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4251

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

« Last post by app103 on November 16, 2007, 07:55 PM »

It's not a haiku, but about a year ago I recieved this one in an email from a mailing list full of Paintshop Pro freaks:

What's this thing called PSP?
I pondered and I wondered...
I hit this key and that key..
Oh gosh how I blundered!

It scared me to death
The things what were in there,
The 'tools' were all taunting...
Click on me if you dare!

I clicked on the browser
And things went a'flyin...
Scared me to death
And left me a'cryin!

I hit the wrong key
And the toolbar went 'Poof!'
I thought "Oh my goodness,
Did I ever goof!

It said 'open an image' --
An image? What could that be?
This button, that button...
This thing's a'pickin on me!!

But the more I went in there
And the more things I tried,
I no longer feared it,
I no longer cried.

I learned it and learned it
And learned it some more,
Now the rest of my life
I just plain ignore!

So don't bother callin'
I won't answer the phone ....
I'm now a PSP junkie ....
Just leave me alone!!!

^{-- original poet unknown}

I haven't seen that much poetry created out of love for a particular application like I have for Paintshop Pro. This thread should finally satisfy a request I made on my blog last year to see some.

4252

Living Room / Re: Free Rice: Increase your vocabulary while you feed the hungry

« Last post by app103 on November 16, 2007, 05:29 PM »

They seem to have some big name corporate sponsors, so I am pretty sure they are going to come up with the money.

4253

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

« Last post by app103 on November 16, 2007, 03:43 PM »

AVG is a great product. And Grisoft has done a wonderful service by offering a free version for all these years.

But...

They have recently resorted to WinFixer-like marketing tactics. Evey other day, when AVG updates itself, my browser opens to an ad for AVG.

The first time it happened it scared the crap outta me because I didn't touch anything that should have opened my browser. I waited, holding my breath, to see what evil thing was going to load, to give me some clue as to what had infected my pc so I could remove it. I was quite surprised to see an ad for AVG.

It's not like AVG hasn't opened a window with an ad for their full product before, just this time they decided to use the browser to do it. They used to use their own application to popup the ads.

Now before you decide to flame me for bashing a great product from a company that has been kind enough to give away a free version, consider this:

On a newer, faster machine...this is just an annoyance. You can just close the window...no harm done.

That being said, there is another issue that isn't just a mere user annoyance...

I have always liked how light AVG was and how well it ran on older low end machines without causing stability problems...liked it enough to publicly endorse it.

I am going to have to revise my endorsement for AVG for older slower PC's, due to the fact that many of them can't handle having more than 1 or 2 browser windows open at a time.

If AVG is going to open browser windows this frequently, this will cause problems on those PC's when their owners already have browser windows open.

I can't endorse a product that has a known issue that has a high potential to make your machine unstable every other day when it's updating. I can't endorse a product that has a high chance of causing your machine to lock up in the middle of you doing something important, leading you to lose whatever you were working on.

4254

Living Room / Re: Free Rice: Increase your vocabulary while you feed the hungry

« Last post by app103 on November 16, 2007, 01:46 AM »

I was thinking, and so was my daughter, and after searching Google I have found that many others thought the same thing...

If we could all play till we have donated 1 bowl of rice every day, that would be a great thing and feed a lot of people.

But the question is...how many grains of rice are in an average bowl?

Not wanting to count, and knowing that the size of grains differ according to the type of rice, I did a search to see what the answer would be.

The believable answers I have found ranged from between 3000 to as high as 10,000.

So, I think I will go with the lower number so I can still have a life, too, and just play till I hit 3000 grains each day, if I can. That's still a lot of playing though. 

4255

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

« Last post by app103 on November 15, 2007, 09:19 PM »

Might be able to report it to Blogger by clicking Flag at the top of the page. 

-Veign (November 15, 2007, 09:10 PM)

That button is for reporting 'obscene content'. The only results you will get from that is that if enough people click that, it will become an 'unlisted' blog and won't get visitors from the 'Next Blog' button.

It will not remove the post, block access to it, or remove it from search engines.

4256

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

« Last post by app103 on November 15, 2007, 09:12 PM »

First of all, probably just denouncing it in comments on the blog. Then... I don't know...

-Armando (November 15, 2007, 08:52 PM)

Leaving comments on the infringing blogs doesn't do any good...the blog owner will just delete them about as fast as you and your friends can add them.

Since it's on a blogspot blog, the proper procedure would be for Zaine to send a DMCA takedown notice to Google.

This is one of the reasons why I made the decision to rewrite my ebooks site, going from a single page to something much harder to copy the entire list. All the work I put into creating my list was too easy to copy and stick in a single blog post and some of these blogs were ranked higher than my site and were making money off my work from ads.

The biggest problem with people doing this and stealing visitors from the original site, is they don't care about the content...they just want the traffic, and ultimately the ad clicks.

They are not going to maintain the content, add to it, improve it...they don't care. To them it's just text that gets them visitors to click on the ads and put money in their pocket.

The poor visitors end up with something that eventually becomes outdated, never seeing the original that is being maintained by the actual creator of the content, who does it as a labor of love.

And the quality of original content can suffer, too. When things like this happen, it can discourage the author from continuing to improve his work.

4257

Living Room / Re: 40+ Free Professional Fonts from Smashing Magazine

« Last post by app103 on November 15, 2007, 08:12 PM »

Gulp.  Twelve-thousand, four-hundred and forty five fonts?  Installed? 

-Ralf Maximus (November 15, 2007, 07:20 PM)

oh those aren't installed at all, at least not in the normal way of having them in my Windows Fonts folder. That would be insane. I only have the necessary ones and a few I use often in there.

I used to just open the ones I wanted to use manually, and minimize them to get them to appear in the fonts list of an application I was using...till I won a copy of FontExpert in one of the software drawings here on this site. Now I use that when I need to view or temp install some fonts.

How long does Office take to boot up?

-Ralf Maximus (November 15, 2007, 07:20 PM)

Quite a long time, since I don't have it installed on this pc. 
I don't have much use for it and I prefer plain text.

I dare ya to use them all in a single document.  :-)

-Ralf Maximus (November 15, 2007, 07:20 PM)

Since I use them for graphics, that wouldn't be too hard to do...just very time consuming. 

4258

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

« Last post by app103 on November 15, 2007, 03:50 PM »

I decided to pick one of my neglected projects that is more than worth doing and get it done.

I have designated a personal pest to bug me every day to make at least 1 post to my ebook site until all 460 posts are made to transfer the content from the old site to the new.

For each day that he bugs me but I still don't make a post, I will donate $1 to someone on the forum, that he chooses. (but not himself)

There is only so much procrastinating I can do before I am broke, so I'll have to get it done.

The following people are the lucky recipients of my penalty $1's:

• skrommel (even though my pest failed to bug me to make a post, I thought it was only fair to pay up any way)
• mouser
• mackal

4259

Living Room / Re: 40+ Free Professional Fonts from Smashing Magazine

« Last post by app103 on November 15, 2007, 03:20 PM »

Do I really need more fonts?

hmmm...I already have 12,445 fonts!

no,no,no,no

* app103 resists the urge

no,no,no,no...YES!!

* app103 clicks to download more fonts 

4260

Post New Requests Here / Re: Auto browser open, form field fill batch script.

« Last post by app103 on November 15, 2007, 08:31 AM »

I am pretty sure that FARR can do this for the type of example that you gave with the Google one, and for sites other than Google.

Now if you mean opening a browser and going to a page and filling in a login form and submitting it for you, I don't know of any application that can do that.

4261

Living Room / Re: Feedback on New Fun Software Please

« Last post by app103 on November 15, 2007, 08:21 AM »

You forgot this one:

Your printer starts printing out necromancy spells while both your pc and printer are powered off.

4262

General Software Discussion / Re: Less Than Worthless Reply From Take 2 Interactive

« Last post by app103 on November 15, 2007, 08:08 AM »

What is worse is when they run out of script and are clueless as to what would be a good response and start making stupid stuff up.

I had an AOL 'techie' run out of script and as a last resort tell me that in order to fix a problem that was causing frequent disconnections, I should copy the file containing all my husband's saved email (since his was the smallest) to a safe location as a backup, delete the original, and replace it with the backup I just made.

This was supposed to help me stay online longer.

4263

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use Desktop Widgets?

« Last post by app103 on November 15, 2007, 06:09 AM »

A widget is a small useful single purpose tool. Outside of a computer, a magnifying glass, a pair of nail clippers, or one of those citrus peeler thingies would be called widgets.

Yahoo Widgets, Konfabulator, Vista Gadgets are collections of widgets that rely on a common 'widget engine'. But a widget doesn't have to be part of a collection to be a widget, nor does it have to rely on a widget engine...it just has to do one thing....and be small.

A better synonym for a widget would be 'tiny tool'.

By all rights, most of Skrommel's tools are widgets and I would call many of the coding snacks, widgets.

I wouldn't call FARR a widget because it is too complex and really does a lot more than one thing, but I would call mouser's DYDLO a widget.

So based on this definition, I think it would be safe to say that we all use widgets and it's just a matter of listing your favorite tiny tools to answer this question, or more specifically, the tiny tools that are always visible on your desktop, or at least visible when they are doing their job. Most tray tools (but not all) wouldn't be desktop widgets because they do their job from the tray and not on the desktop.

And for me, my 2 favorites would have to be my own DClock2, and wordzilla's Pop-Up Cody. They are the only desktop widgets that are always running that I would be more than quite annoyed if I had to close either of them for any reason.

4264

Living Room / Free Rice: Increase your vocabulary while you feed the hungry

« Last post by app103 on November 15, 2007, 04:21 AM »

Click on the answer that best defines the word.

If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word.

For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

WARNING: This game may make you smarter. It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, job performance...

Corporate sponsors pay to have their ads shown. This money goes to buy the rice. You play the game and they make more money from the sponsors to buy more rice.

http://www.freerice.com

4265

General Software Discussion / Re: Coding Horror: Why Does Software Spoil?

« Last post by app103 on November 14, 2007, 07:03 PM »

I bought Snagit 5 when it first came out. I have been using it ever since, never bothering to pay for an upgrade. It worked, did what I wanted, did it well (even on my old slow pc)....never had a reason to ditch it in favor of anything else or pay for an upgrade.

I recently was given a free upgrade to v7. They were hoping that I will like it enough to want to buy v8.

I tried it out...did about 3 test screenshots and uninstalled it, going back to v5.

This is a fast machine, 3.2 ghz with a gig of ram. Snagit 7 was s-l-o-w. I'd hit the hotkey and have to wait for it to allow me to select the area I want captured.

I don't want to wait. I shouldn't have to wait. I never had to wait before. I am generally a patient person, but not that patient.

It was slower running on this machine than v5 was on a 233mhz 64mb ram machine, if you can believe that. 

Whatever they did, they ruined their product, in my eyes. No amount of extra goodies they could add could make up for the slowness that came along with it.

Now I suppose that if I had upgraded from v5 to v6...and then to v7, maybe I wouldn't have noticed the speed difference as much. But that isn't the case here, and I noticed it enough to hate their product.

It's a real problem for developers that make the decision to make users pay for upgrades, rather than giving them lifetime free upgrades. It puts them into a certain way of thinking where they have to keep banging out newer versions with more & more features to encourage people to pay again and upgrade...enough features to make it worth it to the users. So the applications become bigger & bigger and more bloated and including tons of silly things that hardly anybody would want or need.

It's sad really. Because the best version of their product is pulled and you can no longer buy it, if you are a new customer. As a user, the solution is either find something else (company loses your business) or do something slightly less than honest, like paying for latest version and then never using it, opting to pirate an older better version, instead.

I think if the trend continues, we may start seeing software that includes lifetime free downgrades, or free upgrades but pay to downgrade. 

4266

Living Room / Re: PocketPC or Palm?

« Last post by app103 on November 14, 2007, 11:57 AM »

I haven't used a Palm, only an older PocketPC (Jornada 540).

The software it comes with built in is highly compatible with the standard MS bunch of tools. It was made to sync with Outlook, out of the box.

Syncing is done with Active Sync, which is free from Microsoft. Once you select all the things you want to sync automagically, it's just a matter of plugging it in, waiting a few minutes, then unplugging it.

It comes with Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Pocket Windows Media Player, Pocket MS Reader, calculator, calendar, contacts list, todo list, scheduler with alarms, Solitaire, AvantGo (downloads web content to your device for offline viewing, kind of like an offline rss reader), etc. Newer iPAQ models come with a ton more applications than my device did.

You can get viewers for almost any document type it can't already handle, many of them being free. I love it for reading ebooks, in particular. (.lit & .pdf)

The software and tools available for PocketPC is pretty vast & varied, and there is tons of freeware, and there are some amazing things you can do with one. (I posted about how you can turn a PocketPC into a web server and even code a website on it, on my blog.)

If you can use Windows, it is pretty easy to figure out how to use a PocketPC. It has that familiar Windows look & feel. (complete with a customizable start menu)

You don't need a special service plan to have internet access with it. I recently bought a wireless card that fits into the CF slot for mine. 

And you can get a free body mass calculator. 

(VidaOne has a ton of health & fitness software for PocketPC & Windows. Much more than they do for Palm.)

4267

Living Room / Re: Feedback on New Fun Software Please

« Last post by app103 on November 14, 2007, 09:41 AM »

I love the page.

That had to be the most fun I have ever had reading a license agreement. 

Now...the software itself...

I had some very interesting results.

I thought it should have been a lower score for that little demon I live with:


8's are supposed to be lucky...I guess I should be quite happy with the results for my name:


And I always knew my husband's ex-wife (name blurred to protect the guilty) was bad news:


I had this fantastic idea while playing around with it. I am definitely going to be posting something 'relevant' about this application in my blog very soon. It will be quite amusing. 

4268

What's the Best? / Re: Make your own eletronic book software. Recomendations?

« Last post by app103 on November 14, 2007, 02:22 AM »

The best I know of would be Browser Bob. They have 4 different versions, ranging from a freeware to a very expensive pro version. But the developer's site seems to be offline at this moment.

If you can create a website (either hand coded or with a web design app), you can package it in a custom designed browser. Browser Bob is what I used to package the Confusion's Cookie game. It supports anything that IE supports. You can use any kind of client side scripting you want....Javascript, VBScript, HTML, CSS, Java applets, Flash, etc. You can also load content from your own website in it. Anything that opens in a new window, opens in a custom skinned window that you designed. It's quite a powerful tool and packed with features that make it practical for more professional type of work, like ebooks, desktop web applications, etc. Once you have all your art for the custom skin created, it's very fast & easy to use.


A less expensive alternative would be HTML2EXE Baler. It's not as fancy and the GUI you get is rather basic and bland. There are also some antivirus products that don't like the exe files it makes. (They drive AVG bonkers!) This is a big enough of a consideration to make it impractical, even though it does what it does quite well. The issues with AVG is what lead me to repackage my game with Browser Bob.

Both of these will allow you to put everything into a single .exe file (your html, css, js, images, sound files, etc). If you add some js code to prevent right clicking, your users might not even know it's actually a browser they are using.

4269

Living Room / Re: Today is my birthday- when is yours?

« Last post by app103 on November 14, 2007, 01:06 AM »

Someone once told me that there would be serious problems if companies employing IT people gave all their employees their birthday off. There wouldn't be hardly anybody working in the IT department during the month of February.

He said that statistically speaking, good computer people seem to be born more in February than any other month.

I don't know how true this is, but most of the really good programmers I know do seem to suggest that it could be. 

4270

Living Room / Re: Top 10 Signs You're Coding Too Much

« Last post by app103 on November 14, 2007, 12:52 AM »

A coder friend of mine once remarked about how he finally went outside and thought the snow on the ground had a low refresh rate. 

4271

Living Room / Phoenix Technologies Announces Plans to Assault Windows with Hyperspace

« Last post by app103 on November 13, 2007, 08:38 PM »

BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies' plans to market a new application platform the company claims will solve a number of problems endemic to Microsoft's Windows platform might be taken as a provocative gesture at their longtime partner. But Redmond's immediate reaction was nonchalant.

On Monday, the Milpitas, Calif., software maker announced Hyperspace, a Linux-based virtualization platform that will let OEMs bundle cut-down versions of popular open-source software that end-users will be able to access instantly, even without booting Windows.

"We call this embedded simplicity, or PC 3.0," said Woody Hobbs, CEO of Phoenix in an interview.

Phoenix has for many years been the leading maker of BIOS, which enables a PC's Windows operating system to communicate with the hardware. But BIOS is being slowly supplanted by a newer technology called Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).

http://www.infoworld...lt-on-Windows_1.html

4272

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

« Last post by app103 on November 13, 2007, 08:26 PM »

Serena Software plans Monday to release Serena Prototype Composer, a free tool intended to make it easy to prototype business applications.

Prototype Composer is a requirements visualization and prototyping tool designed to simulate how applications will look and function before a developer writes any code, Serena said. The intent is to ensure that an application will meet business requirements from the onset, thus avoiding costly, time-consuming rework.

With the Prototype Composer product, Serena is attempting to solve the problem of business users not always describing everything they want in an application, or being cryptic about it, Nathan Rawlins, Serena senior director of product marketing, said.

http://www.infoworld...rena-composer_1.html

4273

C / C++ / Free Course: Computer Programming I (using C)

« Last post by app103 on November 13, 2007, 03:15 AM »

University of Washington CSE 142 - Computer Programming I

This is a complete basic introductory course (using C) for beginners that have no previous programming experience, that was offered at the University of Washington during the fall of 2000 (taught by Martin Dickey).

If you have never studied programming, this course was designed for you.

Access to slides, homework assignments & solutions, exams & solutions (everything except the lectures and quizzes): http://www.online.cs...shington.edu/cse142/


Here are the lecture videos. It may seem as if I have listed them out of order, but they are actually in the proper order in which they should be viewed. Whoever uploaded them numbered them wrong. The entire set of videos is Closed Captioned.

Lecture 1: Overview and Welcome:
http://video.google....-1715462554446360061

Lecture 2: Problems, Algorithms and Programs:
http://video.google....=4233558706920958797

Lecture 3: Variables, Values and Types:
http://video.google....-6270226769534661340

Lecture 4: Arithmetic Expressions:
http://video.google....-4012488959082539986

Lecture 5: Input and Output (I/O):
http://video.google....-3530829117801479537

Lecture 23: Style:
http://video.google....=5312594019069945032

Lecture 6: Conditionals:
http://video.google....-5644762755800059527

Lecture 7: Functions:
http://video.google....-5817164837086461135

Lecture 8: Function Parameters:
http://video.google....=1417951682209894569

Lecture 9: Iteration:
http://video.google....-3196532431429468258

Lecture 10: Loop Development and Program Schemas:
http://video.google....-6681611693257587151

Lecture 11: Complex Conditionals:
http://video.google....=4474644278071725056

Lecture 12: Functions and Design:
http://video.google....-1157181642585477208

Lecture 27: Switch Statement:
http://video.google....-8851692950135894858

Lecture 24: Structuring Program Files:
http://video.google....=6301599051455260607

Lecture 13: Pointer Parameters:
http://video.google....-4753534994884333178

Lecture 14: Arrays:
http://video.google....-8400251513260474506

Lecture 15: Linear & Binary Search:
http://video.google....id=58946135744842823

Lecture 16: Sorting:
http://video.google....=3181596482608619298

Lecture 17: Multidimensional Arrays:
http://video.google....=3737379017318942565

Lecture 18: Structures:
http://video.google....=4655338131907415046

Lecture 19: Strings:
http://video.google....-3715305332680104509

Lecture 21: File Input/Output:
http://video.google....=4094768230297917471

Lecture 20: Nested Data Structures:
http://video.google....=5205501216392527823

Lecture 26: Recursion:
http://video.google....-3715305332680104509

Lecture 25: Recursive Binary Search:
http://video.google....-5158979852046160121

Lecture 22: Course Wrap-up and Review:
http://video.google....=3431535226574067197


If you want to download them for offline viewing, you can use this site with the URL's I provided above.

The textbook they used in this course is Problem Solving and Program Design in C (Hanly and Koffman)

4274

Living Room / Tales of Mere Existence

« Last post by app103 on November 12, 2007, 01:00 PM »

I discovered a great comic/film site today while procrastinating.

The artist, Lev Yilmaz, is great at taking the ordinary and mundane and making it hilarious....from the things he thinks about when trying to sleep to a typical conversation with his mom to selecting a video to watch with his girlfriend.

Be sure to visit his Youtube page for more.

http://www.ingredientx.com/

4275

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2007 / How to not get stuff done

« Last post by app103 on November 12, 2007, 12:21 PM »

This is just like a day out of my life. 

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=4P785j15Tzk

Now if you will excuse me, my keyboard needs cleaning...so I can get my stuff done.