Recent Posts

2751

General Software Discussion / Re: recommendation: sabayon linux

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 02:32 PM »

Faster filesystems is another virtue.

-urlwolf (January 09, 2010, 12:02 PM)

How much faster are those filesystems than NTFS for "normal" use, though? It's pretty hard to come up with a benchmark, considering that only ext2 is available for NT and that the NTFS support in linux can not be compared to native windows speed (neither the current ntfs3g nor the old wrapper around binary NT drivers). Yes, I know that some of the filesystems are theoretically better, but outside insane practices like putting 20k files in a single folder, can you feel the difference? (explorer.exe is dog slow with large folders, but that's because of explorer and icon extraction, not because of NTFS).

Also, most of the newer filesystems on linux (those actually offering performance benefits) can't yet be considered as mature as NTFS... there's plenty of ReiserFS horror stories around. EXT2 might or might not be faster, but it doesn't have journaling - EXT3 w/journaling should be stable, but I haven't tested it's speed... and really, for normal desktop/workstation use, I don't think I've ever bumped into a filesystem bottleneck.

One of the few reasons where I can see the filesystem make a big difference (apart from data security differences or managing features, like über-cool ZFS has) would be mail servers storing email in Maildir format (which is superior to mbox)... but for most other stuff I don't believe in having a zillion folders or files inside a folder . That said, I wouldn't mind more filesystems being available for Windows; NTFS is decent, but I'd like the data-safety features of ZFS, and I wouldn't mind seeing proper head-to-head benchmarks, even if synthetics don't have much to do with desktop/workstation patterns.

You mean Windows 9x where you had to reinstall every few months just because things got too slow? Now who wouldn't love that!

-Josh (January 09, 2010, 01:06 PM)

Never really happened to me - when I needed a reinstall it was because I hosed my system, which was ever so easier on 9x than NT because of the lack of protection (user permissions as well as memory - having all DLLs in shared writable memory is bad). Back then it did mean a measurable performance difference to clean & compact your registry, though

2752

Post New Requests Here / Re: Display-drivers stretching hack for small screens

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 02:20 PM »

So the applications *stay* maximize and at the position you left them at? They don't follow the scrolling around, or get reverted to non-maximized-but-same-size-as-when-maximized?

2753

Living Room / Re: Great Britain is frozen!

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 02:19 PM »

TucknDar: that's pretty insane

With temperatures like that, you probably have to breathe relatively controlled - might be dangerous going for a run

2754

General Software Discussion / Re: recommendation: sabayon linux

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 10:40 AM »

What I'd really like to fine is a completely stripped down (CLI only) *nix variant that will run (or rather come with) a Samba server for file sharing.

-Stoic Joker (January 09, 2010, 10:30 AM)

Gentoo, perhaps Arch?

I used Arch before going gentoo, and it was pretty nice - but it felt a bit too "fringe", I had a feeling of not knowing whether the distro would be supported 12 months later... and some of the software I wanted wasn't available in the package system so I had to compile it myself.

2755

Living Room / Re: Great Britain is frozen!

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 10:17 AM »

Heh, there's a bigdifference between, say, 40f and 60f (5-15c) to me... but I'm obviously used to colder weather, living in Denmark. Right now it's -3c (~27f) outside... relatively cold, but pretty mild considering it's winter (global warming anyone ). I can manage 5c without problems, giving proper clothing - below that and I don't particularly enjoy being outside for longer periods. At -5c my fingers go numb when bicycling, even wearing my leather gloves >_<

2756

General Software Discussion / Re: recommendation: sabayon linux

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 10:14 AM »

• I had to google a lot. and spent about 16hrs on diff irc channels

-urlwolf (January 09, 2010, 07:54 AM)

How many times were you told to RTFM, "fix it, you have the source", or were otherwise mocked?

(My experiences with linux IRC rooms have been less-than-stellar; but I guess it might help to join freenode/whatever linux channels and not EFNet )

2757

General Software Discussion / Re: How to disable Flash from caching to disk?

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 06:18 AM »

@doctorfrog: You write "...flash doesn't know that trick".
Well, it seems to work for .SWF files - that's flash - right? But I just realised that I am using a FF plugin that invokes an alternative Flash player called "FlowPlayer". Maybe that's why?

-IainB (January 09, 2010, 05:34 AM)

I think he means to imply that it doesn't stop flash from caching the content to disk, which is correct... but it does enable you to pre-cache an entire video, so it should eliminate disk-caused stuttering

2758

Living Room / Re: Great Britain is frozen!

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 05:29 AM »

Curse you, Global Warming!

-Deozaan (January 08, 2010, 06:24 PM)

Heh

You do realize which effect global warming has on the gulf stream, though, and what effect the gulf stream has on the rest of the world?

2759

General Software Discussion / Re: Natural Language Sorting for Comments

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 04:36 AM »

AI and "being fuzzy about things" is something computers are inherently bad at, unfortunately - even the biggest supercomputers running neural networks have only reached the "intelligence level" (what popular science tends to call it; number of neurons != intelligence level, there's also training to do) of a cat, iirc.

One of the places where neural nets is applied is the OCR software in your postal office mail sorting machines. Dunno about the rest of the world, but in Denmark they run software from Siemens... pretty big company, pretty huge corpus of training material, lots and lots of tweaking (for each update Siemens is paid both a fixed amount of cash, plus a variable amount based on the added recognition efficiency - they have a lot of incentive for making the system better, and incentive is actually what the system is called ).

Anyway, the system works pretty well, handles a very high percentage of letters automatically. But there's still a lot of letters that "slip by" and have to be manually sorted (still using computers though, with a whole bunch of postal monkeys hammering their keyboards, entering recipient addressess). A lot of the letters where the OCR system goes "oh, dunno what to do, *toss arms*" are due to bad handwriting, but even correctly formatted addresses with legible monospace fonts (and no stuff like logos or whatever that might confuse the system) slip through... which goes to show that Being Fuzzy And Smart Is Hard^TM - I'd wager that language recognition is a much harder task than "simple" OCR.

2760

Post New Requests Here / Re: All AutoHotkey (AHK) coders read: No more upx packing of compiled ahk utils

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 04:12 AM »

though reading f0dder's "Packing, data handling, stuff - revision 2" posted above (thanks f0dder!) I wonder if I'll ever have use for upx.exe for the sorts of things I'm likely to do.

-ewemoa (January 08, 2010, 05:45 PM)

Keep in mind that I'm not flat-all-out-against exepacking - it makes sense, for instance, if you distribute small tools as .exe downloads rather than .zip (which isn't necessarily a good idea, but for some stuff it's convenient). Or if your application is designed to occupy very little space (fSekrit comes to mind, since it saves it's executable with every encrypted note you make).

But for most stuff, you really should let the user decide, for the reasons mentioned in my article. Oh, and I see that the article doesn't even mention Windows Terminal Servers - even if your app is single-instance (and you thus don't expect much gain from code/data page sharing), on WTS it could be multiple-instance (across multiple user accounts, of course).

There's also the issue of virus scanners not just being anal about compression, but also scanning the files quite a bit slower than non-packed executables... I recall Jibz (iirc) being annoyed with FileZilla by default being compressed. And I've worked with machines slow enough that you could definitely tell loading speed difference, at least when the machine had antivirus software running.

This is drifting slightly off-topic - I'm pretty good at that

2761

General Software Discussion / Re: recommendation: sabayon linux

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 04:07 AM »

Shades: the speed advantage of compiling-for-your-architecture of gentoo hasn't been very large in my experience - and iirc there were some benchmarks showing that for some people (and some compiler options) the system even got slightly slower than "vanilla" binaries. Kinda makes sense, most applications aren't CPU-heavy and thus don't benefit from aggressive optimizations; au contraire, some of those bloat up the binaries, so you end up with fatter and ever-so-slighty slower-loading more-memory-consuming without much advantage.

I use gentoo on my server, though - I like the level of control it gives me over what dependencies are pulled in. Vanilla binaries tend to be built with all options supported - this often includes (optional) X11 support... I don't need and don't want X11 on my server, and gentoo let's me achieve this.

For the desktop, I prefer something smoother and more polished... but that's why I don't run Linux on the desktop in the first place

2762

Post New Requests Here / Re: Display-drivers stretching hack for small screens

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 03:34 AM »

slowmaker: if GimeSpace doesn't use drivers (or integration with Vista-and-later windows manager) but simply does MoveWindow() on all visible windows, there's a good chance that it won't be a 100% smooth experience with all applications. How does it work wrt. maximized windows, for instance?

2763

General Software Discussion / Re: "Renaming" a list of names (not files)

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2010, 04:19 PM »

sounds like a pretty simple regex job that any decent text editor should be able to handle

2764

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: A single hotkey that runs a single command line. Smallest. Snack. Ever?

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2010, 01:14 PM »

Sorry, missed the hotkey request.  The windows hotkey for this is Win+R.  See?  Already built in - no extra resources.

-steeladept (January 08, 2010, 12:18 PM)

Except if you want to run a predefined command-line

2765

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2010, 10:36 AM »

Haha, they should make the rest of the bible (and the Qur'an!) that way

2766

General Software Discussion / Re: How to disable Flash from caching to disk?

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2010, 10:35 AM »

IainB: I use that trick when on slow connections, or when there's "a curl on the intertubes" at home... but it doesn't solve the hiccups I have, unfortunately - dunno what causes them exactly, but they seem limited to FF and not IE or Chrome

2767

Post New Requests Here / Re: All AutoHotkey (AHK) coders read: No more upx packing of compiled ahk utils

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2010, 06:54 AM »

The AV vendors really need to get their sh!t together if merely being packed with a (non-modified) UPX sends their heuristics engines off the tracks... come on, it's easy to identify and unpack.

That said, I'm generally against packing of executable unless there's special reason for it; false positives isn't the only negative aspect of exepacking.

2768

Post New Requests Here / Re: All AutoHotkey (AHK) coders read: No more upx packing of compiled ahk utils

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2010, 06:19 AM »

Even back in the pre-Win9x DOS days, ThunderByte AntiVirus (TBAV, which was the product back then) could decompress exepackers, and it even had a "virtualization" mode for unknown packers¹ - afaik today's antivirus products, at least the better ones, have fast depackers for known exepackers and emulation for unknowns.

I assume the problem with all those false positives is static (or pattern-based) signatures that are simply too short... or heuristic engines that get confused for whatever fscktarded reason.

1: and there was at least one virus that figured out how to break out of the sandboxed mode, in effect causing a virus scan to infect your system

2769

Post New Requests Here / Re: All AutoHotkey (AHK) coders read: No more upx packing of compiled ahk utils

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2010, 06:02 AM »

Hrm, is disabling UPX packing enough to not get AHK scripts flagged? I thought that every virus scanner today knows how to unpack UPX (and several other packers) and do the scanning on the unpacked executable.

2770

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Site included in Browser Defender

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2010, 05:39 AM »

I've had reports of people getting http://f0dder.dcmembers.com blocked for similar silly reasons - jgpaiva has (had?) an autohotkey thing somewhere on his subdomain, and that affected the whole domain, apparently. Seems like it's fixed now, though.

* f0dder sends out some hate to the overzealous heuristic engines.

2771

N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Final Release: Leap of Faith

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2010, 05:34 AM »

2772

General Software Discussion / Re: Very scary! I just completely lost a bunch of files [FALSE ALARM!]

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2010, 05:24 AM »

The only drawback I know of is that a service can't be run portably (in the sense that it must be installed).

-mwb1100 (January 08, 2010, 02:44 AM)

Dunno if that's such a big disadvantage - do you usually have admin access the places you need to run portable stuff?

2773

General Software Discussion / Re: How to disable Flash from caching to disk?

« Last post by f0dder on January 07, 2010, 06:48 PM »

if you're using Firefox, you can try this tip from Lifehacker - How to Fix Annoying YouTube Jumpiness in Firefox.

-lanux128 (January 07, 2010, 06:42 PM)

Ugh... why does session-store cause a speed bump like that? >_<

2774

Finished Programs / Re: ZIP to PHP converter

« Last post by f0dder on January 07, 2010, 06:17 PM »

For the intended use of this program (as I understand it: upgrading websites, especially pre-fab systems), it should.

-f0dder (January 07, 2010, 06:14 PM)

Isn't that related to the files' CHMOD?

-Tuxman (January 07, 2010, 06:15 PM)

Of course, but if you've found a way to inject files you're normally running with a user account that has write access to the files you're interested in overwriting - duh?

2775

General Software Discussion / Re: How to disable Flash from caching to disk?

« Last post by f0dder on January 07, 2010, 06:16 PM »

Do you, by any chance, use FireFox for browsing? (whoops, reading your post a bit more closely, I think I already answered that myself )

I've noticed that FF stutters a lot more wrt. flash than IE or Chrome