Recent Posts

801

Living Room / Re: Show us your (physical) desktop

« Last post by Lashiec on May 18, 2008, 05:54 PM »

Yeah, exactly like that, I didn't express myself clearly

802

General Software Discussion / Re: which is the lightest instant messenger?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 18, 2008, 01:54 PM »

Oh, there's a plugin for that as well

I hope that *someday* they will add some more functionality to the program, but I'm sure someone will complain "OH NOES, FEATURE BLOAT OMG!!!1111", there's always one guy who does not like smileys and automatic updates

803

General Software Discussion / Re: Dilemma - Free AVG8 - Buggy; Updates for Free AVG 7.5 ending May 08

« Last post by Lashiec on May 18, 2008, 01:50 PM »

Hmmm, I wonder how good are the spyware detection capabilities in AVG 8 compared to AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5. *sigh*, to download a entire suite to replace a single app...

804

General Software Discussion / Re: which is the lightest instant messenger?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 18, 2008, 01:36 PM »

Ah, yep, you also need SmileyAdd to show them.

805

General Software Discussion / Re: which is the lightest instant messenger?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 18, 2008, 01:28 PM »

The official MSN Live, with all it's bloat, only uses 24megs of private bytes... it's working set is 40megs though, but again 'only' 21megs private WS. I normally use miranda, but (afaik) it doesn't support custom emoticons, which can make some conversations pretty hard to follow...

-f0dder (May 18, 2008, 09:49 AM)

Since 0.7.5 custom emoticons are supported, sometimes it fails to display them, although it also seems to depends of what engine you're using to format text in the message dialogs.

So, yeah, Miranda is one of the lightest, around 7-9 MB of usage out of the box. Mine uses around 16-21 MB, that's because of the plugins I have installed

806

General Software Discussion / Re: Updated: Maxthon 2.0.8 FINAL supports IE/COM plugins

« Last post by Lashiec on May 18, 2008, 01:17 PM »

o_O, but they are only two tabs!

807

Developer's Corner / Re: Forking in Open Source Projects - Debate

« Last post by Lashiec on May 18, 2008, 01:14 PM »

That's why i was considering a license which gives the current maintainer of an active project some control over when and hot to allow forks.  However, I do recognize that in terms of a free software philosophy, this is problematic because it means closing the safety valve that is always available otherwise with forking.  So I'm not sure what the best solution is..

-mouser (May 17, 2008, 03:03 PM)

I don't think such license exist for what you mention. In the case you're considering there would no other solution that to find a middle ground, both parts should lose and gain some freedoms to partly achieve their goals. In other words, you should opt for a custom license that let other parties fork your project under a specific number of reasons, or after a discussion between the maintainers of the original project, and those wishing to fork it.

In other news, the newly release Pidgin 2.4.2 implement some of the changes that prompted the creation of Funpidgin.

808

Living Room / Re: Show us your (physical) desktop

« Last post by Lashiec on May 18, 2008, 12:59 PM »

I see Logitech has been experimenting with new mouse designs . Congrats!

809

Developer's Corner / Re: Forking in Open Source Projects - Debate

« Last post by Lashiec on May 17, 2008, 11:22 AM »

Yeah, actually the developer of TabSRMM said that in the future he would like to see all mods submitted as patches so he can include them in the main plugin, and effectively get more people collaborating with the project. The Miranda plugin ecosystem is quite particular, as practically all plugins are developed by a single person, and sometimes they maintain various plugins (in this case, TabSRMM and Clist Nicer+, which are everything but small)

810

Developer's Corner / Re: Forking in Open Source Projects - Debate

« Last post by Lashiec on May 17, 2008, 11:07 AM »

Out of curiosity, does anyone know of any licenses that forbid forking and or distribution, but make the software sourcecode available for individual modification/examination?

-mouser (May 16, 2008, 07:22 PM)

A custom license, like this one

Imho forking is a bad thing, and usually shows that a project is ill, whether it's because it's lead by too big egos, the codebase is a horrible mess, or whatever.

-f0dder (May 17, 2008, 04:59 AM)

Well, in those cases a fork is more than recommendable, I think

I don't know if Funpidgin can be considered a 'fork' in the true sense of the word, after looking at the changes introduced in the program, this looks more like a 'mod' than a fork. Of course, if the program is further developed like their authors claim, I guess that later you can call it a 'fork', but I suspect that either it won't be, or it will be backported into Pidgin, after a time of discussion.

Forking can be a bad or a good thing, that depends on a lot of aspects. Examples of a bad fork are Compiz, which spined off Beryl. Beryl was a more feature-rich version of Compiz, but was also licensed under the GPL, unlike Compiz, which used BSD, that meant Compiz could not take code from Beryl, but the other way around was possible. Fortunately, as you may know, Beryl was abandoned and renamed as Compiz Fusion, which is expanded version of Compiz, but without requiring a separate codebase (thanks to plugins and external tools).

Other bad examples are ffdshow, Media Player Classic and Visual Boy Advance. After Milan Cutka, gabest and Forgotten, respectively, abandoned the development of these three projects (well, gabest claims he will come back to MPC at some point), a lot of forks appeared, and clearly it was a f****** mess, not only for developers (and, in the two first cases, codec packs authors), but also for users, as it confused the hell out of them (which is the best? which one should I choose?). After some time, various authors stepped up and decided to merge parts of the different projects and create newer ones with the resulting codebase (ffdshow tryouts, the two builds of MPC maintained by the guys at Doom9, and VBA-M), which finally injected some sanity to the whole situation (the Visual Boy Advance was a particular sickening one, because most forks focused on feature bloat, without particularly improving emulation accuracy).

But don't fear, there are good examples as well, WebKit being the most prominent one. As you may know, WebKit was up to not so long ago, the Apple-forked codebase of KHTML. If we look at the situation back then and right now, clearly the forking was extremely beneficial for everyone involved, and for many people more. A rendering engine used by an relatively obscure web browser is now the darling of software development companies, being used in Safari, OmniWeb, Konqueror, the iPhone, and Google's Android platform, while is also being introduced in Qt 4.4 as the default HTML engine, and effectively replacing KHTML in KDE 4. Hell, even the Epiphany team (another example of forking) replaced Gecko after using it during years with WebKit.

Other examples are the particular mods of certain Miranda plugins, that always implement newer and more advanced features compared with the original plugins, and end up being backported into the main plugin. Actually, the developers seem to like this, as it means the plugin is being improved in ways the original authors would have not followed (lack of time, lack of interest, etc.)

So, like everything in life there's no single answer, and only time will tell if Funpidgin was a good idea, or just another IceWeasel situation. And which path of the four outlined by Jeff Atwood will take.

*PHEW*

811

Living Room / Re: Silly: Best web error message?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 16, 2008, 10:41 AM »

YES!

812

Living Room / Re: Pirating abandoned content?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 16, 2008, 10:01 AM »

Since I have been pirating abandoned content for years (emulation), I don't have any moral issue with it. Don't know what's the case with books, I never found myself in that position as I always found paper copies of the books I want, either by buying or borrowing them from the college library.

Considering that most people these days take for granted that pirating current media that still bring profit to their creators is the normal behavior, be it TV series, movies, anime, music or games, and talk about it in public, I guess there's not much to debate, at least if we take the big picture.

813

General Software Discussion / Fedora 9 out in the wild

« Last post by Lashiec on May 15, 2008, 09:47 AM »

After the numerous problems that the early-adopters of the so called LTS release of Ubuntu experienced, perhaps it would be a good idea to check out what the other major distros are offering, and judging from its release notes, Fedora 9 looks quite promising.

Homepage

Apart from the usual enhancements that new versions of the different packages that conform the distro bring, the Fedora team decided to go wild, and adopt KDE 4 as the default KDE version in the KDE-centric variation. Another new feature that looks quite interesting if it *works* it's what they call a preupgrade tool, that in theory guarantees a seamless upgrade to the new version from Fedora 7 and upwards. We know how Ubuntu upgrades usually perform, so if the things works as advertised, they could have some advantage here. They also included experimental support for the ext4 filesystem, a welcome upgrade to the aging ext3 (now that the filesystems designed by Hans Reiser won't be updated in some time, for obvious reasons).

A more in-depth look at what's new is also available. Personally, I'm waiting for the next Mint version (which I hope does not carry the problems from its "parent" distro), but Fedora is looking more and more interesting each passing release.

814

Living Room / Re: To Compress or not to compress

« Last post by Lashiec on May 15, 2008, 09:07 AM »

I only compress loose files in ZIP or RAR format, though the perspective of compressing the entire drive(s) look tempting, it's not that I'm dying for that extra free space. I guess Microsoft feels the same, as that particular option was never featured as "ZOMG! Look at this". BTW, does anyone know what are the savings compared to traditional algorithms (on the same files that is?

Afaik there's no "full drive compression" with NTFS, pretty much died out with stacker/doublespace back in the DOS days. NTFS does support per-file compression though, and it can be inheritable for directory structures - so in theory I guess it could be applied automatically for a whole drive.

-f0dder (May 14, 2008, 09:28 PM)

Then what about the first checkbox:

that reads "Compress contents to save disk space"?

815

Living Room / Re: Suck An Egg RIAA

« Last post by Lashiec on May 15, 2008, 08:48 AM »

Not only NIN-related guys, but Trent Reznor himself it seems. So those wishing maximum fidelity in FLAC format, can download the album again.

816

Living Room / Pixel art by the bucketload

« Last post by Lashiec on May 14, 2008, 05:07 PM »

Smashing Magazine published a few days ago tons of the best examples of what can be achieved with pixels and some time. Lots of 8-bit spirit for some really cool illustrations.

It also includes one of the best videoclips in recent times, Move Your Feet by Junior Senior. And contrary to most posts these days, this is not spam
via Unhandled Perception

817

General Software Discussion / Re: Your fav' audio CD burner?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 13, 2008, 08:37 AM »

Personally, I would not use Exact Audio Copy for audio burning, it's been said that its burner it's probably the most accurate when it comes to replicate an audio CD from ripped tracks (save Feurio), but we are talking about burning loose songs from YouTube videos :D. That's its main selling point as an audio burner, but unfortunately compatibility offsets this advantage.

What Exact Audio Copy does best (save dbPowerAmp, and maybe PerfectRip) it's ripping audio CDs, for the rest, try the other suggestions.

818

General Software Discussion / Re: Software to change tooltip settings in XP?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 13, 2008, 07:19 AM »

Well, the registry entry does not work, the tooltip gets behind the taskbar anyway. The AHK solution works mighty fine, so does the C one, though this one is invisible to the user. I guess the C# one also works, but I don't have such compiler installed.

819

General Software Discussion / Re: Maxthon or Avant?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 13, 2008, 06:43 AM »

I tend to move my mouse when i think or do things -i guess its like doodling- and that triggers stuff at random. 

-iphigenie (May 12, 2008, 05:25 AM)

Em, you know, you have to press an action key and "draw" the gesture before triggering any action

820

General Software Discussion / Re: Software to change tooltip settings in XP?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 11, 2008, 12:52 PM »

GOD DAMMIT, a solution to those damned hidden tooltips. But comes with the kitchen sink, and payware as well. Isn't there a simple solution? (like, prevent it from happening via a registry hack?)

821

Living Room / Re: Winamp 5.53 Release

« Last post by Lashiec on May 09, 2008, 12:27 PM »

I used MM3 and think it's probably the most feature-complete player, but then I realized that I was allocating ~250MB of memory to play music... not nice.

Now I use a super-simple winamp 5.53 with nothing but the basics. It uses ~40Mb when minimized on tray.

-urlwolf (May 08, 2008, 02:26 PM)

o_O, what kind of music library do you have?

822

Living Room / Re: TrackMania Nations Forever! w00t!

« Last post by Lashiec on May 08, 2008, 11:00 AM »

I found this game about a week ago - I love making stuff, so my collection of custom maps is rising quickly. I wonder just how insane you can make a track...

-wreckedcarzz (May 08, 2008, 01:32 AM)

VERY insane, some of the custom tracks available in the biggest servers are designed in a absolutely frustrating way. And well, C-12 Obstacle is hard enough the way it is (lost count of how many resets I have in that track in online mode)

823

General Software Discussion / Re: Your fav' audio CD burner?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 08, 2008, 10:22 AM »

I'm with Ampa, ImgBurn could be your best option here, now that it burns Audio CDs and supports exotic formats and everything, though it seems to only be able to burn those from CUE files, not a big deal. You also need DirectShow filters to decode the format in which the files you wish to burn are encoded, if you have installed one of those codec packs, there should not be any problem.

Burrrn is another option, and comes with lanux's endorsement

Personally, I always used Nero to burn Audio CDs, but it's been a couple of years since I burned my last one, and my Hi-Fi system doesn't read CD-Text, which seems to be related to your problem. Perhaps the files you burned lacked tagging, or you forgot to check up this screen:

or fill the highlighted fields in this one:

824

Living Room / Re: Winamp 5.53 Release

« Last post by Lashiec on May 08, 2008, 10:13 AM »

Not at all, just because any higher versions started hogging resources and including in my opinion unnecessary features for an mp3 player application such as video playing etc...

-Gothi[c] (May 07, 2008, 10:02 PM)

But you can unselect them during the installation phase.

Anything higher than 2.9x didn't barely run on my p133MHz. Even on modern computers I prefer 2.9x just because I don't like wasting resources. It may seem insignificant with modern hardware, but I think it matters.

I think that a minimal install might be able to run in such an old horse, at least I didn't see a noticeable surge in resource consumption when I upgraded from 2.x to 5.x on my old PIII. It may be a different story with newer versions, though.

825

Living Room / Re: TrackMania Nations Forever! w00t!

« Last post by Lashiec on May 06, 2008, 03:10 PM »

Cool, added. We have to set up a race some day here at DC