Recent Posts

476

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 27, 2007, 08:25 PM »

Yes - there is desktop software for *nix, but there are far too many critical applications that I need that simply won't run on anything but Windows. *nix just isn't a viable alternative at the moment.

Usually because that's because people don't know what the equivalents are under linux. Or they expect the same behavior out of software that is designed from a different philosophy.

Legally, you can't use proprietary hardware drivers on Linux because of the GPL.

Wrong. There are plenty of proprietary hardware drivers for linux, and they are all legal. They are not allowed to be statically compiled into the kernel and distributed that way, but they are allowed as kernel modules (think dll's in windows, same thing.). The very reason commercial developers hold back on developing linux drivers or software is because of misinformation like this.

The fact of the matter is, there is only about 3 or 4 Linux distro's out there, among the hundreds, that refuse to include any proprietary software into their repositories and cd's (eg: blag). And even then you CAN still install proprietary stuff on them if you really want to.

477

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 27, 2007, 06:02 AM »

The package management in any Debian-based distro is far superior to both Windows and other operating systems

How can it be superior if it doesn't even exist in windows?
I'm not sure if apt is that much better than Gentoo's portage or fedora's yum or freeBSD's pkg_add, etc,.. but it sure is better than nothing at all!

478

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

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 25, 2007, 04:33 AM »

New minor release (bugfix from previous version): http://linkerror.com...ion=download;lang=en

Everything under the list menu works as it's supposed to now. I think I forgot to test that stuff in all the previous versions, but bullets and numbering and all that stuff seems to work great now And saving as non-xml no longer nags.

479

Official Announcements / Re: Power Supply on my PC just exploded: i'll be mostly offline this week crying

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 24, 2007, 03:36 AM »

R.I.P. mouser's PSU.

480

General Software Discussion / Re: Amazing realtime 3D network traffic visualization

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 21, 2007, 11:27 AM »

I'm not sure if it was created as a serious network monitoring tool rather than a cool looking visualization method but I guess the sound does help I think, when you hear an explosion somewhere in your network, even when you're not paying attention, something MUST be amiss ... then you could see where the smoke is coming from. Surely there's more efficient serious tools out there, but c'mon, they don't have an interface that looks like it was taken right out of the movie 'hackers'

481

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

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 21, 2007, 01:23 AM »

Updated the website a bit.

482

General Software Discussion / Amazing realtime 3D network traffic visualization

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 20, 2007, 04:00 PM »

An amazing network monitoring research project from Netcosm (http://www.netqos.com)
Project page here: http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=dtC6ZM0_m8U
Video of the thing in action: http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=dtC6ZM0_m8U

 
 

483

Living Room / Re: Latest Apple Mac vs PC Commercial: PCs suck because of all the software cho

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 19, 2007, 04:13 AM »

I am definitively not an anti-mac person either,...
I am however, an anti-marketing-anti-commercials-anti-corporate-person
It seems the more market share any given IT company gains, it aims it's arrows always at either the new computer users, or other cooperations. I yet have to see an OS ad on tv aimed towards programmers, ubergeeks, power users, etc,...
Probably because they are too smart to blindly give away their money or something.

484

Living Room / Re: Latest Apple Mac vs PC Commercial: PCs suck because of all the software choices

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 19, 2007, 02:29 AM »

It's more that i notice how much mac's seem  to be marketed to people who don't want to get involved in installing software, configuring, etc.  to each his own i guess.

in other words, Steve Jobs wants his users to be smug n00bs,... no news there

485

Living Room / Re: Latest Apple Mac vs PC Commercial: PCs suck because of all the software choices

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 19, 2007, 01:40 AM »

for some of us, it's this vast world of independent small software development and all the experimentation we can do trying new software that makes the pc/windows platform so fun.

<obligatory>
  pc / GNU/Linux too
</obligatory>

486

Living Room / Re: Why Linux is better

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 17, 2007, 08:42 PM »

I remember correctly, the runtime library it has imposes an even bigger hit than the already bloated BCB/Delphi VCL

Only if you compile all of wxWidgets into one monolithic library, the default way is that it uses several different libraries for different parts of wxWidgets, and thus you can opt to not link in the parts you don't need.

And even if you would compile with a monolithic lib, the only difference is exe size, the application would run the speed you'd expect from a C++ application without the slow loading and VM overhead of Java.

487

Living Room / Re: Why Linux is better

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 17, 2007, 04:19 PM »

(I must say that the DonationCoder way of doing stuff is one thing that keeps me attached to Windows !)

I've been trying to push cross platform applications on DC, my own applications run on most operating systems if you recompile them, and i make binary builds for windows and linux.

Mouser is a heavy user of Borland c++ builder, so until Borland makes a new 'kylix' or (hopefully) something much better, I don't think you'll see a port of say farr soon, unless I can convince him with my hypnotic willpower that he should remake it in wxWidgets

Many of the coding snacks are made as AutoHotKey scripts, which is again windows only software, and usually heavily depends on the windows API.

I think as time goes on you'll see more cross platform stuff here, as people become more aware of different platforms and their 'developers curiosity' crosses the OS boundary. It all probably heavily depends on the tools people are used to when developing their applications.

488

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

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 13, 2007, 11:23 AM »

Yep, check out the aui demo in the wxWidgets samples, also check:

http://www.wxwidgets...w.html#wxauioverview
http://www.wxwidgets...rt.html#wxauidockart
http://www.wxwidgets...art.html#wxauitabart
http://www.wxwidgets...er.html#wxauimanager
http://www.wxwidgets...k.html#wxauinotebook
http://www.wxwidgets...o.html#wxauipaneinfo

and the regular toolbar too of course

489

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

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 13, 2007, 10:53 AM »

...and you seem to have acomplished it with grand perfection, gothi[c]!

You must have overlooked my 'Some small bugs I just noticed' section
Also one very important feature missing imo (and will be added asap) is font type/size combo boxes in the toolbar.
Implementing that is easy enough, but i'm running out of space on the toolbar, so i'll be switching to multiple removable/movable/customizable toolbars. (wxWidgets has a few fun classes for that).

490

Official Announcements / Re: The Gizmo Effect!

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 13, 2007, 10:21 AM »

My poor little site also suffered the Gizmo effect, this is what it looks like:

491

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

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 13, 2007, 09:40 AM »

Ok, finished the new version, folks

New features:

  -Full screen / stay on top settings (hit the F11 button to toggle full screen)
 

  - Adjustable speeds for the keyboard shortcuts/default speed, which gets saved along with your text when you save as .XML
 
 

So in other words, now you can hit the play button, and then hit F11 to have it scrolling full screen, you can still control the speed with the keyboard shortcuts, and pause/resume with the space bar.

Since different songs have different tempo or bpm (which is I guess, the modern term these days.) you no longer have to keep changing the speed every time you load a song, it will just use whatever settings you have set for it as soon as you load it. ( File -> Preferences  to change the speed settings )

You can go download it from http://linkerror.com...cgi?section=download

I haven't yet put all of you who suggested the features I added in the about box, but you will be in the next version. A BIG THANK YOU for all of your input everyone

Still no smooth scrolling though, that one is going to involve a bit more work. The next one may or may not have it; same with the mirroring feature.

[edit]
Some small bugs i just noticed:

- You may get a window popup complaining about xml parsing when you open/save a non-xml file.
- Anything under the list menu seems broken?

Will fix it later, I will be away this weekend and have to leave soon, so I won't have time now

492

Living Room / Re: Why Linux is better

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 13, 2007, 09:25 AM »

Maybe it also is partly due to what users want.
Experience tells me that if a user requests a certain change or feature, I'll try my very best to implement it.
Maybe F/OSS users aren't as demanding.

493

Living Room / Re: Why Linux is better

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 13, 2007, 03:41 AM »

I just can't find apps with the level of polish that I get even from the simplest windows freeware. It is a strange curse of the open source products that the desktop tools often aren't ever finished

-iphigenie (April 13, 2007, 03:21 AM)

That's quite a generalization you make there. There are actually plenty of quality polished applications available for the GNU/Linux platform.

The only reason it may appear that many projects are unfinished is, because many of them ARE.

In the closed source world, one only makes a release when an application is in a stable, finished state, and then features are added, bugs are fixed, until the next stable polished state is achieved and another release is made.

In the open source world the development cycle is slightly different. Many open source applications are in constant development, and it is up to you to use the latest stable release instead of the latest and greatest development release, or in some cases it's the other way around.

In the open source world it's common to make an application public before the first release, because developers like to share their code with common developers. On windows it's each for himself, nobody codes for developers, everyone only codes for users.

However, this does NOT mean that there are no open source polished/finished applications available. Also, not all applications for the GNU/Linux platform are open source. There are many closed source applications for GNU/Linux.

The reason why many small freeware applications for windows appear more polished is because most of these are developed with RAD tools that let the user create a polished LOOKING app in no time. These applications are not polished at all, they often contain inferior code because they were made by less skilled developers. (Yes, this too is a generalization.)

494

Developer's Corner / Re: Source code colors: Contrast / Readability / Ergonomics

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 12, 2007, 12:24 AM »

I remembered this old thread when I ran across this page:

http://www.cs.cmu.ed...Test/index-html.html

source code coloring example'o'rama

495

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

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 11, 2007, 10:06 PM »

 Cool

I guess i should make another release soon, I've been very busy with other projects though,
maybe i'll just do a small one with some suggestions implemented from here

496

ProcessTamer / Re: Process Tamer gets rave review

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 11, 2007, 08:37 AM »

that link,... 401 Authorization Required?

497

Living Room / Re: Why Linux is better

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 11, 2007, 08:33 AM »

Funny, it's ironic how that site reminds me of how Microsoft markets its software.

Of course, OS arguments are silly, everyone just uses what they like best and that's the end of that discussion. It's good to have diversity and choice.

I use GNU/Linux mainly, 99% of the time, FreeBSD on the server, but I do have windows on a separate partition for making windows builds of my software, and play a game here and there.

I like the diversity. Of course it would be great to have more hardware support for Linux, and more of the mainstream games ported (and both go hand in hand with having a larger user base); but at the same time I don't want to have the Windows `culture` and user-base 'ported' along with it.

The reason why me and many other people use *nix is because of the choices and power it offers, along with a certain way of thinking. If tomorrow all windows users would be GNU/Linux users, that way of thinking would cease to drive GNU/Linux development, and it would quickly be replaced by monetary interest (which is already the case to a certain degree).

498

Living Room / Software patents, and the crazy business side of software.

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 08, 2007, 03:11 AM »

Here is an interesting essay on software patents, and the business side of software development:

The most common is to grant patents that shouldn't be granted. To be patentable, an invention has to be more than new. It also has to be non-obvious. And this, especially, is where the USPTO has been dropping the ball. Slashdot has an icon that expresses the problem vividly: a knife and fork with the words "patent pending" superimposed.

The scary thing is, this is the only icon they have for patent stories. Slashdot readers now take it for granted that a story about a patent will be about a bogus patent. That's how bad the problem has become.

The problem with Amazon's notorious one-click patent, for example, is not that it's a software patent, but that it's obvious. Any online store that kept people's shipping addresses would have implemented this. The reason Amazon did it first was not that they were especially smart, but because they were one of the earliest sites with enough clout to force customers to log in before they could buy something. [1]

We, as hackers, know the USPTO is letting people patent the knives and forks of our world. The problem is, the USPTO are not hackers. They're probably good at judging new inventions for casting steel or grinding lenses, but they don't understand software yet.

http://www.paulgraha...softwarepatents.html

499

Living Room / Re: a little linux DNS/DHCP help requested

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 05, 2007, 06:28 PM »

[Select]

19:01 < Gothi[c]> How do I configure bind so add dns requests
                  (eg bleh.com, meh.bleh.com,
                  foo.meh.bleh.com,...) point to the same
                  machine? can i add zones with wildchars?
19:14 < vchrizz> Gothi[c], i think you want CNAME records ..
                 http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch8/cname.html

Hope that helps...

500

Living Room / Re: a little linux DNS/DHCP help requested

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 05, 2007, 05:49 PM »

Configuring bind for me is usually allot of trial and error, It's an get-it-over-with-and-forget-about thing
I'd have to dive into man pages to answer that, but I suggest you ask on irc, in the #bind channel on the server irc.freenode.net