Recent Posts

651

Living Room / Re: Yelp Website Accused of Extortion -- More Examples of Corrupt Review Sites

« Last post by Eóin on February 25, 2010, 12:11 PM »

Not shocking but very disappointing

A funny comment on the wired.com writeup:

Blackmail? It’s a premium member ‘feature’; paying a little extra to have negative reviews moderated down… What’s wrong with that? It’s completely legal and part of the free market.

Me suspects a troll.

652

Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« Last post by Eóin on February 25, 2010, 10:00 AM »

This just supports one of the long standing arguments why ordinary people pirate- even without taking price into consideration the pirates still offer a better product. As long as that continues to be the case I'll have little sympathy for the victims.

653

Circle Dock / Re: UAC Issues - Vista/Windows 7, 32 & 64-bit

« Last post by Eóin on February 24, 2010, 09:13 AM »

Out of sheer curiosity I looked into it and f0dders suggestion of adding read/write permission to the 'standalonestack.ini' does indeed work as a stopgap.

UAC file virtualisation compatibility doesn't kick in for native x64 applications, my guess is that's why not everyone see the issue, they may be running the 32bit version on a x64 OS.

P.S. the x64 installer is suffixed 'IA64'. To me thats the Itanium 64bit architecture, not AMD64.

654

General Software Discussion / Re: Simple audio conversion with tag preservation.

« Last post by Eóin on February 22, 2010, 03:41 PM »

Ah! foobar2000 does it quite handily, really must check out it's other non-playing features

655

General Software Discussion / Re: Why the aversion to .NET Frameworks?

« Last post by Eóin on February 22, 2010, 03:03 PM »

But did they do it for Mobile 7? It's all rumors so far. And one of the more believable ones floating around is that there will be two editions with the 'professional' edition supporting old applications.

656

General Software Discussion / Re: Why the aversion to .NET Frameworks?

« Last post by Eóin on February 22, 2010, 02:22 PM »

It will finally ditch Win32 and the unmanaged baggage which exists solely for backwards compat.

-MrCrispy (February 22, 2010, 02:14 PM)

MS takes backwards compatibility very seriously, I doubt they'd ever consider such a move.

657

General Software Discussion / Simple audio conversion with tag preservation.

« Last post by Eóin on February 22, 2010, 11:32 AM »

If I rip any CDs I do so as FLACs but my small Zen doesn't support that format so I have to convert to MP3. I don't mind doing so but most codec conversion programs are big swiss army knives. Also not all support preserving tags when you convert a file.

So does anyone know of a neat small app that would fit this job.

658

Developer's Corner / Re: The programmer as (starving) artist

« Last post by Eóin on February 21, 2010, 01:20 PM »

The key is: with more and more free code available every year, why would I pay someone to "reinvent the same wheel" over and over? Stand on their shoulders and build something more, something better.

-zridling (February 21, 2010, 10:57 AM)

Exactly true, but that doesn't affect the opportunity for work, it increases the quality if you still have skilled programmers to fit those pieces together.

The article seems to suggests that free software and programmers in general are shooting themselves in the foot by making their craft ever more accessible. But there is no evidence offered to support that statement, it's just random musing.

659

Developer's Corner / Re: The programmer as (starving) artist

« Last post by Eóin on February 21, 2010, 09:23 AM »

The author seems to be under the delusion that programming compares to the likes of painting, poetry music. If anything it's closer to crafts like say carpentry, electronics, plumbing, etc...

This is a bit harsh but his commentary reads as someone making predictions of an ecosystem they only observe but aren't a part of. A number of the commenter's seem to have drawn that same conclusion.

660

General Software Discussion / Re: Game-play always beats graphics

« Last post by Eóin on February 21, 2010, 04:41 AM »

Where did you get that wallpaper? In a strange way I like it!  Can you point me to a download link?

-Shades (February 20, 2010, 09:47 AM)

It's from CGWallpapers, an artist called Patrick Beaulieu.

f0dder have you ever played the latest installment, Afterlight? I didn't play either of the two before it, Aftermath and Aftershock, but I thoroughly enjoyed Afterlight! I must also check out the UFO: AI, looks very promising

661

Java / Re: Multiplatform...

« Last post by Eóin on February 19, 2010, 06:04 AM »

As you develop you should test your programs on another OS, say Linux in a VM for simplicity. Ideally you would test on all target platforms but even just testing on two separate OS will help you get a good idea what's portable and what's not.

662

Developer's Corner / Re: Help Me Decide How to Giveaway Some C++ Books Here on DC

« Last post by Eóin on February 18, 2010, 08:10 AM »

@f0dder - Effective STL perhaps?

663

General Software Discussion / Re: Why the aversion to .NET Frameworks?

« Last post by Eóin on February 18, 2010, 04:24 AM »

I share those sentiments mouser, but that's from my programmers perspective too.

664

General Software Discussion / Re: Why the aversion to .NET Frameworks?

« Last post by Eóin on February 18, 2010, 03:46 AM »

My observations:

• DLL-hell does not apply. It refers to when different versions of DLLs could coexist side by side and were not backward compatible. .NETs can sit side by side quite happily.
• Backward compatibility, also not an issue, with just .Net 3.5 installed I've been able to run any .NET programs which I've come across. Same goes for the compact .NET frameworks on phones, you only seem to need v 3.5.

665

Living Room / Re: What’s Better: Saving the World or Building Another Facebook app?

« Last post by Eóin on February 18, 2010, 12:20 AM »

What’s Better: Saving the World or Writing an Article?[/sarcasm]

Directed at the author, not app!

666

Living Room / Re: Stephens Weekly Tech News: Feb 14, 2010

« Last post by Eóin on February 17, 2010, 10:27 PM »

The patent claim is a joke. I'm sure there are more than enough prior art examples to have it thrown out.

667

General Software Discussion / Re: Regular Expression Designer: Free Program to Help you Build Regular Expressions

« Last post by Eóin on February 17, 2010, 07:42 AM »

Not just C#, been reading a book on F# these days and it also seems really nice.

668

Living Room / Re: Which is better windows mobile or android os or iphone os?

« Last post by Eóin on February 17, 2010, 04:10 AM »

Musibi I'd recommend asking your question over at xda-developers. Since both phones you're looking at are HTC it's the perfect place to ask

669

Living Room / Re: Which is better windows mobile or android os or iphone os?

« Last post by Eóin on February 16, 2010, 11:50 PM »

There are plenty of reports the the Touch HD2 will get an official upgrade to Mobile 7, and unofficial is practically a guarantee. I should say though that what I want from a smartphone is actually a full blown Pocket PC. If I just wanted a smart phone maybe I'd consider Android. But as it stands, never having used one, I can't really say how good they are or not v. Win Mobile.

670

Living Room / Re: Which is better windows mobile or android os or iphone os?

« Last post by Eóin on February 16, 2010, 02:00 PM »

I mean I've had 3rd party software crashes and once or twice they required the phone be rebooted. I should point out that I constantly tweak my phone and try out newest versions of software so I tolerate the odd crash much the same as I do on a PC.

The stock setup of both the HD and HD2 were very stable.

671

Living Room / Re: Which is better windows mobile or android os?

« Last post by Eóin on February 16, 2010, 11:59 AM »

I'd take the complete opposite stance. Windows mobile is the most customizable OS out there for phones. I have a HD2, unfortunately it's been plagued with screen issues, that seems to be a hardware fault with mine which also affects a LARGE percentage of the HD2s sadly. Other than that it's a truely fantastic phone but it seems a lottery whether you'll get a faulty one or not.

But regards Windows Mobile, it's flawless. HTC don't install any crap and I've had maybe 5 crashes at most in over a year (I had a Touch HD prior to this HD2), and I'd sooner blamed HTC's 'Sense' interface for those few, which comes on their Android phones too.

If you do though settle on Android I'd sooner look at the Nexus One before the Hero, it's got a better hardware spec, on par with the HD2.

672

General Software Discussion / Game-play always beats graphics

« Last post by Eóin on February 16, 2010, 09:20 AM »

Many may remember the old classic, UFO: Enemy Unknown. Well I recently came across a version for Windows Mobile, PocketUFO. It's largely identical to the original and as it's every bit as addictive I've been totally hooked. Fantastically there's a PC version and you can copy your saves back and forth between the phone and PC and continue your campaign on either.

You gotta laugh though at how all this is in spite of the graphics, just look at how small the game window is sitting on my desktop.

673

Circle Dock / Re: This may amuse ... from today's download stats

« Last post by Eóin on February 11, 2010, 07:08 AM »

Those are crazy download figure! And have 30 people tried to run circle dock on their phone

674

Developer's Corner / Re: What's your *favorite* programming language and *why* ?

« Last post by Eóin on February 11, 2010, 02:39 AM »

I was browsing through book on F# just recently and was really impressed. Thinking of buying the book at very least, it seemed like as a language it was well worth a study.

675

Living Room / Re: HTML...In Britsh?

« Last post by Eóin on February 04, 2010, 07:03 PM »

... to rant that I would like for both variations of the English language to be recognized by all coding facilities.

-Stephen66515 (February 04, 2010, 04:44 PM)

Why stop there though, what about other languages, how about synonyms of various keywords? The truth is as Tuxman pointed out, code is simply not a language in the classical sense of spoken or written languages.