Recent Posts

4226

Living Room / Traffic Growth Could Choke 'Net by 2010

« Last post by app103 on November 20, 2007, 05:12 AM »

One of the great things about technology is that it's surprisingly easy to underestimate how strong the demand for it can become. Remember IBM CEO Thomas Watson's purported 1943 remark, "There's a world market for maybe 5 computers," and Bill Gates' supposed 1980 comment, "640 kbytes of RAM ought to be enough for anyone"?

Interestingly, there's no evidence that either is an actual quotation -- and Gates in particular has emphatically denied the words attributed to him. However, they linger in the public consciousness as a way of reminding ourselves of a greater truth: The appetite for technology can surprise even seasoned veterans.

That certainly happened to me recently. Awhile back, my colleagues and I decided to look at how demand for Internet capacity might change over the next five years, and see whether the existing and planned infrastructure is adequate. To do so, we modeled user consumption of bandwidth over time, validated it against the best available data and then projected that demand forward. It's essentially a Moore's Law model of Internet demand, in that it looks at the rate of increase in a commodity (processing power in the case of Moore's Law, and bandwidth use here). Then we compared that demand to existing and planned infrastructure capacity...

http://www.pcworld.c...94-pg,1/article.html

4227

Living Room / IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?

« Last post by app103 on November 20, 2007, 05:02 AM »

In a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court judgment concerning the prosecution of a cinema owner, Associate Justice Potter Stewart completely failed to define what is obscene by deciding that, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material [under discussion] . . . but I know it when I see it." In other words, pornography is - community standards notwithstanding - in the eye of the beholder.

A reasonable (to me) definition of pornography is "that which appeals to base human desires and is contrary to the established moral code of the society." It is with this in mind that I deem the IT industry to be pornographic.

http://www.pcworld.c...93-pg,1/article.html

4228

Living Room / Re: Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

« Last post by app103 on November 19, 2007, 07:08 PM »

Here is his paper if you want to read it:

http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770

4229

Living Room / Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

« Last post by app103 on November 19, 2007, 06:58 PM »

There is also a related video that goes along with this.

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

from Lockergnome

4230

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for a special RSS reader

« Last post by app103 on November 18, 2007, 11:18 PM »

The docking is kind of important, because I don't want it overlapping open windows.

Except for the fact it doesn't dock, it's the most beautiful RSS reader I have ever seen! 

4231

General Software Discussion / Re: You Should Pay Me to Read This Post (It's worth it...)

« Last post by app103 on November 18, 2007, 10:24 PM »

What is "ex" in AOLex?

-Curt (July 05, 2007, 05:26 PM)

AOL has browsers in 3 flavors:

The standard traditional all-in-one browser that has browser, email, IM, media player, etc...must have an AOL account to use it. It kind of resembles Opera when run in MDI mode instead of tabs. This is the software everyone loves to hate.


Looks pretty much the same on a Mac:


Then there is the newest thing they have created called Open Ride that has 4 panels, tabbed browser, email client that supports their mail and other POP, IM, and media player. There is a "dot" in the intersection of the 4 panels that can be dragged and positioned to change the size of all 4 at same time.


And then there is what I use & love...AOL Explorer (AOLex). It's just an IE based stand alone tabbed browser that looks beautiful, runs well, and has some really nice features. There is no extra garbage in it like IM, email or media player and it needs no AOL account, although if you have one, you can use some of the extras like portable favorites. This is the same browser that was later incorporated into the bottom left panel of Open Ride.


^{You will have to forgive me for dragging this old post up and finally responding, I am a bit behind on my unread posts.}

4232

Living Room / Re: Why is the 'N' key always the first to go?

« Last post by app103 on November 18, 2007, 08:39 PM »

Someone should make an app that records the number of keys being pressed and could tell you what key you use the most.

-p3lb0x (July 14, 2007, 01:51 PM)

That is what Whatpulse is all about. 



And there is a DonationCoder Whatpulse team.

If you would like details on joining, see this post.

4233

Developer's Corner / Re: It's A "Must Read" - Static Versus Dynamic Typing (A great overview)

« Last post by app103 on November 18, 2007, 08:14 PM »

You might want to take a look at Jython the next time you are thinking about Java, since you are a lover of Python.

4234

General Software Discussion / Re: Blog steals Zaine's Great Software List

« Last post by app103 on November 18, 2007, 07:59 PM »

The reason why it has 0 diggs is because it was removed from the digg site, as if it had never been submitted.

Check the original digg link and you will see that it, the previous diggs, and all comments are gone.

And I just checked in the comment history of my digg account, and there is no listing of any comment having been made by me on that post, so they were all deleted from digg's system.

4235

General Software Discussion / Looking for a special RSS reader

« Last post by app103 on November 18, 2007, 07:31 PM »

Does anybody know of a free RSS reader that is (or has) a ticker that can be docked at the bottom of my screen? (this location is important, as I already have too much at the top of my screen)

I would want the ticker to be quite thin and not take up that much screen space.

I would also want it to scroll, cycling through the headlines (10 most recent) of all my feeds and not just a single feed. And it needs to be able to handle a LOT of feeds.

It should show a snip of the content for an entry on hover, and go to the page related to it in my default browser when clicked.

What I am looking for is something resembling this:



The problem with the one shown is that it doesn't dock, it just stays on top...and it only shows a single feed...and it closes itself if I close my browser. 

4236

Living Room / Re: DonationCoder.com Yearly Fundraiser for 2007 - Advice Requested Please

« Last post by app103 on November 18, 2007, 06:51 PM »

maybe we could make a chart showing what we could do with the money / how we would use it..

every time i hear about some silly company getting $5,000,000 in funding i think wow what we could do with that kind of money in terms of funding projects and developers..

-mouser (November 18, 2007, 04:02 PM)

Why not break it all down into it's smallest parts, and present it in a way that allows people to check off a bunch of boxes and donate a specific amount based on the cost of things around here, with the understanding that the money will be pooled to cover the cost of everything and not necessarily the exact item they check off?

Like how much does the bandwidth for the site cost for a day? How much for the server for a day? Let them donate an amount that would cover that. Make a nice checklist where we can check off 1 or more items, a box to enter a number of units for that particular item, and hit a submit button and donate an amount based on that.

Include some of the things you wish you could do and what it would cost to do that, breaking it down into as small of a single unit as possible.

If you want to show how much you have collected towards the goal, you could list the number of units still needed to reach the goal of that item. The items in which the goal hasn't been reached would be a bit more noticeable, encouraging people to maybe donate a bit more to cover those rather than to cover the easier ones. (But of course you can still collect to cover above & beyond the goal of any particular item.)

4237

Living Room / Re: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

« Last post by app103 on November 18, 2007, 04:31 PM »

How to answer those questions the helpful way. 

In my opinion, this link is more important than the one on asking questions.

While this page is more about explaining things to someone that has very little computer experience, a lot of the concepts still apply to other situations when you are helping people, such as remembering things like...

Nobody is born knowing this stuff.

Beginners face a language problem: they can't ask questions because they don't know what the words mean, they can't know what the words mean until they can successfully use the system, and they can't successfully use the system because they can't ask questions.

You are the voice of authority. Your words can wound.

4238

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2007 / Re: My challenge and how I propose to do it

« Last post by app103 on November 18, 2007, 03:36 PM »

Thanks, app103, your site looks very useful. But do you really have to transfer it manually?

Skrommel

-skrommel (November 18, 2007, 01:39 PM)

Yes skrommel, I do.

The original site is a badly written static page full of just titles & links.

I am expanding that to include much more info and a post has to be written for each book.

This is what happens when you end up making a site that you never intended to. This was supposed to be just a text file that I passed along to people in a chatroom when they needed it.

If I had actually planned on having a site from the beginning, it would have been this way from the start. Then there wouldn't be so much work to do now.

4239

Living Room / Re: Help Name Our Cat!

« Last post by app103 on November 17, 2007, 09:52 PM »

Oh, one more thing...

Tell your daughter not to pick a name that she would be embarrassed to be calling while walking up & down the street, just in case the cat gets out of the house and lost.

The neighbors will hear you calling it, and if you pick the wrong name, they will think you are nuts. (that's how neighborhood rumors get started)

4240

Living Room / Re: Help Name Our Cat!

« Last post by app103 on November 17, 2007, 09:48 PM »

She can name it after a programming language

and there is one just for cats  

But it has been my experience that a cat can't really be named right away after joining your family. They generally don't accept the name you first want to give them. They seem to let you know what their name really is after you give them a little time to get to know you.

The little demon I live with, my first instinct was to name him Houdini, after he escaped and got loose in the car on the way home. My boss handed it to me along with my paycheck and said I had to take it or I was fired...there was no time to get a carrier to transport and I had to put it in a cardboard box.

My daughter didn't like that idea for a name and wanted to name him Zip, after the little black & white cat Beanie Baby that he looks like.

But this cat had other ideas and about a week later he let us know he was to be called Chewy, after he began chewing on everything like a puppy.

And I could swear my daughter is speaking Chinese to that cat when she calls him to eat by saying "Chow time now, Chew."

I had another cat at one time that was called Packwack...because it's name was supposed to be Packrat (it liked to hide things) but my little sis couldn't say that right.

And there was the stray I took in that I asked him what his name was and he actually answered me...Meow. So that is what we called him, although he usually wouldn't respond unless you called him by his full name, Meow Meow. 

4241

Site/Forum Features / Re: DonationCoder forum search plugin

« Last post by app103 on November 17, 2007, 09:36 AM »

Mouser: the code for the AOL Explorer search plugin isn't working properly.

I checked the source for the page and the javascript needed in the head is missing and the code for the link is calling the function for installing the Firefox one.

It's all wrong & messed up.

I have attached the correct code to make the AOL one work, to this post.

Can you please fix it?

Nice work, April. 

I installed the Firefox version and was trying to see if I could also lure your AOL version to install on my Maxthon 1.6, but to my surprise the answer was a Windows Internet Explorer popup saying "Netscape 6 or Mozilla is needed to install a sherlock plugin" ??

-Curt (June 30, 2007, 06:03 AM)

Something about that error message bugged me but I didn't really give it that much thought till later on. The error message reported is the one for the Firefox plugin. If the AOL Explorer code was done correctly, the error should have said "You must have AOL Explorer 1.5 or later installed to use this feature."

So I checked it with my browser, which should have been able to install the plugin, and it couldn't. So I checked the source and saw where it was messed up.

Thanks Curt! 

And anybody that would like to know how to make search plugins for AOL Explorer or modify existing Sherlock plugins to work, are welcome to download the attachment & see. 

4242

Developer's Corner / Re: Serena to offer free apps prototyping tool

« Last post by app103 on November 17, 2007, 07:41 AM »

In the planning phase, often a set of mockups (i.e. wireframes / visuals / not-doing-anything-except-show-the-task-flow clickable app / html clickable images)  really helps clarify what is meant by a feature and how it ought to work in the user's mind.

That is especially true in agile methodologies which imply the participation of client/user throughout.

A tool like this which might allow someone to sit with the user and on-the-fly react to a user comment, eg. "how could I change X" "well we would use a standard config list, like this"  --click click drag drag drag refresh-- "no, i dont think I would know what to do with this" "how about tabbed? and we could add a colour picker" --click click tick refresh -- "ah yes, less confusing"

Handing something like that together with a func spec/user stories/whatever the flavor of the month is for defining the works of the required app  *really* would help the developers who inherit bits of the work.

-iphigenie (November 17, 2007, 05:01 AM)

Isn't that what Delphi is for? 

click click drag drop...instant GUI...fill in the code that makes it work later.

At least this is how I do it when I get an idea for something. I see the application in my head, see what it will do when you click this, or do that...make a quick GUI and save it with a text file describing the rest, so I don't forget.

4243

General Software Discussion / Re: Hey Grisoft: I love AVG but I hate popups!

« Last post by app103 on November 17, 2007, 02:11 AM »

I have mine set the same way. Maybe you haven't been hit with this yet.

4244

Living Room / Re: Feedback on New Fun Software Please

« Last post by app103 on November 17, 2007, 12:41 AM »

Now I said I was going to do something good with this, and I kept my promise...

I have uncovered proof that the Anti-Christ is trying to take over the U.S. by running for President in the next election....and yes, he is a Rebublican. 

If you like the page, Digg it!

4245

Living Room / Re: Keeping track of software license/serial keys

« Last post by app103 on November 16, 2007, 09:07 PM »

I used to keep the info on tiny pieces of paper taped to the bottom of my keyboard, back when I didn't have that much software. This method was actually suggested by the first company I purchased software from, as they will charge you to retrieve lost keys after the 3rd time. At the time I thought it was a smart thing and did it with all my software.

But after my collection grew larger, and I had to replace a keyboard, this became impractical.

4246

Living Room / Re: Keeping track of software license/serial keys

« Last post by app103 on November 16, 2007, 08:56 PM »

I keep the info in 3 places:

• Save original email in a folder just for license info emails.
  
• Save a plain text file of the info with the archived setup file for the application. (don't need anything special installed to read it)
  
• Save the info in Keepass. (I also keep CD keys here)

4247

Living Room / Re: Please Write Software Poems...

« Last post by app103 on November 16, 2007, 08:39 PM »

This is a known fact
McAfee can't scan a rar
It will always fail

On older pc's
It will cause it to freeze up
When a rar is found

Just a rar icon
Is enough to cause trouble
Just being on screen

Switched to AVG
Put an end to my problems
No more freezing up

AVG's now bad
Because they make the popups
Now need new AV

4248

Living Room / Re: Please Write Software Poems...

« Last post by app103 on November 16, 2007, 08:18 PM »

Gmail really sucks
I cannot send a ZIP file
Blame the EXE

-Renegade (November 16, 2007, 07:36 PM)

Gmail is OK
I can send an EXE
try in a RAR file

-app103 (November 16, 2007, 07:56 PM)

Emailed with my mail
Using my own mail server
Next time I'll use RAR

-Renegade (November 16, 2007, 08:13 PM)

Gmail's scanners fail
when seeing inside a rar
everything slips through 

this is some old news
AOL discovery
they use mcafee

4249

Living Room / Re: Feedback on New Fun Software Please

« Last post by app103 on November 16, 2007, 08:09 PM »

I wonder which one is the number of the breast?

-f0dder (November 16, 2007, 06:04 PM)

8

Just turn it sideways and put 2 dots in there. 

Or maybe 8008 or 80085... Not sure...

-Renegade (November 16, 2007, 06:22 PM)

and as I showed before, my number is 888     

4250

Living Room / Re: Please Write Software Poems...

« Last post by app103 on November 16, 2007, 07:56 PM »

Gmail really sucks
I cannot send a ZIP file
Blame the EXE

-Renegade (November 16, 2007, 07:36 PM)

Gmail is OK
I can send an EXE
try in a RAR file