Recent Posts

2976

fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.40 needs some abuse!

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2009, 05:50 PM »

There, NT4 and Win9x support should be back again, and the way to make notes Read-only should be sane.

I ended settling for vc2003toolkit and the win2003-server edition of PlatformSDK for release builds, built through SCons scripts, and using Visual Studio 2008 (and IDE for building) while developing. This also trims some ~11kb off the executable size because of vc2003's smaller libc overhead

It's probably a good idea to give this beta version a thorough bashing (I'm going to get at it myself with a few different physical and virtual windows versions), since the toolchain has been radically changed. The shouldn't cause problems, but better safe than sorry.

If no bugs are found, this should be the final beta before 1.40 is declared final and (hopefully ) stable.

While I find that fSekrit is pretty much feature-complete for what it was intended to be, there's still a few more things I want to add to the project; but those require internal structure changes and source code cleanups... I'm pondering whether I should make fSekrit open-source after doing those fixes, or wait until I've implemented those last few ideas I have. Any suggestions?

2977

General Software Discussion / Re: Chrome OS preview looks pretty cool

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2009, 02:33 PM »

The security level makes sense, and I think it's essentially a pretty good idea... I just hope they aren't going to use it to limit what you can do on your hardware - and that they let developers target the platform without a lot of draconian requirements (Apple/iPhone springs to mind here - you need a Mac, you need to pay to get your stuff on the iPhone store, and the crap is heavily censored (both "moral" as well as "oh, that could hurt our own profits" crap)).

2978

Developer's Corner / Re: Apple's App Store Mistake

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2009, 02:09 PM »

Speaking as the Devil's Advocate, there is the flip-side of these artificial limits, that being a more stable platform in regards to interoperability and end user experience.  Or does that not matter?

-wraith808 (November 24, 2009, 12:52 PM)

I see the point in this, but it's not like having a non-closed platform makes it less stable on the hardware it's designed for - just slap on a "no warranty/support if used on 3rd party hardware", and the hackers would be happy.

[Edit - sorry f0dder - I accidentally click Modify instead of Quote - I think I put things back as they were!! ]

2979

General Software Discussion / Re: Chrome OS preview looks pretty cool

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2009, 12:35 PM »

Chrome OS Security overview - sounds good... but also like a potentially very locked-down platform. (lockdown against malware = good, lockdown against users = bad).

2980

Developer's Corner / Re: Apple's App Store Mistake

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2009, 10:21 AM »

Might not be monopolistic, but enforcing really draconian and artificial limits on your products is A Bad Thing^TM. OS X not wanting to run on vanilla x86 hardware without hacks, that's an artificial limit. The iPod and iTunes locked-down-ness, those are artificial limits.

2981

Living Room / Re: What is a "Gentleman's drink"

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2009, 08:27 AM »

I've always though Gin&Tonic is a pretty girly drink

2982

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Show Unread Posts

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2009, 03:06 AM »

I always open new tabs for all individual "unread posts" pages - then I open tabs for the topics that interest me. When I'm plowing through that, I repeat the process to catch new topics that might have popped up while I went through the first cycle

2983

fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.40 needs some abuse!

« Last post by f0dder on November 23, 2009, 06:53 PM »

but you can either use a hex editor or grab an EDITBIN from an older VS.

-f0dder (November 23, 2009, 05:45 PM)

I can send you my 05 if you like.

-Stoic Joker (November 23, 2009, 06:38 PM)

Thanks, but no need - I had an older version lying around myself

2984

fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.40 needs some abuse!

« Last post by f0dder on November 23, 2009, 05:45 PM »

(See edit to previous post).

I've used the following since 1.3, which worked fine on Win9x and NT4:

[Select]

ofn.Flags = OFN_CREATEPROMPT | OFN_HIDEREADONLY | OFN_PATHMUSTEXIST | OFN_NOCHANGEDIR;

You can't set subsystem version in linker options in the IDE as far as I can tell, so it has to be done commandline with EDITBIN - pretty lame they put limitations on what you can put there, but you can either use a hex editor or grab an EDITBIN from an older VS.

I did a little Googling on vs2008+win9x, seems like it's official that vs2005 is the last version with Win9x support (didn't find an official MS statement on it, but whatever ).

2985

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 47-09

« Last post by f0dder on November 23, 2009, 04:54 PM »

Pirate Bay Says Tracker Tech is So Yesterday, Man

I'd probably also say that if I was involved in tracker-related lawsuits

DHT is fine and all, but you still need some way to get peers... unless you want to probe the entire internet. And in my experience, trackers gets you your peers faster, and work just fine for legitimate content.

2986

fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.40 needs some abuse!

« Last post by f0dder on November 23, 2009, 04:49 PM »

OK, finally got around to installing Win98 and NT4 virtual machines... took a while to hunt down NT4-SP6a and IE6, but at least now I can do some testing. VS2008 EDITBIN.EXE won't let me set a subsystem version lower than 5.0, so I have to use a hexeditor to do that, joy joy.

I can reproduce your findings, Stoic Joker: works on NT4 (except for the save/open dialog boxes), and starts (but hangs somewhere) on win98. Exciting. I did a couple of tests, and the last version that works on Win98 is 1.3. Version 1.35 has the wrong osversion and hangs when hacked... so let's see what changed from 1.3 to 1.35. My guess is upgrading visual studio

EDIT: yup, seems to be a combination of upgrading Visual Studio and the PlatformSDK... the PSDK needed WINVER, _WIN32_WINDOWS and _WIN32_WINNT defined to 4.0 (probably the WINNT define that's most important, wouldn't be surprised if recent PSDK versions disregard the Win9x symbols entirely), and along with setting osversion stuff now seems to work on NT4 again.

Win9x is another story, and this is where the VS2008 upgrade comes in... Win98 gets stuck in some weird GetModuleHandleW/test-for-zero/Sleep(4000) loop, which must be from the libc startup routines. So, to get Win9x support back, I'll have to build with something else... I'm not going to have VS2005 and VS2008 side-by-side, but thankfully I still have a version of the vc2003toolkit before Microsoft pulled it offline (foo! shame on you!), which I could integrate with the SCons build scripts... I know that it's libc runtime works with Win9x, so as long as it plays nicely with the more up-to-date PSDK, it should work out in the end.

But one thing is for sure: for other projects than fSekrit, I doubt I'll support anything older than Windows 2000.

2987

Developer's Corner / Re: Apple's App Store Mistake

« Last post by f0dder on November 23, 2009, 02:43 PM »

And its not the iPod that was the big success - it was the iPod/iTunes combination, and iTunes is arguably the more important. The iPod wasn't even theirs: they bought it in originally, though it was probably Jonathan Ives that designed the version (3) that made it a really big success.

-Dormouse (November 23, 2009, 02:33 PM)

Heck, even the iPod wheel thingy wasn't very original - the Danish company B&O came up with something like that a good while before Apple, but didn't pursue it.

If it wasn't for all those loose-wrist latté-drinking snobs, Apple wouldn't be nearly as successful as they are.

2988

fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.40 needs some abuse!

« Last post by f0dder on November 23, 2009, 12:20 PM »

Stoic Joker: I dunno if it's "just" a problem like that, though - I'll have to figure out what the last NT4/Win9x working version of fSekrit is, and look at which changes have been made... I don't think there's been big changes to the APIs I use, but the compiler has been upgraded a few times, and that is at least part of the reason for failing (setting newer subsystem version and some other info).

2989

Post New Requests Here / Re: Switch to window while alt tabbing

« Last post by f0dder on November 23, 2009, 07:51 AM »

here's another one by holomind made with Autohotkey. you can also try TopDesk but it costs $19.95 USD.

-lanux128 (November 23, 2009, 07:47 AM)

If you're on Vista or Win7, I'd recommend against that AHK version, and basically also most other exposé clones than switcher2. s2 has the advantage of interfacing with Aero, and thus providing live window updates without hogging your CPU. It also doesn't crash, unlike some of the other versions

2990

fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.40 needs some abuse!

« Last post by f0dder on November 23, 2009, 06:56 AM »

Beta-4 added, recognizing hyperlinks.

There's basically two things I'd like to fix in 1.40 before making it final: first is making read-only behavior sane, because it clearly isn't right now. Second is fixing Win9x/NT4 problems, which might require building release versions with an older compiler...

2991

Post New Requests Here / Re: Switch to window while alt tabbing

« Last post by f0dder on November 23, 2009, 06:56 AM »

switcher2 is pretty nice and slick

2992

General Software Discussion / Re: Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?

« Last post by f0dder on November 21, 2009, 10:30 AM »

Eóin: very debatable indeed - most standard apps aren't going to benefit from wider address space or wider registers... but will rather be penalized by somewhat larger memory consumption (code as well as data). Of course, while 32bit code does run natively under 64bit and isn't emulated, there's the WOW64 translation layer taking place... but for standard applications (barring foxit reader ), the speed hit there is negligible, just like you don't see a speed hit due to the unicode<>ansi conversions the non-unicode functions do on NT.

2993

General Software Discussion / Re: Anyone observing bad performance overall scrolling this forum of FF on Linux?

« Last post by f0dder on November 21, 2009, 03:32 AM »

urlwolf: have you specifically, manually, installed non-free video drivers, or are you running with whatever the linux distribution came with?

2994

General Software Discussion / Re: Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?

« Last post by f0dder on November 20, 2009, 07:43 PM »

It doesn't sound appealing.  Like I say, they're a step behind.

-MilesAhead (November 20, 2009, 07:38 PM)

I guess Microsoft's reasoning is that 64bit support is a "pro" feature that "hobbyists" don't need - if you're producing 64bit applications, you're probably doing "serious business" and can afford the full compiler package. I don't necessarily agree, but I think it's fair enough of MS to impose a restriction like that... and after all, you do get the full 64bit compiler in the PlatformSDK.

Whether the strategy hinders the adoption of 64bit as the main platform... *shrug*

2995

General Software Discussion / Re: Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?

« Last post by f0dder on November 20, 2009, 06:55 PM »

You don't have to shell out $1000 to do 64bit development - Visual Studio Express is free... only produces 32bit executables, but you get the 64bit compiler for free from the PlatformSDK, and with a bit of hacking you can integrate it into the VSE IDE. You probably can't debug those executables from the IDE though, which will make it hard to trace 64bit related issues; but you can do your main development+debugging for 32bit, and produce (possibly even working ) 64bit output for free

2996

General Software Discussion / Re: Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?

« Last post by f0dder on November 20, 2009, 05:51 PM »

MilesAhead: IMHO there's no reason to go compiling everything as 64bit, unless you know for certain that the application can take advantage of the extra (and wider) general-purpose registers, or the much larger address space. For a lot of things, you might as well stay 32bit and enjoy the somewhat smaller executable images and memory consumption.

I love SuperFetch, and have left it at default settings. Yes, you might get some additional harddisk access early after system start, but the launch speed of applications after that far outweigh this "annoyance"; my laptop running Vista64 starts Visual Studio faster than my workstation running XP64 (with quadcore, 8 gigs of RAM, and (back then) 10k-rpm Raptor drives...)

2997

Find And Run Robot / Re: Shortcut to launch with admin privileges?

« Last post by f0dder on November 20, 2009, 05:46 PM »

tip: ShellExecute using the "RunAs" verb. Not properly documented and feels hacky, but that's the UAC API for you, I guess

-f0dder (November 16, 2009, 01:08 AM)

As I recall, RunAs (in Shell & ShellExecute) was an option back in Win2k, it just never caught on because everybody just ran as Admin back then.

-Stoic Joker (November 20, 2009, 01:32 PM)

It was?

Thing is, the undocumented "RunAs" UAC thing in ShellExecute doesn't take any user credentials - so imho it's extremely misnamed.

2998

General Software Discussion / Re: Chrome OS preview looks pretty cool

« Last post by f0dder on November 20, 2009, 09:02 AM »

The OS does not support hard drives, just SSDs (solid state devices)

-zridling (November 19, 2009, 10:41 PM)

Sounds like a preeeeetty arbitrary and artificial limit, considering that SSDs use exactly the same connectors and protocol as standard hard drives... 

2999

Living Room / Re: Dual NIC use

« Last post by f0dder on November 20, 2009, 08:59 AM »

I dunno if XP Pro has the functionality you need, my guess would be that it's limited to the server editions of Windows. Also, I can't help think: why do you want to do this setup? A full PC sucks a lot of power compared to a standalone router/firewall... which will probably offer more configuration options as well.

3000

General Software Discussion / Re: Anyone observing bad performance overall scrolling this forum of FF on Linux?

« Last post by f0dder on November 19, 2009, 04:28 PM »

Not running a proper binary video driver?