Recent Posts

476

Site/Forum Features / Re: March 2009 Survey Discussion

« Last post by housetier on March 30, 2009, 06:56 AM »

I am very much in favor of reviving the reviews. Ours are the best, we should make more of them. Maybe we could review older reviews and update them for new versions of the software, or have little review-addons targeting just the updated program and look at what has changed...

DC is the place I turn my friends to when they need (to know) something I can't help them with.

477

Official Announcements / Re: MARCH 2009: It's the 4th Anniversary DonationCoder.com Fundraiser

« Last post by housetier on March 29, 2009, 01:08 PM »

Exciting times!

It's more proof this community is super-amazing 

478

Living Room / Re: The Daily What’s Top 7 Billy Mays Infomercial Re-Dubs : NSFW Language

« Last post by housetier on March 29, 2009, 10:08 AM »

This is part of a not so viral marketing campaign: http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=OVHUAco_k-g "Barry Scott - Cillit Bang"

But I like the 300 remix more: http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=G8GM1LMPHt4

And there will even be a movie: http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=fXICRlcqOpM

479

Living Room / Re: What's your favorite food snack?

« Last post by housetier on March 29, 2009, 09:00 AM »

I prefer Original Wine Gums, supersalty licorice, and bread sticks. In general my snacks should be small so I can just put them in my mouth and return to typing, and they must be non-greasy as I don't want to wipe my hands everytime before I go back to typing.

Small cookies are fine too. And when I read a longer piece of text or watch a movie I peel&eat oranges or bananas.

480

Site/Forum Features / Re: March 2009 Survey Discussion

« Last post by housetier on March 29, 2009, 08:03 AM »

It's quite long. But I guess it needs to be long to get "good data" to work with.

I forgot one improvement: quickpolls in the user bar (where my avatar and such is shown). It makes for quick and easy feedback.

481

Site/Forum Features / Re: RSS Feeds for DonationCoder.com and this Forum

« Last post by housetier on March 25, 2009, 07:56 PM »

I want author and forum name in the feed items.

482

General Software Discussion / Re: Free HTML/PHP IDE

« Last post by housetier on March 24, 2009, 04:45 PM »

I like the Drupal plug-in! Too bad though there doesn't seem to be a version for linux available.

Does the 30-day trial period apply to the plug-ins only or to the whole product?

483

Developer's Corner / Re: What JavaScript libraries should I look at? Prototype?

« Last post by housetier on March 23, 2009, 04:10 PM »

also Visual jQuery will be a HUGE TIMESAVER. It only takes seconds to find the answer you seek.

484

Living Room / "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

« Last post by housetier on March 23, 2009, 04:00 PM »

Essay by Clay Shirky

I don't know how I cam across this essay, it appeared in my feedreader. However, despite it being quite long, I read it completely and found it interesting and insightful. It goes back all the way to pre-Gutenberg times, mentiones revolutions, business models, ideas, and seems to come back to chaos (uncontrollable change) every so often.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

In essence it says: The newspaper industry should just stop worrying about the future, because in that future there will be no newspaper "industry" anymore. This makes the future less bleak for me, as I have a well-founded distrust for those big papers: they have a hidden agenda and it's not called "journalism"...

This essay has supposedly earned 622 responses of which I could see only a dozen, but this shall not discourage me to write yet another one! What's your response, where is your journalism?

485

Developer's Corner / Re: Programming Problem: return every possible order of an array.

« Last post by housetier on March 22, 2009, 07:04 PM »

Wikipedia's page about permutations has example code. I find them quite simple

486

Developer's Corner / Re: What JavaScript libraries should I look at? Prototype?

« Last post by housetier on March 22, 2009, 06:58 PM »

jquery.

It makes programming javascript fun.

487

Site/Forum Features / Re: Meta Survey Survey for Fundraiser Survey

« Last post by housetier on March 21, 2009, 12:05 PM »

"Now that you have donated - what do you expect to change/enhance/improve/happen?"
"Would you like to be able to donate more than you have?"
"Do you know your karma increases by donating but not by the amount donated?"
"Do you see the DonationCoder community as a role-model for other activities (kindergarten care, car repair, shelter for homeless...)"
"Have you smiled today?"

488

General Software Discussion / Re: Rambooster. Junk?

« Last post by housetier on March 20, 2009, 07:23 PM »

My page file is actually smaller then it used to be.

-cmpm (March 20, 2009, 03:35 PM)

Which means you now have less virtual memory than before. I do not see the benefit in that.

489

General Software Discussion / Re: Rambooster. Junk?

« Last post by housetier on March 20, 2009, 03:15 PM »

In the end the windows kernel does a good job of managing the scarce resource ram; badly programmed software will make the job harder.

Rambooster and other crapware like it will only interfere with what your operating system was designed to do: They manage resources, it's their job and it should not be the job of yet another program (which relies on the OS to do its shitty work).

490

Developer's Corner / Re: Firefox Addons Developer Guide published

« Last post by housetier on March 14, 2009, 12:53 PM »

And speaking of add-ons: Mozilla is organizing an Add-ons Workshop in Berlin, at my precious club c-base!

Naturally I'll be there, but I won't be able to attend. Instead I'll be helping out, like a stage hand. It will still be fun though If you are in Berlin around that time, Saturday 28th of March 2009, you should come by!

491

General Software Discussion / Re: delete all the lines that do NOT start with a specific string in multiple files

« Last post by housetier on March 14, 2009, 12:30 PM »

on linux a combination of grep and the shell's for loop could accomplish this:

[Select]

export BAN="whatever should not be kept"
mkdir after
for textfile in *.txt; do grep $textfile -v ^$BAN > after/$textfile; done

This should work if the files all have a .txt extension.

"grep -v" prints lines that do NOT match; "^" means beginning-of-line; "$BAN" will be replaced by whatever you put between the quotation marks in the export statement above. The output from grep is then put into a new file with the same filename, but in a different directory.

If you have cygwin, you can do this under windows as well.

492

Developer's Corner / Re: Firefox Addons Developer Guide published

« Last post by housetier on March 12, 2009, 02:31 PM »

I hope this one works better than those I had found before.

493

General Software Discussion / Re: Moving from yahoo mail to gmail

« Last post by housetier on March 10, 2009, 05:50 PM »

1.) Make a backup
2.) Make a backup that actually works

Now if you have been using yahoomail for a while, it will take a while to move to a different webmail provider. While you are at it, why not get your own emailserver, so you'll never have to deal with providers deleting your inbox when you dont log in over a period of time? Also you are less likely to be in a situation where a provider goes out of business or changes their business plan and suddenly charges you (more than before).

No way will be easy, but I think using your own mailserver can give you some benefits. I am sure there a some nice people here on DC that would help you setting one up

494

Living Room / Re: Why I Avoid Apple Products

« Last post by housetier on March 10, 2009, 12:20 PM »

Apple should go with the trend and rename itself "iPple". It follows the popular if not overhyped scheme of small i followed by a capital letter and looks about as ugly as the company when they start suing their consumers again.

495

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Xchat script for tircd (Twitter)

« Last post by housetier on March 10, 2009, 12:16 PM »

if you need a delay after a command it gets tricky with this sort of simple script. suppose you want to wait for 2 seconds after joining a channel before you start inviting others:

[Select]

/join #channel
/timer -repeat 1 2 invite person1
/invite person2

this contradicts my statement about missing loops and shows how far you have to go to get a simple sleep: This "timer" only runs once (-repeat 1) with a delay of 2 seconds and executes "invite person1" on every loop.

When you need anything more sophisticated than this you will need a proper programming language

496

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Xchat script for tircd (Twitter)

« Last post by housetier on March 09, 2009, 06:37 PM »

It could be something like this

[Select]

/join #this
/invite him
/invite her
/join #that
/invite them
/invite those

Just xchat commands, one on each line. You can't use variables, loops, or any sort of control structure here, it's just a list of commands which will be executed in that order.

Put these in a text file and use "load -e c:\Wherever\You Put\The script.txt" as connection command.

497

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Xchat script for tircd (Twitter)

« Last post by housetier on March 09, 2009, 05:58 PM »

You can tell xchat which channels to join: Press Ctrl+S to open the server list, there click on "Add" and a "New Network" will be added to the list. Change its name to something more appropriate, like "twitter", and click on "Edit". Here you specify the server for this network, it is probably "localhost" (if the port differs from 6667 append it to the hostname with a slash: "localhost/8889")

Now there is a bunch of checkboxes, of which the one about automatically might be the most interesting. Below that, we see a list of text boxes, one is named "Favorite Channels". This is where you keep your list of channels you want to join. However, I recommend using the helper dialog that pops up when you click a third button, the one with the "..." right of the text box.

And without scripting we can go only this far.

If the list of people and channels does not change often, you could use something I call "simple scripts" which are a list of xchat commands that are executed by xchat. But if you want more comfort and features, we need a real script...

498

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 10-09

« Last post by housetier on March 08, 2009, 01:13 AM »

WRT the flaw in Adobe's PDF reader I recommend trying an alternive PDF
reader that might even be "better" than the original: no loading of
dubious toolbars and other excessive features (which don't belong into a
document *viewer* anyway).

Yes those free versions might have flaws as well I know I know...

499

Living Room / Re: Netvibes - What do you think?

« Last post by housetier on March 07, 2009, 07:36 AM »

I had been using Google Reader for a while when I cam across Netvibes. I liked it because I could customize a lot, something Google Reader doesn't really offer. But after a while and with the many feeds I read (about 200) it became complicated to handle in Netvibes, and I went back to Google Reader.

I am very much used to reading all the items sequentially, so I do categorize my feeds but only for searching & finding if I want to recommend a certain feed to someone. The news items are just read one by one, as they are updated.

However, even though Google Reader is not beta anymore, changes are made by Google and then I have to wait for my browser extensions to be updated as well to cope with that change. This made me consider going away from Google Reader and try a completely different feed reader: newsbeuter.

To sum it up, google reader works but their changes to the interface make it a less pleasant experience so I will retake control of the software.

500

Living Room / Re: The Greatest Graphic Novel of All Time: Watchmen

« Last post by housetier on March 04, 2009, 01:38 PM »

I like most of the comics by Enki Bilal. Also, the ones by Moebius are literally fantastic.

But my all-time favorite has been Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei.

I would consider all these adult material, for the brutality (Bilal), drug use (Moebius), and violence (Tsutomu Nihei). Very good stuff!!