rob86

Have we been missing out on MyCents? I just noticed now that I haven't received a single email telling me about another $1 of MyCents since Sept 16! I never even noticed until now. I hope I didn't miss out on MyCents for a months worth of posting. I thought I wrote quite a few posts. I haven't been paying attention

Opera and Firefox are both excellent browsers. I've been using Opera(Lite) for a long time, and back in it's early history when Firefox was young, it was far ahead of Firefox in quality in my opinion. It used to cost quite a bit of money, maybe $100USD I'm not sure.Yet, there's no denying that so far, Opera has lost the battle for being the rising star browser. Statistics show a mere handful of dedicated users use Opera, hardly more than other alternatives, while Firefox takes up the bulk of non- IE browsers. What went wrong? Can we learn anything from Opera's lack of success? They have an excellent product, yet they never exploded in popularity like Firefox.I think it has to do with their proprietary nature. They aren't open source like Firefox, and the ability to customize it is limited. I know that I stick with Firefox now almost entirely because of the 3rd party extensions. I think they shot themselves in the foot by keeping their code so private. It's much faster than Firefox, but people like open source even if it isn't as good. Plus, it's the "programmers/tweakers" who are more dedicated to software, and advertising it. They are the ones who would gladly boast their support for a web browser on their website or a t-shirt. Opera needed to impress that group of people.

Imagine this scenario.1. One software or product (an e-book, or something) is freely available for download. 2. Another very similar product is said to cost some arbitrary price BUT the creator sneakily makes it freely available through other means. For example, an easy to crack javascript password or uploading it on a torrent site. The author #2 realizes he can't compete with a free software that's just as good by putting a price on the product, but having a product that people use is better than being obscure and unknown. To compete with product 1, he makes his product look better by significant price on it knowing that most people won't pay.Do you think that putting a price on something makes it a more attractive product, or will people still be drawn to the free open source community because of what it stands for, and that it's not as immoral as stealing/pirating.

I was told the other day some interesting facts about crows. They're supposedly almost the smartest bird on the planet, and are the only bird that flies TOWARDS gun shots because they know hunters will leave yummy leftovers behind after their hunt. I don't know if these facts are true, as I literally heard them from a friend of a friend who heard from an expert on the radio, but they're interesting. I never thought of crows as super-intelligent, but when you think of it, they are quite smart. They very rarely get hit by cars on a highway despite being on it all the time. They aren't hunted for food because they're so smart they modified their genetics to make themselves taste awful! just kidding. I spent a lot of time watching the wildlife in my area and studying their reactions. I like watching animals and it's uncanny how similar to humans they are. Maybe that would be put better if I said it's uncanny how humans aren't as different as we think. I think your project is interesting. Feel free to post your research

How difficult is it to make games like that with PyGame? I haven't been learning Python for very long. I'm almost done with the lessons here http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ but considering it only took a couple days to go through it and understand it, I can't help but feel like there's a lot more to know before being able to make anything good like a game!

Is Activepython the same as ActiveState Komodo without the support for other languages? I downloaded the Komodo demo the other day when I was looking for IDE's but didn't try it yet. I'm interested in Pygame and will check it out. What's the difference between Pygame and Pyglet?

Just how good is your video card? I have a pretty old Desktop with an NVidia 5200 Fx 128mb. I wouldn't call it a great video card and I have no problems playing pure HD movies. I remember one person had a problem where their videos would skip if they didn't have their laptop plugged in. Have you tried that? The videos wouldn't work with the laptop running off the battery.

Just wondering if anyone here has a website with linux tips or programming lessons/tips. I know there are lots on the web, but since I'm interested in this stuff lately I thought I'd support a trap members website by checking out their website, if anyone has one.

I was reading a few webpages a while ago that revealed how it is common for people doing advertisements for companies and products to photoshop in or photoshop out people of different races, mostly african american. I saw examples of a black persons head being cropped out and a white person's head stuck on. I've also seen black people strangely added into a group of white people to make a product look more "multiracial". I even read in the news a while ago that people who do my province's tourist advertisements often paste in people of different races to make the location appeal to foreign people more. It's shocking really, that this is done. Is it really not possible to get people to get different races together for an advertisement picture? Why would people be cropped out and replaced with the face of a white person? In all seriousness, could skin colour clash with the advertisement's colours? You should pay more attention to the advertisements you see, and look for any race-related photoshopping errors. You might be surprised and find one. I don't know if there's racist intent here or what, but it's weird.

Do you think hearing laughs on a T.V. show is annoying, or even insulting? Does it depend whether it's real laughter (live audience) or fake canned laughter injected into the show? Networks often use big laughs from one live show in other not-live shows. It's always made me wonder, because there are very few people, whether viewers or a creators of a show who admit to preferring laugh tracks. I've read many interviews with people who say "I didn't want no stinkin' laugh track in my show" but the network forced it. I've heard people often comment that laugh tracks are insulting, implying the viewer is too stupid to choose when or not to find something funny.While I find laugh tracks very annoying and distracting, I quickly get used to hearing laughs, after a few episodes, but if I just block them out, what's the point of having them? I watch comedies without laugh tracks, and they're just as entertaining, if not more so. Are laugh tracks just popular in America or have they spread to other parts of the world as well? Like I said, I block them out, so I can't remember which shows have them to be honest.

I've read a lot of programming lessons online, and a few books (this doesn't mean I completed the lessons in all of them.. I have a hard time keeping focused on one thing) and I seem to be drawn to certain ones. I found that I like a colorful lesson. It seems to keep my attention more and make things more memorable. This means colorful syntax highlighting for example. It seems to lighten up the dreary mood of reading a bunch of technical stuff. Complete black and white is a negative point for me. I think that's what makes unix man pages so boring.I like examples, who doesn't? A lesson without examples is in my opinion, a bad one. Examples make things a lot easier and could arguably be the most important part. I also like mini - projects, exercises, or simple questions. They give me a chance to apply the knowledge I learned. In some not so great lessons, they teach something, and neglect to give an example of how it's really used, expecting it to be obvious to a newbie. I'm often left wondering, "Okay, what good is it?". Being guided to use the new skills in a real program makes things make more sense.I don't like that a lot of lessons with exercises don't contain answers. It's always nice to be able to check out the solution to something that doesn't make sense to you yet.Depending on the language, I often like simplicity. I tried a few web lessons and one book on web-based languages like CSS and HTML, which wrote entire paragraphs on simple things. It made it look impossible to learn. It was an entire text book on HTML and CSS, very intimidating. I stumbled upon w3schools and the information was so brief but clear with examples I could experiment with, that it made learning all of those languages very easy. What a difference the presentation can make. Obviously, a more difficult language might need a little more explanation than a quick syntax + example, but a lot don't. Another thing I like is a lesson that tells you what to do after the lesson is finished (assuming there is more to know). I was learning C++, having great success with the lessons, finished the book and I was left wondering what I was supposed to do. Sure, I could make a text adventure game, or a math solver, but I had no idea how to make anything in a GUI. I had no guidance, a google search left me confused and overwhelmed, and I got disillusioned with the whole thing and completely forgot about C++ and programming for a while. Well, those are a few of my likes and dislikes.

I'm actually using Ubuntu. That's the problem I've been having with PyShell but I'm not quite sure how to go about patching it myself. I downloaded the most recent PyShell.py from that page and did a find for PyShell.py, which found a lot of them. I don't know which one to patch (though I'm guessing not 2.5, since it says 2.6 in the shell) and I don't really know how to add the patched stuff in. I see a bunch of + + + + 's in the patch file, so I'm assuming there's an easy way to add this stuff in? A unix command? diff? /usr/share/pyshared/wx-2.6-gtk2-unicode/wx/py/PyShell.py/usr/lib/python2.5/idlelib/PyShell.py/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/wx-2.6-gtk2-unicode/wx/py/PyShell.py/usr/lib/python2.6/idlelib/PyShell.py/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/wx-2.6-gtk2-unicode/wx/py/PyShell.pyEdit: I think I'm wrecking havoc on my PyShell. I tried using the "patch" command, and only two of three "Hunks" succeeded, leaving one "Hunk' a failure. Hmm... It did actually fix two things that annoyed me, but code that failed to be patched was the up arrow key part. Looks like I'll have to put my newbie programming skills to the test and do this manually... look out. I sure hope making pong was adequate training for this.. :PEdit Again: Looks like finishing the patching by hand was extremely easy and it seems to work. Not sure why the command 'patch' didn't work 100%, but oh well. Thanks for finding the patch .

I've been playing with IDLE - Python's shell (the >>> part, not the editor part) to experiment with python a bit as it's a bit better than using a terminal. It's missing one important feature, and that's the common up-arrow repeat last lines I'm sure you're all familiar with as it's in pretty much everything. Am I missing something, or is this not possible in IDLE? When testing one liners, I hate having to retype the whole line.

There is a new book in the official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the famous trilogy featuring science fiction, british humour and the intriguing and dramatic tale of man searching the universe over for a good cup of tea. The book is called "..and Another thing". It wasn't written by (The late, great) Douglas Adams, but it received good reviews for retaining Adams' signature writing style and received the blessing of his family. Haven't read it myself, but seeing as H2G2 is one of my favourites, I hope to some time in the future. For people who never read the trilogy before, you can get a basic idea of the silly humor by observing that you can't really have six parts in a trilogy. It's a great series of books, full of wit, things to ponder on, and interesting characters. Read it!It is because of this series that I feel complete - I now know the meaning of life in it's most simple and understandable form.If you' happened to be unfortunate enough to see the recent full length movie before reading the books -- try to forget that. The movie was not that great. The books and even the radio series (available online for free -- it's good listening) are better.

Well that's the thing about MC, it's run in a terminal. You open up a terminal and type "mc". I don't know how to do all the basic stuff in mc, like selecting files. I never used it much.

I think I found something that looks very similar to what you need. http://www.damonkohler.com/2009/10/finding-unique-files.html This guy is comparing two folders and outptting the uniques. I don't think it would be too difficult to make a script to process this information. It might be a good idea to copy uniques to a FolderThree, and then you could erase SF and rename FolderThree to SF's name, unless there's a better way, I don't know.

Is there a reason why you don't delete _everything_ in Slave folder and then copy _everything_ from MF to SF? You didn't mention if they were exact duplicates or the SF contained updated stuff.I've been trying to figure it out, but I'm a newbie with scripts myself. I'm thinking you might find the "uniq" command useful, I don't know much about it , but it looks promising. Another command is "diff". I'm back with another stupid suggestion, the file manager Midnight Commander has an option to compare folders (directories). It works well and easily at highlighting files that don't belong - which is what you want - but I don't know exactly what to do with the files once they are highlighted. I've only been using MC for a whole 15 seconds. It's kind of a strange beast to me.

I haven't built a computer before, but the Puppybox looks like a great little project. I like PuppyLinux so having a use for it would be great. I didn't see anything on "Building a puppybox" about a modem? The guy who made it uses it for web-related things, but there was no mention of a modem to connect to the internet with? Is it hooked up via USB or something?

Since Bob Marley is one of the top selling artists in the world, I'll assume someone out there knows his music. His bassist was a little ticked off about receiving little credit and money for a lot of the hit songs Bob became famous, and rich for. Do you think Mr Barrett is right in claiming that he had a large part in the success of Bob Marley? I think he's indeed right, the bass riffs in Bob's songs are definitely recognizable. I think this had a big part in the success of the songs.

My opinion? I think Xisto has been around a long time, and the people who created it are getting bored of it. You don't see many mods or admins chatting it up on here. Back in the day, they were probably very active in promoting their forum. I think it's running on auto-pilot now and the mods step in to help when they have time. I don't sense a very enthusiastic staff, though most times they are quite helpful if you ask a general question about a web design related thing. I think they just moved on to new things in their lives. What ever happened to that re-design Trap contest? I haven't heard anything about it. A few of my website support questions have been ignored, but I'm not complaining. The fact that I even got to register a domain without paying for it is pretty cool. I didn't even expect that to be possible without some sell your soul catch, so I'm satisfied. I think it's a cool forum too, where people from different parts of the world with different interests can talk about things. Too bad it's pretty inactive.. most of the sections i like to talk about are dead

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Of course, this only applies to Canadians, but if any of you feel like having a turkey sandwich to celebrate with us, feel free! Thanksgiving is technically on Monday, but many people have their big thanksgiving meals on Sunday. So enjoy your turkey, or tofu (what do vegans eat?) everyone!

Is this a trick question? A person who crawled out of a dark cave he lived in for 20 years could make a better movie than the rubbish Hollywood has been putting out lately. We're (the public in general, not ME) becoming used to the idea that a good movie is a movie with outstanding CGI effects, nude scenes and toilet humor. That's not to say there haven't been a few excellent and original movies, but most are garbage. I guess it depends what you consider a good movie. If your idea of a good movie is one that makes billions of dollars, then I think that's highly unlikely for a humble small town film maker in these times. If your idea of a good movie is a good movie, where you can see through the relative crudeness for what it is, and see the originality and innovation, and don't care if it's going to be a block buster, I think this person could make a great movie. Hollywood is notorious for producing high cost garbage, but there are many lower budget foreign films that are excellent despite their rough finish compared to the polish of a big budget movie.Hitchcock is one of the world's most celebrated directors, and I've seen his lower-budget work, and his short subject films and I think it's great. He has a unique and highly recognizable directing style that he never learned from any book, so where did he learn it? I think he knew what he wanted in a film, he knew what suspense was in his mind, and he did what he could to make those ideas come out on screen. He knew what he wanted his cast to look like, and he made the films how he saw it in his mind. Who knows, but people have been imitating him ever since. I've never seen anyone duplicate his style, even though I'm sure people have studied it in depth. He could have been this small town young man with no education and I'm certain he would have been just as talented.There is no set formula for a good movie. Sure, there are technical gurus, ones who excel in making a movie look professional and polished, but I love simple comedy shows filmed in one room with a limited cast. These are light entertainment, very uplifting, and to me, are worth ten times more than most 2+ hour multi-million dollar movies. Cash cows they may or may not be, but in my mind they are gold.It's the movies that are outside the norm that become most recognizable. Think about 2001: Space Odyssey, if you've seen it. It's a completely unique film. It wasn't going by any formula that was learned. The FX were innovative at the time, before CGI. When I first watched it, I was bored out of my mind, I wasn't used to this slow paced style. I kept thinking, "Huh? This is one of the best films of all time? I can hardly get through it! What's with the weird ending? Why is there no plot?" I had so many preconceptions going into the film, expecting a Star Wars thrill ride, that the entire time I was judging it negatively. When I eventually finished the movie, I had this weird feeling, like I had experienced something strange and it made me think. I eventually realized the greatness of that particular film, it wasn't just a movie, it was almost artwork, and it remains one of the most memorable I've ever seen. I know it's not a low budget film, but my point is it's a different style.Of course, to make it in Bollywood, you'd have to be an expert dance choreographer to do the obligatory dance scenes, wouldn't you? Or maybe people in India are born knowing how to dance... hmm.Well then, that was quite a ramble. Knowing me, I probably went off tangent and completely forgot to reply to the original post.

I watched this on NASA TV and it turned out to be quite boring and disappointing to watch. As you'd know if you read, there were two "spaceships" (that's what they called them) that collided with the moon. The first one was supposed to create some kind of an dirt plume large enough to be visible on earth with a telescope and this was filmed live with the second one. It turned out, that the collision was not even visible to my eye on the live video feed, and after reading opinions on the news websites, many observers who stayed up until early morning camped out in a field with telescopes were also disappointed by the lack of a "10km plume" which NASA had previously predicted. I can't say I would recommend watching the video unless you're very curious, it's not overly impressive unless you want to see a close up of the moons craters.It certainly wouldn't have damaged the moon at all, and was a much more minor thing that I had expected. They said it was the equivalent of a SUV crashing into the moon -- so it wasn't a nuclear warhead or anything.NASA however was quite pleased with the mission and their scientists have lots of information to work with. The mission wasn't just about watching a cool lunar explosion, after all. I haven't read whether they found water or not which was the main objective. Stay tuned for more information!

I watch what's been going on and am disappointed with the world, not because of Obama, or because of his prize, but because of how his run for presidency and election reveals that there is still a lot of racism in the world. People think Obama united people, but he didn't. Whether it's his fault for not discouraging (as any politician would do, take any votes they can) or the fault of his "followers", there is a lot of racism against white people lately. Am I the only one who can see the ugly attitudes of so many people come out since Obama was elected? I hear too many people putting Obama in a god-like status solely because of his skin colour. He was automatically better than any white president the US ever had in some peoples eyes just because he wasn't white. Is this what non-white people really think of us? That we're sub-human? I'm also seeing a lot of white people retaliate against this attitude with hatred, and it's not because of Obama, it's because of the attitude of his supporters. I guarantee most people would have been fine with Obama for president, but it's the constant issue of his skin colour making him better that is annoying people. Why are we still celebrating him being the first black president? Who cares? Isn't he human like the rest of us? I guess I have a different view of what racial equality, unity and peace is all about. I see people as human beings -- their skin colour, culture, religion merely being a unique characteristic of these people that should be appreciated. It should be as significant as someones eye colour. Somehow, the fact that people are still caring about his skin colour whether in a positive respect or negative is a sign the world has a long ways to go. So do I think Obama deserves a peace award? No. There are humble musicians who have inspired more people to peace and racial/religious harmony than this "great leader of the free world". When you see the supporters and fans of these people, they don't care whether you're black or white, if you're christian or muslim, it's not even an issue. With President Barack Obama, it seems like race is the ONLY issue.

I was wondering where NASA got the permission/right to do whatever it wants, but I don't have a problem with what they are doing, it's interesting and they're better at doing what they do than I am, for sure! Calling it a missile is kind of an blowing it out of proportion, it's supposed to be more minor than the large meteorites that hit on a weekly basis only they can send a satellite in right behind the first "rocket" when it's controlled. If there are better ways to study it as you say, I think they'd love to hear your ideas. The fact is no matter what reasons you have for not liking the idea of ramming a space ship onto the surface of the moon, whether it's the possibility crushing a city of tiny intelligent creatures (a la Twilight Zone) or just plain rude, collisions with the moon are hardly a rare occurence. Look at it! http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Do you really think it will mind having something new crash into it for a change?