Recent Posts

4451

Living Room / Top 10 Weird Science Sites

« Last post by app103 on July 27, 2007, 08:46 AM »

I love science, especially offbeat and weird science. During my Internet travels I've come across some amazing resources-- some informative, some strange, but all of them fascinating. Here then, are my top picks in the Weird Science category...

http://askbobrankin....m/weird_science.html

from Internet Tourbus newsletter

4452

General Software Discussion / Re: Is this the holy grail to solving windows-out-of-resources bugs?

« Last post by app103 on July 27, 2007, 08:36 AM »

app this is only for winnt/2k/xp, wont work on win9x.

-mouser (July 26, 2007, 10:47 PM)

I have 4 pc's in my house and 2 of them are running XP (my main pc and my daughter's laptop).

4453

Developer's Corner / Re: Does my web page suck?

« Last post by app103 on July 27, 2007, 08:33 AM »

This post begs the question:  Does DC pass the test?

-Tekzel (July 27, 2007, 07:59 AM)

nope 

4454

Living Room / Re: Top 10 Sites for Kids

« Last post by app103 on July 27, 2007, 06:14 AM »

I would like to add one to the list: neopets.com

They go to great lengths to protect kids and won't let anyone under the age of 13 engage in any of the social parts of the site (message boards, Neomail, guilds, games with chat, etc) without verifiable parental consent.

4455

Living Room / Top 10 Sites for Kids

« Last post by app103 on July 27, 2007, 06:13 AM »

"My eleven year old wants a Myspace account, but I think she's a bit young for that. Are there some other sites I can encourage her to visit, with games and activities that are appropriate for pre-teen kids?"

http://askbobrankin...._sites_for_kids.html

from Internet Tourbus newsletter

4456

Developer's Corner / San Francisco power outage: A lesson in backup power

« Last post by app103 on July 27, 2007, 05:44 AM »

If you haven't really thought about it before, now might be a good time to find out what kind of plans your hosting company has for dealing with situations like this. Some of the better companies go to great lengths to make sure they stay up & running, in case of disaster.

The Web hosting company The Planet.com Internet Services tests its backup generators monthly and some employees ask if that's really necessary, said manager Urvish Vashi. The blackout in San Francisco Tuesday explains why.


Among the 40,000 customers affected by a nearly two-hour electrical blackout in San Francisco was 365 Main, a Web hosting company whose clients include Sun.com, Yelp.com, and Craigslist.com. Their Web sites were among several that were unavailable Tuesday when the local electric utility, Pacific Gas & Electric  (PG&E) suffered an outage that cut power to the southern part of the city, including the South of Market area, or SOMA, which is home to several technology companies.

The outage served as a reminder of the importance of backup power systems to keep Web sites, and the businesses behind them, running.

http://www.infoworld...osting-outage_1.html

4457

Living Room / Re: Comic blogs — I love 'em

« Last post by app103 on July 26, 2007, 11:46 PM »

Ctrl-Alt-Del!!




http://www.ctrlaltde...online.com/comic.php

4458

General Software Discussion / Re: Is this the holy grail to solving windows-out-of-resources bugs?

« Last post by app103 on July 26, 2007, 10:42 PM »

Oh, yes! Thank you!

I have been having a prob with this ever since I upgraded to IE 7. It has been driving me crazy.

It causes major probs with Paintshop Pro 7...not only will menus be missing, but it will change settings in the registry when you close and completely screw up things like the layers window, next time you run it. It happens frequently enough that I keep a .reg file handy to restore my settings.

4459

Developer's Corner / Does my web page suck?

« Last post by app103 on July 26, 2007, 10:03 PM »

Now you can learn good web design by looking at examples of bad web design.

Vincent Flanders will take you on a humorous tour of all the things you shouldn't do when designing a page, and give you real life video examples of what he means, from all the bad websites he has visited.

He even provides checklists in case you are not sure if your site sucks.

I found a bunch of the videos on youtube, and this is one of my favorites:  Marijuana.org

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/

^{...and yes, he is quite aware that his page sucks, by his own standards.}

4460

General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« Last post by app103 on July 26, 2007, 02:18 AM »

If the world is headed web-centric, dust off the old pc, grab some cheap RAM to boost your old 9x machine to the max ...and install K-Meleon.

All you will need is a box that can run a browser.

You won't need whatever M$ releases in 2010.

And how much cheaper can you get than grabbing what your neighbor tossed in the trash last night? Even though Linux is free, free hardware is nicer. :-D

The whole concept of this is bad news for OEMs like HP & Dell. And why are you going to need faster CPU's? Bad news for Intel & AMD.

Great news for companies like Adobe...just wait till you can develop web apps in flash...in your browser.

And instead of paying a flat price for a desktop IDE and keeping it till it is obsolete and getting the most for your money, developers will be paying a monthly, or maybe even an hourly fee, to use the tools they need.

Gone will be the days when you could 'buy' software. You will be renting it.

You might as well save as much money as you can by keeping the old hardware and OS...you'll need it.

4461

Living Room / Tech Support vs. Phone Sex

« Last post by app103 on July 24, 2007, 10:40 PM »

Let's start with Dell's hot new line of business. Not to be out done, HP seems to have joined in on the fun. (see the comments at bottom of the page)

Followed by Secure Computing's 'IronMale' service. 

And now we will top it off with a comparison of tech support and phone sex, as reported by someone that has worked in both professions. (no...not me)

4462

Living Room / Re: Copyright law explained with a simple drawing

« Last post by app103 on July 24, 2007, 05:42 AM »

Here is a fun video using tiny clips of Disney films to illustrate and explain fair use and copyright. It's one of the best examples of Fair Use for educational purposes I have ever seen.

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo

4463

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Snailware: Newer Software for Older Slower PC's

« Last post by app103 on July 24, 2007, 04:40 AM »

Since Win9x isn't open source, there isn't all that much else that you can do...but that's not to say that there isn't smart 9x lovers out there that are trying.

The biggest insecurity is the IE browser and OE. Find newer alternatives to those, that will run on 9x, and it's much more secure.

There are projects for Win98 and ME over at MSFN that will hopefully help, with patching, over time. They are testing and packaging stuff from patches meant for 2k, XP, & vista on 98SE and ME and putting together unofficial service packs that add more security and features to both of those OS's. It's a pretty amazing project. 

The good news is that all those 9x specific exploits are disappearing, since the bad guys are assuming it's not worth going after 9x systems any more and are concentrating their efforts on XP & Vista now. Given another 10 yrs, 9x could be as 'safe' as linux...I mean, who would be expecting anybody to still be running it? You don't hear about any new exploits for Win3.1 or C64's, do you? 

4464

General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« Last post by app103 on July 24, 2007, 01:42 AM »

The whole idea of web-centric applications can give new life to older Windows PC's providing they get a newer browser and not run old, insecure, outdated, incapable versions of IE.

This is great news for snail owners, providing their older systems can handle the resource demands of the web apps.

4465

General Software Discussion / Re: GMail Drive in My Computer

« Last post by app103 on July 23, 2007, 05:52 PM »

Now here is an interesting XDrive feature: Skip the Download

With this tool, it adds an option to the context menu in Internet Explorer that will allow you to right click a link (page, setup file, whatever) and instead of downloading the file to your pc, send it to your xdrive where you can download it later.

That could really come in handy with some things.

4466

General Software Discussion / Re: GMail Drive in My Computer

« Last post by app103 on July 23, 2007, 03:37 PM »

I originally installed the XDrive Desktop to be able to take advantage of drag & drop in Explorer for backing up files, and to take advantage of being able to schedule automated backups with it. (I love automation!)

I have since uninstalled it because of some problems I have had with it.

Logging in for one. It takes forever and I have to attempt it multiple times until I get an error and the next time will work. It gets to about 80% where it maps the drive, then goes backwards to 60% where it's authenticating and just hangs there for awhile...then goes back to the login screen. Eventually it works and mounts the drive, but I don't feel like playing with it for a few hours trying to get it to work. (I might be having a problem with 'nick collision' from being logged into too many AOL services with too many screen names at same time from same IP)

The other problem I had with it was that it frequently causes problems with Explorer once it is running and logged in. I have trouble opening other Explorer windows not related to the x: drive if I have something transferring.

I have also had problems with transferring folders with a lot of files. It fails and then I have to do it again...and again...and again.

The web interface seems to work much better, but I have also had a problem with that. It has on at least one occasion crashed my browser, causing me to have to reboot to be able to use my browser again.

I think once I get the stuff I want backed up to it uploaded, I will just continue to use the web interface and set an alert to remind me to back up stuff to it...and remember to back up my projects to it when I am doing it to my email storage accounts. (I mail them to myself as attachments from one Gmail account to another, and CC to my aol account and store it to AOL's servers from there, too...which gives me 3 copies of everything stored off my pc's and out of my house. With XDrive it will make 4 copies.)

I still would be willing to use the XDrive Desktop, at some point in time in the future, if they can get the bugs worked out. I am not sure if/when this will happen, and there seems to be no way to report problems with it. So I don't know how aware they are of all the issues.

I supposed they only know of the ones that paid accounts are having, as those people have the right to call them on the phone and complain and report all the problems they have with the software.

4467

General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« Last post by app103 on July 23, 2007, 02:51 PM »

Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 2.1 (aka Windows/286 and Windows/386)
Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups (WfW)
---
Windows 95 (Windows 4.0)
Windows 98 (Windows 4.1), Windows 98 Second Edition
Windows Millennium Edition (Windows 4.9)
---
Windows NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0)
Windows XP (Windows NT 5.1)
Windows Server 2003, Windows XP 64-bit Edition 2003 (Windows NT 5.2)
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (Windows NT 5.2)
Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs (Windows NT 5.1+)
Windows Vista (Windows NT 6.0)

(from wikipedia)



so...next one being 7 sounds about right.

Now about that Pay-as-you-go plan...

People thought I was crazy when I suggested this was going to be the future of Windows when I mentioned it back in 2002.

At that time I had thought it would be that maybe you'd get a basic OS for free (like you can get Linux for free), with them passing out disks in much the same way AOL did (flooding the market with their 'free' product). They would probably only release a new version of the CD about once every 10 years, but continue to have newer versions of Windows as a series of 'patches' to be applied to the one that is available on disk, and them keeping the disk always behind the current version when they release a new CD.

And that to access Windows Update to get these 'patches' would be on a yearly or monthly subscription, which all patches and upgrades to bring you up to the current Windows version would be offered, once you paid. Without the fee being paid, it is possible that they would cause your OS to 'expire' and they would have some way of shutting it down till you called and gave credit card info over the phone. (much in the same way you pay for internet access and it gets shut off if you don't pay your bill)

If they offered it this way, they would have much less problems with piracy on their hands, and less of a problem with people running older more insecure versions, because they could force newer versions on people... but at the same time, there would be no way people of lower incomes would be able to afford to run it.

It is also possible that on an older machine that couldn't handle an upgrade, that the OS would shut down permanently, forcing you to buy a new computer if you wanted to continue using Windows.

As I can see now, they aren't going this far...yet. (at least not with their next version of Windows)

4468

General Software Discussion / Re: GMail Drive in My Computer

« Last post by app103 on July 22, 2007, 01:29 PM »

You do not have to download and install AIM to have an XDrive account. You can just make the screen name and get the free AIM email address to use for it.

-----

The enormous number of people that are AOL, AIM, or Netscape Mail users has forced those that wish to have an account to exercise the creative part of their brain, at least once...to think up a screen name (something that can be about as hard as coming up with a good domain name).

Or you can just bang on your keyboard and memorize whatever text comes up.

Personally, I hate ones with numbers...means I wasn't creative enough. (app103 is when I am not in a creative mood  )

I have a total of 8 AOL/AIM screen names...only 1 of them has numbers...and they all make some sort of sense, without resorting to any type of '1337 sp33k'

4469

General Software Discussion / Re: GMail Drive in My Computer

« Last post by app103 on July 22, 2007, 07:53 AM »

I know of people that are not US citizens that have managed to get an AIM account (there is no country restrictions on that)...and then an XDrive account with their AIM email address.

4470

Developer's Corner / Re: Calling all people with writing skills: I am in need of help (A lot of help)

« Last post by app103 on July 22, 2007, 06:33 AM »

Thank you very much. 

I have boosted your account. You may start posting.

If you have any questions or need more categories added, just ask.

Some books fall into more than one category, so check the list carefully for others it could fall into, after selecting the main one for it.

Do not select these categories: Donate or More Free Books. They are for other things...not books.

Follow existing posts as a guide for the format to use for posts and what to include.

Make sure you check the box for links to open in a new window when making links.

Have fun! 

4471

General Software Discussion / Re: GMail Drive in My Computer

« Last post by app103 on July 22, 2007, 12:33 AM »

Anybody with either an AOL or AIM account (you can get both for free) can have a nice 5 gig XDrive account for free.

With the XDrive Desktop application, you can have it show in Explorer as either your X, Y, or Z drive.



That's more space than GMail gives you, and it's meant for this purpose. It's not a hack that violates some terms of use policy like the Gmail thing does.

You can also share files with others if they are also XDrive users. And there is no time limit on the files, like with YouSendIt...or file size restrictions. You can upload up to the max your XDrive account allows, which is 5 gigs on a free account, 50 gigs on a paid account.

And the XDrive Desktop program can be set to do automatic backups of whatever files you want, on a schedule.

4472

Developer's Corner / Calling all people with writing skills: I am in need of help (A lot of help)

« Last post by app103 on July 21, 2007, 06:11 AM »

I have a site that is a service to programming students and self-learners that might not be able to afford expensive books. There are many available legally for free and my original site lists where to find them. There is currently over 300 books in the list.

I am in the process of moving and improving content from the original badly designed site to a much better one.

What I need are volunteers to help complete this job before the end of this century.

What needs to be done:

• take every link from this site and make a post to this site
  
• include title, author, format, and price (they are all free, in some way)
  
• write a brief, objective description of the book (not a review, no opinions here)
  
• include a summary list of the chapters (some will be rather long lists, so they would need to be shortened into just main topics)
  
• include URL to book
  
• tag them appropriately, multiple categories if necessary

Now what I am figuring is that each person that volunteers can do one or more sections from the original site to the new one, so we don't have duplicate entries with people posting the same books as someone else.

Some sections are big...some are small. You can choose the section(s) you feel you can handle based on the number of links and amount of work involved, or that you feel comfortable with its content.

You do not need to read the books or understand them. Most info can be obtained from the table of contents for each one. Sometimes you may need to briefly scan the preface for some additional info.

• Good English skills required.
  
• Experience making posts to a WordPress blog is a plus.

Would anyone like to help? (you'd be rewarding authors that make books available for free by giving their books publicity, and helping students that need to find them)

To get started, all you have to do is register on the new site and post a reply here telling me the section you want to work on and I will raise your status there to give you posting privileges.

Thanks, in advance.

4473

Find And Run Robot / Re: A long shot: anyone up for creating a fake satire hype video for FARR v2?

« Last post by app103 on July 20, 2007, 08:25 PM »

As for FARR vs the start menu: how about a custom created start menu with A LOT of messy folders and subfolders covering the whole screen basically. When navigating, let the folders have regular names in the beginning but more and more weird the deeper the narrator navigates...

example: program > games > some games > more games > simon sorcerer II > simon sorcerer I > Pong > Q how many more folders > A many more > and more > ahhhgr!!! enough already

And at that stage in the folder tree the narrator gives up on the start menu and pulls up FARR, types a few characters, find and launches the game. That last sequence is then repeated, now in slowmotion with a millisecond counter running and to the sound of racing cars. The text "world record" flashes at the end.

-Nod5 (July 20, 2007, 07:44 PM)

FARR vs my twin taskbars of doom (mouser thinks they are scary) 

A battle to the death! Which would win? 

4474

Find And Run Robot / Re: A long shot: anyone up for creating a fake satire hype video for FARR v2?

« Last post by app103 on July 20, 2007, 12:15 PM »

mac vs pc type thing?

It's Find and Run Robot...what M$ character is famous for the job of not finding things all that well?

Rover! (think of XP's search)

So all we need is a guy to be FARR Man and a dog...a dumb dog.

Put them both on what looks like a windows desktop...and a 'user' that you don't see, but you hear his voice, asks both of them to find things for him.

FARR Man dashes away and comes back each time with what he asks for, no matter what it is.

Dog just lays there and does nothing...or just typical dog things....basically just being useless.

The real comedy is in what FARR Man is asked to find and bring back or do. The requests start out reasonable but get crazy as the user begins to see that FARR Man is actually a magical genie and starts to test FARR Man's abilities, and begins to feed him requests for stuff he wishes he had. But FARR Man succeeds each time....ending with FARR Man reading the user's mind and bringing back something the user didn't ask for, but did think about... or ending with FARR Man being psychic and predicting what the user will need.

(I am thinking that FARR Man may have provided him with cash, sports car, sexy girl friend, etc.. and the user might be in need of some condoms that FARR Man provides without being asked)


And the whole time, Rover the M$ search dog is totally useless.

4475

Official Announcements / Re: What changes would you like to see on DonationCoder.com in 2007?

« Last post by app103 on July 20, 2007, 06:11 AM »

From the connection I think I can understand what a "gri" is. But my dictionary had no idea - and I have no idea - why it is "gri". So before I might be blocked I would very much like to know the translation of gri ? please!
 

-Curt (July 20, 2007, 06:03 AM)

This is gri and these are his posts.

But you really won't appreciate the full effect unless you see it in the SMF section, as wordzilla mentioned.