Recent Posts

1151

General Software Discussion / Re: Utility to get one good copy from three corupted ones?

« Last post by Eóin on May 10, 2007, 08:29 AM »

Thanks for the suggestions guys!

compn, looking for a bittorrent or emule copy was a very good idea, unfortunately I couldn't find either. I looked into zidrav too. It's a neat program, one to remember, but I don't know anyone with a clean copy to get a patch from.

Hirudin, I was thinking along the same lines as you too. I decided to write a tiny app to scan through the three copies byte by byte and any time a discrepancy showed up in just one copy it would discard it.

That threw up some interesting results. First there were loads of discrepancies, so many that you'd end up wondering how anything over 100MB ever downloads correctly. Still, things looked good initially as there was never a spot where all three files disagreed. In the end though the new cleaned copy produced just gave another 4th hash still not matching the MS ones.

So, I'm going to try one last time here on the college connection using IE7 for a change. If that doesn't work I'll just get it myself off of usenet over the weekend. I saw a posted copy there with 300MB extra of par2 redundancy files. I'll have to get a clean version from that.

Thanks again for the suggestions

1152

General Software Discussion / Utility to get one good copy from three corupted ones?

« Last post by Eóin on May 09, 2007, 08:06 AM »

Hey all, these last two days I've been trying to download the recent MSDN Library (April 2007 Edition). Three times I've downloaded it and each time I've gotten three different hashes none of which match the ones from the download page.

Instructions
...snip...
Large Download size
The size of this download is over 2 GB and due to the large size, there have been reports of file corruption during file download. It is recommended to run a CRC verification after downloading.

SHA1 hash: 0x1ACA38B900F89049457EDC325198DC8419C4ACE1.
Or CRC value: 0x24BFED4A.

-www.microsoft.com/downloads

These are the hashes I get

1st
SHA-160     : F53D30759AE25C3DC32109444CBFEC9612A5FA0A
CRC-32      : B69C368F

2nd
SHA-160     : 5BA5BB78DEBD6BF27616AD9BFF420F6D9F8375F2
CRC-32      : 8C28E28C

3rd
SHA-160     : 4074EA3D7F095B466FD8424E24F8029239B14D92
CRC-32      : F6977EEA

Assuming the corruptions are small and different in each file it should be possible to construct a correct file from the three I have. Anyone ever come across a utility that might do something like that? It's frustrating because I've never had problems like this from the p2p networks

1153

General Software Discussion / Re: Things I can do in Linux that I can't do on Windows

« Last post by Eóin on May 08, 2007, 10:14 AM »

Haven't read the article in detail to make an overall comment, but there is a logic flaw in one of the points-

Things I can do in Linux that I can't do on Windows...

... Run an entire operating system for free without pirating software, and without breaking the law.

1154

General Software Discussion / Re: Intel Core 2 Duo + WinXP SP2 problem - only single core detected and used

« Last post by Eóin on May 08, 2007, 03:59 AM »

Did any driver come with the motherboard? I think I needed to install drivers for my Athlon 64 x2 before XP could see the two cores.

1155

Living Room / Re: Almost 50% of Americans shun high tech

« Last post by Eóin on May 07, 2007, 11:13 AM »

Update- A quick scan of the original report indicates it is being misrepresented, first the figures are relating to connectivity (the internet and mobiles) not high tech in general. The actual results which were combined into the 49% figure are as follows-

8% Inexperienced Experimenters
They occasionally take advantage of interactivity, but if they had more experience, they might do more with ICTs.
 
15% Light But Satisfied 
They have some technology, but it does not play a central role in their daily lives. They are satisfied with what ICTs do for them.

11% Indifferents 
Despite having either cell phones or online access, these users use ICTs only intermittently and find connectivity annoying.

15% Off the Network
Those with neither cell phones nor internet connectivity tend to be older adults who are content with old media.

Which paints a very different picture I think.

P.S. Cpilot, I know you didn't misquote the original halfbytes blog so my disagreements with it here are not aimed at you at all

1156

Living Room / Re: Almost 50% of Americans shun high tech

« Last post by Eóin on May 07, 2007, 10:54 AM »

I fail to see how using tech devices occasionally and being hostile to them can be lumped together. By their logic they could just as easily have said-

57% are avid, voracious or occasional users of all things high tech or are hostile towards high tech
23% of users embrace technologies for social networking and employment
10% rely on mobile devices
10% use tech devices but find them a bother

1157

General Software Discussion / Re: Flash Game of the Day: The Last Stand

« Last post by Eóin on May 06, 2007, 07:05 AM »

Yep that was a good one

1158

Living Room / IE7 not actually a recent version of Internet Explorer? (Humour)

« Last post by Eóin on May 04, 2007, 06:48 PM »

Was searching for the MS Platform SDK download and came across an older version. The page didn't work in FireFox so fare enough I fired up IE7 but was a bit surprised

1159

Living Room / Cryptography humor, Bruce Schneier Facts.

« Last post by Eóin on April 30, 2007, 06:53 AM »

Anyone here who came across the Chuck Norris Facts, or perhaps the earlier Vin Diesel Facts and chuckled at a few should definitely check out these much superior Bruce Schneier Facts. There are some very clever and subtle 'facts'. You may even have to google some of the concepts mentioned to get the joke but that makes them all the funnier.

[attach 1][/attach]

ITAR prevents Bruce Schneier from travelling abroad, even though the restrictions on the export of strong crypto have been lifted.

Bruce Schneier puts the "cry" in "cryptography".

There are no prime numbers, just numbers Bruce Schneier hasn't bothered to factor yet.

-http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/

1160

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Quality Comparison: PDF Readers / Viewers (Update +1 and Conclusion)

« Last post by Eóin on April 28, 2007, 09:01 AM »

One big hit against Sumatra is it's 'printed' quality, it's an absolute disaster. I get the impression that it's passes a low-ish resolution raster image to the printer. Also it's painfully slow at doing so.

But anyway I realise this comparison was about 'on screen' quality.

1161

Developer's Corner / Re: source editor that prints indentation guides

« Last post by Eóin on April 26, 2007, 03:50 AM »

Hi ivery, Programmer's Notepad will print whitespace indicators where tab will show up as arrows. Might that be of help to you. See the pdf I printed to with PDFCreator for an example.

[attach1]

1162

Developer's Corner / Re: The OMGWTF Programming Contest - Design Purposefully Buggy Code and Win

« Last post by Eóin on April 25, 2007, 10:54 AM »

That looks like fun, might throw an entry together myself over the weekend if I get the time.

1163

Living Room / Re: Sumotori Dreams - a hilarious 3D sumo game in 87kB

« Last post by Eóin on April 24, 2007, 05:04 AM »

Excellent game, pure entertainment

1164

General Software Discussion / Re: Network/application traffic inspection

« Last post by Eóin on April 21, 2007, 12:38 PM »

Ethereal is a name I've often heard mentioned for this purpose. Its seem now it's going under the new name Wireshark. Haven't used it myself in a long time, and even then it was only ever just out of curiosity.

1165

Living Room / Re: 14 Surefire Ways to Annoy Users

« Last post by Eóin on April 18, 2007, 06:20 AM »

Another:

• Make changes to the shell context menu without asking the user first or without providing an easy means to undo the changes.

This is fun

1166

General Software Discussion / Re: Softpedia's 100% FREE Award

« Last post by Eóin on April 17, 2007, 06:08 PM »

I tend to agree with you guys that unless they are hosting the 'tested' binary themselves then their claim about it's safety are largely meaningless.

In the past I always checked the user comments on download.com. You could filter them to only show the negative comments and then I'd fly down through them looking for mentions of spyware. Hardly fool proof I admit but it at least gave you an overall impression of the software.

These days I find myself relying on recommendations from reputable sources (Zaine you qualify as one of those ) or I try to stick to opensource apps which is perhaps a bit naive but you have to let your guard down at some stage.

Recently though I've seen a number of programs mentioned on Softpedia which I would trust in of themselves, as such I've found their association with Softpedia and it's 100% FREE award to improve Softpedia's rep.

app103- I see your point about bandwidth theft, it is quite irresponsible of them to provide direct links to your downloads, they really should instead refer people to your webpage. Perhaps you should look into some anti-leeching trickery?

1167

General Software Discussion / Softpedia's 100% FREE Award

« Last post by Eóin on April 17, 2007, 11:25 AM »

Hey all just curious about Softpedia's 100% Award

I've always been fairly trusting of this reward and it's only occurred to me recently that I don't necessarily have a basis for that trust. Now don't get me wrong, I've never heard anything to make me mistrust it, but I'm curious how others here view it.

1168

Living Room / Re: What Programs Run In Your System Tray?

« Last post by Eóin on April 12, 2007, 07:11 AM »

FadingTaskbar, nothing more

1169

Living Room / Re: Why Linux is better

« Last post by Eóin on April 12, 2007, 05:26 AM »

Ok maybe 'out and out lies' was a bit harsh. But the site is most certainly written to imply a number of false facts so I'll downgrade my earlier statement to 'out and out deceive'.  Some examples-

More eyes make fewer security flaws.: This is not in any way a fact, it's just a guess.

Linux can run for years without needing to be restarted:  So can Windows. In that page the author is comparing Windows used as a desktop v Linux used as a server. That's not an honest comparison.

Installing Windows is just the beginning: Come on, that's unfair, look at all the trouble MS got into when initially bundling IE with Windows.

The whole Choose what your desktop looks like page completely ignores the vast number of alternatives available for Windows.

I won't go on for fear of a flame-war which I certainly don't want. And I'll state again I really like Linux, but I think a site like that one badly damages Linux's credibility.

Edit >> Left my browser windows open so made my reply without seeing the last two posts hence why I might have repeated what they've said in places .

1170

Living Room / Re: Why Linux is better

« Last post by Eóin on April 11, 2007, 09:48 AM »

Hi Gothi[c] I quite like you're last point, the opensource attitude really encourages others to join in. Back when I was a young vb hobbyist programmer I was endlessly frustrated by how many modules required you to pay for them. I look back now after having since learned the Win32 API and am almost disgusted by how trivial many of the modules were that someone would actually try to charge you.

These days it feels like there is much less of that, all the time you see people releasing very complex libraries under very liberal (think BSD or MIT style) licences. I just hope that as Linux grows this culture among its developers doesn't get diluted to the extent that it starts to die out.

1171

Living Room / Re: Why Linux is better

« Last post by Eóin on April 11, 2007, 06:50 AM »

Ok I actually like Linux as an OS so this is not some pro-Microsoft propaganda but that is not an honest site. Yes sure they throw in some token arguments for the other side at the end but their pro-Linux points either simply ignore equivalent software and functionality for windows or completely out and out lie.

1172

General Software Discussion / Re: What fonts do I actually need?

« Last post by Eóin on April 04, 2007, 05:37 PM »

Sorry for the unproductive post but speaking of comic sans

1173

Living Room / Re: Favorite Sci-fi movies?

« Last post by Eóin on April 04, 2007, 05:23 PM »

My top favourites have been mentioned here many times so I'll just repeat my number one; Dune.

Now for one which hasn't been mentioned; 5th Element .

1174

General Software Discussion / Re: how tidy and complete is your music library?

« Last post by Eóin on March 25, 2007, 09:58 AM »

Mine is tidy but I'd like to think not obsessively so Basically musikCube forced me to correct a lot of tags and every now and again I run MediaMonkeys 'auto-organise from tags' to clean up the directory layout.

1175

Living Room / Re: Living with Linux Ubuntu (ONLY) for 30 days

« Last post by Eóin on March 11, 2007, 04:50 AM »

What strikes me as funny is that he is judging APPLICATIONS and then talking about them as if they are 'LINUX' which is, afaik, a kernel.

-Gothi[c] (March 11, 2007, 03:15 AM)

I think, despite protests from FSF, Linux has caught on as a name for the platform as a whole. Personally I think that's a good thing, Linux is short and catchy. And who in their right mind ever thought recursive acronyms were cool anyway