back. I lost use of it for a couple months because I think I moved the original and the system couldn't find it anymore.