I spent the better part of this afternoon adding Amazon Web Payments to the methods you can submit payments to the DC site.

My throat is sore from all the yelling and cursing I did at the computer screen.. It is a holy nightmare navigating the amazon.com web payment system website -- there are about 50 different logins for different aspects of different facets of their different payment services.. it's a total rats nest and one of the most convoluted and chaotic payment systems i have ever seen.  I had a hard time believing how badly organized it was.  That's being generous.  Really really horribly done.  For a company that got things so right with their normal site checkout, the developer side of things here is a total unmitigated failure.

Anyway..

It works, and it's up now.  I had to set a fixed amount for the amazon payment button and for the fundraiser i chose a large value ($50) but i put alternative buttons on the alternative payment page ($10, $25, $50, $100).  Maybe i'll lower the main button after the fundraiser.

It looks like the amazon web payment system makes payment really easy for users if they already have an amazon.com account, and it charges less of a fee than paypal, so that's all good.  If the payer doesn't have an amazon.com account however, it looks like it's going to make them set one up before letting the proceed to make a payment, which is pretty annoying.  In that respect paypal is still *much* better, as it lets people just fill in credit card info quickly for a one time payment.

Nice writeup on FreewareGenius today about DC member seedling's program:

http://www.freewareg...ul-playlist-creator/

Random Mixtape Maker is a free program that can create "intelligent" playlists based on user-defined guidelines. For example you can tell Random Mixtape Maker to look for music inside certain folders but to avoid a certain subset of folders and certain songs you specify; to create a playlist that plays for x minutes; to limit each artist to 3 songs max; to include the tracks in your "must have" list, and to always follow some tracks with others, and so on.

Direct link to Random Mixtape Maker page: http://seedling.dcmembers.com/rmtm.html

I used to think this setting was a decent performance thing, and used to enable it. My impression, based on various faulty wannabe-tech-knowledgy blogs was that "Enable write caching" was only the usual filesystem caching, whereas "Enabled advanced performance" meant the actual disk write cache (ie., the on-disk memory buffer, usually 8, 16 or 32 megabytes).

It's a while since I learned the true meaning, and turned off the setting in shock, and then didn't think much more about it. But after yesterday's slashdot article Apps That Rely On Ext3's Commit Interval May Lose Data In Ext4 (and especially a lot of the moronic comments, sigh) I remembered this setting again, and thought it would be a decent thing warning about it here at DC.

Basically, what it does is making the Windows API function FlushFileBuffers() do nothing. This API is meant to flush the OS's write cache for a file to disk, and is the only way to guarantee that your data goes to disk in a modern OS. Enabling the setting probably won't affect a lot of software positively (since not a lot of software actually uses FlushFileBuffers()), but for things like databases this is crucial to ensure data consistency across crashes.

Read the technet link for a more in-depth description, and go turn that checkmark off if you have it enabled..

I'm a photographer an need to make a tree of folders with names of customers. I have a customer list in an .xls or .txt file, can this be done automatically so it saves me much time. can someone help me, i just downloaded autohotkey or is there an other way to do this?

From www.makeuseof.com:

I’m sure that this has happened to you before. Someone you have ties to, whether it’s a co-worker, your boss, or even worse, a parent, has finally discovered social networking and wants to be your newest Facebook friend. For me personally, that’s no big deal. I’m fairly open about my online activities. Everything I write, Digg, ...
Here’s what I would do to keep that fact confined to my closer friends:
On your Facebook home page, you should see the ‘Settings’ menu close to the search field on your upper-right. Open that menu and go to ‘Privacy Settings’
...

http://www.makeuseof...m-all-your-business/

Most large programs for Windows PCs come packaged in installers, which guide the user through installing the program, add entries on the start menu, and provide an entry in the Add/Remove software control panel.

But there are times when you really don't want to be able to use software without installing it -- such as placing it on a usb drive and running it from a public computer or from a friend's computer.  Such install-less programs are generally called "portable."

The PortableApps suite was designed to help facilitate the use of portable applications, by making it easier for you to collect, manage, and launch sets of portable applications.  It's a cool free project.

PortableApps.com Suite™ is a complete collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, audio player, sudoku game, password manager, PDF reader, minesweeper clone, backup utility and integrated menu, all preconfigured to work portably. Just drop it on your portable device and you're ready to go.

http://portableapps.com

Note: we've talked about portableapps.com plenty of times on the dc forum; for more info see here.