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Recent Posts

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9301
But if you do insist on going the cookbook route, at least be sure you read all the instructions - and follow them to the letter... :mrgreen:

There's also imaging software to image your machine before you make wholesale changes so you can get back to where you are.  With them being so useable now, I just don't see how you don't have an image if you're getting ready to do something that you *know* you don't understand...
9302
Site/Forum Features / Re: NANY 2011 :: A New Concept -- Have your say!
« Last post by wraith808 on April 19, 2010, 03:00 PM »
I have real concerns that trying to do 2 similar events like this wouldn't spread ourselves too thin.

Another alternative we've discussed is for NANY to be an end of year celebration of ALL the new applications created over the last year by DC members.. this would include coding snacks and large applications, anything created in the last year.  It would be more of a showcase and celebration of what members have created.

I think that making the event focus on the whole year does exactly what you are trying not to do- spread things a bit thin.  Perhaps if we had another volunteer coordinator if it was too much for Perry, we could have things like app suggests- 2 cycles of apps per year, with one just starting as the other is winding down.  It *does* seem like traffic on DC picks up during the NANY season (though I could be wrong).  If it does, isn't NANY driving the growth of DC?
9303
Living Room / Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation
« Last post by wraith808 on April 19, 2010, 02:28 PM »
An interesting discussion on URL shorteners on DonationCoder: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

And, hey, look, a mere 98 characters line (170 internally, including BBcode and HTTP link).


Ummm... that's not twitterable, which is what my point was.  The arbitrary limit set by twitter at 160 characters is what made these url shorteners gain traction.  They were around before, but no where near as ubiquitous as they seem to have become since twitter.  I'm not advocating their use anywhere else in particular.  I personally never used them until I started using twitter, and it became easier to use the same URL in all mediums rather than switch up for one contact method.
9304
Living Room / Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation
« Last post by wraith808 on April 19, 2010, 01:16 PM »
It would be interesting to see a survey of tweets with shortened URLs. I bet the vast majority would still fit within the 160 chars limit even with the long URL.

Of course I have no data to back that up, it's just a feeling ;)

Of course, people don't just tweet the URL... or why do it using twitter?   As micro-blogging implies, it's commentary on the URL that adds value.  Fitting said commentary + the URL (and sometimes even the shortened URL) is at times a challenge.

frex - what I would consider a miniminalist tweet about this conversation -

An interesting discussion on URL shorteners on DonationCoder - Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation - https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=22478

Clocks in at over 160 by 22 characters.
9305
Living Room / Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation
« Last post by wraith808 on April 19, 2010, 11:09 AM »
One of the reasons that bit.ly is in such widespread use is
People are lazy, and deluded into thinking security is the other guys problem. Regardless of how chronically incredibly dangerous this practice is ~OMG~ it's Fun! - Because the whole point of the internet is FaceBook, marketing & vanity...

Yes, I'm a bit cranky today.  :)

:huh:

Ever consider the limitation of twitter and what it does to URLs.  Isn't this 'twitter' craze partly to blame for that?  Or are they absolved because it has to be the lazy, deluded people's fault?

There's all sorts of dangers on the internet... shortening URLs I don't think falls too soundly in that category.  It's in the implementation (as ScanCode just pointed out above) not the practice.
9306
Living Room / Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation
« Last post by wraith808 on April 19, 2010, 10:13 AM »
Problem seems to me to be mostly with the automation - because they're not automatically checking to see if the link is long enough to need shortening. (i.e. running www.wdc.com through bit.ly helps who?)

if(strlen(link) < Screen_Width_of_Typical_Cell_Phone) {
  Skip_it;
}

One of the reasons that bit.ly is in such widespread use is that it gives you other information about the link, i.e. how many times it was clicked, how many times was your version of the URL clicked vs others that link to it, how many were from twitter and how many from other places.  Nothing identifiable, but some people might use that, I suppose...
9307
Site/Forum Features / Re: NANY 2011 :: A New Concept -- Have your say!
« Last post by wraith808 on April 19, 2010, 09:21 AM »
What resources are required for NANY?  Have you quantified what it truly takes to run the event?

The two event system may work on 6 month cycles/  This all depends on the resource to run an event.

Something like:
NANY 20## - The event as it is with the fast paced effoft for developers to complete their apps.  This is what forced me to finish an idea I had for a long time - now that idea is being turned into a business because the NANY event gave me a kick in the ass to complete it
Summer Blockbuster 20## - The new first class event as proposed.

Basically offer a Winter and Summer event.

I like this, rather than diluting the current NANY.  It seems like other than NANY as of late, we don't have any other contests/promotions during the year.  I get caught up in day-to-day work, so don't really work on my software as much as I would like, but these kinds of things give me impetus.  It's not about the prize as much as it's about the prodding to me.
9308
Living Room / Re: stackoverflow-like site for DC. Would it work? Now free
« Last post by wraith808 on April 19, 2010, 08:21 AM »
Perhaps a way to tag forum threads so that they're associated with particular wiki entries, e.g. "File managers" would have about 50 threads attached to it. ;) Then as you're reading a thread, if a new one gets mentioned, you just select the text that describes it, hit "copy to wiki" and it puts it over there, ready for you to edit further and integrate it into existing content. The biggest problem I see with that approach is attribution and copyright...

This.  That's what I meant about a SO question creating a forum thread (or vice versa).  You have your place to discuss the issue, and your place to have a question and answer.  I've had more than one that someone has backdoored me a question by PM because the forum was too noisy.  Yes, the conversational approach is nice, but when you're searching for an answer, it makes the forum seem too noisy, and not helpful.
9309
PS - Above I said "First..." and then never got to "second"   :-[  Second, if this was considered a "Large" font then why wouldn’t any other of the 200+ programs installed have the same problem?

If a developer sets their labels as not autosized, but sized based on their layout and you uniformly switch the font size, this will happen.  In older versions of windows, it was large fonts vs regular fonts- I guess windows 7 lets you change that with greater granularity. 

You can easily test by changing your fonts to 100% and seeing if it works.  And by large, I meant larger than normal.  If you code your UI based on the font being 10px then someone sets it to say... 115%, then that same letter that was 10px before will be 11.5px.  And if you set your label to something other than autosize, then for a 10 word label, the text will overflow by 10*1.5px = 15px- large enough to notice.

As I said, I'm not saying this isn't their fault- but I bet that if you tried to switch to 100% and tested their application, you wouldn't see this problem.  A bit of information you can pass onto the developer...

It's up to you whether you want to try it by setting your fonts momentarily to 100% and seeing if that is the case and then passing it on to the developer- but things like that tend to get addressed (or you can see the developer's colors) if you give concrete examples to back up your claim rather than the generic "I'm seeing X" message IME.
9310
That is considered 'large' fonts.  If a developer sets their labels as not autosized, but sized based on their layout and you uniformly switch the font size, this will happen.  In older versions of windows, it was large fonts vs regular fonts- I guess windows 7 lets you change that with greater granularity.  As I said, I'm not saying this isn't their fault- but I bet that if you tried to switch to 100% and tested their application, you wouldn't see this problem.  A bit of information you can pass onto the developer...
9311
First, the UI doesn’t seem to work to well on my computer here. The text is overly large and therefore a lot of it is cut off at the end of each line. Also, in most cases the bottom ~10% of all text is cut off. See the screen caps below.

Do you use large fonts?  That seems to be the problem from the screenshots that you post.  Many apps aren't developed for large fonts, so when viewed in them, are quite ugly.  It's an easy thing to get around, and I know .NET apps don't seem to have that problem anymore, but in many languages, the developer still has to do it.
9312
Living Room / Re: stackoverflow-like site for DC. Would it work? Now free
« Last post by wraith808 on April 18, 2010, 11:40 AM »
I use tinyportal on my site... it integrates with SMF and turns it into more of a CMS/portal without diluting the forum feel to the site.  And I personally don't agree that something couldn't be added alongside donation coder without diluting it... but it seems that I'm one voice in the wilderness :)
9313
hehehe i think this was a joke post of some sort.. it certainly is proving amusing :)

Hmmm... I don't really think it was a joke post.  And though the solutions may not be applicable, the way that this was pointed out didn't seem apropos of the whole DC community feel.  You can give information in a way that doesn't seem condescending- especially to someone that's new to the site.

To me your list of speedup software seems overly excessive. I suspect a lot of overlapping functionality within this set.

When you start a gaming session, would it not be smarter to disable (MS Windows and 3rth party) services and other background tasks (indexing for example) that are not essential for the game? Throwing in the famous car analogy...'nothing beats cubic inches'.

Go and look at sites like www.blackviper.com to see which services can be disabled. Besides spending some time this solution is free, unlike all those more or less 'snakeoil' type of software you mentioned.

This seems like the way to point it out to someone that didn't know without making them feel defensive.  But that's just MHO...
9314
Living Room / Re: Apple Attacks Adobe
« Last post by wraith808 on April 16, 2010, 05:32 PM »
With open standards and open source, you sidestep that entire mess.

Like with SMF?  OSS is not the Holy Grail.  It has its ups and downs just like anything else, and when people start making money off of it, all bets are off.  You might have the source to one version, but that source isn't necessarily the next version that's put out there.
9315
Living Room / Re: stackoverflow-like site for DC. Would it work? Now free
« Last post by wraith808 on April 16, 2010, 01:05 PM »
But even if everything was running and ready... what do we do? Stop using the forum for a week and post only on the other SO thing? Then reconvene here and discuss the experience?

No, I think the point of such an activity would be to see how the new software could supplement the DoCo experience, not replace it.  In many cases, people come to DoCo and ask one question and don't ever post again.  Many people, I'm sure, don't even do that... but search for an answer and don't return.  The SO site would support that kind of experience. For discussion, you'd still have the SMF forums.  Some way to link between the two would be nice... (perhaps when you create a SO question, it automagically creates a discussion topic, and has a link to it, with a reciprocal link in the topic?)
9316
Living Room / Re: Yea, I won't be getting an iPad anytime soon
« Last post by wraith808 on April 15, 2010, 03:48 PM »
If it did multi tasking I might get one for myself, or maybe wait for the new iPhone?!

The iPad uses the iPhone OS (if a modified version), so I'm sure that if it isn't on the plate immediately when 4.0 comes out, a little after that it should have multi-tasking.
9317
Living Room / Re: stackoverflow-like site for DC. Would it work? Now free
« Last post by wraith808 on April 15, 2010, 03:47 PM »
I think it could be combined.  Sometimes people come for an answer to a question and don't really know where to post it, and aren't necessarily out to spur conversation; other times people come to the site to spur conversation- not necessarily for an answer.  Keep the current forum the way it is, but just like you have other subdomains, have answers.donationcoder.com (or something to that effect), and run that in this fashion for more of a Q&A.
9318
Living Room / Re: stackoverflow-like site for DC. Would it work? Now free
« Last post by wraith808 on April 15, 2010, 07:31 AM »
There's also OSQA - http://www.osqa.net/.  The thing I see wrong about using a hosted version like StackExchange is that you have to propose the idea, then it seems that you have minimal control over the site.  Not sure how that's going to work- I'd think a self-hosted version would be better.
9319
Living Room / Re: Apple Attacks Adobe
« Last post by wraith808 on April 15, 2010, 07:24 AM »
(I'm no fan of Adobe either, but you get what you deserve when playing with proprietary software and hardware.)

Get what you deserve?  That's sort of harsh language... like blaming the victim for being mugged just because they were walking through a bad neighborhood.  Some people prefer working with closed systems that just work... do they deserve to be gimped by the product maker whims?  It might be legal, but I wouldn't say it's ethical...
9320
Living Room / Re: Apple Attacks Adobe
« Last post by wraith808 on April 14, 2010, 10:54 AM »
Has anyone been paying any attention to the Apple iPhone developer license 3.3.1 issue?
I hadn't before now... thanks for the heads up.

For those not familiar with it already, Apple has restricted all iPhone development to Objective-C, C, and C++ (written/compiled in Xcode) (with some other allowances for HTML5 and JavaScript that have strict limitations). They are torpedoing a whole whack of technologies that people use for iPhone development:

  • MonoTouch

The general reaction so far is pretty vicious against Apple.

Novell (makers of MonoTouch) have been very diplomatic saying that they are asking for "clarifications", or in other words, they're looking to see if Apple wants to screw everyone, or just Adobe.

Thoughts?

The thing is... I'm a windows developer.  But in my house, I have 2 iPhones, and soon an iPod touch... and maybe... horrors... an iPad soon.  (Some friends bought it, I played with it, and it's not just BAIT... It's a really good experience!)

One of the big reasons for my buy-in is MonoTouch- I've even been looking at getting a Mac because I was going to dual boot windows 7 and mac's os so I could work on my iPhone.  But this... wow.  MonoTouch would let me use my C# skills on my apps... but this would take that away.

As Eoin said,
Of course if Apple were a monopoly like MS then the EU would probably already be stepping in to prevent this nonsense.

Which has always been my argument against doing the things to MS that have been done... you don't just kick the big guy, because the little guys are doing the same thing too... and right is right and wrong is wrong.  Apple has been a mini MS in their marketing for a while now, and IMO they should be policed in the same manner as MS.   In fact, their Market Cap is about to pass MS.. so who is the little guy now?
9321
Living Room / Re: UK amateur photographers: if you're good, don't use Boots!
« Last post by wraith808 on April 14, 2010, 09:07 AM »
And I disagree with your disagreement. ;) How do the store employees distinguish between "child pornography" and a parent taking pics of their kids having fun swimming, which just happens to be naked (as kids often are), or in the bath, or whatever? Not to mention, do you really think a child pornographer would be stupid enough to go and print something at a shop like that? How many people doing malicious things are really going to use a public service like that and risk getting caught? Do you think more criminals would be caught than innocents? Do you want the FBI knocking on your door one morning with a warrant after you drop off photos of your kids at the local printer? Sure it's an "innocent mistake" and you would eventually be cleared of any wrongdoing, but is it reasonable to go through that kind of ordeal just on the outside chance that it might possibly catch someone who could be doing something illegal? Surely there are better ways of finding and incriminating these people that will have less "collateral damage".

I totally agree with this view, and have a specific personal example that illustrates the result of the same sort of thinking.  My mom was a 4th grade teacher for a long time until she retired - 30 years or so.  During her last years there, her principal didn't like her- it seems that it was a problem of insecurity, as it seems that she (being young and female in a position that old men usually held) didn't get along with any teacher older than she, or any male teachers.  But back to the subject, my mom saw physical evidence on a child on one occasion- the kid had a welt on the side of his face.  He had never had any evidence of abuse before then- this was not a systematic thing, and she talked to him, and he said he'd smarted off to his mom, and she'd smacked him.  This incident got back to the principal, and she called child services... and in addition, the police so that my mom got carted away from the classroom in cuffs in front of her kids.  It turned out with investigation it was just that... he'd called his mom quite the bad word, and she'd smacked him across the mouth on the way to school.  Child services found no fault in my mom's actions, nor the actions of the mom.  It wasn't a regular occurrence at all.  They tried to cover up their actions by saying it was better to err on the side of caution, but it's very telling that they tried to settle monetarily with my mom out of court for the whole police thing.  My mom just got them to pay the attorney's fees and dropped it at that, even though the attorney had advised her that she could get a lot more, and indeed they were offering a lot more.

While it's true that we have civic responsibility, to prosecute someone because they don't police some other person's life seems very wrong.
9322
Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: crack tracker
« Last post by wraith808 on April 13, 2010, 06:40 PM »
^ Well, yes.  I'd hope that most supporters of this site would fall into the same category as you.  But in the world wide interwebs, there are more that don't share this point of view than do, unfortunately.
9323
Living Room / Re: "The More You Use Google, the More Google Knows about you"
« Last post by wraith808 on April 13, 2010, 01:36 PM »
And a good one. :thumbs:

I think that different people have varying opinions on the subject, and there has to be a middle ground.  It seems that not using google helps, though the viable alternatives that exist are few.  And it matters in those as to whether they are more or less likely to do anything untoward with the information (as some see even the profit off of such services an untoward situation).  Personally, on matters like that, it doesn't truly matter to me, either personally or collectively.  If they provide the service and I get to use it free of charge, then do what you will to stay in business, as long as it doesn't involve inconvenience or irritation to me.  And the same thing collectively as far as I'm concerned- everyone's got to make a dollar, and I have nothing against someone making it in this manner.
9324
Living Room / Re: "The More You Use Google, the More Google Knows about you"
« Last post by wraith808 on April 12, 2010, 02:05 PM »
And perhaps it's the entire issue of conflating privacy with liberty (not the same thing, though related) that is at the root of some of this disagreement.

Agreed whole heartedly, along with the personal understanding of the context of certain words, I think.  Someone said something earlier that I think really rings true- how much privacy one has in this world is really a function of one's belief that their actions/words are private.  Because really, privacy is not a tangible thing anymore in this world of technology IMO.
9325
Living Room / Re: "The More You Use Google, the More Google Knows about you"
« Last post by wraith808 on April 11, 2010, 09:26 PM »
You said that "That's wrong and tinfoil hat thinking IMO.", and we pretty much know that "tinfoil hat thinking" is used for undermining people, lightly mentioning that they are crazy enough to believe some crap that is normally by standard unacceptably stupid to believe by normal people. If that is not how you meant it please correct me.

Well, not to poke my nose into an altercation, but what I think when I see 'tinfoil hat thinking' is conspiracy theory... not that someone is crazy.  And that's the way I've always seen it used... not to undermine someone's position.   :two:
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