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1376

General Software Discussion / Re: Implement features that are known to be loved in other programs, on your own

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2011, 11:36 AM »

Something that puzzles me is why programmer do not copy each other more often.
Implement features that are known to be loved in other programs, on your own. Why not?

-urlwolf (August 15, 2011, 05:07 PM)

Because it takes time and effort

1- Live search. That is, you get hits as you type, with context.

Depending on the GUI toolkit you use, it can be somewhat bothersome to add this kind of live search. It's definitely no fun for raw win32 API coding . And depending on what you're searching, it might be non-trivial to implement in an efficient way.

2- highlight all matches in search.

Could be a fair amount if the text control you use don't have explicit support for this feature.

3- Have redefinable shortcuts. For all your functions. Very few programs do this consistently.

Which is a shame. It's something you need to plan in before you start programming, as it's hell to do as an afterthought.

5- rapid entry of tasks, by parsing some simple natural language instead of having to go through a long form.

This can easily become a pretty complex task to implement - especially for regular developers in that haven't been dealing with natural language stuff. Google has the advantage of having a lot of people on their payroll

6- Smooth scroll. This is a big one. Really. Get out of browserland, and all other tools scroll like they were running in BASIC on a ZX spectrum.

I personally hate smooth scroll - at least pretty much all implementations I've seen. It's slower to get from position A to B, and often can't be stopped once you've started it (ie., spinning my mousewheel to scroll, I expect being able to contra-spin it to stop when I'm where I want to be - this tends not to work with smooth scrolling enabled).

In this day an age, I do not understand why good ideas do not spread faster.

Apart from #6, I'd say I have some decent reasons why

1377

General Software Discussion / Re: EKOPath 4 Compiler suite is now Open Source

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2011, 11:28 AM »

Instead of running 'pathcc' to compile, I needed to run 'pathCC', which is the C++ compiler.
Apparently, 'pathcc' is the C compiler. o_O

-Edvard (July 12, 2011, 03:37 PM)

I've always found case sensitive filesystems (and the use of them) to be utterly moronic and confusing - this is another fine example

Anyway, interesting development... now (or 'soon'? ) we have EKOPath, LLVM and GCC on the open source front, with Intel and Microsoft on the closed path. Never bad with a bit of healthy competition

1378

General Software Discussion / Re: FlatPress blogging platform: flat text file stored, open source, freeware

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2011, 11:06 AM »

Redmine is not terribly hard to install, provided you already have Ruby/Rails setup on your box.

-JavaJones (August 10, 2011, 03:47 PM)

...but a Ruby setup is a big bowl of AAAAAAAAAARGH to setup. At least it's been no joy for me on gentoo and debian systems. Pickyness about versions, weird behavior, RoR connections to mysql timing out after N hours with no apparent fix, sluggish performance, et cetera.

If you manage to get it going, do yourself a favor - never upgrade anything. Ruby is famous for breaking backwards compatibility, even for relatively minor updates, and the various Gem authors have taken that habit to heart.

1379

Living Room / Re: Samsung hard drives - don't buy them unless you like subliminal mental torture

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2011, 11:03 AM »

I've cut several small rectangles out from the foam so that each hard drive rests on four of these layers.

-nudone (August 16, 2011, 03:09 AM)

Good for sound reduction, but what are the effects on temperature? Sleeping pads are made for insulation...

1380

General Software Discussion / Re: Stupid question ... what is the difference between != and <>?

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2011, 10:59 AM »

Apparently, in it's typical "oh, let's confuse people" style, PHP supports both "!=" and "<>" for inequality comparisons - and from what I can tell, they're identical.

Pascal (and thus Delphi) used <> too.

1381

Living Room / Re: Facebook v Shagbook in Trademark Battle

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2011, 10:45 AM »

What's wrong with Randi starting her own business(es)?

-Deozaan (August 09, 2011, 04:18 AM)

Nothing... as long as it involved the words "randy", "face" and "shag"

1382

Living Room / Re: Facebook v Shagbook in Trademark Battle

« Last post by f0dder on August 08, 2011, 10:10 AM »

They should've just called it faceshag instead.

1383

General Software Discussion / Re: Software Hall of Fame

« Last post by f0dder on August 08, 2011, 10:04 AM »

@widgerunner - FWIW, that's just f0dder doing his f0dder 'tech-ninja' thing.  

When he's in that mode, most of what he says gets said with tongue jammed firmly in cheek. 

He's a very nice guy - and I doubt he ever intended to offend, or have that remark be taken seriously. 

-40hz (August 07, 2011, 11:50 AM)

I didn't intend to offend anybody - except for people who still believe writing large parts of their applications in assembly is a good idea.

* f0dder admires firmly bulging cheek

In seriousness, 'retards' was perhaps a bit strongly worded. Let's rephrase it to "people who thought they knew better, but seldomly did." (I've been through the "kiddy" period, but fortunately I got smarter.)

1384

Living Room / Re: Building a home server. Please help, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on August 05, 2011, 06:13 PM »

...sssSo, a 1 bite (file change) write automatically requires/results in (assuming 3 drives) a complete rewrite of both of the corresponding blocks? That does sound a bit pricey. But it does explain why the block size selection is so critically dependent on intended usage during setup.

-Stoic Joker (August 05, 2011, 06:10 PM)

Yep - read+modify(inmemory)+write. Just like you've gotta do when dealing with a plain IDE drive, you're only dealing with a single drive and a single sector there, though.

1385

Developer's Corner / Re: C# Help Pls :)

« Last post by f0dder on August 05, 2011, 06:01 PM »

Two relevant SO questions:

http://stackoverflow...o-webbrowser-control
http://stackoverflow...-browser-like-chrome

1386

Developer's Corner / Re: Software Revenue/Licensing Thoughts

« Last post by f0dder on August 05, 2011, 05:53 PM »

Commenting on the original post:

As an end-user, I hate it. It's too confusing, and it smells of the developers trying to confuse me.
As a developer, I hate it - it's a maintenance and support nightmare.
As a reverse engineer and protection developer, I like it - sounds like a fun 6+ month project to implement.

1387

General Software Discussion / Re: Software Hall of Fame

« Last post by f0dder on August 05, 2011, 05:42 PM »

You were smart enough to use  DESQview and QEMM, bt you fell for SpinRite? O_o

-f0dder (August 04, 2011, 05:19 PM)

You never needed to reinterleave an MFM HD, I take it? Spinrite was  

-oblivion (August 05, 2011, 02:04 AM)

Nah, not sure if I've ever used a machine with anything older than IDE drives - definitely never owned one. Fair enough, SpinRite might have had some Raison d'être then.

I grant it lost a lot of its usefulness once RLL drives came along, and IDE and subsequent technologies have made it a niche "recover from low-level errors" thing that I think I've only ever needed to suggest somebody use once in the last decade or so, but I still appreciate the quality of the program -- from a distance.

-oblivion (August 05, 2011, 02:04 AM)

My main problem with SR is that it's so g*dd*mn full of snake-oil. A lot of tech mumbo-jumbo, the aura of "zomg it's programmed in ASEMBLARHG! I'M A WIZARD!" (christ, get over yourself, assembly is hardly rocket science and only retards and kids did 100%-assembly applications even back then), and the program was built to show a lot of useless but "geeh, that looks techy!" stuff on screen.

Using it for "error recovery" is a stupendously bad idea, too - what it does puts insane amounts of stress on a drive, and is a pretty good way to kill a drive if it's already failing. If you've got something really messed up, what you want to attempt is doing a superfast imaging operation to a healthy drive, skipping bad sectors... trying to read bad sectors a zillion times with a failing read/write head? Yeah, THAT'S a good idea. (You might want to attempt such an operation *after* the initial pass, but it's not really rocket science). Oh, and as for the "recovering bad disks by doing magnetic reconstruction" mumbo jumbo? Geez.

Sorry for harping on this, but I've always had a really big problem with false prophets

disk was slow

-f0dder

That's what you get for not using Spinrite [DARFC]  

-oblivion (August 05, 2011, 02:04 AM)

[/quote]The only thing SpinRite sped up on IDE disks was demise

Nuts & Bolts - The best defragger, ever.

-app103 (August 05, 2011, 02:53 AM)

Oh yeah, that one was almost magic! I really like how it did extensive pre-planning before the defrag procedure so it could reduce the amount of data shuffled. Nothing quite like it has ever appeared for the NT-based OSes.

One app I really liked in the DOS days, and even used for a while in the 9x days, was the RAT - Resident Ascii Table. Was a great TSR for looking up ascii codes for the codepage 865 box-drawing chars (and other stuff) you used a fair amount when doing text-based DOS GUIs

1388

Living Room / Re: Building a home server. Please help, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on August 05, 2011, 05:29 PM »

Keep in mind that when you RAID, you're not addressing at sector or filesystem cluster sizes anymore - you're addressing RAID block sizes. So a 1-byte change change to a file on RAID-5 can end up pretttty expensive - multiple drives as well as large blocks per drive.

But I guess you'd have a smart administrator that tries to match FS cluster size, RAID block size and, in the case of SSDs, erase-block sizes to something reasonable.

1389

General Software Discussion / Re: Software Hall of Fame

« Last post by f0dder on August 04, 2011, 05:19 PM »

And how could I forget SpinRite, by the Heavenly Steve Gibson?

-oblivion (August 04, 2011, 11:07 AM)

You were smart enough to use  DESQview and QEMM, bt you fell for SpinRite? O_o

- Turbo Pascal: revolutionized programming (for both hobbyists and pros).  Affordable, fast, and one of the first (if not actually the first) IDE's.

-mwb1100 (August 04, 2011, 02:19 PM)

It generated pretty lousy code, but it was a great language to develop in back then, and Borland IDEs were amazing when you were learning programming; integrated help was great. And the capability of compiling directly to RAM and bypassing the disk subsystem was a godsend for fast modify/compile/test cycles, disk was slow

Castle Wolfenstein - first step in a new generation of shooters.

-wraith808 (August 04, 2011, 02:53 PM)

Do you mean Castle Wolfenstein or Wolfenstein 3D? . Wolf3D was awesome, but it began even earlier - the first one I tried was Catacombs 3D. Doom was when it really got awesome, though

1390

Living Room / Re: Building a home server. Please help, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on August 04, 2011, 05:07 PM »

Weirdest thing about RAID-1. When it breaks, it sometimes takes out both drives.

-40hz (August 04, 2011, 02:58 PM)

Shit happens - drives from the same batch can die shortly within eachother (especially if you have very disk-intensive rebuilds... mirroring isn't too bad, raid-5 is BAD). And then there's stuff like power surges etc. So yeah, stuff dies.

I had this happen to clients twice in my career. So it can't be that rare an occurrence in the field. Which is why I'll only use RAID-1 for mirroring the OS drive thereby reducing it to a 'downtime reduction only' function.

-40hz (August 04, 2011, 02:58 PM)

Backups tend to run nightly - so mirroring can potentially save you several hours worth of lost data. And of course reduced downtime is a nice bonus, that does require hotswap capability though

Never tried RAID with SSD. (Not being wealthy has its downsides. ) Is anybody doing that? And if so, does it adversely affect the life of the SSD drives? Mirroring probably wouldn't. But RAID-5 should since there's so much extra R/W activity generated by all the striping plus parity info being written to the drives.

-40hz (August 04, 2011, 02:58 PM)

Raid-5 (and other "big storage" schemes) would be silly on SSD until their storage capability goes massively up. The added writes of raid-5 is a real concern, but apparently the current crop of SSDs die off by crap electronics well before the erase cycle limit is reached

The drives are mainly useful for cache layers or or really I/O intensive stuff like databases. Mirroring might make sense, striping could (but you'll need  expensive motherboard and I/O cards, SATA and PCI-e bandwidth considered?).

1391

Developer's Corner / Re: The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake: Nice article about programming design goofs

« Last post by f0dder on August 04, 2011, 02:11 PM »

Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end?

-mouser (August 03, 2011, 02:31 PM)

If it had done anything else, the situation would probably be worse today.

NUL-terminated strings aren't optimal, but they were the logical choice back then, and are better than some of the alternatives. The BIG mistake is how a lot of the libc (and especially the string functions!) were designed.

1392

Living Room / Re: How to deal with syncing multiple versions of a file from multiple sources?

« Last post by f0dder on August 04, 2011, 02:03 PM »

The short and implementable-in-real-life answer: cover your eyes, and run away screaming, arms flailing.

-f0dder (August 01, 2011, 09:55 AM)

...How do you flail and cover your eyes at the same time?

-Stoic Joker (August 03, 2011, 06:55 AM)

Cloth, or perhaps tar - there's lots of possibilities ;P

Are you Zaphod Bebelbrox?

-Stoic Joker (August 03, 2011, 06:55 AM)

Humm, didn't he have multiple heads rather than arms?

1393

Living Room / Re: Building a home server. Please help, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on August 04, 2011, 02:01 PM »

If you want speed, get an SSD. If you want redundancy, do regular backup.

-JavaJones (August 03, 2011, 02:19 PM)

...and possibly couple it with RAID Mirroring. That does add real redundancy and isn't (just) for downtime reduction

1394

General Software Discussion / Re: How necessary is the UAC in Windows 7?

« Last post by f0dder on August 02, 2011, 03:44 PM »

You might try taking your UAC settings down a notch (to one up from the bottom).  As I understand it, you get notified just as often as with the setting above it, but your screen doesn't go black at all.

-cyberdiva (August 01, 2011, 08:07 PM)

Doing that renders UAC pretty much useless. And while the flicker-to-black is a bit annoying, it's a sign that UAC really is kicking in and you aren't being faked

1395

Living Room / Re: Building a home server. Please help, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on August 01, 2011, 05:53 PM »

RAID5 is great (if you spend $$$ on a fast card or fast CPU to do the parity computation), right until a disk dies and you need to rebuild the array... and the second and third disks croak.

If you do end up building some form of RAID (and frankly, without a bunch of computers and a distributed file system, that's probably your only choice for that kind of storage), be sure to use drives from different vendors AND from different batches - that'll somewhat reduce the risk of your drives shitting themselves at the same time. Check out stuff like Everything you know about disks is wrong and Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?... and cringe.

1396

General Software Discussion / Re: Annoying experience with non-pirated software

« Last post by f0dder on August 01, 2011, 12:51 PM »

1) Are you using RAID setup - especially software RAID? I had endless file corruption errors on my last RAID system which tuned out to be the Promise drivers at fault.

-Carol Haynes (August 01, 2011, 11:17 AM)

"Software RAID" would be the purely built-in capability of your OS - while the lower end RAID cards generally don't do much on the hardware end and keep it in the drivers, they do add those drivers...

The above might sound a bit pedantic, but IMHO it's an important distinction - I've never had a problem with Linux or Windows' built-in RAID capability.

1397

Living Room / Re: How to deal with syncing multiple versions of a file from multiple sources?

« Last post by f0dder on August 01, 2011, 10:11 AM »

The longer reply...

i don't really care about merging and subversion control all that much.  It's not that I need everything to merge properly.  I just want to figure out a way to manage this workflow where I do some stuff at home, some stuff at work, some stuff on a usb stick.

-superboyac (August 01, 2011, 09:06 AM)

And what do you intend to do when (not if!) things get out of sync? This is a pretty darn bad workflow unless you want to end up in a royal mess... I'm fully aware that having strict procedures for how/when you edit files is also somewhat of a pain, but believe me - it's far less than the "Oh fsck, which is which?" mess you can end up in otherwise.

Also, timestamps are a notoriously bad way to handle things. Say you do some important edits to "SuperStory.doc" on your workstation, then have to toddle off for a weekend trip. There, you do some other minor work on the same base SuperStory.doc on your laptop (which doesn't have the changes made on your workstation). Your laptop has the most recent timestamp, but your older-timestamped workstation copy has the most important edits.

What you need to realize is that there isn't an end-all-be-all system that can handle what you want across all possible file types. It doesn't exist, not even if you're going to throw a gazillion dollars at enterprisey systems. What you'll find will either be too generic or too specialized.

(D)VCS platforms tend to handle binary data poorly - no go for .doc files or images. It's a (very) viable solution if your documents are in sane textual formats (latex, docbook, svg, html, ...) - but if you mainly deal with binary files and can't switch to something better, it's not really a solution either.

Don't even think about using subversion - it's OK when you need to deal with legacy systems, but it has numerous issues and should be avoided, considering there's much better modern solutions. Bazaar, Mercurial, Git, et cetera.

1398

Living Room / Re: 64 Bit OS - When to Switch ?

« Last post by f0dder on August 01, 2011, 09:57 AM »

Though an earlier statement, would be misleading if taken differently, as a 64 bit can also work with 32bit drivers as they are in compatibility mode.

-edrez (July 31, 2011, 08:01 PM)

A 64-bit OS requires 64-bit drivers - no way around that for the mainstream operating systems. Something to keep in mind if you have old or esoteric hardware.

1399

Living Room / Re: How to deal with syncing multiple versions of a file from multiple sources?

« Last post by f0dder on August 01, 2011, 09:55 AM »

The short and implementable-in-real-life answer: cover your eyes, and run away screaming, arms flailing.

1400

General Software Discussion / Re: It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers

« Last post by f0dder on July 31, 2011, 11:02 AM »

People who use IE with the Chrome Frame extension score higher than people who use Firefox, Chrome, or Safari?

-Deozaan (July 30, 2011, 04:36 PM)

That'd probably be people who are forced to use IE at work, but who are smart enough to be able to install such a plugin and subvert company IT policy?