Messages

9001

Living Room / Re: First thing to do in 2006

« on: December 27, 2005, 11:35 AM »

First thing to do in 2006: recover from hangover, eat bacon and eggs and quaff a repair-beer

9002

Finished Programs / Re: MP3 Player

« on: December 25, 2005, 10:05 AM »

brotherS, is there any 2.x download on the official winamp site? Last time I checked, I couldn't find it... glad I kept the 2.91 install files, but curious whether there's a more recent 2.x version available.

9003

Post New Requests Here / Re: .EXE extention changer

« on: December 25, 2005, 03:21 AM »

Or, download http://apatch.tk/ - it has a bunch of patching options that makes messenger nicer to work with

9004

General Software Discussion / Re: Core Force

« on: December 25, 2005, 03:15 AM »

It's free, though. I just wonder why everybody adds all kinds of access control to their security solutions, instead of providing "just" a flexible rock-solid firewall...

9005

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Live Messenger-no i don't have any to give away-yet.

« on: December 25, 2005, 03:13 AM »

Nice with a little laugh the morning after the big evening 

9006

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Live Messenger-no i don't have any to give away-yet.

« on: December 24, 2005, 08:16 AM »

Live Messenger? What is this, anyway?

9007

Screenshot Captor / Re: Request : mouse pointer shadow

« on: December 22, 2005, 03:01 AM »

I wonder if it's possible to capture the actual pointer? If it's drawn hardware accelerated or even if windows just hides it when doing a bitblt, it could prove problematic

9008

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Free Download Manager + FlashGot 0.5.9.99

« on: December 21, 2005, 04:34 AM »

I haven't used download managers for quite a while - started with GetRight like most people probably did, then moved to FlashGet... and then stopped using these managers since I got fast & stable ADSL. Larger downloads were usually done with torrents or ftp anyway, both having okay resume capabilities.

Just installed FlashGot + FDM today, since I was too lazy to manually click all the files at Microsoft's "PlatformSDK full download" site - pretty nice being able to "download selection"

9009

Living Room / Re: NSFW-Yahoo news really neads an editor

« on: December 21, 2005, 03:32 AM »

Haha, poor guy

9010

Living Room / Re: nudone's new pc

« on: December 20, 2005, 05:39 AM »

I can't think of any reasons why having multiple partitions would slow things down... sounds like bollocks to me.

9011

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA - encrypted-SFX-EXE to see secret text

« on: December 20, 2005, 05:25 AM »

Okay, so I fell asleep and didn't get anything done until 5 in the morning or so 

Encryption and hashing is in place, and I have file loading and saving working. Do you want separate passwords for read-only and read/write, or would a "this data is read-only" flag be enough? Do you want read-only to disallow copy/paste operations?

The GUI is the annoying thing to write, I'm doing it at API level to avoid size bloat... this has the downside that it's boring and tedious to write it, though. The application will have it's own edit control, so decrypted text never goes to disk.

Current exe size is ~70kb uncompressed, and it will stay below 100kb when finished. If that's too large, I can rewrite some stuff to get it smaller.

Unfortunately, I don't know if I'll have more time to work on this before the new year - I'm celebrating Christmas at my dads place and staying there for a while. But I guess I could stuff some development tools on my USB flash drive...

9012

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA - encrypted-SFX-EXE to see secret text

« on: December 19, 2005, 09:47 AM »

I'm working on a little something that's closer to the original idea, and has adequate encryption. I'll hopefully have it done later this evening... stay tuned

9013

Best Text Editor / Re: evolvEd - General Purpose Text Editor

« on: December 19, 2005, 08:37 AM »

Ok, so a few days passed 

My initial impression is that the editor is somewhat slow, which is probably caused by it being mutiple-instance rather than having tabs or MDI. (ie, when I open a new document, it takes that somewhat-less-than-half-a-second before it opens). Also, the line highlight bar doesn't update until you let go of your arrow keys, except if it's at the top or bottom of a document.

I find it a bit distracting that dialogs don't use the system default font, and the flashing messages on the status bar are distrcting too (ok, those can be disabled). You might want to provide an option to disable smooth scrolling for mousewheel.

I really like the color schemes though, and it does seem to have enough features for a lot of people - I'll stick with Notepad++ though, because it has tabs and it's easy to write plugins for it. But good work nonetheless

9014

General Software Discussion / Re: Has any one held off on upgrading to Firefox 1.5?

« on: December 19, 2005, 08:16 AM »

Ho humm... fox 1.5 seems faster than 1.07, but it's still a bloated pig. Opera feels better, but has issues with my java-based webbank and rendering on some sites. I'm back to running fox 1.5 though, scrapbook and adblock are features I really miss in Opera.

So, well, I'm running firefox 1.5. Just wish they would get their damn act together and fix up the speed and memory hogging issues.

9015

Living Room / Re: nudone's new pc

« on: December 19, 2005, 07:48 AM »

YOU BASTARD!

Congratulations, hope it's a real killer. You should take pics while you assemble it, always lovely to see those miniseries ^_^

9016

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA - encrypted-SFX-EXE to see secret text

« on: December 17, 2005, 03:43 PM »

Hm, re-saving to the exe "isn't possible" - or rather, it would require the use of temporary files. Would still be possible without too big security flaws by encrypting before saving the temporary file, but still...

9017

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA - encrypted-SFX-EXE to see secret text

« on: December 17, 2005, 11:14 AM »

Stefan, do you need to be able to edit the file, or is read-only access just fine?

If read-only is fine, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with some hack

9018

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Possible Large Directory Opus Discount

« on: December 17, 2005, 11:10 AM »

Presumably, despite all the gripes, MS still has a product people want to buy, or there are some parts to MS Office that aren't included in OpenOffice that people use.

Ooo feels a lot heavier than msoffice - at least program startup time is insane in comparison (and that is *without* using either products' startup-time accelerator). Also, while it has certainly become better with recent versions, Ooo's support of MS formats still have a few problems with non-trivial documents (yes, proprietary formats etc., but meh.)

I suppose the strong automation support in Office is also important to some people. There's a lot of apps that are just frontends for access (and not even VB frontends, but just an access frontend file thing), and I've seen examples of solutions that rely heavily on excel. God know how many in-house solutions depend on Office...

I quite like Ooo, it's a lot less cluttered than ms-office. But it's larger and slower - this is annoying, but something I can live with for personal use (I don't fire up Office all that often). I really wish I could switch to Ooo at the museum where I do IT administration, but I'm afraid Ooo is not all there yet.

Both guys who run the company are as nice as can be when corresponding with them via email.  I say this because I don't want anyone to misinterpret my remarks above as me thinking he's a pr-ck because he's not.

Okay, at least that's something then

9019

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Possible Large Directory Opus Discount

« on: December 17, 2005, 04:08 AM »

The author nearly never ever puts Directory Opus on sale & when people complain about the high price he usually acts like his program would be a bargain at twice the price.

Doesn't sound like a program I'd be comfortable using, then... arrogant software developers = 

9020

Living Room / Google in the sixties

« on: December 14, 2005, 08:22 PM »

http://fury.com/imag...oogle_circa_1960.jpg 

9021

Living Room / Re: How much ram do you really need?

« on: December 14, 2005, 04:41 PM »

I don't know, Carol - I would assume MS WDM drivers to be based off ATi. Note that the drivers are generally pretty well-working, and I have only had one or two driver crashes while using a ATi r9600xt (and those were heat-based back then I think).

But if you have an ATi system, I would recommend NOT using LargeSystemCache=1 (and if on XP, go the control panel way and check that your system is optimized for "Programs" and not "System Cache"). Not all systems will show up this bug, and probably only systems with 1+ GB of ram. But if it does show up, you'll need to dig out your NTFS recovery tools...


See this thread: http://win.asmcommun...ex.php?topic=17926.0

9022

General Software Discussion / Re: Are vector graphics universally accepted in web design ?

« on: December 14, 2005, 04:16 PM »

Humm... there's other vector-based fileformats than flash, but unfortunately you probably won't find any support except for "bleeding-edge" browsers. Or well, at least not in IE

9023

Living Room / Re: "Price as Signal" - very interesting piece

« on: December 14, 2005, 01:02 PM »

Even if it does seem a bit rip-off, it's a pretty decent idea. Only for two reasons, though:

1) working when both parties are behind firewalls. There's really no 100% foolproof way around this without using a dedicated man-in-the-middle server.

2) security, both the SSL encryption (which isn't really all that strong, but shows that they prefer taking opensores packages instead of writing their own), but also the "activation code" thingy. Guiding people to download tight/ultravnc, set up settings and security etc... is a pain in the behind.

What makes it come off as cheap is the use of VNC. I don't know how efficient the protocol itself is, but the idea of taking screen screenshots at regular intervals doesn't work too well. Even on a 100mbit LAN, VNC has always seemed pretty laggy to me. Ultr@VNC with GDI mirror driver is an improvement, but I've yet to find something that beats Microsoft RDP...

9024

Living Room / when physics become fun

« on: December 14, 2005, 12:53 PM »

My younger brother just directed my attention towards http://www.sodaplay.com/constructor/ - amazing how cute constructions you can make from such simple building blocks (masses and springs, basically). And of course some sine-wave animated "muscles" to make things dynamic... 

9025

Living Room / Re: How much ram do you really need?

« on: December 14, 2005, 12:30 PM »

Also, there's a LargeSystemCache=1 setting which lets windows use a lot of ram for filesystem cache - this gave me some okay speed boosts back when I used it. However, DO NOT USE IT WITH ATi VIDEO CARDS, the drivers are bugged and it will result in data loss that may even look like a physical harddrive error (clicking drive-head sounds, spinup problems, etc.)

On Win2k, you had to do this setting manually. On XP, you can find it in System Properties -> Advanced -> Performance Settings -> Advanced -> "Memory Usage = System Cache". The bug only happens on "some" systems if you're to believe ATi, but I'd stay away from it.