Recent Posts

2701

General Software Discussion / Re: 'C:\Program' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable prog

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2010, 08:38 AM »

s/dos/console-mode - doesn't seem to be a DOS version of it anymore? (unlike RAR, which is available in both DOS and win{32,64}-console and a lot of other versions).

How did the integration happen, btw? Default on install, or some checkbox, or some obscure menu item, or a .reg file or something else you might've done manually but forgotten? It seems very wrong to do the integration by default, considering you don't always want file management when you launch a shell...

2702

General Software Discussion / Re: Is ubuntu's windowing/redrawing slower than windows? Is this X, or Gnome?

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2010, 08:19 AM »

Moved to sabayon, scroll in FF still sucks...

-urlwolf (January 19, 2010, 08:11 AM)

In which way does it suck, though? Flickering while scrolling? "Sluggish" scrolling? Or "just" scrolling in blocks as opposed to smooth-scroll?

Flicker or Sluggish could be driver or X11, blocky more likely an app setting (which can *feel* sluggish if you're used to smooth scrolling - or even if you're used to non-smooth scrolling if the "blocksize" is larger than on Windows).

Even a dog-old integrated graphics card should handle something as simple as scrolling 100% smoothly, since it's pretty much a simple BitBlt() operation. And we're talking, like, mid-90'es style dog-old, not 2006-style old

2703

General Software Discussion / Re: Thunderbird 3 Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2010, 03:44 AM »

Thanks a lot for the CompactHeader and MinimizeToTray+ links (I used a tray minimizer for TB2, but didn't bother go looking for one for TB3 that worked ). Two-line no-text flat-button header with CompactHeader is pretty nice.

Oh, something that would be useful: in "message overview" mode (when you've selected multiple messages and TB3 shows an overview of them), is there any way to get it to keep URLs clickable? That would be really useful wrt. forum reply notifications.

2704

General Software Discussion / Re: Just discovered a HUGE annoyance in Windows 7

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2010, 03:33 AM »

OK, here's a few things to consider.

Apps failing to write userdata: this sounds serious, and weird - haven't run into it myself, so I'm a bit stumped as to why it might be happening. Read something somewhere sometime () that you can end up in weird situations if you install your apps with UAC disabled and then re-enable UAC, but... *shrug*

Hotkeys: there's several ways to define these, one of them has the possibility to override existing hotkeys (ie., built-in Win+X). This method requires setting up a system hook, injecting DLL into all processes, (try to) un-register hotkey in all processes (because you don't know which one has registered the hotkey), and then re-register the hotkey. It should be obvious why this won't work for elevated apps if the I-want-hotkey app is running from a LUA. Doesn't explain some of the Win7 hotkey weirdness fully, though!¹

Permissions on secondary drive: this has already been mentioned by Carol and Eóin, but needs a slight clarification: it's not because of acccount/computer name, but the SID (not GUID, they look slighty similar but aren't) assigned to your user account; if you upgrade Windows, the SID should carry over, when you do a fresh install you get a new (random) one. This is not a Windows 7 thing, but rather it's generic NT. You'll see the same if you carry an NTFS-formatted USB drive to another computer. Too bad there's no built-in "really take ownership and fix permissions of all these files, and get rid of the orphan SID".

Monitor woes: sounds weird too, defining primary monitor works fine on my win7 installation.

Win+{up,down} is a YMMV thing - I really like the behavior, as I often go between maximized and "restored" state. Maximized firefox is awful on a 1680-wide screen

¹: I override Win+F to locate32 and Win+E to xplorer², but in some applications those hotkeys are overridden - even though those apps aren't elevated! I'm pretty stumped as to why this happens, but I think it might happen in apps programmed in MFC.

2705

General Software Discussion / Re: ubuntu's worrying decline in quality

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2010, 03:14 AM »

zridling: yeah, I know about that - but how do you get the impression that it's related to the bug? Might just be me who's dull, but reading the error report doesn't hint at this being the cause?

2706

Developer's Corner / Re: Programmatically effecting console font colors and size in Delphi console app

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2010, 03:12 AM »

Hm, I'm not actually sure whether the shortcut would have to be used to start the application - haven't checked. Back in the days for DOS apps, the settings were iirc read&applied even though you didn't launch the app through the shortcut - dunno if this applies to win32 console mode apps, they are quite different from DOS executables

By the way, when we have a shortcut and set the font property, a registry key with the same name of the shortcut file will be added to HKCU\Console, similar to the second method.

-kyrathaba (January 18, 2010, 08:58 PM)

Didn't know that - but I'd consider it an implementation detail, unless it's clearly documented in some official MS doc.

It just doesn't seem that this should be so obscure in a language as well-liked and widely used as Delphi.

-kyrathaba (January 18, 2010, 08:11 PM)

It's been quite some years since I used Delphi, but my impression from back then was that the VCL handles standard stuff - if you need something slightly more obscure, especially if it's not super-officially documented, you have to go API?

2707

General Software Discussion / Re: 'C:\Program' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable prog

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2010, 03:08 AM »

FAR? I used to use that back in the DOS days, was a pretty nice app (but hey, I don't expect any less from the WinRAR guys ). Weird that it adds itself to auto-start though, and even weirder that it does it in a buggy way.

Nice that it was an easy fix and it wasn't something malicious that tried to be sneaky.

2708

General Software Discussion / Re: Win 7 XP Mode is Hardware-Dependent

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2010, 03:06 AM »

Carol Haynes: nope, haven't checked - dunno if Insyde offers generic BIOS downloads (I do know that if you are "important enough" and work on "certain projects" you can get custom BIOS from them... dunno if I have any strings I can pull though ).

And I'm not sure if I dare mess around with non-kosher BIOS; AFAIK the laptop has no "dual bios" or "rescue mode" or whatever. Can't really afford to fry it, and the company I bought it from (Zepto) has gone belly-up, so I don't know if it's even possible to get a badly flashed BIOS fixed...

2709

General Software Discussion / Re: 'C:\Program' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable prog

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2010, 07:12 PM »

Try this

The first hit sounds pretty promising - I'm pretty curious why you'd have something added to cmd.exe autorun though, and why it's malformed (missing quotes around "program files" - and why it's even depending on a hardcoded string that won't work on i15d windows versions, when it could do %ProgramFiles% )

2710

General Software Discussion / Re: Ready Boost?

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2010, 02:41 PM »

Windows ReadyBoost: does give a bit better performance on really low-memory systems, if the USB drive is fast enough. I've always thought this feature was a bit misguided... RAM is pretty cheap now and much, much, much faster (you'll want to avoid swapping, whether it goes to disk or USB) - the hours spent designing ReadyBoost could have been spent better elsewhere.

As for eBoostr, I've always been pretty skeptic of it - they don't really document what they're doing, how they're doing it, nor why they're doing it. It probably has more valuable than those good-for-nothing "memory optimizers", but still: meh.

2711

Developer's Corner / Re: Programmatically effecting console font colors and size in Delphi console app

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2010, 02:23 PM »

First: please don't even consider changing the default console appearance in the registry in order to achieve something.

Second: can't you just create a shortcut to your .exe and specify the font?

2712

General Software Discussion / Re: ubuntu's worrying decline in quality

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2010, 02:20 PM »

zridling: what does FAT's lack of permissions have to do with this?

2713

General Software Discussion / Re: Tweaking IE to prevent further attacks (for now)

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2010, 02:11 PM »

I've used Java for ~1½ year now, because it's the language my school teaches - not a bad choice, IMHO. I've come to appreciate a lot of things about it (and the Eclipse IDE), but there's also things that annoy me... especially when it comes to GUIs. Haven't found a decent visual GUI building tool, and the Java GUIs indeed to feel somewhat sloppy. Don't think I'm going to deal with Java code for any personal projects, but OTOH I wouldn't mind having to use it at my job. Performance does seem relatively resonable, though - you don't get the speed of native C++ code, but a friend of mine wrote a realtime textured, filtered, colored-lighted 3D engine; pretty much Quake2 visual quality, in the days of Pentium2's.

As for JavaScript, well... haven't dealt much with it, but again: you can do really funky stuff, because pretty much everything is an object - even your functions. If I needed to add scripting support to something (aka outside-a-browser usage ) I'd seriously consider JavaScript; more lightweight than Python, more "normal" than LUA (even though it's powerful because of those "funky features", but you don't HAVE to use those).

2714

Living Room / Re: Something on computer is fubar

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2010, 02:02 PM »

Hardware-accelerated audio and EAX are dead. Neither work on Vista or Windows 7.

-Innuendo (January 17, 2010, 11:04 AM)

Yeah, pretty lame move from Microsoft's side. Isn't it supported through OpenAL, though, or is that purely software based?

2715

General Software Discussion / Re: Win 7 XP Mode is Hardware-Dependent

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2010, 02:01 PM »

Some CPUs have virtualization but it is disabled when they sell them as OEM CPUs to give retail CPUs (at a higher price) a marketing edge. This seems to have been common in the early days of hardware VM technology.

-Carol Haynes (January 18, 2010, 08:39 AM)

...and sometimes you have a CPU that should have virtualization support, but for some reason your BIOS vendor has chosen to disable the feature - I'm a victim of this with my laptop

Btw, if you don't run any virtualization software, it's a good idea to turn it off in your BIOS - rootkits installing themselves as hypervisor == nasty stuff.

2716

Unfinished Requests / Re: Utility to remove file/folder from directory.

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2010, 09:32 PM »

How did this happen? Which filesystem? You're mentioning "infected" - is it possible that the disk structure is OK, but self-pointing is done by a (rootkit) driver?

Poking directly at the file structures isn't something for the faint of heart, especially not if we're talking NTFS which is largely undocumented... and you definitely don't want to do it on a mounted filesystem

2717

Developer's Corner / Re: Random bmp generator

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2010, 09:29 PM »

If you haven't already, grab a .BMP format reference from Wotsit - the (Windows) BMP header is a bit more than resolution

For the sake of not going insane, define the header as a C struct - or if you feel like going all-in, a C++ class. You should end up with either a struct and a write_to_file() function that takes a file and a header struct as arguments, or a C++ class with a write_to_file member function (we'll save proper C++ iostreams to quite a bit later ).

Now, for file I/O, you have a lot of options. You can go for low-level file routines, C-style FILE* streams, or C++ iostreams. Low-level and FILE* are pretty much the same: they let you write out X bytes at a time. C++ iostreams are focused with writing "objects" - but you can also use them to write out bytes.

Writing out the header - the safe and portable way is to write out each member of the header structure one by one (basically making sure you're only ever writing C primitive types). This works, but can be pretty slow for large structures - we're talking huge then, though. You'd probably be tempted to simply write out the header in one go, but this won't work because of the memory padding the compiler does for speed. You can tell it to not do this packing, but that is unportable - beware if you ever plan on supporting "queer" platforms. When dealing with binary file formats, you'll want to define types (or find a stdint.h, if it doesn't come with your compiler (*cough* Visual C++ *cough*)) that have the correct bitsize.

So... which file I/O routines do you currently use, and how have you defined the header?

2718

General Software Discussion / Re: Tweaking IE to prevent further attacks (for now)

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2010, 05:41 PM »

JavaScript was initially developed by Netscape, and was named LiveScript then. But because everybody was hype-OD'ing on Java, some schmuck decided it should be renamed, although JavaScript has very little resemblance to Java. The language has later been standardized as ECMAScript, and Microsoft's dialect is called JScript. Iirc flash's ActionScript is also based on ECMAScript.

JavaScript is actually kinda cool, even when seen outside browsers - you can do some pretty funky stuff with it

2719

General Software Discussion / Re: Tweaking IE to prevent further attacks (for now)

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2010, 02:12 PM »

First, JavaScript != Java - big difference (I'm sure you already know that, and are just being a bit imprecise in your post). AFAIK a whole bunch of exploits have been targetting vulnerable old Java JVM versions (old versions aren't removed when you upgrade to latest, and java applets can specify specific versions to bind against >_<), while this exploit is JavaScript.

Yeah, ActiveX is mentioned as well; dunno if scripting in IE is implemented with ActiveX, if the exploit is mixed JavaScript/ActiveX, or if the exploit is only in JS but uses some ActiveX objects to do further work... too bad the details are so vague.

DEP is nice, yes, but there's still a few apps here and there that have issues with it - I had to turn off systemwide DEP after a while . Guess it made sense not to have it on by default in IE7, were probably too many browser plugins that were crappily written? It does seem to be 0% overhead though, which is a nice thing; and while it's not complete waterproof solution, it does indeed limit the attack vectors shellcode have.

2720

General Software Discussion / Re: Win 7 XP Mode is Hardware-Dependent

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2010, 01:40 PM »

Not all Win7 capable CPUs have virtualization support - Atom CPUs don't, and neither does most Centrinos. Dunno about non-centrino core2 CPUs, it's possible that some of the lower-end ones don't support it... and I haven't looked at AMDs offering at all (except from knowing that they do have a virtualization instruction set as well).

Buyer beware! , look up CPU model number from the vendor before buying, and checker whether it supports VT-x (for intel) or AMD-V (for AMD). The wikipedia article on x86 virtualization also has some lists.

2721

Living Room / Re: Need NAS Enclosure recommendation

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2010, 01:29 PM »

I finally got the time to pull the cable for the service department so everybody is now hard wired at 100Mb

-Stoic Joker (January 16, 2010, 10:43 AM)

only 100Mb? If you took the effort required to run cabling, I hope you ran at least cat-5e

How fast does HomePlug go these days? I thought they were up to around 200Mb/s, at least by specification... I wonder how fast you can go, though - probably depends not only on the quality of your power cable wiring, but also how clean voltage is supplied by your power company?

2722

General Software Discussion / Re: Tweaking IE to prevent further attacks (for now)

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2010, 01:19 PM »

Stoic Joker: well, I guess it's not that strange that it's possible to find an exploit that works across multiple versions; I was thinking that this implied the same exploit code could be used, which would be quite something... but that isn't mentioned anywhere; brainfart on my part.

Anyway, I've read a few blogs here and there about the exploit, and the details are indeed a bit scarce. But from what I understand it's a javascript bug that's being exploited - and while much of the info is badly worded, I believe that you only need to visit a "compromised site", not actually clicking on anything on the site, which makes it pretty dangerous. Especially now the exploit code is in the open, and will be used for drive-by exploits. Yes, us power users have noscript and adblock, but a lot of regular users don't.

Also, various blog entries mention that IE8 sandboxed mode helps mitigate the attack, and DEP (default in IE8, optional and default-disabled in IE7) also help mitigate the problem, but it's not mentioned how much it helps - like, whether sandboxing lets the exploit do it's stuff, but limits which files can be read/written... and whether DEP might let the browser crash, but not run the exploit code. All we get is "mitigates"

2723

General Software Discussion / Re: Tweaking IE to prevent further attacks (for now)

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2010, 07:25 AM »

Stoic Joker: still, from what I see the exploit only requires you to visit a malicious site, not to manually run any .exe, .pdf, whatever. Hack one banner server and insert the exploit... *b00m*. It's also a bit scary how many versions of IE it affects... 6->8?

2724

Living Room / Re: Need NAS Enclosure recommendation

« Last post by f0dder on January 14, 2010, 07:44 AM »

(Via WLAN.)

-Tuxman (January 14, 2010, 05:55 AM)

Don't expect to get super high performance enhancements from a new NAS device if you're going to access it over WLAN...

2725

General Software Discussion / Re: Space Management : there is a new competitor - SpaceSniffer

« Last post by f0dder on January 14, 2010, 07:41 AM »

Umberto, you could keep the main program installer-free but add a "add explorer right-click integration" menu option or similar?