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Recent Posts

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8176
Screenshot Captor / Re: transfer error
« Last post by mouser on January 30, 2014, 01:15 AM »
ImageShack is moving to a premium service model from next month.
crap.
8177
Screenshot Captor / Re: transfer error
« Last post by mouser on January 29, 2014, 05:03 PM »
Seems likely.

Oh in case you didn't notice, you can go into SC options and change from imm.io to imageshack, which is still working perfectly in Screenshot Captor.
8178
Screenshot Captor / Re: transfer error
« Last post by mouser on January 29, 2014, 04:40 PM »
Just tried it and got Transfer Error too.
They must have changed something or are experiencing a service problem.
I'll check again tomorrow, if it's still happening i'll investigate.

Anyone know any imm.io service changes?
8179
Developer's Corner / Re: The Descent to C - introduction to C from a HLL perspective
« Last post by mouser on January 29, 2014, 08:20 AM »
Great find  :up:
8180
Dr.Windows / Re: Dr.Windows - LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - v1.05.01 - February 27, 2005
« Last post by mouser on January 29, 2014, 06:52 AM »
Sorry it took so long.

Please try the new downloads on the official web page:
https://www.donation...DrWindows/index.html

Change list:

v1.06.01 - 1/29/14
  • [Bugfix] Fixed index out of range error caused by array length bug (thanks jimbo1qaz)
  • Moved to dual installer system (normal and portable zip)
  • Signed executable
  • Added manifest
  • Fixed some dialog typos (thanks jimbo1qaz)
8181
MEWLO Web Framework / Re: Mewlo Web Framework Blog
« Last post by mouser on January 29, 2014, 02:39 AM »
Mewlo Web Framework Blog Entry #5 - January 29, 2014 - Third Party Components

So I took a little time off working on Mewlo, but I'm back to it now, and starting to have a little more fun with it.

Today I thought I'd talk a little bit about which components of Mewlo will be handled (at least initially) by 3rd party open source libraries.

I see Mewlo occupying a middle ground between Django, a framework which uses very few 3rd party components, and Pylons/Pyramid, which is heavily reliant on 3rd party components (both excellent frameworks).

First, let's talk about different ways one might utilize 3rd party components/libraries in a framework.

In the Pylons/Pyramid framework, the framework works hard to make it possible for programmers to use alternative components for major core functions -- such as the database engine, the template engine, etc.  The advantages of such an approach is that the coder is free to use whichever alternative components they prefer.  The disadvantages are that the framework cannot rely on the existence of features and functions, and must sometimes go to extreme lengths to coordinate actions, resulting in overly-complex code.  Sometimes operations must be left to the coder to implement simply because the framework cannot know how the operations would be implemented by different components.  Each component has it's own way of working and it's own coding conventions.

Django, in using custom in-house components for most things (database engine, templating system), can offer a more uniform API and a cleaner more integrated framework.  Components are highly optimized for the framework and follow a unified set of conventions.  The built-in Django components are actually quite excellent.  The disadvantages of such an approach include the in-house coding and maintenance effort required for such components, rather than relying on a high quality active third party open source component, and inflexibility of not allowing programmers to choose their own components for core features (database engine, templates, etc.).

With Mewlo, a conscious effort has been made to follow a philosophy of "one right way to do things".  As such, we are not concerned with offering programmers the flexibility of using their own database engine, template engine, etc.  I realize this can be a controversial decision for some -- and where there is no real complexity cost associated with offering choices (as is the case with template engines), we may relax this strategy.  But in general, we begin with the premise that enforcing the use of a specific component set is not a bad thing.

Furthermore, Mewlo leans much more heavily in the direction of reinventing-the-wheel and writing code in-house, for most functionality.  As such we avoid the use of components when such components are integrated tightly into the framework -- it's my belief that the more different components maintained by different organizations, the more moving parts there are that lead to messier and convoluted code.

Having said that, Mewlo does use some key 3rd party components/libraries.  These components represent a substantial amount of non-trivial intricate code and they are actively developed and maintained by other entities.  It is judged that reinventing these components would not be a good expenditure of time, and we have tried to focus on components that do one thing well.

But, it should be noted, that Mewlo makes an attempt to abstract the interface to these components using thin-wrappers, so that all user-written code goes through a Mewlo API, rather than interacting with these 3rd party components directly.  This has several benefits.  First, it allows Mewlo to present a uniform outwardly-facing API interface.  Second, it allows us to replace components in the future without changing the basic API.  Third, it's consistent with our strategy of designing Mewlo as an language-neutral OOP hierarchy that we could move to another language.

Note that the 3rd party Components I am speaking of here are python libraries that play essential core roles in Mewlo.  I am not talking about occasions when some custom user code will want to use an arbitrary library to perform some limited action.


Template Engine - Jinja2
------------------------

We have preliminarily chosen the Jinja2 templating system for Mewlo (we could have just as easily chosen mako).  As discussed earlier -- a programmer using Mewlo does not invoke Jinja2 functions directly, but acts through an abstract Mewlo class that could easily be extended to support additional templating engines.


ORM Database Layer - SqlAlchemy
-------------------------------

For database operations that do not have to run at the absolutely fastest speed, there are huge advantages to using an object-oriented ORM database layer.  An ORM database library/component is an intricate thing with lots of moving parts that relies on some esoteric language features.  As such, it's exactly the kind of thing that we would prefer to hand off to a well-maintained 3rd party component.  SqlAlchemy fits this bill nicely.  Again, all database operations are done via Mewlo classes, which abstract the calls to SqlAlchemy and facilitate DRY coding with minimal reuse of configuration information.


Form Construction and Validation - WTForms
------------------------------------------

Mewlo currently uses the small WTForms library to handle form creation, presentation, and validation.  Form handling is small enough in scope, that we could replace this in the future with our own custom library -- or move to a larger form library.  For now it represents a good solid minimal form handling component.


Low-level Web Objects - Werkzeug
--------------------------------

Mewlo currently uses the Werkzeug library to handle the low level request and response objects (including cookies, etc.) that lie at the heart of a web framework.  The choice of Werkzeug does violate one of our guidelines for choosing 3rd party components in that it includes code to provide a large number of features that we have no interest in using.  Because we only use minimal pieces of the Werkzeug library, it is highly likely that we will rewrite this component in-house for Mewlo, or move to a much more minimal library for request and response handling.


Others
------

There are several parts of Mewlo that have not been implemented yet, but which will most likely depend on the adoption of 3rd party component libraries:

    * Css/Javascript/Ajax frameworks
    * Internationalization library

8182
Living Room / Re: A Table Tennis match turns into an amazing display of playfullness
« Last post by mouser on January 27, 2014, 03:40 PM »
Zaine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8183
General Software Discussion / Re: Clipboard Help+Spell: Notes is always empty in Grid view
« Last post by mouser on January 27, 2014, 07:56 AM »
I'm going to move this to the CHS section.

But i can explain the confusion:
That field where you have written zxc is the clip TITLE.

To see that, you need to enable the "TITLE" column in the grid.  To do that, click the little icon to the left of "ID" in the grid header.

Does that make sense?
8184
General Software Discussion / Re: Delete lines starting with a string in a txt file predefined
« Last post by mouser on January 26, 2014, 11:58 AM »
Contro we are going to have to start making a rule for you about the # of requests you can post per day  :o
8185
Living Room / A Table Tennis match turns into an amazing display of playfullness
« Last post by mouser on January 26, 2014, 07:44 AM »
Just wonderful.. I wish we could all remember to not take things so seriously and have this kind of fun with our skills.



8186
General Software Discussion / Robot Odyssey - An incredible programming game from 1984
« Last post by mouser on January 25, 2014, 06:22 AM »
This is a great long read about a game I'd never heard about from 1984, called Robot Odyssey.

Robot Odyssey was apparently an impossibly difficult, programming (well really circuit wiring) game, that had a big impact on those that played it.

It was called Robot Odyssey, it took me 13 years to finish it, and it sealed my fate as a programmer.


See also: http://www.droidquest.com/

When i was just starting to code as a teenager, one of the games that really captured my interests was a robot programming called RobotWar, which I wrote a complete clone for on the original ibm pc.
8187
N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY 2014 Release - epCheck
« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2014, 10:59 PM »
Another nice writeup: http://www.blogsdna....avorite-tv-shows.htm
8188
Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2014, 08:42 PM »
You've made some interesting points Ren, but I'm not sure how to square them with the stuff I read.

Here is the (official?) bitcoin faq page (http://bitcoin.org/e...are-bitcoins-created), emphasis mine:


The Bitcoin protocol is designed in such a way that new bitcoins are created at a fixed rate. This makes Bitcoin mining a very competitive business. When more miners join the network, it becomes increasingly difficult to make a profit and miners must seek efficiency to cut their operating costs. No central authority or developer has any power to control or manipulate the system to increase their profits. Every Bitcoin node in the world will reject anything that does not comply with the rules it expects the system to follow.

Bitcoins are created at a decreasing and predictable rate. The number of new bitcoins created each year is automatically halved over time until bitcoin issuance halts completely with a total of 21 million bitcoins in existence. At this point, Bitcoin miners will probably be supported exclusively by numerous small transaction fees.
Why do bitcoins have value?

Bitcoins have value because they are useful as a form of money. Bitcoin has the characteristics of money (durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability) based on the properties of mathematics rather than relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities (like fiat currencies).

To me that (and other discussions i read when searching for "bitcoin + scarcity") seems to confirm my point -- that it is a central element of design that huge amounts of cpu have to be churned through, solely because it is essential that one not be able to quickly mine coins.  That's the whole point of the scarcity thing, which still seems key to me.  The design of the system simply does not allow allow a situation where mining coins is energy cheap and efficient.  By design if someone found a way to mine the coins for half the energy cost, it would simply mean that the next day everyone would be running twice as many computers to mine bitcoins.

In fact, the scarcity-by-design and spread-of-mining-over-all-miners nature means that that the amount of cpu resources and energy costs will ALWAYS rise to a cost near the expected value of the coins.  If you think that a coin will be worth $1000 then you would be willing to spend a little less than $1000 on your energy bills and hardware costs to mine a coin (or spent that much money infecting people's computers with bots to do so).  The system is designed to force people to churn through that cpu time and energy cost because by design it must -- those extra cpu cycles are not benefiting anyone they are simply there to impose an (artificial) cost on users in order to enforce a limited supply.

My point was that it doesn't have to be that way.  You could find a way to keep exactly the same properties (of scarcity, limited supply, protection against attack, etc.) but have the cpu work required for mining actually be useful, in-and-of-itself, for other purposes.

Thanks for the links to primecoin -- i look forward to reading about it.
8189
Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2014, 07:32 AM »
I try to avoid this bitcoin stuff because the whole world of finance seems completely insane and make-believe to me.

However, i am somewhat interested in the technology issues.

I think the points being made about other currency (gold, diamonds, etc.) being intrinsically mostly worthless -- and in that sense not particular different from virtual/digital currency, are all valid.

But what I think eleman touched on which is odd about bitcoin is that, if i'm understanding it correctly, one of the key ideas of bitcoin is that by design it MUST require huge amounts of otherwise-useless cpu cycles, in order to simulate/create scarcity.

It's a key property you have to have scores of high-powered computers doing nothing but churning through useless operations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to do "work" that is of no value other than to purposefully slow down the generation of these digital tokens.

That does strike one as wasteful.

But now the interesting technological question that comes to mind is, could you flip that?

Could you make a new crypto/digital currency where the work required to virtually "mine" such things was actually PRODUCTIVE USEFUL work?

Like a crypto/digital coin which was generated by successfully solving protein folding problems, etc.

Such a thing would still enforce rarity/scarcity by requiring massive cpu cycles -- but those cycles themselves would be producing useful work.

It would be as if coal/diamond/gold mining helped the environment.. Now *that* could be revolutionary.
8190
N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Duplicate Photo Finder
« Last post by mouser on January 24, 2014, 04:29 AM »
Hey Ren,

Looks like the download link is offline, can we get an updated download link? (or just attach to forum post?)
8191
Non-Windows Software / Re: SteamOS : a quick review - plus setting up a virtual environment for testing
« Last post by mouser on January 23, 2014, 09:01 PM »
Thanks for the post 40hz, very interesting.
8192
N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY 2014 Release: Process Piglet
« Last post by mouser on January 23, 2014, 04:22 AM »
Nice write up at "Dave's Computer Tips" by Jim Hillier:
http://www.davescomp...with-process-piglet/

And at Lifehacker Australia:
http://www.lifehacke...indows-applications/

And here: http://www.drakeinte...2/12/process-piglet/
And here: http://www.softpedia...Process-Piglet.shtml
And here: http://www.trishtech...sage-process-piglet/
8193
Living Room / Re: Hard Drive Brand Reliability Data
« Last post by mouser on January 22, 2014, 06:25 PM »
Some comments to take note of from the backblaze blog:

The drives that just don’t work in our environment are Western Digital Green 3TB drives and Seagate LP (low power) 2TB drives. Both of these drives start accumulating errors as soon as they are put into production. We think this is related to vibration. The drives do somewhat better in the new low-vibration Backblaze Storage Pod, but still not well enough.

These drives are designed to be energy-efficient, and spin down aggressively when not in use. In the Backblaze environment, they spin down frequently, and then spin right back up. We think that this causes a lot of wear on the drive.

8194
Living Room / Hard Drive Brand Reliability Data
« Last post by mouser on January 21, 2014, 08:19 PM »
We occasionally discuss the issue of hard drive reliability on the forum but this it the first time i can remember seeing hard data showing brands with clear differences in reliability..

Hitachi drives crush competing models from Seagate and Western Digital when it comes to reliability, according to data from cloud backup provider Backblaze. Their collection of more than 27,000 consumer-grade drives indicated that the Hitachi drives have a sub-2 percent annualized failure rate, compared to 3-4 percent for Western Digital models, and as high as 25 percent for some Seagate units.


hard-disk-afr.jpg


Links:


8195
DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Websense (Directly and via VirusTotal) - DonationCoder is Malicious
« Last post by mouser on January 21, 2014, 07:13 AM »
From websense email reply:

Hello,

The site you submitted has been reviewed and determined safe for browsing. The site will resume its filtering under the following category:

https://www.donation...AndRunRobotSetup.exe  – Information Technology

Categorization updates should be reflected in the next scheduled database publication, and will be available shortly to Real-Time Updates subscribers.

Thank you for your inquiry,

Samana
Websense Labs
8196
DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Websense (Directly and via VirusTotal) - DonationCoder is Malicious
« Last post by mouser on January 20, 2014, 07:26 PM »
The best summary of how to report file false positives that I know about is by Chiron on TechSupportAlert (please chime in if you know of other good ones, especially any that automate reporting!):

http://www.techsuppo...ntivirus-vendors.htm

Another awesome page on techsupportalert, thanks for that  :up:
8197
DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Websense (Directly and via VirusTotal) - DonationCoder is Malicious
« Last post by mouser on January 19, 2014, 08:04 PM »
thx rg
8198
DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Websense (Directly and via VirusTotal) - DonationCoder is Malicious
« Last post by mouser on January 19, 2014, 07:30 PM »
Has anyone found a way to report a false positive to these Websense jokers?  It never ceases to amaze me how these security services have no problem classifying things as malware for no reason and then make it almost impossible to contact them to have it corrected.
8199
DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Websense (Directly and via VirusTotal) - DonationCoder is Malicious
« Last post by mouser on January 19, 2014, 07:24 PM »
Thanks for the report.  Another false alarm by some lazy site -- FARR does no such thing.
Let me go look.

Notice that VirusTotal shows dozens of analyzers all report FARR as clean, only "Websense ThreatSeeker" has incorrectly listed it.
8200
MEWLO Web Framework / Re: Mewlo Web Framework Blog
« Last post by mouser on January 19, 2014, 04:54 AM »
FYI: I'm just getting back into Mewlo work after a couple of months break.
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