Recent Posts

276

General Software Discussion / Re: disk space analysis by extension (for backup decisions)

« Last post by Lashiec on June 17, 2009, 09:02 AM »

Just like I recommended it to Veign, I recommend it to you as well. WinDirStat also reports size per file type, just like this:

The help file mentions you can check up network drives or use UNC paths, so it should work on networks.

277

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for application to determine what folders are using up the most space

« Last post by Lashiec on June 16, 2009, 09:16 AM »

Installed it's around 750 KB. You can install it from a USB drive, or even a floppy

EDIT: Whoops, it uses different colours per file type, not per folder . Still, the list of folders above the treemap is sorted by folder size.

278

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for application to determine what folders are using up the most space

« Last post by Lashiec on June 16, 2009, 09:12 AM »

WinDirStat. Each folder in the map uses its own colour, so you can quickly tell which is the one taking more space than the others. Although I can't locate the ZIP file in its page, just the installer.

279

Living Room / Re: Looking for P2p file sharing for personal use

« Last post by Lashiec on June 13, 2009, 09:05 PM »

Oh, ok, I thought it was local network only. Then, the only P2P option that I can think about is DC++, but I think it won't be of any help.

280

Living Room / Re: IE to be removed from Windows 7 in EU

« Last post by Lashiec on June 13, 2009, 08:55 PM »

They can demand to remove something. That's for sure but including software from other companies?

-fenixproductions (June 13, 2009, 08:34 PM)

Hey, OEMs litter Windows installations with tons of unrelated software . No, but I understand your point. Actually, China is in the news these days for the requirement they put on all computers sold there to include software to monitor user behaviour block pr0n, although all the major computers makers are "unaware" of the issue (i.e. not commenting). And, while not related to private businesses, one of the provisions of the infamous HADOPI law in France was to apparently require installation of spy software to monitor Internet connections. That is, we know what happens when we let politicians run free.

I've also read comments from other sites and one thing hit me: when someone gives Apple with Safari to be criticised too, there are responses which can be simplified to "Apple is not a problem because they are small. MS is big and its influence to market is disturbing. That is why it should be controlled.". And now the question is: different rules for different players? Embedding IE is wrong but it's OK for Safari because Apple is "too small"? WTF? Can it be money problem only? Do they expect bribe or what? I don't really understand such fuzzy logic.

I think the response is mostly related to the unlikeness of the EU (or any other government) to accept the complaint based on its tiny market share. Although, based on Asa Dotzler frequent remarks, Mozilla wouldn't have a problem filling it. Apple is also a very peculiar case, as they're selling what it's essentially a PC as an appliance under their rules, a good example of going against them being the Psystar case. It would be equivalent to gamepad makers complaining about the proprietary wireless protocol standard XBOX 360 pads use.

281

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your favorite program to listen to internet radio?

« Last post by Lashiec on June 13, 2009, 08:30 PM »

Talk about simplicity

282

Living Room / Re: Looking for P2p file sharing for personal use

« Last post by Lashiec on June 13, 2009, 08:27 PM »

I have some many computers and some of the stuff needs to stay in sync and I cannot afford cumbersome methods(copy, delete, figure out what was updated etc) to keep things in sync.  I already use http file server for small stuff but again that is not good for bidirectional stuff.

-kartal (June 12, 2009, 10:35 PM)

Maybe SyncToy, then?

283

Living Room / Re: IE to be removed from Windows 7 in EU

« Last post by Lashiec on June 13, 2009, 08:14 PM »

Remember this is a solution proposed by Microsoft, and thus has not been accepted by the EU, and the rest of the browsers makers involved in the case. And it would be WRONG to accept it. Not only it does not solve anything, it f**** users in the process while giving Microsoft an advantage in browser distribution with their proposed 'channels'. Seriously, how difficult is to display a window the first time the user tries to access the Internet showing all the possible alternatives (there are not so many after all)? I assume IE controls will still be bundled with Windows (otherwise, tons of apps will break), so all you have to do is set up a page and show it up there.

Still, even if you choose a middle ground to keep everyone happy, what's the point? I understand Opera's original complain, and I also understand Mozilla and Google backing it up, but this is 2009 not 199x. You only have to take a look at market share numbers all over Europe to see that IE is receiving some serious beating by Firefox in many countries, heck, even by Opera in Eastern Europe. I think fair competition has been more than restored since IE's rise to prominence in the late 90s and the subsequent lock on the market.

284

General Software Discussion / Re: linux hater is back?

« Last post by Lashiec on June 11, 2009, 07:14 PM »

He's back? I didn't even know he was gone. Or, more accurately, I don't know who he is. Care to fill us in on some backstory?

-Innuendo (June 11, 2009, 09:31 AM)

Sure thing

285

General Software Discussion / Re: Freeware Image Organizer (Especially Tags/Keywords)?

« Last post by Lashiec on June 11, 2009, 07:05 PM »

XnView can do everything you ask AFAIK, excluding the ability to handle such huge number of pictures with ease, and mostly because I don't have so many to test

286

Living Room / Re: What's your favorite drink?

« Last post by Lashiec on June 07, 2009, 06:22 PM »

Water. Really

287

Developer's Corner / Re: ServerFault.com

« Last post by Lashiec on June 04, 2009, 07:36 PM »

I do have to say this was not intended personally. I listen to the StackOverflow podcast religiously, and I very much enjoy his work on that.

-Ehtyar (June 04, 2009, 06:54 PM)

Sure. I'm an avid reader of Coding Horror as well, partly because the guy is an skilled blogger, and partly because he usually talks about something interesting, but I thought some of the issues you point can be explained by certain Jeff's posts. That said, Stack Overflow is not only him, so that would explain the extreme contrast between things he said and how things were implemented in the site.

While I do understand the point he makes with regard to storing user credentials, you cannot tell me there are not solid and well proven frameworks in just about every language under the sun for storing user credentials securely. Where people become unstuck is when they decide to roll their own and inevitably screw it up. Lazyness.

-Ehtyar (June 04, 2009, 06:54 PM)

Well, it also lines up nicely with his disdain for having several user credentials in the web. While it's the first site I have encountered to require OpenID, at least they have several providers to choose from. I'm not exactly sure about that wrong direction you say OpenID is going, but while the idea is certainly nice, the execution is weird to say the least, and I don't think that most users really care about the whole thing. Even now, that everyone and their dog is jumping on board, including (gasp!) Microsoft, it's becoming more irrelevant each passing day due to various reasons (browsers and passwords managers doing a "good" job storing different credentials, the vast majority of users not having that many passwords and logins to remember, etc.)

Spectacular lazyness, and cheapness. He's also having us sign up to yet another service, which is rather irresponsible/hypocritical given his standing on storing user credentials...

-Ehtyar (June 04, 2009, 06:54 PM)

Perhaps they reached the conclusion that many people would already have a Gravatar account (giving how essential is for blogs and the like), who knows.

I'm not sure I followed this one correctly, but it sounds like he's saying BBCode is the only sane alternative to letting your users put html in their posts. That is most definately correct, but it does not explain, nor justify, his development of a completely new syntax for his BBCode. One that makes substantially less sense than the kind we're all familiar with, I might add.

-Ehtyar (June 04, 2009, 06:54 PM)

Yup. I googled a bit about Markdown, which is another light markup language as BBCode as you may know, and it seems it does not offer XSS protection. Why they choose Markdown over BBCode? Dunno.

Not sure of your point here Lash Man. CAPTCHAs are fine, but not when you have to fill one out for your first 10 comments and votes. Just silly. If they're having such massive SPAM problems, get more moderators on board.

-Ehtyar (June 04, 2009, 06:54 PM)

Ooops, sorry about that, looks like I mixed thoughts. Then it's also probably done to avoid sock puppetry, and avoid giving yourself some extra points. That said, it's not that CAPTCHAs would be such an effective dissuasive method.

288

Developer's Corner / Re: ServerFault.com

« Last post by Lashiec on June 04, 2009, 06:33 PM »

Typically I totally avoid web 2.0 completely, but ServerFault sounds like (and is) a really great site. Having said that, I've found a few things that piss me off about this site (and its attempt at being web 2.0) that I just can't keep to myself.

• Forcing OpenID is just plain retarded, and massively out of touch. Surely any technically competent person knows this technology is going in exactly the wrong direction.
• Using gravatar for avatars exclusively? Sucks!!
• Reinventing bbcode for no apparent reason whatsoever? Made of suck!!
• The number of restrictions and CAPTCHAs placed on new users? Made of lots of suck.
• Using AJAX to update everything except the front page? Priceless.

-Ehtyar (June 03, 2009, 06:28 PM)

Answer: Jeff Atwood

On OpenID requirement:

The important thing to take away from this, if you're a programmer working on an application that stores user credentials, is to get the hell out of the business of storing user credentials! As we've seen today, the world is full of stupid users like me who do incredibly stupid things. Are you equipped and willing do everything necessary to protect idiots like me from myself? That's a key part of the promise of OpenID, and one of the reasons we chose it as the authentication system for Stack Overflow.

On Gravatar:

  Let someone else host the avatars . This collides with the concerns he expressed about depending on external services (Akismet), but whatever.

On BBCode:

With BBCode, if the user enters HTML you blow it away with extreme prejudice -- it's encoded, without exceptions. Easy. No thinking and barely any code required.

Since we use Markdown, we don't have that luxury. Like it or not, we are now in the nasty, brutish business of distinguishing "good" HTML markup from "evil" HTML markup. That's hard. Really hard. Dare and Jon are right to question the competency and maybe even the sanity of any developer who willingly decided to bite off that particular problem.

On restrictions and CAPTCHAs:

  IIRC, Jeff wasn't a big believer in CAPTCHA, but seeing how he removed the famous "orange" method and opted for reCAPTCHA, I suppose it's done to avoid system abuse.

And yup, reinventing bbcode is silly - especially because they (knowing Jeff's technical expertise) probably use regular expressions for parsing it

-f0dder (June 03, 2009, 06:53 PM)

And f0dder hits the jackpot!

Also, apparently everyone who can tell Mark Russinovich from a photo should be interested in the site. What's more, he/she must be a system administrator

289

Living Room / Re: Where did your DC user I.D come from?

« Last post by Lashiec on June 04, 2009, 05:31 PM »

tomos already discovered the origin a while ago, and it should be pretty clear for the rest. In any case...

Not that I'm his reincarnation, back in this plane of the existence to terrorize DC, but back in the day I couldn't beat this guy in the game whatever I did, so its image and name kinda stuck on my head. Then, after seeing how my usual screen name, an acronym that sounded way too cool in my teen years, was used by everyone and their dog, I was forced to choose another one, and so I came to be named "Lashiec". I even like the name.

290

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 evaluation

« Last post by Lashiec on June 04, 2009, 05:09 PM »

I guess I should find a Win7 version matrix (if it's available?) - for Vista, Ultimate didn't really have anything interesting for me, and the Business Premium (which our school offers for free) has everything I need. Expect it's going to be pretty much the same with Win7.

-f0dder (June 04, 2009, 11:03 AM)

Nope, each Windows 7 version is a superset of the previous one, which means you'll have to vLite Media Center from the Professional edition

291

Living Room / Re: "Check mail every ??? minutes"

« Last post by Lashiec on May 26, 2009, 12:36 PM »

But Miranda interacts with your POP3 or IMAP account, yes? Then it has to check for mail every "X" minutes

-f0dder (May 26, 2009, 08:25 AM)

It would if my college mail account allowed access via one of those two protocols, but it lacks such feature, at least officially. And since that is the sole mail account I use that isn't tied to an IM service, well...

292

Living Room / Re: "Check mail every ??? minutes"

« Last post by Lashiec on May 26, 2009, 07:29 AM »

Dunno. As soon as I receive new mail, Miranda notifies me of it. In the case of Yahoo, the system is a bit flaky (so it could notify you the next day), and GMail is supposed to check every 30 minutes.

293

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your favorite program to listen to internet radio?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 26, 2009, 07:13 AM »

I use foobar2000 (I also use it to clean the house and pet cats, but that's another story ). Pretty much all the major audio players can handle streaming, including those with a less busy interface, like XMPlay, VUPlayer or AIMP.

294

General Software Discussion / Re: Mozilla Contest: How Would You Improve Tabbed Browsing?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 20, 2009, 01:45 PM »

Wow, if managing 20 tabs is a problem for these guys, they'll panic in front of my 200+ tabs sessions

I'm interested in what will come out of this, even if some of the articles they link practically solve many of the inherent problems of tabs without reinventing the wheel or doing weird things (I particularly like Raskin's mockup and the solutions he proposes). I hope the ideas people submit don't try to solve everything they can in a single interface (like Mahemoff apparently suggests), otherwise they'll end up with complex interfaces that try to anticipate every user needs and will only confuse the hell out of the user.

Personally, I'd like to see something like Internet Explorer QuickTabs or OS X Exposé on steroids. Instead of having a tab bar, you would have a thumbnail page with realtime previews of the pages you have open (taking advantage of GPU acceleration, which at least Opera Software is working on). You can move them around, group them if you like, have various thumb pages to overcome screen space limitations, the browser can notify you of specific pages incidents via visual cues on its thumbnail, etc. Clicking on one would of course take you to that page, and you could easily go back to the thumbs with a hotkey or hovering the mouse over a previously defined hotcorner.

That said, I personally think that, for most people, all of these are solutions in search of a problem, and they don't present clear advantages to them. Not to mention that, one way or another, browsers already have methods to solve many of the problems outlined. The real problems, not the "things I'd like to have", as those could be cool for a while and remain unused for the rest of the time.

295

Best Virtual Machine Tool / Re: VirtualBox - Top of the Lot

« Last post by Lashiec on May 16, 2009, 05:50 PM »

Anybody got an idea how the XP mode in Win7 actually works? AFAIK it does contain an entire XP install that's run in the VM, but how are applications handled? Do they get installed in the VM image, or are they installed on your Win7 system and sorta box-wrapped into the XP-VM?

-f0dder (May 14, 2009, 05:49 PM)

For what I read, the applications get installed in the VM image, and shortcuts for the apps are created into a specific section of the Start menu of Windows 7.

296

Living Room / Re: My (Somewhat Realistic) Dream PC - Is it necessary?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 13, 2009, 07:45 PM »

Okay, so I'll be honest here and say I don't know much about SLI/Crossfire. All I know is that two GPUs can connect together but I don't really know what the benefits of that happening are. Can someone explain to me what purpose SLI serves and go into some detail as to why or why not it's worth having SLI? Also, Lashiec, what sort of SLI-induced headaches are you talking about?

-Deozaan (May 10, 2009, 03:21 PM)

In addition to the issues mentioned by f0dder in his first post, one of the problems of running two cards in SLI or Crossfire is they take some good space on the motherboard, and depending on how the layout is set up in the one you're using, they might render all the PCI and PCI-e ports unusable, it could be less of a problem for you as the cards you chose are not double-wide. Also, they might cover some the SATA ports in the mobo, again depending on where they are located (in some boards they are moved upwards or turned 90 degrees to the right to avoid this).

Then there are the inherent problems with these setups. AFAIK, for a game to take advantage of SLI and Crossfire, the drivers you're using must have specific profiles for them. It seems the problem it's no longer as big as it was, but you still encounter a game from time to time that does not support these setups. And the problems with load balancing that f0dder mentions sometimes result in games that have lackluster performance in comparison with the results you get with a single card.

There used to be problems if you were using SLI with multiple monitors as well, but nVidia fixed them a while ago.

297

General Software Discussion / Re: The New (And Improved?) VLC

« Last post by Lashiec on May 13, 2009, 06:33 PM »

OK, now the big question comes, can I remap CTRL+O to use that dialog?

Also, when are global hotkeys coming!!!!

-Josh (January 31, 2009, 08:39 AM)

In 1.0

298

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7, disk imaging, vmware

« Last post by Lashiec on May 13, 2009, 06:19 PM »

Hmm, a plane ticket to Denmark looks to be significantly cheaper than this particular SSD... I'm afraid it won't last too much in your hands!

Then again, I could get a completely new computer with that much money . Tell us later how the little thing performs

299

Living Room / Re: My (Somewhat Realistic) Dream PC - Is it necessary?

« Last post by Lashiec on May 10, 2009, 12:43 PM »

Heh, typical pre-built PC. Throw a lot of RAM memory, skim on the rest of the components.

1. Sure, 12 GB is overkill. Dunno what kind of apps you run, but you have to be a seriously heavy multi-tasker using heavy apps to take advantage of that. 4 GB, or 6 GB if you use a Core i7 (to take advantage of triple channel) is more adequate IMO, you save money and you still get quite some memory to go crazy (based on my experiences with 2 GB of RAM).

2. Cost-wise, it would be a good idea to take a look to the Phenom II or the older Core 2 (Duo or Quad), maybe even wait for the i5. The Core i7 may be the fastest processor available, but it has a matching price, including the motherboard, and on most tasks you will be hard-pressed to notice an advantage (again, depending on what you do with the computer).

The GPUs are sufficient if a bit underpowered. Not really underpowered, but there are several offerings both from nVidia and ATI with similar prices as the two 9800GT (which is nothing more than a revision of f0dder's GPU), but better performance. You also avoid several of the SLI-induced headaches, and with a 19" monitor you won't be using resolutions that need so many power.

PSU, +1 on f0dder's opinion.

3. Sure, as fenixproductions and f0dder said, two hard drives (or three, or even four...) is not a bad idea. You have several options there: a small one for the OS and applications and a big one for the rest of the data, run two in a RAID mirror, have an internal drive synchronized with an external one... A big drive for backups would be mandatory in all cases. A thermal compound is not really necessary, probably all coolers carry one, and IIRC the Core i7 one carries its own thermal compound patch so you don't have to spread it over the CPU.

300

Living Room / Re: The Geek's "100 things to do before you die" list

« Last post by Lashiec on May 07, 2009, 06:49 PM »

Gee, the Geek 1.0 is the prototypical "nerd" that only existed in comedy movies.