Recent Posts

426

Developer's Corner / Re: Docoto Defense - DonationCoder.com Game in Development

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 30, 2007, 05:53 PM »

1,4,2,3 for me still.

427

Developer's Corner / Re: Docoto Defense - DonationCoder.com Game in Development

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 28, 2007, 12:08 PM »

Yes, I like the top one best! Looks awesome! Great work, nudone!

428

Developer's Corner / Re: Here's Why You Shouldn't Program Alone

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 21, 2007, 07:12 PM »

This is true in many cases (though there are exceptions I can imagine,..) but I feel there is a vital part missing to this article:

So you've deceided to not do your beloved project alone,... you have everything lined out of what the result should be, you have some general idea of the classes that should exist in your program, now how do you start composing a team when you don't have money to pay your developers (eg: how do you start an open source team)?

I'd love for other developers to help out with my projects, but I sure as hell don't see anyone jumping to join in. Even a team of one or two would help, but it is probably very very hard to find people that like your project enough to contribute to it.

Another problem is,- at what maturity level does your project have to be, in order to start composing a team? Can your team start from scratch, or should you code the general outlines of the project first, before you gather up a team? .... etc....

Making a statement saying that one shouldn't develop alone is one thing, but one should provide more information as to how to NOT program alone, to provide readers with an alternative. (A solution that does not involve joining an existing project, people want to realise their own ideas and projects and that's how most of us end up coding alone, many times because there's simply noone else interested enough to join in, or because the questions above are unanswered.)

429

Living Room / Re: DC get together in Western Europe?! July 2007?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 20, 2007, 02:50 AM »

hehehe, ok.
I'll contact you later with my contact info in Belgium, Darwin.

430

Official DonationCoder.com Reviews / Re: Don't forget - a new review every saturday

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 19, 2007, 04:20 AM »

I think we forgot.

     

431

General Software Discussion / Re: Are you a hardcore software fanatic or a poseur?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 18, 2007, 04:40 AM »

[Select]

# yum list installed | wc -l
1142

(on Blag Linux.)

432

Developer's Corner / Re: TwinForms: A WxWidgets Form Designer in C++ Builder

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 18, 2007, 03:43 AM »

hehe, don't worry, i just mentioned codeblocks is open source so you could look at it's source code to see how they integrated scintilla and wxWidgets. (since code::blocks uses both)

you DO have a choice, the wxWidgets library is licensed under L-GPL with an exception stating that derived works in binary form may be distributed on the user's own terms. See http://www.wxwidgets...g/about/newlicen.htm for details.

433

Developer's Corner / Re: TwinForms: A WxWidgets Form Designer in C++ Builder

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 18, 2007, 03:23 AM »

wxWidgets uses native controls (on linux it will use GTK, motif or even xlib) on windows it uses the win32 api, etc,...
QT draws it's own controls, and thus doesn't look integrated into the OS.
I don't really see no reason to use qt when you've got these wx controls working in bcb...

I think, for portable code, instead of using TScintella, you shoud look into using wxscintilla
. It should probably work fine with bcb.
http://sourceforge.n...rojects/wxscintilla/

There is a wonderfull cross platform example of wxWidgets + scintella in the open source Code::Blocks IDE. (http://www.codeblocks.org/)

434

Developer's Corner / Re: TwinForms: A WxWidgets Form Designer in C++ Builder

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 18, 2007, 01:34 AM »

Welcome, gururamnath,

Thanks for the response! That indeed makes it very useful. Very interesting project.

435

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: Mouser please read

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 17, 2007, 07:27 PM »

chris, here at dc we call that getting mousered

mousering
  verb, mousererd, mouser-ing
  1. Having your conversation partner dissapear into nowhere without prior warning.
  2. Receiving a late or no response.

 
Don't worry, it's nothing personal, it happens to all of us at some point. Mouser needs to hire a secretary!

436

Living Room / Re: DC get together in Western Europe?! July 2007?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 17, 2007, 05:04 PM »

Me and Della are in.
We'll be in Belgium for the entire month of July.

437

Developer's Corner / Re: TwinForms: A WxWidgets Form Designer in C++ Builder

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 15, 2007, 10:15 PM »

... are those wx controls on a vcl form ?!

438

General Software Discussion / Re: Überwallpaper!

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 15, 2007, 02:52 PM »

I frequently pick a different one, depending on my mood, from a central repository where i keep most wallpapers I like, which you can view here: http://www.linkerror.com/wallpapers/

Most of them are from deviantart or some random google images search.

439

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the Switch-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 15, 2007, 02:31 PM »

You're probably better of using fdisk to determine what the name of the device of your second drive is, Zaine, because it shows more information about the filesystem... eg:

[Select]

sudo fdisk -l
Password:

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              14       30401   244091610   8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1       19456   156280288+   7  HPFS/NTFS

As you can see, it also shows whether or not a filesystem is NTFS or ext3 or whatever else. (I use LVM though)
So if i wanted to add a line for my windows drive, I know windows uses NTFS, so i know the device would be sdb1 so the line to add in fstab, would have /dev/sdb1 in it's first column.

440

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the Switch-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 15, 2007, 02:20 PM »

typing in: man fstab
at the command prompt will give you lots of information explaining how that file works, in detail, but i'll have a shot at it,...

As you know, the concept of a C-drive, D-drive, or drive letters in general does not exist. In windows, hard drives, cd's and even floppy disks also have to be `mounted`, but all this goes on behind the scenes, and the user is unaware of it. Windows (and DOS) will automatically assign drive letters to any drive it finds, and automatically 'mount' the drive on these 'drives'.

In linux, a drive, partition, or filesystem( could be an .iso image too for example ) can be mounted in any directory, and drive letters don't exist.
When the kernel (the core of the operating system) starts up, it will first see if any parameters were given along with it's startup (there is a root parameter which you can pass to the kernel in a boot loader, to tell it which drive/partition/filesystem should be mounted as 'root' filesystem). When referring to the 'root' filesystem, I am referring to the filesystem on which the directory / and all it's subdirectories are located. After mounting this filesystem, it will continue booting up, running what is called 'init' scripts which start different programs required on startup. And it will also check the /etc/fstab file to see which other filesystems it must mount. So naturally this file is of great importance to linux.

Lets look at a typical fstab file:

[Select]

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /                      ext3    defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
/dev/sdb1   /media/windows ntfs    uid=500,gid=500,user                  0 0
/dev/cdrom  /media/cdrom   iso9660 ro,user,noauto,unhide,uid=500,gid=500 0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap                   swap    defaults        0 0

The first column on each line, tells linux where to FIND the filesystem. Typically this will be something like /dev/sdb1 or /dev/hda1 etc,... (SATA drives are labeled as sda,sdb,sdc,etc,... IDE harddrives are labeled as hda,hdb,sdc,etc,... followed by the partition number)
The second column on each line tells linux where to MOUNT the filesystem. This is where you will find the files on that particular partition.
The third column on each line tells linux what TYPE of filesystem it is. (eg: ext2, ext3, ntfs, fat32, etc,...)
the Fourth column is for any additional OPTIONS you with to pass when mounting the filesystem (such as whether or not it should be allowed for regular (non-root) users to mount the partition, and what the default file permissions would be.
The last two columns (0 0 or 0 1 or 1 1 etc) are parameters telling how frequently that particular filesystem should be checked for errors on startup.

The particular example above may look a bit strange, because it uses LVM (Logical Volume Management) (see http://en.wikipedia....al_volume_management ) This is why you see stuff like the volgroup lines in there.

The devpts, tmpfs, procfs, and sysfs mount points are special directory trees containing information on running processes, hardware, temporary files, etc,...
For example, when you type the following command:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Various information about your CPU will be shown. This just goes to show that ANYTHING can be treated as a filesystem and can be mounted.

I really hope this clears up at least a little bit,... Please be brave, strong, and don't be intimidated by any of this to stop learning! It really isn't half bad once you get the hang of it! I understand it's easy to be overwhelmed, because there are vast culture differences between Windows and Linux. There may or may not be some GUI applications out there that update the fstab file automatically, but I still think it's important to know what goes on behind the GUI, because at least then you know what to do if the GUI doesn't work

441

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the Switch-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 14, 2007, 06:30 PM »

To automatically mount your second drive on boot, and/or have it accessible by users other than root, you can add a line to your /etc/fstab file

(to edit /etc/fstab as the root user you can enter a command like:

[Select]

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

)

Add following lines for an additional ext3 drive and an additional ntfs drive, for example:

[Select]

/dev/sdb1   /media/seconddrive ext3    uid=500,gid=500,user    0 0
/dev/sdc1   /media/windowsdrive ntfs    uid=500,gid=500,user   0 0

Adding these lines also lets you use 'shortcut' mount commands like:
  mount /media/seconddrive
or
  mount /media/windowsdrive

Remember the mount points (the directories in the /media folder) need to exist, and if they don't exist they need to be created (as described in previous posts).

Also remember to change /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdc1 respectively with your hd and partition, you can find out the correct names by using the methods described in previous posts.

442

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the switch-02: Which Linux distro to choose?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 10, 2007, 12:03 PM »

Of course, if you have to open a terminal to get something installed this quickly becomes far more complex than a casual computer user will be able to deal with. However, this is just a learning curve as I imagine that the first time one opens a CMD console in Windows to be pretty daunting too

-Darwin (June 10, 2007, 09:09 AM)

I recently guided a 70 year old buddy of mine, who is trying to switch from Windows through a more complex installation process over the command line, after which he made the comment:

"All this linux stuff 'LOOKS' complicated, but once you start getting some grokking of it, it really makes sense."

443

Developer's Corner / Re: SkyIDE - Latest Release Information

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 08, 2007, 09:48 PM »

Hmm... On second thought... I think you should probably put some more thought into the linking process before adding more features like this.

You have to remember, there are so many infinite ways that one can link a program or library (dll), that they invented makefiles, and even complete complex build systems and languages just for that purpose. I'm thinking it will be very hard to capture all that functionality in one or more GUI dialogs... Maybe you should do a small study on various build systems (eg, Makefiles, autoconf/automake/libtool, bakefile, scons, jam/bjam, etc,...) and see how they implement these things. You'll find that most use complex scripting or xml (bakefile), to direct the linking process. Capturing all that functionality in a GUI would be great! But it would also very hard to be complete. I think,... to do it 'right', it would require some study.

Of course, you don't HAVE to capture all that functionality, you can always support calling an external build system, and let that take care of the whole thing for you. However, implementing SOME of it, and additionally supporting an external build system may confuse users into thinking that they aren't able to do certain things.

Implementing all of it probably isn't a good idea, since you don't have your entire lifetime to complete this project, nor do you have an entire team of developer slaves. So maybe you should put some thought into letting an external application direct the linking and compiling process, and drop more features like this all togeather.

Just some thoughts.

444

Developer's Corner / Re: SkyIDE - Latest Release Information

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 08, 2007, 05:43 PM »

Oh ok, i get it.

gnu make has an option (-j) to specify how many simultanious compiles are supposed to happen at the same time.

[Select]

       -j [jobs], --jobs[=jobs]
            Specifies the number of jobs (commands) to run simultaneously.  If
            there  is  more than one -j option, the last one is effective.  If
            the -j option is given without an argument, make  will  not  limit
            the number of jobs that can run simultaneously.

i guess it's similar to what you have, but it differs in being able to configure a specific amount of simultanious jobs, maybe that would be a good feature to add, the number of simultanious jobs has an effect on the compilation time of the project. Generally a good rule is to use the number of cpu cores + 1 (or if you have hyperthreading +2); eg:

if you have a pentium 4, with hyperthreading, make -j3 will give you best performance (1 core + hyperthreading + 1 = 3)
If you are as lucky to have a quad cpu system, make -j5 will give you best performance
etc..

It's actually more commonly used with distributed compiling farms to specify how many nodes are in the cluster, eg to use with distcc or something.

It would really be AWESOME if SkyIDE would let you build a compile farm out of the box btw
That would probably even be a feature that would attract businesses if SkyIDE were to mature. And if it ever gets famous you could make money off of it by selling support

445

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the switch-02: Which Linux distro to choose?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 08, 2007, 04:08 PM »

During the summer, I'll be celebrating the first Linux Distribution Contest (LDC) to see what's the perfect Linux distribution for my needs and interests.

One thing I've noticed over time is that the linux distribution only makes a difference initially. Eventually when you're comfortable enough playing with *nix you usually end up setting them up the same, and the only thing that makes the difference from one distro to the other is the package management system and aviable packages, like Zaine mentioned. Be it debian's apt-get, gentoo's portage, or fedora's yum, they are all good tools. And with many distributions you can find multiple installed. Blag, for example has both yum and apt. And portage can be installed on any distro, it doesn't have to be gentoo. So really, the lines between distributions really start to get blurry, as you get your hands dirty.

For users migrating from windows, the distribution is of massive importance however, because these don't have the experience required to fix something if it doesn't work out of the box, and having to do too much fiddling often leads to massive overwhelm, misunderstanding, and eventually giving up, since the unix culture is vastly different from what you're used to on Windows. Some of these distributions do a very good job at gradually introducing you to that culture, as opposed to throwing you in for the wolves.

Personally, I have used slackware, freeBSD, gentoo, ubuntu, blag, mandrake, suse, DSL, and many others, and I can honestly say that I don't have much of a preference. I run blag because of it's philosophy (free software only, no closed source) not because of how it looks and behaves as a distribution. And that's something you'll find with many *nix users. They go for a certain philosophy behind a distribution (be it political, or more technical); the mechanics and software are easy enough to change to your liking regardless of distro.

Hardware support is not an issue because all GNU/Linux distributions use the Linux kernel (this of course excluding bsd and solaris, but those aren't Linux distro's anyway ), and you can compile your own kernel with whatever drivers you want relatively easily. However for new users, this again is of great importance, because they want things to 'just work'. I have seen new users switch distribution countless times, just because some device wasn't automatically detected (usually because the developers of the distro have opted to not include whatever driver module) in one distro, but it was in another.

Besides distro, what DOES make a bigger difference is the kernel, I'm expanding beyond the scope of just Linux here, but whether you're new or a guru, there IS going to be a difference between say a BSD kernel, a Linux kernel, and a Solaris kernel. Different linux kernels are easily interchangable though. You can easily use a 2.4 kernel if your distro uses a 2.6 kernel, and the other way around. (Gentoo even lets you use a bsd kernel instead of a linux kernel)

Cool! I'll be close to the city of Namur, at a cave site called Scladina. Maybe we should try and arrange something for any European DC'ers that can and wish to meet up?

We'll be in Ghent, though Scladina sounds like an interesing place to go see. I remember going there as a kid with my parents The Han and Spy caves are very interesting as well. Maybe we should start a new thread about this and invite anyone in who wants to come.
 

446

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the switch-02: Which Linux distro to choose?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 08, 2007, 10:08 AM »

!
Darwin, me and Della be in belgium too next month.
We should have a dc get-togeather I'll install and setup linux for you if you want

447

Developer's Corner / Re: SkyIDE - Latest Release Information

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 08, 2007, 07:55 AM »

I think this whole multiple file compilation thing is confusing me.
Are you trying to implement something like make -jn ?

448

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the switch-02: Which Linux distro to choose?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 08, 2007, 07:46 AM »

If you're wanting easy setup and non-open drivers, that's one consideration (often Ubuntu or Freespire).

... or for those, like me, who want to use an 100% free(as in freedom) and open distro, (i doubt that there will be many) there is only a handful of distro's to pick from. One of which is Blag ( http://www.blagblagblag.org ), which is surprisingly user friendly, and in my experience comes close to ubuntu as being easy to install etc,...

449

Post New Requests Here / Re: DONE: a self-scrolling, BPM adjustable html/notepad/text file gizmo

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 03, 2007, 06:04 PM »

PS the unsupported compiler I (try to) use is Bloodshed Dev-C++. Its best feature is that its free. Also it comes with a good tutorial. (and I still can't use it Sad )

Dev-C++ uses MingW under the hood, and wxWidgets and wxWidgets applications can deffinitly be compiled with it. You can find a guide for it here: http://www.wxwidgets...tutorials/devcpp.htm

the app was zipped, not installed...trying to have windows install it made no difference whatsoever.
it works GREAT on my tower, but not at all on the laptop, no versions of it seem to there.

You are probably missing that msvcrt dll file. You can download it here. Put it in the same folder as the program (exe) and see if it works then. It may or may not be the right version of the dll though, haven't checked into that yet. Worth a shot

450

Living Room / Re: Microsoft's proposed new user interface

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 02, 2007, 11:48 AM »

It's not that simple. This is only the most recent examlpeof a whole body of work. Here's an overview of multi-touch by someone who's  been working in the field for over 20 years:

http://www.billbuxto...titouchOverview.html

Great link! Nice timeline. You can really see the progress. Very interesting.