Makestation has officially hit 20,000 posts!

A big congratulations to the community, we could not have made it this far without you. Thank you all, for those that post a lot, and even for those that do more lurking. Its the combined community involvement that has made the Makestation community a great place to be.

This has been a great year for the forum so far. I look forward to seeing you all around during the next big milestone!

This is a new forum game. We're gonna build a skyscraper. The goal is to get to 100 floors. We count up, but we must state what's on the floor that we are building. Also, we're skipping the number 13 because real skyscrapers skip it too.  

I'll start us off: Floor 1: The lobby.

Hy Admins, after the Shoutbox doesn't quite fit the style, I tried to change that:

Open the theme template "index" and replace:
{$dvz_shoutbox}

with:
<table border="0" cellspacing="{$theme['borderwidth']}" cellpadding="{$theme['tablespace']}" class="tborder">
<tr>
<td class="trow1">{$dvz_shoutbox}</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br />

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/52261216

British motor racing legend Sir Stirling Moss has died at the age of 90 following a long illness.

He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Formula 1 drivers of all time, even though he did not win the World Championship.

Moss retired from public life in January 2018 because of ongoing health problems.

"It was one lap too many, he just closed his eyes," said his wife Lady Moss.

Moss previously spent 134 days in hospital after suffering a chest infection while on holiday in Singapore in December 2016.

Is that a mistake when quoting the parentheses ?

Greets Tc4me

Title says it all. What's your relationship status? Don't forget to vote in the poll!

I used to do a lot of covers. Namely vocal covers and guitar covers. If any of you guys want to know what my voice sounds like, check out the link below. It's a cover of Distant Early Warning by Rush. Actually, my father and myself did it, along with some help from a couple friends of his. The guitars and vocals are me. The keyboards and bass are my father, and the drums are someone else. Not perfect by any means, but it was a fun hobby of ours back in the day.

My Vocals and Guitar: 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tng7202umub7on...2.mp3?dl=0

We had a good time with it. We do a lot of them, and I want to get back into doing originals. I recorded the instruments for this track (titled Shrapnel) but I never got around to finishing them. 

Open to any feedback or suggestions. I'll be getting back into it in about six months!

I make MyBB plugins on the side. We've so far released a number of them made by members of Makestation, with several more in the pipeline. Right now, I'm looking for help with the status feed and I'll be getting it wrapped up in the next month or so as my schedule frees up. 

Namely, I'm looking at someone to help test, and someone to help us audit for security. I aggressively test my plugins before releasing them (both for stability and for rogue input), but another set of eyes is a huge help. I had some help with BAM's testing, so if anyone would like to help test, please let me know here! 

Regarding live boards, we are using the status feed here, but I can't recommend using it on a live board currently UNLESS you are okay with completely reinstalling it once the release comes. There will be no upgrade path from pre-beta releases to the final. We've been doing it by hand here, but it's a fairly involved process.

Hello community! 

We are, for the first time in six years, reconsidering some of our board layout. We're still a tight knit, small forum, so we don't need a huge number of boards. However, we're making a goal to shuffle a few things around and will probably a board or two in the process. We need suggestions on what you think needs improvement. I've done as many mockups as I can, and something just isn't quite sticking yet.  

The main problem we're having now is that project journals are kind of shuffled throughout the forum. That was actually something the original Makestation solved with its initial layout. We had designated sections for ideas, creativity discussion, and project journals, and these boards would contain just about any niche. The issue was that ALL project journals went into one board. You'd visit that one board and you'd see almost any topic imagineable. 

We ended up splitting them out by the topic (media, technology, writing, etc.) and putting a project journals sub-board in each category. It kept things a little more organized at the time. We're looking into some other improvements, so I wanted to get an idea of whether you guys would use these, and most importantly, for inspiration from the community. Current ideas in the pipeline: 

• Threadmarks. This is a specialized table of contents for project journal threads you create. If you write an update or another post, you can hit "add threadmark" when you add the post and it gets added to your table of contents. No feature exists within our forum software for this, and there is no plugin. We will have to write our own. I will happily do so, but I want to get an idea of whether or not people think it's useful before we go ahead and give it the green light.
  
  
• Project Journal list in profiles. Profiles have been heavily revamped in recent months on the forum. Ideally, we want the community to be as profile-centered as possible, so we've been adding new features for them. This would also require a special plugin, but if they'd be useful, we will write one. 
  
  

I use Python almost religiously for anything I can get away with. It's honestly *almost* the perfect language. It's easy to write and read (and clean and concise), works on any platform without compiling specifically, has libraries that are perfect for almost anything, and is installed (or easy to install) almost everywhere. 

The problem with Python is that, boy oh boy, if it isn't slow... And I do a lot of scientific computing with it. It's not acceptable to spend 5 seconds just to rotate one image. 

So I found Cython. It's one of numerous attempts to make Python significantly faster. Unlike some of the other options, Cython somewhat requires some custom modifications to the underlying code (namely declaring C data types). This is not required. It will compile without a hitch if you forget them, so it's easy to retrofit old code. However, you throw away a lot of the performance benefits if you don't declare the types. 

I find that it's quite a bit faster than PyPy (another good alternative to the standard Python interpreter that uses just-in-time compilation). Cython is almost a language of its own because it requires certain modifications, but it's literally the ease of Python with the speed of C, and I don't think you can get much better than that. 

The only downside? You have to compile for every architecture...