A month and a half ago we announced a programming contest here at DC, to give away an amazing programming prize generously donated by long time DC forum member Chris Hanscom.

Three people chose to enter the contest, with entries that could not have been more different.

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Complete DC newcomer Eric Wong blew everyone away with not one but two unusual entries that were extremely impressive from a technical/programming standpoint.  His first program, Webcam Signature, uses a computer webcam to identify and track a colored object and let users create signatures from it.  It's described by eric (VideoInPicture) on this thread, and has it's own full and beautiful website along with a video demo: here.


Eric's second submission, coded in only a couple of weeks, is called Circle Dock, and is a wonderfully cool implementation of a circular floating toolbar/dock/start menu.  Eric describes it in this thread and has another great website for it complete with a demo movie: here.

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Long time active DC participant Eóin entered a very polished professional program for managing sets of windows system services.  His program is called ServiceProfiles, and is described on this post has a website: here.  It's a program we expect many power users would find immediately useful and valuable:

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Sometimes poster and long time DonationCoder chatroom participant hollowlife1987 submitted Btts, a complete standalone torrent tracker, complete with it's own web server (made in C# with asp.net).  It's a pretty impressive accomplishment and a very cool demonstration of what can be done combining asp with C# in a standalone tool.

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We AGONIZED over who to give the prize to.  All of them really deserved it for different reasons.

It's a strange prize to give out because it's such a varied set of tools that very few people on planet earth would have real use for more than one or two of the components in it.  We decided to ask the participants to tell us honestly how they would use the prize if they won it.. We do this quite a bit at DonationCoder because we try very hard to be fair and put things into the hands of those who will benefit from them.

This was actually the primary way we decided who to give the prize to -- not by deciding which program or programmer we liked best, but by deciding at this stage who we thought could most use it.

DeVeDe is a(nother) video converter, but with the sole purpose of producing DVD's viewable on a TV using a standalone DVD player

Features (from the site)


I'll start by saying that I have (until recently) had no interest in or requirement for anything like this, hence my knowledge of all things relating to video editing, conversion, production, etc is practically nil, and as such, I have absolutely no qualifications for writing this review...

Recently though my inlaws purchased a shiny new HDD camcorder...

how is that relevant?  well, for a start they are techonogically challenged.  They really shouldn't have any tech whatsoever, period.  They didn't seek any advice regarding their purchase, just what the salesmen told them on the day (I think you can see where I'm going with this....)

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DeVeDe on the other hand was something of a revelation.  Not only was it dead simple to use, but I understood what it was doing, and I got good results (choose the output format (DVD, VCD, SVCD, CVD or DivX), add my files, answer the prompts, and I'm done!!)

The interfaces are logical, clean, and simple, with all the common functions ready to hand, and the lesser only a click away.   

I know this is controversial, but i tend to agree with the general premise that it's helpful to have one person (or two), who is for all intents and purposes in charge of making final decisions and riding herd over a project.

This short essay talks about why:


http://www.freesoftwarema..._and_open_source_software

This is a Java applet, so you will need Java installed and enabled in your browser, to be able to use this.

http://wordle.net

We all love to hate Windows (or a version of it), but where's the Linux hate? Say no more, the Linux Hater's Blog has you covered, where 'Linux users' are labeled 'lusers' for short. Even ZDNet's Jeremy Allison adds his take on what's good to hate about Linux:

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Reading the LinuxHaters blog is a wonderful way to waste an afternoon. The premise behind it is that Linux is so awful that the blogger must rant about a particular problem they have had with the operating system, and describe it in great detail at least once per day. Every reply is labeled a “flame”, and the people responding don’t seem to know (or maybe they just don’t care) that the whole blog itself is a way to goad fanatical Linux supporters into attacking the author. Usually they complain that the author just “doesn’t get it” as to why Linux really does work well in this particular case. I must confess I enjoy reading the replies sometimes more than the blog posts themselves....

LinuxHater really doesn’t hate Linux, despite the name. No one takes that much time to point out flaws in a product that they completely loathe and despise. The complaints are really cries of frustration with a system that just doesn’t quite do what is desired (albeit well disguised). A friend pointed out to me that the best way to parse LinuxHaters blog is to treat it as a series of bug reports. A perl script could probably parse out the useful information from them and log them as technical bug reports to the projects LinuxHater is writing about. Deep down, I believe LinuxHater really loves Linux, and wants it to succeed.

Here's an interesting article, written in 2006 by a guy who activelly worked in windows Vista.
It's interesting to see the whole process involved in making such a giant product, and how things sometimes don't come out the way they were expected.

http://moishelettvin.blog...ws-shutdown-crapfest.html

To be honest, I actually like the feature mentioned in the article (it's Vista's shutdown button), except for the fact that it comes predifined to "sleep", which makes no sense. After changing it to "shutdown", I think it's a giant step better than XP's dialog.