Recent Posts

976

Developer's Corner / Re: List of sites (and books) for programmers

« Last post by zridling on January 28, 2010, 06:55 AM »

Thanks app!

977

Living Room / Yea, I won't be getting an iPad anytime soon

« Last post by zridling on January 28, 2010, 06:52 AM »

I can see the value of the concept, but essentially you're paying a monthly fee ($15-$30) to use it as you would an iPhone.

SOME EARLY REACTIONS:
Walt loves it:
http://mossblog.allt...le-ipad-impressions/

Tim Lee hates it, says Apple wants people to pay for content when marginal cost of copies is zero:
http://timothyblee.com/?p=2169

Newspapers see subscription money from it:
http://www.guardian....ipad-save-newspapers

Myself? I'd rather have a touchbook for half the price and none of the monthly phone/network fees:
http://www.alwaysinn...ating.com/touchbook/

More reactions from around the world here:
http://smokingapples.../news/ipad-thoughts/

978

Living Room / Re: Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git

« Last post by zridling on January 28, 2010, 06:42 AM »

Thanks for the transcript, ewemoa. I remember watching this a couple of years ago. Above my head because I've never seen git in action.

979

General Software Discussion / Red Hat launches OpenSource.com

« Last post by zridling on January 26, 2010, 06:17 AM »

Red Hat launches OpenSource.com. Should be interesting.

980

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

« Last post by zridling on January 25, 2010, 09:14 AM »

Fortran, the pinnacle of human achievement. 

981

Developer's Corner / List of sites (and books) for programmers

« Last post by zridling on January 25, 2010, 09:12 AM »

A few good sites for programmers, along with several books. Many you will no doubt know. Please recommend others that you know.



SITES

• stackoverflow
• CodeBetter.com
• Uncle Bob's Software Craftsmanship Corner
• Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror
• Joel on Software
• Paul Graham, Essays
• Compound Thinking

BOOKS RECOMMENDED BY PROGRAMMERS FOR PROGRAMMERS (not necessarily how-to's)

• Code Complete, Steve McConnell
• Pragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt, et al.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Julia Sussman
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, Martin Fowler
• Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules, Steve McConnell
• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Frederick Brooks
• Coders at Work, Peter Seibel
• Clean Code, Robert Martin

982

Living Room / Astronaut sends first tweet from space!

« Last post by zridling on January 23, 2010, 09:04 AM »

Astronaut T.J. Creamer is tweeting from space and taking questions. He lists his address as: ÜT: 29.585495,-95.107821 (what, no Star Date on these tweets?)

Follow him here:  http://twitter.com/astro_tj

983

General Software Discussion / Re: Anyone else tried UltraEdit for Linux (UeX)?

« Last post by zridling on January 23, 2010, 08:56 AM »

I see what you mean, f0dder. IDM upgrades -- not just updates -- UltraEdit far too often. Think they're up to version 16 and the last version I bought was 12. It will be interesting to see how serious they are about maintaining a Linux version over time. If the revenue is there, more power to them.

984

Living Room / Re: I hate Valentine's Day!

« Last post by zridling on January 23, 2010, 08:51 AM »

Carol has outed me, so I'll come clean. I simply dislike all holidays. I don't even like Christmas! (Though I will acknowledge Festivus.) There are just too many for every role that a person has. Guess I should lighten up.  

985

General Software Discussion / Anyone else tried UltraEdit for Linux (UeX)?

« Last post by zridling on January 21, 2010, 11:16 AM »

Still seems to be a few features missing from the Linux version, though I'm impressed with the accommodation of various packages and desktop environments for keyboard shortcut options. And of all things, no word count! They pre-announced four upgrades to UeX for 2010. Ambitious to say the least, but perhaps that's a matter of getting closer to the Windows version.

I also like how they worded their Lifetime license: Upgrades for the Lifetime of the product. (Was that so hard?)

986

Living Room / Re: I hate Valentine's Day!

« Last post by zridling on January 21, 2010, 11:10 AM »

Exactly, y0himba, but I don't need a corporation telling me to go buy something from them as a substitute for my feelings. I can express those anytime and how many times I want, without their guilt-sanctioned reminders that if I don't do something special on that particular day, I'm the bad guy.

987

Living Room / I hate Valentine's Day!

« Last post by zridling on January 20, 2010, 09:37 PM »

I'm married and I hate it simply for the commercial pressure to conform to a Hallmark-born holiday and arbitrarily spend money expressing the same care/love for my wife that I share daily.



But if you're single, it really stinks. Because you get bombarded with all the junk that goes with it that day. There's got to be a better way to ignore or convert this day into something less manipulative. Suggestions?

988

General Software Discussion / Re: ubuntu's worrying decline in quality

« Last post by zridling on January 19, 2010, 09:57 PM »

Good point, which makes me wonder why the bug still exists... like most bugs in Ubuntu. Don't mean to trash Ubuntu, but the [Ubuntu] forums have been filled for years with complaints about the same bugs over and over. Since most people use USB sticks to move data around among their systems (esp. when traveling), I'd figure this to be more urgent than "medium."
 

989

Living Room / Re: A programmer`s appeal for donation (not me :))

« Last post by zridling on January 19, 2010, 09:46 PM »

I'm an impulsive donator: when I have it, I'll donate, and when I don't, you know I'm tapped for bills. I wish the guy well.

990

General Software Discussion / Re: ubuntu's worrying decline in quality

« Last post by zridling on January 19, 2010, 01:29 AM »

Here's what little I've learned about disk mounting. Mounting of the filesystem permissions is different than permissions of the files on a vfat filesystem. The permissions are established on the mount point. Without user permission/s, your [e.g., EXT4] filesystem won't be able to read that vfat drive. The following pages on chown and chmod explain the options better than I ever could. And don't miss mounting via fstab as an option.

Most distros like openSUSE, Mint, Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, et al. will easily mount vfat USB sticks. I don't run Ubuntu, so I've not run into this problem. Wish I knew more.

991

General Software Discussion / Re: ubuntu's worrying decline in quality

« Last post by zridling on January 18, 2010, 07:02 AM »

Interesting, and confirms my campaign for new Linux users to stay far away from Ubuntu and its variants; it simply has too many bugs that will drive you crazy, and it's been that way for years! Not sure what "usb-creator" is. Is that a program of some sort? I could be wrong, but the user seems to be confused about the way Linux handles various filesystems.

FAT32 and FAT16 don't have a native permission structure per se so Linux grafts one on it in order to make vfat compatible with Linux. With vfat, you change access permissions by changing the "umask" option in the fstab entry for the vfat partition. You can't use chmod or chown on a vfat filesystem since it has no native permission structure, only an emulated one created by the Linux kernel for compatibility reasons. If you try to chmod or chown a vfat filesystem -- even as root -- you will get a "permission denied" error message.

Native Linux filesystems like ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, etc, have native support for Linux file permissions built into the filesystem. You change the permissions on a partition with a Linux filesystem by running chmod or chown on the partition mount point while the partition is mounted. It will not work if you run those commands while the partition is not mounted. If (or rather why) Ubuntu can't do this is beyond me.

992

General Software Discussion / Tweaking IE to prevent further attacks (for now)

« Last post by zridling on January 14, 2010, 06:10 PM »

IE was allegedly used by hackers emanating from China. I've noticed the Chinese and Russians don't play nice online. Be interesting to see if Google really does walk away.



"Internet Explorer was one of the vectors" used in the attacks that Google disclosed earlier this week, Microsoft said in a statement. "To date, Microsoft has not seen widespread customer impact, rather only targeted and limited attacks exploiting IE 6," the statement said. The vulnerability affects Internet Explorer 6, IE 7, and IE 8 on Windows 7, Vista, Windows XP, Server 2003, Server 2008 R2, as well as IE 6 Service Pack 1 on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Microsoft said in an advisory on Thursday afternoon.

The hole exists as an invalid pointer reference within IE and it could allow an attacker to take control of a computer if the target were duped into clicking on a link in an e-mail or an instant message that led to a Web site hosting malware, Microsoft said. "It could also be possible to display specially crafted Web content using banner advertisements or other methods to deliver Web content to affected systems," Microsoft said in the statement.

Microsoft is working on a fix but could not say whether it would address the issue as part of its next Patch Tuesday scheduled for February 9 or before. Setting the IE Internet zone security setting to "high" will protect users from the vulnerability by prompting before running ActiveX Controls and Active Scripting, Microsoft said. Customers should also enable Data Execution Prevention (DEP), which helps mitigate online attacks, the company said. DEP is enabled by default in IE 8 but must be manually turned on in earlier versions.

993

Developer's Corner / Resources for Women in Open Source

« Last post by zridling on January 14, 2010, 05:46 PM »

Here's a few:
http://www.itworld.c...es-women-open-source

When I first started programming in high school at age 15 (on a mainframe), I was one of only two or three girls in the class of perhaps 20 students. At the time, I thought that was a pretty good ratio. God knows that I never lacked for a date. Ever since then, however, I've been doing my best to encourage more women to get into the field. Not because I believe that the computer industry arbitrarily needs to have a one-to-one ratio, but because I love computing so very much and I want to share that excitement. My enthusiasm extends to the open source community as well.

994

Living Room / Re: Great Britain is frozen!

« Last post by zridling on January 14, 2010, 05:42 PM »

@rjbull: Somerset, 4th January

Hey, when did you guys start growing trees again? I thought you cut them all down during the Industrial Revolution. What did I miss?
 

995

Living Room / Re: Boxed PC games market 'gone by 2011'

« Last post by zridling on January 13, 2010, 05:56 PM »

Damn, and I was thinking about getting into gaming in 2012. Figured by then I'd have the money.

996

Living Room / Re: Great Britain is frozen!

« Last post by zridling on January 08, 2010, 05:40 PM »

tomos, that pic of that iced cross is incredible. That's some wind.

997

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by zridling on January 08, 2010, 08:25 AM »

998

Living Room / Great Britain is frozen!

« Last post by zridling on January 08, 2010, 08:00 AM »

We're having the same weather here in the US-Midwest. -3F this morning.

999

General Software Discussion / Re: (Semi-NSFW) How Fanboys View Operating Systems

« Last post by zridling on January 05, 2010, 05:41 AM »

Brilliant, fenix. Thanks for reposting here, Paul. So true.

1000

General Software Discussion / Re: "God Mode" in Win7? (All Tasks)

« Last post by zridling on January 05, 2010, 04:23 AM »

Thanks Ehtyar. Found another story on it just posted on OSNews:
http://www.osnews.co...7_s_Hidden_God_Mode_

1) Create a new folder.
2) Name it: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
3) That's it.