Messages

126

fSekrit / Re: FSekrit 1.40 Error Saving File

« on: November 23, 2016, 03:49 AM »

Hi, sorry for the late reply.

The problem sounds a bit strange - you've been using fSekrit for years, and suddenly this error appears, without making any changes to the system? That the problem disappears in safe mode hints to me that the problem is with software, not NTFS permissions, and my guess would have been antivirus software. But you say there has been no changes, and that you even uninstalled Avira.

fSekrit works by copying itself to a temporary location and using that as the "editor" executable, to be able to write to the "document" executable (it's not possible to write to the executable file of a running program without doing some very dirty tricks). Under normal operation, this means the editor executable is in %TEMP%, unless you have a file called fSekrit.portable in the same folder as the document executable.

When saving, fSekrit starts by writing to a temporary file, then it deletes the document.exe, and finally moves the temporary file to the document.exe name. The fSekrit 1.40 codebase doesn't check for errors deleting document.exe, so that's probably the step that fails.

I'm not sure why that happens, as it's not something I've seen under normal operation (I'm running Win10 these days, but fSekrit 1.40 has been running on pretty much every version from Win9x). But something is probably keeping the document.exe open - this could be backup software, antivirus software, or even explorer.exe. I would suggest grabbing Sysinternals' Handle and see if it reports some other program keeping the document.exe open.

127

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Vopt 9 defragger free

« on: August 13, 2016, 07:10 PM »

I notice some defraggers have an "SSD mode."  I wonder if it is merely marketing though.

-MilesAhead (August 13, 2016, 08:58 AM)

Yes and no :-)
Just like everybody added "32" and "64" to their application names when those platforms were new, adding "SSD" to disk/filesystem utilities is a thing.

There's some valid things a defragger could do with SSD in mind, though. Like being less aggressive in consolidating fragments - it's not as necessary on SSDs as HDDs, and you want to minimize writes. Not sure if applications can control TRIM or if that's solely handled by the filesystem drivers, but that might be a thing as well.

Yep, pure speculation

I wonder if that is because it would have taken work to get it to the point where it could be released as such.

-wraith808 (August 13, 2016, 10:17 AM)

Good point.
While there might not be a lot to be embarassed at at that point in life, there could be 3rd-party code with licenses that aren't OS-friendly. A code dump without 3rd-party stuff that doesn't compile could be useful in and by itself, but it would require work to do... and that's probably not what you want to spend your final days on.

128

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Vopt 9 defragger free

« on: August 13, 2016, 02:45 AM »

Too bad he didn't go all the way and made it open-source, not just gratis

Of course, with SSD hard disks most of the above has become a moot point, accessing fragmented or defragmented files on a SSD hard disk hardly makes any difference in time and are much faster than on a standard spinning hard disk anyway.  Still, the added bonuses from strictly separating files are still valid.

-Shades (August 12, 2016, 10:23 AM)

Would be interesting to see some benchmarks on this. I guess that if the fragments aren't smaller than the SSDs page size, you won't be able to measure a speed difference.

129

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CHS more colourful default?

« on: August 02, 2016, 04:13 PM »

Tastes differ - I find the "Save.Me" screenshot to look pretty gaudy, and prefer applications to use the Windows system skin unless there's a very good reason to look different. Which there isn't, for 99% of the software out there

130

General Software Discussion / Re: Firemin: reduce FF memory usage

« on: August 02, 2016, 02:10 PM »

I don't have much patience anymore with AddOns that aren't zero configuration.

-MilesAhead (August 02, 2016, 09:19 AM)

Great power and flexibility requires a bit of effort - I'm impressed how easy uMatrix is to use, considering what it does.

131

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« on: July 25, 2016, 05:50 PM »

Well, the D programming language was done in this spirit.  There is a good book or two on it.  I never thought it would survive but it has.  Still didn't feel "perfect" to me.

-mouser (July 25, 2016, 03:49 PM)

Last time I tried D was several years ago. The languaged felt kinda nice, but iirc it fell into the "meh, garbage collection and no deterministic destructors" language bin, and felt like it wouldn't be suitable for the kind of systems-level programming you can use C++ for. Also, tooling was bad. My impression was "decent enough language, but I might as well use C#".

Isn't this what Go was designed for?

-Deozaan (July 25, 2016, 05:09 PM)

Go was designed by people who haven't heard about languages newer than C.

I'm currently working my way through "The Go Programming Language", and there's a lot of things that seem really ill-conceived for a language designed in modern times. I tries to be systems-level, but has garbage collection (loss of determinism), but still has pointer/non-pointer types - which affects class (or, well, not classes, because Go) design. Also, while having GC, it doesn't have exceptions, so you're back to C-style "let's check for and propagate errors alle the time!". It doesn't have generics, leading to really awful code involving interface{} (aka Java/C# Object), and eschews modern language constructs because "We hire kiddos straight out of college and they don't grok advanced features" - come on, even Java has moved beyond manually iterating data types in favor of modern collections framework.

Go seems like a decent enough language if you need to write small trivial console applications, utilities that Unix-style orchestrate other utilities, etc... but I don't really like it. It also has bad tooling, and a totally insane excuse for library management. As I understand it, you kinda either pull in libraries from a GitHub master branch, or you copy out the source code for a specific version in the source tree of each and every of your projects that use that library.

---

I like the tidbits I've had time to read about Rust, but haven't had time to look properly at it.

132

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« on: July 25, 2016, 02:48 PM »

As a long time C++ coder, I'm still skeptical of the benefits to releasing new versions of C++, but it's a good book, and one of those books where you learn interesting things about language design.  Note: Not suitable for learning C++ only for those with lots of C++ coding experience.

-mouser (July 22, 2016, 07:37 PM)

There's been a lot of important development in C++, especially C++11 - threading and memory model, auto, lambdas.

But there were several times while reading EMC++ where I twitched or frowned. "With all these years of expertise, how could they make this part of the library so convoluted?" and such. Can't remember the specifics, but iirc I frowned at stuff related to time, async/tasks, as well as some of the details about move semantics.

I kinda wish for a "Modern C++" language - something that does away with all the undefined behaviour, bad historic decisions (e.g. most of the standard library), but still retains the good things (super performance, multiparadigm programming, deterministic constructors/destructors)...

133

Living Room / Re: better battery life out of a laptop

« on: July 18, 2016, 08:54 AM »

Hmm. I think you may find with most RAMdrives nowadays that stability is probably not an issue - unless the OS is unstable, of course.   

-IainB (July 17, 2016, 09:16 PM)

Or somebody trips over your power chord, or there's an outage, or if you just happen to be unlucky and get that once-in-a-blue-moon-BSOD. Windows is pretty stable these days, as long as you're running Vista or later, but bad things can happen. I'm not very fond of losing work.

Sure, you can use a ramdisk that flushes to disk at set intervals, but then you still have the drive spinning up and down every now and then. Doing that too often is not good for drive health, and losing 30 minutes of work can be a real bummer.

I do use a flush-to-disk ramdrive myself, but only for %TEMP% and my Firefox profile - and it's backed up with Crashplan. I can live with losing half an hour of browsing history, but not a lot more than that.

2. ...Screen is definitely the biggest power drain, especially when you're not running anything compute-intensive

-f0dder (July 16, 2016, 03:40 PM)

Yes. I've always assumed this to be likely, though I didn't collect any data to back it up.

-IainB (July 17, 2016, 09:16 PM)

I've measured light/dark difference (wall out let level), and it was quite noticable for both CRT and TFT/LED screens. Can't remember just how much it was, but it was enough that it's something you'd consider for a laptop screen - but not enough that I'd be worried about cost using my desktop machine

However, I do wonder what hard disk drives you have had that reduced your QOL by vibrating or being too noisy.   
I mean, I have never experienced such problems on a laptop hard drive (even failing drives), over the years. It's generally the fan(s) that will tend to vibrate and/or become too noisy, because the heat-exchanger is clogged-up by bits of airborne fluff and flakes of dead skin to the extent that the waste temperature rises through lack of adequate cooling, so more power is fed to the fans to improve the cooling. Taking apart and thoroughly cleaning the heat-exchanger grill, the fan enclosure (and the fan blades too), and a shot of CRC on the fan spindle usually transforms it into a cool and as-good-as-new state, believe me.   

-IainB (July 17, 2016, 09:16 PM)

For all HDD-based laptops I've used, HDD rotation has produced noticable vibration, and most of them noise as well. Whereas have almost been louder than the HDD spinning noise, the spinning noise is a lot more high-pitched, which is a noise profile that annoys me a lot more than the fan noise. The clicking noise of moving the actuator arm also tends to be louder than the fan, but that noise doesn't really annoy me.

At any rate, swapping your HDD for a SSD reduced both noise and vibration - it's a win/win situation. Will probably also reduce heat, but that one depends a bit on the drive. Last time I did research, most SSDs tend to have a constant (although small) power drain even in idle, whereas HDDs go to about 0 when they're spun down... and some of the faster SSDs could guzzle a lot of juice and get moderately hot.

134

Living Room / Re: recommendations for a free web host

« on: July 16, 2016, 04:47 PM »

Personally I'd look for non-free but cheap. I simply don't trust "free".

A local sporting club might not have a big budget, but wouldn't something like $10/month be possible? That would probably get you pretty far - might even get real support and working backups.

135

Living Room / Re: better battery life out of a laptop

« on: July 16, 2016, 03:40 PM »

Don't even consider running editing on a ramdrive - it's simply too much grief if you lose your work. There's a good chance there will be enough background I/O anyway that your main drive wouldn't spin down... aaaand they don't even use that much power.

Screen is definitely the biggest power drain, especially when you're not running anything compute-intensive - the hardware change that would be most likely to get you more battery life would be, well, the battery - especially if the computer is more than a couple of years old. Batteries wear out over time.

A SSD might be a good option - you might not get much extra battery life out of it, but it's a big quality of life thing. Less noise, faster program startup, much reduced vibration (nice if you use the laptop in your lap). And do be careful to check reviews first: in laptop situations (especially when it's been possible to spin down the disk), some brands have actually ended up being more power-hungry than traditional disks. Don't worry about NCQ as you're not doing disk-intensive stuff, and this also means you shouldn't really worry too much about TRIM either (do chipsets really have to support it? I thought it was just pass-through to the drive, and the support was tied to OS).

136

Living Room / Re: Logitech Unifying software permanently alters mouse firmware? How to revert it?

« on: July 15, 2016, 01:22 PM »

Pairing button might not be enough - a colleague once borrowed the keyboard I had at the time, and I ended up having to ask another colleague to install the logitech drivers and re-pair the keyboard to my dongle, because I refused to install the drivers myself.

137

General Software Discussion / Re: Firemin: reduce FF memory usage

« on: July 05, 2016, 03:04 PM »

Here's a snapshot of my uBlock filter lists:


You'll notice I don't have, for instance, "Anti-social" lists - that's because I disallow allow connections to those domains in uMatrix.

I run NoScript in whitelisting mode. Sure, it's a bit of a bother, but for domains I visit on a regular basis, the NoScript + uMatrix only has to be done once (or when sites change their infrastructure). YMMV

Ads annoy - I can live with "quiet" ones, but there's too much stuff that's huge, pop-over, blinking or whatever. And on top of that, ads are a major malware risk, because they depend on 3rd-party ad networks. Those have been hacked every now and then, causing legitimate sites inadvertently serving malware.

Oh, and I also use RefControl and only send the HTTP Referer header for those sites that absolutely need it.

138

General Software Discussion / Re: Win10 installation with MBR

« on: July 04, 2016, 03:24 PM »

especially Diskcryptor, which won't work on UEFI/GPT. I do not want to use bitlocker and - please - no discussion about this.

-brahman (July 03, 2016, 01:02 PM)

Switch to VeraCrypt already - no discussion.

139

General Software Discussion / Re: Firemin: reduce FF memory usage

« on: July 04, 2016, 03:21 PM »

Steven, swap ABP with uBlock Origin (more efficient engine) add uMatrix to the mix - it lets you (easily) select which 3rd-party domains you want to let a site load stuff from (can be controlled on css, image, script, XHR, ... level) and your browser will be zoooooooooming

140

General Software Discussion / Re: Firemin: reduce FF memory usage

« on: June 29, 2016, 02:10 PM »

I took a quick look through the source code.  The main program is written in AutoIt3 and it does in fact periodically call EmptyWorkingSet() API.

-MilesAhead (June 29, 2016, 09:13 AM)

Ah, so my initial hunch was correct: "just another piece of junk using EmptyWorkingSet()".

With quotes like "attempt to eliminate Firefox memory leaks and decrease the amount of memory Firefox uses.", "all the memory leaks was gone." and "The method Firemin uses to decrease Firefox memory usage is not proven and the debate over if it works or not will go on until the end of time, but the logic remains; if it works for you, use it and if it does not, don't use it. It is really that simple." makes me roll my eyes.

And "Firemin runs the clean memory API call a few times per second."? That's just insane.

Manually calling EmptyWorkingSet does nothing Windows won't do itself, it'll only do it prematurely. It doesn't fix anything, it only (potentially) swaps stuff out to your pagefile - before it's necessary to do so. Which means you'll get a disk hit, and another disk hit when that stuff needs to be paged back in.

141

General Software Discussion / Re: ERAM (Open Source RAM Disk) Development

« on: June 27, 2016, 12:07 PM »

3. I still think that there's more speed to get out of this driver when it works properly on a 64-bit OS.

-Zero3K (June 26, 2016, 05:18 PM)

You seem somewhat obsessed about this particular RamDisk - why? Even according to benchmark you attached, it doesn't seem to be anything special... and it has a nasty CPU spike (might be a glitch - the benchmark doesn't strike me as being particularly thorough).

For people to want to spend their time improving something, there has to be some motivation. The uncertain license status is a turn-off, and in general it just seems more worthwhile to contribute to something not dead, like ImDisk.

142

General Software Discussion / Re: ERAM (Open Source RAM Disk) Development

« on: June 26, 2016, 03:19 PM »

1. You should still try contacting the author if you haven't done so already - he might not care, but it's really not a good idea getting into copyright trouble.
2. It happened here on DoCo, and it wasn't pretty.

Also, the benchmark PDF you attached seems to be slightly old, and if ImDisk is present, I missed it. Given the somewhat murky status of ERAM, you're probably better off contributing to ImDisk if your interest is OpenSource. If you just want a good, small, fast and  free (beer) RamDisk, get SoftPerfect.

143

General Software Discussion / Re: ERAM (Open Source RAM Disk) Development

« on: June 26, 2016, 02:04 PM »

I removed the License file.

-Zero3K (June 26, 2016, 12:39 PM)

If you want to go through with this, you should probably contact the original author(s) and get some clarification on what license they want.

When something is released without an explicit license, it falls under normal copyright, and can't be considered OpenSource - so it's a bit dangerous contributing to, and doesn't belong on GitHub. I know this might seem pedantic, but keep the CircleDock fiasco in mind...

And you should add an AUTHORS file that make it very clear who and where the code originally came from.

144

General Software Discussion / Re: ERAM (Open Source RAM Disk) Development

« on: June 26, 2016, 02:53 AM »

You can't just take other people's work and stick an arbitrary license on it.

The domain from your link is blocked by uBlock, so...

145

General Software Discussion / Re: ERAM (Open Source RAM Disk) Development

« on: June 26, 2016, 01:43 AM »

So you just snatched that code and stuck a GPLv3 on it?

Size doesn't really matter for a driver (as long as it's not grotesque), speed does - I don't see a benchmark on the GitHub repo, though, only a single CrystalDiskMark screenshot, which doesn't tell anything without a point of reference.

146

General Software Discussion / Re: ERAM (Open Source RAM Disk) Development

« on: June 26, 2016, 12:27 AM »

Did you write this, or get the source from elsewhere and dump it on GitHub?

Are there anything particularly interesting about this RamDisk, compared to ImDisk?

147

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« on: June 15, 2016, 01:07 PM »

Because they're one of the more reputable groups (quality product...) on the darker side

-Stoic Joker (June 15, 2016, 11:11 AM)

Who are they? Never heard of them before.

148

Developer's Corner / Re: jQuery plaintext to hyperlink issue

« on: June 13, 2016, 11:50 AM »

Sounds like you did the change before sending out the message, rather than immediality before displaying it? Also sounds like you're not doing proper escaping of the messages.

149

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« on: June 11, 2016, 02:30 PM »

Congratulations, DeoGeek!

150

Developer's Corner / Re: jQuery plaintext to hyperlink issue

« on: June 11, 2016, 02:30 PM »

Oh no doubt that was my first though. Perhaps I'll just replace <script> tags altogether with null =P. I'm not too worried about my userbase at the moment and will brainstorm on some proper escape handling!

-Asudem (June 11, 2016, 12:46 PM)

Yeah, and if people expect a standard server and have access to the standard code, they might not expect script attacks to work - and it's even less of an issue if you run a strictly private server.

Still, it's nice to Do Things Properly. And don't write your own escaping, find some existing project - there's insane corner cases, including all sorts of unicode nastyness.