Recent Posts

126

Seedling's Software / Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« Last post by seedling on April 21, 2006, 03:55 PM »

Thanks for your interest in my apps (currently just Random Mix Tape Maker).

If you have any feedback I'd love to hear it (good or bad).

This started out as a tiny tool for my personal use to sift thru my mp3 collection and make a playlist from my favorite artists.  Because I do a lot of work on the computer and also on the road, I would always make a mix compilation to listen to, but got tired of always picking from the same top songs, forgetting that there were other great songs as well.  So I made this thing to make a list and randomly pluck out songs for me and it's been pretty darn fun to use.

Enjoy.

127

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Executable Compressor Programs

« Last post by seedling on February 20, 2006, 03:37 PM »

I use EXECryptor to protect and compress ( http://www.strongbit.com ).  It will prevent reverse engineering of an executable.  According to the crackers over at http://forum.exetools.com, nobody has broken the encryption yet.  I tried using the registration key feature of EXECryptor, but it was cracked pretty quickly.  Now I just gut the demos by removing a lot of code, then encrypt them.

-mrainey (January 14, 2006, 02:41 PM)

you are doing your customers such a disservice by releasing demos and then still using this cpu cycle eating monster. i mean if you truly remove key functions in your code then what's the point of using a protector compressor?

let me explain something about execryptor. first, it IS a very clever protection i have to admit. but for god sakes, don't you know it runs multiple threads watching for debuggers etc? not to mention how it creates, on demand, the import pointers it uses. and of course it doesn't really encrypt anything, it just obfuscates the hell out of the functions you want protected (which i guess is a form of encryption?). it does this by taking a normal small < 100 byte asm function and turns it into multiple thousands of bytes. when it's all done it then compresses the whole thing. if you were using this protector back in the old days you'd definintely see a difference in speed. i guess we all take advantage of the fact that new processor speeds all but hides these overactive protectors.

also, execryptor is not at all impervious to being cracked. believe me, i've seen it done what do you gain from having yet another crackable protector/compressor that uses up more cpu cycles than your original app ever should have? not much i guess.

anyway, for these reasons i'd never use execryptor.

if you want good, solid compression, i'd stick with pecompact or upx.

if you want a step up for protection, then i'd go with asprotect (altho i don't like how it allocates so much memory to emulate api calls). but it's generally not that obtrusive, has quick decompression and solid function encryption.

armadillo is also a good protector, but too much overhead for my taste (actively debugging your app while running).

...there you go, my 2 cents

128

General Software Discussion / very nice and FREE graph calc

« Last post by seedling on January 19, 2006, 03:00 PM »

http://www.graphcalc.com

seems like an obvious url
been awhile since updated. but still free nonetheless

129

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Large file generator

« Last post by seedling on September 27, 2005, 10:47 PM »

how about this

oops! just a minor error... like it didn't write the file!

fixed now