This is a post that all Billionaires should read carefully.  The rest of you can skip it.

I thought it would be fun to imagine what we would do with a single 2 million dollar donation/grant, just for the hell of it.  It's not something serious, just a thought experiment, and in case any long time DC member wins the lottery and hits their head hard on the same day.

Ok so what would we do with a Two Million Dollar (after taxes please) donation?

• I propose we create a Programming Co-operative living space.
• Purchase a multi-unit apartment building in town of donor's choice, with a bottom floor zoned for commercial use.  We could aim for something 10 residential units in the building maybe.  Fixer upper is fine and preferred and I'm happy to do the work fixing it up with volunteers.
• The residential units will be provided as rotating medium-term free living spaces for programmers who are willing to spend most of their time working on free/opensource/donationware software, and on teaching programming.
• The bottom floor would be used as an open community programming/hacker space where nerds can come to hang out, write software, work on experimental computer projects (art exhibits, etc.), help tutor people in programming, and play and invent board games.
• The building will be DC headquarters and open at all hours to visitors and to provide assistance to learning coders; it will be an official non-profit and raise money to pay for ongoing expenses.
• On the front of the building will be a bronze bust of the donor holding Cody the mascot in his hands.

Any ideas to add?

It's day 8 of the fundraiser, and we're soldiering on.. $8,115 raised so far -- well passed our initial goal but the donations have definitely slowed down dramatically since they peak rate after the fundraiser email/newsletter went out.  That's to be expected -- all of the existing fans of the site have by now sent in their donations, and right now we are seeing the slow march of new donors succumbing to our modest charms..

For day 8, DC member Stoic Joker (author of the popular printer tool Page Countster), released a new utility called "(File and Folder) Fix When".  It's a tool for batch updating file data/time stamps:

• Read more and download: https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=25999

Day 7 of the Fundraiser and we're going strong.  If you've been following the fundraiser so far you know that each day we're trying to post something new -- a new minireview, coding snacks, major software update,etc.

Today it's my turn, and I've released a major new version of my Clipboard Help+Spell application for getting the most out of your windows clipboard, along with a new 15 minute overview video on the program.  I hope you find it useful.

The video is: here.


You can download the program from the Clipboard Help+spell web page.

Day 6 of the fundraiser.. Last night we reached our goal of $6,000 raised (!).  Thank you to everyone who donated.  That's enough to pay for a full year of our deluxe hosting for the site.  As we did two years ago during the last fundraiser, we've extended the range of the thermometer and will keep going for the remainder of March -- hoping to break $10k.

We could definitely use the extra money -- for hosting costs beyond the next year, to distribute the software coders on the site, to pay for the fun things we give away (each year we spend almost $700 just sending out mugs to the participants in our NANY programming challenge).

I hope you will join us if you haven't already (if you have donated during the fundraiser, why not post to this thread and say hello).

For today's fundraiser release, DC member timns (famous creator of the awesome Head in the Clouds web comic) has posted an interesting How To guide for "Using Skype to Monitor Remote Systems".

We provide a little network of servers that host several web services with various API's. Obviously, as part of this we have to offer support and are committed to fairly aggressive SLA's.  In order to help with this, I decided to implement a continual monitoring system to alert us of any systems falling over in our little farm. Being on a limited budget and an inveterate code tinkerer, I set up a little project to see if I could rustle something up. As far as I am aware, this is a novel approach to real-time systems monitoring. A sort of "poor man's Tivoli" if you like.

I tend to avoid anything that reminds me of a phone, but I have recently come to appreciate the value of skype as a tool for collaboration over long distances.

• Click here to read the full HowTo now..

Basic Info

App Name	Clock-on-Desktop from Positbolt Software
App URL	http://www.posiboltsoftware.com/
App Version Reviewed	Extended Edition

Intro:

Clock-on-Desktop is a pretty good name for this product really, since that's exactly what this software does: it provides you with any number of very elegant-looking clocks that sit right on your desktop. The software comes bundled with over 50 skins which means you'll probably find several that are to your personal taste.

I chose it since I'm always on the lookout for ways to make my desktop 'just so' and I am a fussy old stoat. The clocks are skinnable, scalable and support any timezone. I have ended up with a fairly plain, very clear skin that complements my rainmeter theme nicely. This in itself is quite surprising since I am a terrible one for fiddling with the desktop.

Anyway, initial impressions are good: the interface is very nicely designed, with smooth-looking icons and a reasonably intuitive GUI for setting up the basics. The guys clearly have a pretty talented artist working with them, and it's this that makes the software quite appealing. It's verging on the slightly-chubby, soft, Mac-like look and feel. Luckily we stay just on the safe side of twee.

Ok day 5 of the fundraiser.  We're at $5,900 donated by 269 individuals.  Almost at our $6,000 goal -- if we reach that we will extend the thermometer range and keep going!

Today for the fundraiser celebration we have a new mini-review, by DC member Tomos, of a new program called Scrivner, which is still in beta:

"Scrivener is a tool for writers. It's basically an rich text outliner with a very nice gui, and the ability to show/edit summaries of a folder's content (the corkboard), and of course the ability to export/compile all those entries as one document (images not supported).  It is still in beta. Initial impressions are good, but I have been able to crash it by importing an image (I have yet to see can I reproduce that), and I have found a bunch of minor bugs. In general it seems well behaved though and very usable."

• Read the full mini-review: here.