Recent Posts

2301

Developer's Corner / Git: converting svn repo & stuff

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 05:56 PM »

OK, so I've pretty much decided to move from subversion to Git for source control needs. Obviously I'd like my old version history to be ported over from the svn repos, and I've pretty much got that nailed (although there's some quirks to work out, because some of the first stuff I put under version control didn't follow a standard layout).

The tricky part has to do with fSekrit. Eventually, I want to open-source it, but I don't want the full version history to be available to everybody (for instance there's some ugly code in the early versions, swearing in comments, hardcoded passphrases for testing purposes, ...). So, the question goes: is it possible to do a Git setup with two repositories: one with full version history, the other with the "public" version, and the ability to push commits to both repositories? Or will I have to accept that the "historic" repository as a  read-only archive, only pushing changes to the "live" publicly available one?

2302

General Software Discussion / Re: Problem: The connection to the server was reset ...

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 05:15 PM »

Tried disabling the firewall temporarily?

2303

General Software Discussion / Re: GlassPrompt 1.1

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 02:33 PM »

That's kinda cute, how does it work? I assume it's some new Vista+ API that has to do with dwm?

2304

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Tab Candy will change the way I use a browser for good

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 01:00 PM »

TMP was a bit clunky for me - can't remember what exactly it was, but I ended up uninstalling it. And (if I recall it's feature set correctly ), it doesn't do the features of TabCandy that I'm really interested in - named grouping, only showing tabs associated with the currently active group, and the nice visual zoomable overview.

2305

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Tab Candy will change the way I use a browser for good

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 12:49 PM »

OK, so the guy gets a bit over-enthusiastic, and things go a bit overboard in the last quarter of the video... but I believe it could be a really useful thing, especially if it's not just for open tabs (oh, the memory footprint horrors!) but as a way to replace/aid bookmarks.

It really depends on how you use your browser. It's not uncommon that I end up with 20+ open tabs, for assorted tasks. Grouping tabs by task could be very useful for me, reducing clutter when I go from development-related work to some leisure surfing, or whatever. Or "look at this later" when reading blogs, forums, whatever, without cluttering up the already overloaded taskbar.

And hey, it looks visually appealing - which is important

2306

Living Room / Re: Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 11:59 AM »

You imply that these are not particularly difficult issues to work around as long as you know what you are doing.  Is this something you could fairly easily repackage into a "WinGit" package that would make it more friendly?  Just asking, because it sounds like something that would be well received and a fairly simple branch off the main project (if someone were willing).

-steeladept (July 20, 2010, 09:04 AM)

It should be fairly simple - I dunno which installer they use, but even if it's fairly limited one could do an install step that runs a tool which either creates NTFS hardlinks, or or populates the git-blah[/b].exe with argv[0]-replacing-dummy-thing mentioned above

Probably not the most objective reason: but I think I'll consider looking at Bazaar or Mercurial instead of git because (judging from the transcript) I just don't like Linus' arrogant and unfriendly attitude.

-phitsc (July 20, 2010, 06:44 AM)

+1 for that. It's sorta funny, but mostly just... sad. Yes, other projects might have made (very) poor choices, and git might very well be superior; but Linus' level of rudeness really puts me off. One thing is Joe Random ranting on a blog, but somebody in Linus' position? Ugh.

2307

fSekrit / Re: Option to use constant name in temp or set different temp folder?

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 11:51 AM »

Is it only %TEMP% that's protected in this way by AppLocker? In that case, perhaps it's possible for you to run fSekrit in portable mode (see 1.40 release notes) as a workaround.

Because of the way fSekrit works, it has to make this temporary copy of itself - using a constant name would work, but would prevent multiple open notes. There's some possible workarounds for that, but it wouldn't be super pretty

If it's of any help, I could add a registry setting to override %TEMP% in the next version, so you don't have to use portable mode.

2308

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 11:38 AM »

Hehe, Deozaan - that one reminds me of the classic http://bitchmakemeasandwich.com/ . Sexist? Definitely.

2309

General Software Discussion / Re: iAds coming to OSX, possibly

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 11:15 AM »

Hopefully, just this once, a patent will be so airtight that nobody will be allowed to copy it. 

-40hz (July 23, 2010, 05:15 PM)

So Apple wants to patent adware? I wish they could get a patent for all forms of desktop adware and not just an adware OS. 

-app103 (July 25, 2010, 05:11 AM)

2310

General Software Discussion / Re: How to [partially] blur screenshots?

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 11:09 AM »

Keep in mind that you should not use blurring for really sensitive information - while it's not possible to revert the effects of a blur, and attacker can brute-force-blur and get the information he wants.

2311

Living Room / Re: Testing the internet "kill" switch

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 10:43 AM »

Requesting (and probably getting?) personal information just because somebody put up some bomb making tips?

I wonder if the feds are also monitoring who's checking out chem books from the libraries?

2312

Living Room / Re: More ammunition why patents are EVIL

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 10:37 AM »

Broad patents = bad - the patent granting bodies need to be a lot more restrictive (and have qualified employees). Patent trolling shouldn't be legal; patents should be revoked if you don't produce a product within a reasonable timespan. Prior art should always null a patent's validity.

I'm not entirely against patents though, not even software patents; it's fair enough that you get a chance to profit from being innovative. The way the system currently works is entirely despicable, though.

2313

Circle Dock / Re: Change of Licensing from Version 2 (Cancelled)

« Last post by f0dder on July 25, 2010, 10:30 AM »

IMHO it's a decent enough license, and I only think it's fair paying for software if it's helping you make money. The only slightly dubious thing about this is that the current CircleDock is based on Eric Wong's original code.

2314

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7, weird picture

« Last post by f0dder on July 04, 2010, 07:14 AM »

I assume you're talking about thumbnails in explorer? Try hitting F5 to refresh window contents - if that doesn't update the cache, I dunno.

2315

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Fresh Ram 5.0

« Last post by f0dder on July 03, 2010, 10:52 AM »

Yet another of those junk RAM "cleaners"? Christ. Does everybody and their dog have to come up with those?

2316

General Software Discussion / Re: How safe is it to run portable apps on public computers?

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2010, 09:42 AM »

Good idea, steeladept - mounting a TC volume as read-only would probably do the trick.

2317

Living Room / Re: warmouse

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2010, 12:45 AM »

i'm using 13 buttons on the MX Revolution mouse.

-nudone (June 30, 2010, 04:36 AM)

- that sounds pretty insane! How do you utilize all those buttons?

2318

General Software Discussion / Re: Win 8 design documents leaked, plus Icaza comments on them

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2010, 12:42 AM »

Does this feel like yet another choreographed 'leak' to anyone else besides me?  

-40hz (June 30, 2010, 05:50 PM)

...and perhaps not even leaked by MS, but a fake document by somebody else? </conspiracy>

Maybe MS should get Win 7 working correctly first, oops have they ever done that before releasing a new version?

-kip (June 29, 2010, 04:59 PM)

...like? I've been running Win7 since RC, and it works like a charm here.

2319

Living Room / Re: Obama Can Shut Down Internet For 4 Months Under New Emergency Powers

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2010, 12:41 AM »

Of all the things i worry about in terms of government overstepping it's bounds, worrying about them shutting down the internet or part of it is not even on my radar.  Any reasonably sized entity/company/group can take down almost any small website at will with a distributed denial of service attack, etc.. and persecuted/underground groups will always be able to pop up somewhere else.

-mouser (June 29, 2010, 04:59 PM)

Taking down individual websites is one thing - killswitching the backbone is something entirely different. Taking down all US-based websites, IP telephony, and whatnot? And possibly majorly FUBARing the global routing? Ugh!

2320

General Software Discussion / Re: How safe is it to run portable apps on public computers?

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2010, 12:26 AM »

I know this is a week-old thread, but aren't you guys missing something?  Just put the hash checker on the read-only part of the drive!  Tell me if my idea is flawed..But I'm pretty sure it's doable.  You just have to preload the hashes into the read-only part of the USB before you go anywhere.

-Cyeb (June 29, 2010, 09:39 AM)

If you have an USB drive with separate read/only and read/write parts, sure - never came upon one like that myself, though.

2321

DC Gamer Club / Re: Portal 2 Announced!

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2010, 12:21 AM »

Portal 2 intro and some gameplay footage. This makes me really want to play the game!

-Josh (June 29, 2010, 02:44 PM)

dr00lz!

Looks like something that might very well be worth playing, and not just new levels built on portal 1 concept.

...and from the gameplay montage, wow. Looks like it has potential for some really mindboggling puzzles

2322

Living Room / Re: Are my EBook Reader dreams going to be answered in 2010? A full size reader?

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2010, 12:10 AM »

I wish it would be possible to overlay an e-ink display with a multi-touch TFT... if the TFT could be completely transparent when inactive. This would combine the readability and low battery drain of the e-ink with TFT's fast update time (zooming, panning, navigating, bookmarks, whatever). That, or have the TFT on the flip side - keeping the device thin, light and durable is über-important, though.

2323

General Software Discussion / Re: Truecrypt defeats FBI

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2010, 12:03 AM »

Eóin: salts are prefixed to your passphrase, to make brute-forcing slower, thwart rainbow-table attacks, and make hashes of identical passwords different. Making samedata+samekey look different is handled by an Initialization Vector (nonsecret, just as salt is).

40hz: as others have mentioned, changing a few bytes won't corrupt the entire encrypted data stream... depending on the encryption mode employed. For ECB mode, you ruin up to the Cipher's block size (128 bits for AES), for CBC mode you ruin more... potentially the whole stream, but systems supporting random access (like TrueCrypt) cuts the stream into chunks - so you only ruin a single chunk. TC doesn't use CBC mode, btw, but XTS - which I know nothing about. Also, I ran into a paper about error propagation in CBC mode a while ago, and it turns out it's not as effective as you might think; don't have an URL handy, I'll let somebody with better google-fu hunt it down

2324

Living Room / Re: 20 years later, the movie "Total Recall" still kicks butt

« Last post by f0dder on July 01, 2010, 11:39 PM »

In this case, human evil extends far beyond the individual to become manifest in the whole of society.

-40hz (July 01, 2010, 06:32 PM)

Oh, but it's not evil, you know - it's the greatest good for the greatest number!

2325

Find And Run Robot / Re: What hotkey(s) do *you* use to trigger FARR?

« Last post by f0dder on June 22, 2010, 10:03 AM »

Am I not supposed to use the Windows key for my own shortcut key definitions?

-ewemoa (June 22, 2010, 07:53 AM)

It's fine using them for your own purposes, as long as you realize they can be defined by Microsoft later on... which means you should never use them for defaults in software you release.

Too bad MS doesn't provide a clean way for the user to say he doesn't want those default hotkeys... which means you have to resort to keyboard hooks in order to unregister hotkeys from explorer.exe and whatnot.