Recent Posts

9551

Living Room / Re: Micro-Fundraiser for the Official DonationCoder CodyMobile!

« Last post by mouser on May 01, 2013, 01:17 PM »

Past the $300 mark -- thanks everyone! 

9552

Site/Forum Features / Re: Google ad test

« Last post by mouser on May 01, 2013, 12:50 PM »

Ok, here's my latest try:


Too much more warning and we're going to get into the silly zone..

9553

Site/Forum Features / Re: Google ad test

« Last post by mouser on May 01, 2013, 09:25 AM »

Ok let's turn the tables on these scammy ads and turn this experiment into a public service  

I've modified the ads now so that they are prefixed by this text (subject to improvement):

"During May of 2013 we are experimenting with showing automatic google ads on our forum threads to visitors who are not logged into our forum. The following ad was not chosen or endorsed by our site, but *might* be useful to you.

Be smart and ignore ads recommending some junk registry cleaner or computer speed up service, or ads claiming they've detected something wrong with your computer. When in doubt, post a question on our forum and get real advice from real people!"

If you have suggestion for better wording/warning, let me know.

9554

Site/Forum Features / Re: Google ad test

« Last post by mouser on May 01, 2013, 08:50 AM »

What I was hoping was that adsense would show ads strictly based on the content of the thread, but that seems like wishful thinking..

Are there ad services where you can choose and approve a small number of "sponsors" each month, and only show ads from them?

9555

Site/Forum Features / Re: Google ad test

« Last post by mouser on May 01, 2013, 08:42 AM »

We might have to cut this experiment short (or switch to text ads?), as the main effect so far is having my disgust for google quadruple.

I see these as dangerous because they're items we'd all recommend *against* anyone using

agreed -- i see this as a real problem -- the ads that google most wants to put on our pages are programs that we would normally advise against.. i guess that's the main point of advertising.. yuck.

9556

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by mouser on May 01, 2013, 07:50 AM »

Just read a couple of books on Django in my ongoing quest to design the next best web framework..

9557

Site/Forum Features / Re: Google ad test

« Last post by mouser on April 30, 2013, 08:42 PM »

I have never seen that ad before.. thats ridiculous -- how can google adsense possibly allow that as an ad !?
i am going to add it to blacklist immediately.  i am honestly shocked that google would allow such an ad.

in fairness, i have ads enabled and all of the ads i've seen are clear about what they and are clearly normal advertisements, are and none are "click to download" types.  for example here's the last one i saw:


so far all the ones i've shown are normal but unrelated to the topic -- maybe that's because it has enough mined data about me that it is trying to show me things it thinks i want regardless of page contents, or maybe that's just because its going to take some time for page contents to be reflected.  time will tell.

BUT

the one you are seeing looks pure evil!

9558

Site/Forum Features / Re: Google ad test

« Last post by mouser on April 30, 2013, 02:00 PM »

I am trying another advertisement test.

I've re-enabled an old feature of the forum that we experimented with a few years ago that ads an advertisement entry at the bottom of a forum thread with more than a few posts on it.  However, it will only show when you are not signed into the forum, so no forum members will see it.

Since these advertisements won't show to signed-in forum members, the real question will be whether such advertisements has any effect of scaring people off or reducing the number of people who sign up to participate on the forum..  If so then they are unacceptable.  But rather that hypothesize let's experiment and see how it feels.

ps.
If you deliberately want to see ads in the forum out of curiosity or because you like them, i enabled a kludge:

• Go to your Profile Forum Information page.
• Find at the bottom where it says "Chance of Displaying Advert. (0-100)" and enter a value of 101, and save.
• Now you should see the forum ads on the bottom of any thread with more than a few posts.

9559

General Software Discussion / Re: Raymond.cc compares antivirus memory usage

« Last post by mouser on April 30, 2013, 11:17 AM »

It would be nice to see Raymond do a follow up comparing cpu usage.

9560

Find And Run Robot / Re: Find and Run Robot - Freeze after Launch

« Last post by mouser on April 30, 2013, 09:52 AM »

Ok so on at least one case, we have more clues.

As previously stated, the hang seems to be coming when querying the OS for the icon index of a shortcut file (.lnk file).

The further clue is that at least in once case, the shortcut is pointing to a network file, which is why it's timing out, and that in fact if you bring up properties dialog in windows explorer for the shortcut file it also hangs.

So if *ALL* the hangs are caused by same phenomena, then one solution might be to have FARR resolve shortcuts and skip trying to get icons for those that refer to network share files.

9561

General Software Discussion / Raymond.cc compares antivirus memory usage

« Last post by mouser on April 30, 2013, 09:30 AM »

The Raymond.cc blog has just put up a serious comparison of the memory usage of a ton of different antivirus programs.

It's not easy to evaluate such things given all of the different factors involved, but the results are informative.  Definitely worth a look to see where your antivirus program of choice comes in.  Is your favorite tool a memory hog?

http://www.raymond.c...system-memory-usage/

9562

LaunchBar Commander / Re: I have to Start Launch Bar commander twice!!

« Last post by mouser on April 29, 2013, 08:42 PM »

Did you figure this out yet? Something is quite confusing about this.  Can you clarify what behavior you are seeing when you launch LBC.  Don't launch it twice.

9563

Screenshot Captor / Re: Assign hotkey to Quick Capture bar?

« Last post by mouser on April 29, 2013, 07:42 PM »

Can you elaborate how you envision using this?

Do you mean literally you want to always use the PrtScr key to toggle the visibility of the Quick Capture Bar, and then use that to make your captures?

I could possibly add a hotkey configuration entry for toggling the quick capture bar -- then you could set that to PrtScr if you wanted to.  Or, since there is already a "toggle visibility" hotkey, i could make an option to say that instead of toggling main window visibility that should toggle quick capture bar visibility..

9564

Find And Run Robot / Re: Find and Run Robot - Freeze after Launch

« Last post by mouser on April 29, 2013, 01:33 PM »

Based on my first report back, preliminary findings suggest that the hang may be occurring because the operating system is taking multiple seconds to resolve an OS api call to SHGetFileInfo to get system icon index for a display result.

Now there are a few options here for me to fix the problem.

The first may be to discover if the slowdown ONLY occurs when trying to resolve icons to LNK files -- if so, an easy solution might be for ME to resolve the lnk shortcut links and then request system icon indices for the real files.

To help determine if that  is a viable solution will require some more debug testers, or perhaps if there is something about the icons in the files that this triggers on -- it's still completely unclear what specifically triggers this slow icon request -- it may be just that windows is deciding to occasionally clear it's icon cache after N requests, etc., and that it's completely unpredictable.

The second option would be a more clever deferred-icon resolution approach, where i update icons in a separate thread, showing them with generic icons until while they are pending resolution.  This is feasible though not exactly fun.

9565

Screenshot Captor / Re: Win7 x64 and screen shots

« Last post by mouser on April 29, 2013, 12:33 PM »

Welcome to the syoung!

We actually know of this problem!
It's due to a security program blocking screenshot tools.

ZoneAlarm is one program that does this, Kaspersky is another.

This thread has some more discussion of the issue:
https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=20962

Solution is simply to add Screenshot Captor to the allowed list.

Another thing that would be good to do is write to these companies and tell them how incredibly irresponsible it is for them to be causing this behavior without telling the user why the screenshots are made blank.

9566

Find And Run Robot / Re: Find and Run Robot - Freeze after Launch

« Last post by mouser on April 29, 2013, 09:08 AM »

This is for those experiencing farr HANGING while in the middle of search:

I need patient testers to run the debug version which I have uploaded here:
https://www.donation...indAndRunRobotD1.zip


Step 1:

Download the zip, rename the original FindAndRunRobot, then overwrite with the new one, and run it.

This debug version is going to create a *huge* debugout.txt file (under userdocs/DonationCoder/JrDebug or something like that) while running and searching (it's also going to run slower than normal version).

The size of this file could run several megabytes per search -- it contains lots of info about what farr is doing and the timestamps that the events are occurring.

Once you run the debug version go find that debugout.txt file to make sure you know where it is.


Step 2:

The hardest trick then is to try to get the freeze to occur.. once you get a freeze to occur, cancel or compete the search and then EXIT FARR (and don't restart it or the debug file will be overwritten!).


Step 3:

Then we'll want you to either zip and email me ([email protected]) the entrie debugout.txt file or if its really large, open it and grab everything from the last "search about to start with" down to the end.

Hopefully the timestamps there will give the clue about exactly where it's encountering the slowdown/hang.

9567

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Sort OneNote 2010 Sections

« Last post by mouser on April 28, 2013, 06:51 PM »

merged it; thanks for the heads up tomos.

9568

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR v2 - Official Bug Tracking and Feature Request Thread

« Last post by mouser on April 28, 2013, 06:42 PM »

I think we should be fine with the hotkey configuration, so you can disregard that request.  Glad to here to the issue is fixed -- thanks for your patience.  I think I'll push out an official update tonight. 

9569

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR v2 - Official Bug Tracking and Feature Request Thread

« Last post by mouser on April 28, 2013, 05:03 PM »

Can you guys try this beta and see if it fixes the keyboard layout problem (and also please check if hotkey configuration still works fine):

• https://www.donation...AndRunRobotSetup.exe or
• https://www.donation...RunRobotPortable.zip

9570

Screenshot Captor / Re: Strange problem with default screenshot directory on network drive

« Last post by mouser on April 28, 2013, 04:40 PM »

That sounds really annoying.. sounds like when system wakes up from hibernation its returning file creation errors.. I will see if i can't find a way to deal with that -- like detecting if the drive is a network drive and if so trying to pause and wait for drive to wake up before throwing that error.

The second error about "no disk in drive" -- does that always happen AFTER the first error about "creating non-existing directory"?

And you said the error occurs then the machine wakes up from hibernation -- but do you really mean that it happens when the machine wakes up -- or do you mean it happens if you try to take a screenshot right after the machine wakes up?  Or do you mean it happens after the first screenshot taken after the system wakes up from hibernation, regardless of the delay since that time?

9571

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: which license key (6 months) do I use for OneNote 2010 SortUtility?

« Last post by mouser on April 28, 2013, 09:36 AM »

Probably best to post your issue on this thread: https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=23629.0
That will ensure the author sees it.

9572

Find And Run Robot / Re: Backing up FARR settings

« Last post by mouser on April 28, 2013, 09:14 AM »

Not a silly question.  This thread has all the answers:
https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=32573.0

9573

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: which license key (6 months) do I use for OneNote 2010 SortUtility?

« Last post by mouser on April 28, 2013, 09:00 AM »

Not all of the programs made by donationcoder members need license keys -- I believe that the OneNOte 2010 Sort utility (I assume you mean this one) is free and does not need a license key.  Though you are always encouraged to send a donation to the author if you appreciate the program.

9574

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR v2 - Official Bug Tracking and Feature Request Thread

« Last post by mouser on April 27, 2013, 07:59 PM »

Ok i see where the problem is, i'll have a beta version to test on sunday.

9575

Living Room / Re: Micro-Fundraiser for the Official DonationCoder CodyMobile!

« Last post by mouser on April 27, 2013, 11:53 AM »

Afoot  |  bicycle  |  rickshaw  |  moped  |  banger  |  half-decent  |  decent  |  Bentley turbo  |  Bombardier BD-700

ps. I did add a running total to the bottom of the first post.