Recent Posts

1926

Living Room / Re: Not backing up will cost you!

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

Superboy, JBOD means making a bunch of (possibly irregularly sized) drives appear as one large drive - which is pretty bad for your data if even a single drive crashes (although not as bad as striping, where your data is evenly distributed across all drives). JBOD is a raid mode, not "just stuffing a bunch of drives into a single computer".

1927

Find And Run Robot / Re: Wish: Run as Administrator

« Last post by f0dder on January 04, 2011, 04:41 PM »

Cool! Ask and ye shall receive.

-CWuestefeld (January 04, 2011, 04:39 PM)

That's what SHE said!

...err, I mean, yeah. Was definitely nice of mouser to implement it, means I hardly ever use the start menu anymore

1928

Living Room / Re: Not backing up will cost you!

« Last post by f0dder on January 04, 2011, 04:41 PM »

I do striping (which really shouldn't be called RAID, since it's anti-redundant) on my workstation, because I like the added speed, and only use that partition for relatively volatile stuff - and one big partition is more useful than two 74gig partitions (yes, I'm striping my raptor drivers). Definitely useful.

I mirror my fileserver, and I find this extremely useful as well - it unfortunately doesn't do hot-swap, but five minutes power-down and HDD swapping is a lot better downtime than having to restore a new drive from backup. As long as you don't use mirroring instead of backups.

But JBOD, RAID-5 or other solutions? Wouldn't even consider it.

1929

Find And Run Robot / Re: Wish: Run as Administrator

« Last post by f0dder on January 04, 2011, 04:35 PM »

I asked mouser for this quite a while ago - so it already supports the windows-start-menu-standard way of launching as admin: ctrl+shift+enter.

1930

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your preferred server OS for home use? And Why?

« Last post by f0dder on January 04, 2011, 12:23 PM »

Linux - because it's gratis (I used to have a lot of spare time).

1931

General Software Discussion / Re: What in the world is "Refactoring?"

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2011, 05:06 PM »

i've just never really learned to make use of refactoring tools and don't see myself doing so.

-mouser (January 03, 2011, 05:00 PM)

That's a pity, since some of it is really boring manual work. Especially in the C#/.NET land, ReSharper is pretty darn awesome. Whole Tomato's Visual Assist is pretty good for C++. Dunno what offers there are for BCB...

But it's definitely nice working with refactoring support that's well integrated in your IDE. Trying to, say, rename stuff across a whole project definitely isn't fun without it.

1932

General Software Discussion / Re: What in the world is "Refactoring?"

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2011, 05:00 PM »

An explanation of "refactoring" can be boiled down to: "cleaning up source code".

Refactoring.com is apparently Fowler's, he's the guy behind the "original refactoring book". One of the ideas of that book is that you don't "just" clean up code - you clean it up as a series of small, well-defined and named tasks... and run your code tests after each task.

It's those individual tasks that a good IDE with refactoring support can do; it still needs your "architect" brain to direct the bigger picture.

1933

General Software Discussion / Re: Is it possible to have a future without a .NET-style takeover?

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2011, 04:30 PM »

had their world shaken badly by the proprietary and unexpected act of dropping VB6 and going to .NET.  Know any other war stories about this?

-CodeTRUCKER (January 03, 2011, 03:27 PM)

Eh?

VB6 is from 1998. As of March 2008 it has entered MS's unssuported phase. And that's about time, really - there's a lot of things that are horribly, horribly wrong with VB. 10 years is (way) enough.

1934

Living Room / Re: Trouble with Google as the source of traffic

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2011, 04:23 PM »

Putting Google ads on your site is the best SEO you can possibly do.

-Renegade (January 03, 2011, 03:43 PM)

1935

General Software Discussion / Re: Laymen's terms: How does svn work? Why is it good?

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2011, 10:59 AM »

As an end-user, you probably don't want or need subversion - as Renegade mentioned, it's version control for source code. (It can be used for other stuff than plain source code, but it's only really useful for text-based files that change in predictable ways).

The tortoise part is a friendly GUI so you don't have to much around with the command-line.

Aaaaand... there's better systems around than subversion - if you aren't going to deal with a legacy project, you do want when one of the newer DVCS systems; not only is the 'D' part immensely useful once you wrap your head around it, but subversion's network protocol is hopelessly horrible.

1936

Developer's Corner / Re: Any EASY Windows Forms Skin Kits for C#?

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2011, 10:53 AM »

Found something interesting here:

http://www.skincrafter.com/

-Renegade (January 03, 2011, 10:04 AM)

The front page graphics looks exactly like the kind of UI skinning that makes baby Jesus cry. Please don't go down that road. And if you do, at least make sure the skinning can be 100% disabled so you get native look and feel... and not the half-assed "native look and feel by emulating a particular windows version via skins" that some skinning packages offer *puke*.

1937

Living Room / Re: Microsoft2Apple - Keyword Searches (NSFW)

« Last post by f0dder on January 02, 2011, 06:17 AM »

 

1938

General Software Discussion / Re: In need of security advice ...

« Last post by f0dder on January 01, 2011, 03:50 PM »

Even if you watermark photos, what are you going to do when somebody misuses them?

1939

General Software Discussion / Re: In need of security advice ...

« Last post by f0dder on January 01, 2011, 03:15 PM »

As was mentioned, screen capture is always a viable way to get an image.  However, screen capture produces an image somewhere between seventy (70) to 100 dpi - not certain about Linux, but don't think it's greater - which is a far cry from, say 1440 dpi, which would make the capture pretty much useless for offline purposes.

-barney (January 01, 2011, 03:06 PM)

If you don't want images in the original resolution captured, don't put the original-res images online - simple as that.

1940

Developer's Corner / Re: Check Gmail using C#

« Last post by f0dder on January 01, 2011, 02:40 PM »

Have you tried tracing the UploadFile method in the VS debugger to see if there's any particular line of code that causes a hang?

It's not a good idea doing stuff like this from your UI thread, anyway... you should either schedule the task on a background worker thread, or (better) use Async I/O. I'll refrain from saying anything about having non-ui code in a btnWhatever_Click handler

1941

Living Room / Re: Are You Ready to Switch to GNU/Linux?

« Last post by f0dder on January 01, 2011, 02:13 PM »

C++ is not "slow". Compare the startup time of a C++ and a Java application and shut up.

-Tuxman (January 01, 2011, 12:19 PM)

Startup time is not necessarily the best indication of execution speed anyway - there's scenarios where both Java and .NET will likely be a better fit than normal-style C++ code.

1942

General Software Discussion / Re: In need of security advice ...

« Last post by f0dder on January 01, 2011, 07:59 AM »

+1 for Renegade and the nude one.

Unless you go to really extreme solutions involving the use of custom hardware, you can't stop nefarious people from grabbing and (mis)using your images. If your daughter puts her photos on the net, that's just a fact she'll have to live with. The various "no-copy" methods will only make it difficult for benign people who'd like to use a pic as wallpaper, it won't stop the baddies.

1943

Living Room / Re: Are You Ready to Switch to GNU/Linux?

« Last post by f0dder on January 01, 2011, 06:39 AM »

As Linux is GPL, how does any distribution NOT become GPL? That violates the license. And if it's GPL, then it's GNU.

-Renegade (December 31, 2010, 09:22 PM)

Unless I'm really mistaken, licensing something under the GPL does not make it GNU.

There's a lot of software in every linux distribution not written by the GNU project people.

And there's a fair amount of opensource projects that aren't under the GPL license, and are included in most/lots of distributions.

Insisting on calling a distribution GNU/Linux imho equals downplaying the importance on non-gnu/non-gpl projects, and I find that rather distasteful and self-important of the GNU guys.

1944

Living Room / Re: Are You Ready to Switch to GNU/Linux?

« Last post by f0dder on December 31, 2010, 06:32 PM »

IMHO "GNU/Linux" doesn't mean "GNU-only" - then you wouldn't have a very large distro, anyway. Since it doesn't mean GNU-only, it doesn't mean opensores-only either.

-f0dder (December 31, 2010, 03:16 PM)

Well, it MEANS GNU-compatible only.

-Tuxman (December 31, 2010, 06:22 PM)

No, not really. Calling it GNU/Linux only conveys that it's a distribution that's bent over for GNU's sense of self-importance.

1945

Living Room / Re: Are You Ready to Switch to GNU/Linux?

« Last post by f0dder on December 31, 2010, 05:09 PM »

...opensores...

-f0dder (December 31, 2010, 03:16 PM)

Pejorative. Shame on you f-man!  

-40hz (December 31, 2010, 04:14 PM)

I don't always do it on purpose, I swear!

(This time I did, though )

1946

Living Room / Re: Are You Ready to Switch to GNU/Linux?

« Last post by f0dder on December 31, 2010, 03:16 PM »

IMHO "GNU/Linux" doesn't mean "GNU-only" - then you wouldn't have a very large distro, anyway. Since it doesn't mean GNU-only, it doesn't mean opensores-only either.

1947

Living Room / Re: Are You Ready to Switch to GNU/Linux?

« Last post by f0dder on December 31, 2010, 10:17 AM »

I'm not familiar with what you're referring to.

-Renegade (December 30, 2010, 11:02 PM)

Debian's apt repositories have a "non-free" trunk. In Debian's kernel are some binary blobs for common drivers. Both are incompatible with the term "GNU/Linux".

-Tuxman (December 31, 2010, 10:06 AM)

...and an attitude like that is why linux isn't taking off for the majority of normal people.

1948

fSekrit / Re: fSekrit still in development?

« Last post by f0dder on December 31, 2010, 06:21 AM »

Definitely in agreement with TT1, ideally with a GPL'd license.

-webfork (December 30, 2010, 05:55 PM)

Still not sure which license I'm going to stick on it, but there's no way I'll even consider tainting my project with that nasty piece of crap

1949

Developer's Corner / Re: Any EASY Windows Forms Skin Kits for C#?

« Last post by f0dder on December 31, 2010, 06:15 AM »

Renegade: if what you want to do is creating one of those "unique" applications, you're more in the realm of custom controls than just "skinning". And this can be justified, Reason wouldn't work very well with the standard windows controls. And if this is what you're doing, it's a pity if you're stuck with WinForms and can't move to WPF's much better design/layout stuff.

MP3 players are a good example of software that shouldn't be skinned, though - even if 99% of them are.

1950

Developer's Corner / Re: Mimic a shell environment (or terminal env) for a 3rd party program

« Last post by f0dder on December 31, 2010, 06:10 AM »

What is the 3rd-party program? Is it something that's publicly available so we could take a look at it?

How are you setting up the stdin/out redirecting, and how are you doing your reads/writes?

Probably won't matter, though, since the problem is 99% likely to be the child app checking whether the file handle is FILE_TYPE_CHAR or not - and using buffering if it isn't. Console handles are FILE_TYPE_CHAR, while pipe handles are FILE_TYPE_PIPE... this is standard libc behavior when setting up the FILE* stdin/stdout handles.

If the stuff can't be fixed otherwise, it might be possible to do a bit of detours/easyhook magic