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3226

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 36-09

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2009, 11:18 AM »

jgpaiva: I think it's pretty impossible. Who'd keep the service up to date? Eóin already mentioned security. The Windows ecosystem is vastly bigger than the opensource one, good luck getting everybody to join the program. Then there's the issue of how the updates are done, and where they're stored (3rd party servers? Super good idea for security (not!), central at MS servers? Wow, major capacity required, etc). Everybody would have to move to a unified installer type (yeah, that's so going to happen), et cetera

3227

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 36-09

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2009, 08:52 AM »

jgpaiva: it would be nice, but kinda infeasible I'm afraid.

3228

General Software Discussion / Re: Export TheBat -> unix MBOX format

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2009, 01:42 AM »

Then I took the plunge and built myself an IMAP4 email server on linux using spare hardware, a decision that has paid off handsomely. Nowadays I'm free to try any email client as I please, without being held up by any proprietary databases.

-mwang (September 09, 2009, 01:15 AM)

That's one of the things I've been considering as well - IMAP + Maildir storage is pretty nice, and so much better for backup (rsnapshot ) than whatever proprietary format, or the non-proprietary but meh MBOX format.

There would of course be the issue of pulling mails from my mailserver to the LAN mail server (I don't want to expose the LAN server to the internet + set up the necessary DNS items etc. to make the LAN server my primary mail server, at least not to start with).

3229

General Software Discussion / Re: alternative to filehamster?

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2009, 01:05 AM »

Thanks for the explanation. I'm not a programmer, so I can only observe. SpiderOak doesn't install a driver either (no .sys files). It does detect block level changes not only because they advertise the feature on their web site, but also the uploads (of changed large files) take so little time that I don't think it's possible otherwise.

-mwang (September 08, 2009, 08:52 PM)

Well, when remote uploading is involved, the time saved even on fast ADSL links would make compare-to-get-changes quite acceptable

It couldn't compare a file to its earlier versions since they sit remotely (well, I do have local backups, but SpiderOak wouldn't know where to look). I don't know if it asks Volume Shadow Copy Service or other system services for the necessary information. But as a cross-platform service with linux and mac os clients, it would have to ask different system functions on different systems if it doesn't do it by itself. That's still possible, of course.

-mwang (September 08, 2009, 08:52 PM)

Hm, interesting.

One solution I could think of would be to store checksums/hashes of each block of a file locally, for large enough blocks that this doesn't cause massive data bloat. It would be faster than comparing to an old version (only one big datastream read + the much smaller list of block-hashes). Still requires processing the entire file though.

3230

General Software Discussion / Re: Hard Drive Repair

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2009, 01:01 AM »

You don't "rescue a harddrive" with SpinRite, you basically just let the drive kick in sector remapping because SR does read+writeback, whereas something like ChkDsk simple does read-"oh it's unreadble"-flagClusterAsBad. I'd never in a thousand years run SR on a dying drive, since it's only going to stress the drive and risk ruining it even more... the only proper way to deal with a dying drive is grabbing an image of it and then tossing the drive out in the garbage bin. Hell, I'd rather sit and tap the drive with a screwdriver to keep it's read/write heads from getting stuck than I'd run SR.

PS: Norton products used to be good back in the DOS days, when NDD made sense to use. Of course I agree fully with your statement these days, especially after Symantec bought the name.

3231

Developer's Corner / Re: Multithreading tutorials

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2009, 12:58 AM »

If you use the Interlocked* functions, be sure to check how to ensure they're using intrinsics for your compiler - it's not happening by default in VC++.

And while they're faster than the kernel-supplied synchronization primitives, keep in mind that it still means issuing a bus lock for the data. Sometimes you can get speedups by splitting up your data set, processing without locks, and recombining.

3232

General Software Discussion / Re: alternative to filehamster?

« Last post by f0dder on September 08, 2009, 07:49 PM »

mwang: there's rsync version(s?) for Windows, the one I bumped into was a cygwin build... and I try to stay away from cygwin as much as possible. rsync in and by itself isn't enough for backup though, imho - it should be combined with script/whatever to get the same kind of functionality as time machine has. I use rsnapshot on my linux box, works like a charm.

Block-level backups are cool, but I don't really need it for the stuff I want backed up. Also, without a filter driver (or something really smart I don't know about), I dunno how they can detect block changes efficiently (comparing to a backed-up version would be stupid). I was mostly excited about the block-level feature because I thougth it would mean a filter driver (I've got a thing for those )... which would mean the backup app instantly knowing about file changes in a pretty efficient way.

Haven't had time to play around with Timeline, but it does sound like it's configurability is on the low end - that kinda sucks. And wtf is up with including a web server as part of the application? O_o - takes up ~28MB installed, and seems like a pretty pointless thing to do. Oh, and if explorer is the only interface for restoring backups, then... ugh.

No, it didn't install any driver (inside the Windows directory tree if that's what you mean) according to my log. It has a "BlockLevel.dll" and it puts a ton into the registry. Do you really need a "driver" to do block-level backups? It registered as a set of system services and does its work in the background. Can't it perform block-level backups that way? That seems to be how SpiderOak does it as well.

-mwang

Well, for what I know, you need a filter driver (.sys) to detect "X bytes written too ffset Y in file Z" change notification (rather than just getting "file has changed") - unless you can ask Volume Shadow Copy Service or something. If you don't get the "X,Y,Z" notification, afaik you'd have to do a manual compare of the file to a previous version in order to detect modified blocks. This would work, and conserve space, but it's a lot slower than simply writing out blocks you've been previously told were modified.

I noticed blocklevel.dll as well and took a quick look at it, and it's definitely not a driver. Seems to use SQLite for something, possibly to store list of changed blocks?... but I didn't look any deeper than that.

3233

General Software Discussion / Re: alternative to filehamster?

« Last post by f0dder on September 08, 2009, 07:23 PM »

I had a quick look at Timeline, and it doesn't seem like it's installing any drivers - I'm wondering how they're doing block-level backups in an efficient way if they don't have a filesystem filter driver to record the changes?

3234

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for a process monitor that may not exist ...

« Last post by f0dder on September 08, 2009, 07:22 PM »

With the video driver model Vista introduced (and win7 obviously continued), you shouldn't be getting BSODs from driver faults; the video driver runs in usermode and can just be restarted. (Hardware faults is a different matter, of course). From your description, my guess is you have flaky hardware... if you get BSOD-and-reboot (as opposed to really messy hardware faults), Windows should keep a minidump file which you can investigate to find out more about the issue - this is likely going to be a lot more valuable than the process monitor idea you've got.

3235

General Software Discussion / Re: alternative to filehamster?

« Last post by f0dder on September 08, 2009, 05:52 PM »

Oh, is Genie Timeline available now? I looked a couple of weeks ago, and at least I couldn't find a download link back then. Would love to play around with it.

It's not like what apple's doing with Time Machine is that new or unique, by the way - it's been possible to do with rsync + scripting for quite a while. Apple just pretty-GUI'ed it . Afaik Time Machine does a full file backup whenever a file is changed, Timeline has an advantage there since it does block level backups and thus captures only the changed parts...

3236

General Software Discussion / Re: Hard Drive Repair

« Last post by f0dder on September 08, 2009, 05:43 PM »

Not sure if it's what you are looking for but some people swear by SpinRite.

-Innuendo (September 08, 2009, 05:38 PM)

Friends don't let friends use snakeoil SpinRite.

Btw, the distinction should be made between "hard drive repair" and "filesystem recovery" - there's quite a difference.

3237

General Software Discussion / Re: doing a web app is easier than a desktop app. Days are counted for Desktop apps?

« Last post by f0dder on September 07, 2009, 10:36 AM »

tranglos: hear ye, hear ye!

There are situations where webapps make sense, but they'll always be slower and more limited than desktop apps in general. There's really no way around it when you run across internet links rather than in-process memory, and when you use JIT'ed JavaScript as opposed to native (or heck, even JVM/dotNET) code.

3238

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 36-09

« Last post by f0dder on September 07, 2009, 10:30 AM »

#1 is a very good idea - they should add it for JVM as well.

#4 - perhaps the .us can finally get secure voting machines?

3239

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your preferred font?

« Last post by f0dder on September 07, 2009, 10:28 AM »

The next step is to embed fonts in browser code. I think between Java and HTML5, this can be done. I've no idea how, though!

-zridling (September 07, 2009, 05:21 AM)

Please, don't.

Rely on the fonts you know will exist on normal systems, and keep fancy fonts for publishing. There's already enough presentation-over-content faggery going on with flash >_<

3240

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR Hogging RAM?

« Last post by f0dder on September 07, 2009, 10:26 AM »

That sounds pretty normal - after just booting my system and doing a FARR search, I've got Virtual Size of 138MB and Working Set of 22MB. The figures in ProcExp you should be most interested in are the "private parts" (), since that's the "meat" of the memory allocations.

3241

General Software Discussion / Re: Export TheBat -> unix MBOX format

« Last post by f0dder on September 07, 2009, 02:24 AM »

Jibz: /EXPORT might've be something to look into - is it documented? I didn't even bother to look in the help file, given that it generally sucks

3242

General Software Discussion / Re: Export TheBat -> unix MBOX format

« Last post by f0dder on September 06, 2009, 10:08 PM »

*bump*

Suffering from yet another night of insomnia, I decided to download the last version of TheBat that my 3.x license entails me to, upgrading it from 3.99.24 (which I've been running for over two years) to 4.0.38. This was kinda the last straw for me; why the profanity have they added profanity skinning to the app? Even setting "windows default" skin doesn't turn all the profanity off. There's surely enough bugs and feature requests those profanity could have worked on instead.

I looked around the net once again for some easy exporting, but it seems there hasn't been any progress (lanux's link to the reveng link hadn't been updated anytime recently), there seemed to be no other offerings, and the plugin API hasn't been updated since October 1st 2005 - and it's pretty profanity horrible ([...]considered as self-explanatory, one paragraph is in russian, ...) - furthermore, the SDK is profanity limited in scope, and basically seems only to support antivirus, antispam and custom macros. Seeing that the ClassName for the account treeview is TXTreeView and how abysmal the search results are, I dropped the idea of making an export tool that worked within TheBat.

The .TBB and .TBI files TheBat stores your folders in looks like something that could be reverse-engineered without that much hassle, but honestly I can't be bothered. I did the manual labor of selecting a folder, hitting ctrl+a, tools->export->unix mbox, hitting in filename, enter... across 5 accounts and 42 folders. No, profanity TheBat won't automatically export all messages in a folder, you have to select them; and it certainly won't profanity export a full folder structure. Woe unto he who has more mailboxes than I do.

But now my data is finally out of the clutches of profanity TheBat's proprietary hands, and in a well-defined well-supported format. Where to go now?

I'm definitely setting up ThunderBird for my active accounts, and I will be running those in IMAP mode. TB isn't perfect, but at least it uses mbox files; while those are by no means perfect, at least they're easy to port to another mail app.

What will I be missing from TheBat?

• MicroEd - I really dig that editor, in spite of lack of proper hyphenation.
• Virtual Folders (but those were too limited anyway).

What won't I be missing from profanity TheBat?

• Bugs and quirks - 'nuff said.
• RITLabs - 'nuff said.
• The fragility of it's message store. While I haven't had a full-scale meltdown, weird things have certainly happened, and I never felt confident that I wouldn't lose data in a crash.
• It's clumsy and overcluttered user interface.

I guess I never used any of TheBat's "really powerful" features, otherwise waving goodbye to it might have been harder. And I'll probably get pissed at ThunderBird once my mailboxes grow big... but until then, I have a feeling of relief.

Not sure whether to import my old mailboxes to ThunderBird - I certainly need access to them, but I've been playing around with MailStore Home. It's a bit tedious importing the various MBOX files, especially since the home version limits you to three sync sources (I only need to sync each file once, but that still means I need to delete the sync entries once imported); fortunately, deleting a sync source doesn't delete the stuff imported from it. Also, the way it names entries in it's tree structure is a bit inflexible, and doesn't have rename/restructure support (not that much of an issue, but still a minor annoyance). Not a perfect app, but it'll probably suffice for now - and it's pretty fast. I might even be able to import all my old mails back from the PMMail 2000 days, which would be nice.

Anyway, it was nice to let out some steam. Now I'm going to RAR up the old TheBat data folders, stuff it in the backup folder on my fileserver, and uninstall the application. RIP, The Bat! - 12th January 2005 - 7th September 2009. Then, off to install & configure ThunderBird.

3243

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your preferred font?

« Last post by f0dder on September 05, 2009, 03:51 PM »

Eóin: how on earth can you live with a variable width font for coding? BLASPHEMER! Hell, for coding, anything else than Dina is blasphemy in my eyes.

PS: that memcpy()ing code looks somewhat dirty to me

3244

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your preferred font?

« Last post by f0dder on September 05, 2009, 03:07 AM »

Hm, Day Roman... what's with 6 and 8 floating above the rest? Also, 0 looks way too much like an o, and 1 like I.

3245

General Software Discussion / Re: JkDefrag further developed as MyDefrag

« Last post by f0dder on September 04, 2009, 12:36 PM »

JKDefrag/MyDefrag does seem to do the job, but darn it's slow - PerfectDisk gets the job done a lot faster, and (at least) as well... but of course that's payware, and beggars can't be choosers

About the display, not only is it slow... I also don't feel it gives a lot of clues as to what's going on. There's no legend for the various colors (which aren't distinct enough), and a mode with a traditional block grid would be nice.

3246

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your preferred font?

« Last post by f0dder on September 04, 2009, 03:32 AM »

Dina while coding, Courier New for xplorer^2, not much preference for anything else. I do tend to prefer serif fonts for both screen and print, though.

3247

General Software Discussion / Re: Switcher2: Expose Clone (Window Arranger) for Windows

« Last post by f0dder on September 03, 2009, 10:11 AM »

Thanks for reviving this thread, f0dder. I'm interested, but am wondering about the resource "hit" under Vista?

-Darwin (September 03, 2009, 09:25 AM)

My laptop runs Vista64, and it uses... dunno, ~20MB or so of private bytes. On my Win7-64 workstation (still running a post-RC beta, haven't upgraded to RTM from school's MSDNAA yet) it's weighing around the same (and running 100% smooth, thanks to the "somewhat more powerful" GPU) - around 10meg non-shared working set, that's not bad at all either.

As for CPU toll, I let a DivX movie play back in Windows Media Player on my laptop, and kept the System Information window from Process Explorer open as well. I couldn't tell the difference in the CPU usage chart from having the Switcher exposé mode running or not, even when flipping rapidly between windows in the F2 mode - testing now on my quadcore workstation, keeping Properties->Performance open and doing the same hits in at around 0% CPU usage for the Switcher process, and some hardly noticeable spikes on the procmon SysInfo CPU chart, as expected caused by the dwm.exe process. Those spikes were around 5% or so when doing "normal rapid" flipping, and up to 15% when keeping an arrow key pressed.

Haven't checked if dwm.exe memory consumption goes up when using switcher, but I expect it won't - it's already responsible for keeping the window content of the applications.

In other words: pretty negligible resource consumption. I should test if I get different memory consumption with varying number of open Windows - and it's worth testing the difference between Win7 and Vista as well, since Win7 (if running with a new WDDM driver (1.1 as opposed to Vista 1.0, iirc)) keeps windows on GPU memory rather than system memory.

PS: I expect that pre-Vista compatible exposé clones will be worse wrt. resource consumption - they need to basically take screenshots of all your open Windows in order to work, which takes some memory. And for "live" previews, they need to keep taking screenshots (the faster the "smoother") - this takes up CPU cycles.

3248

General Software Discussion / Re: Switcher2: Expose Clone (Window Arranger) for Windows

« Last post by f0dder on September 03, 2009, 02:51 AM »

Why didn't I search DonationCoder for "Windows Expose" before I did the google query? That could have pointed me to Switcher a bit quicker (oh boy, some of the expose clones are unstable rubbish). Especially that it's Vista-only and seems to "use Aero" rather than constantly doing polling screenshots is pretty sweet. And while it isn't 100% smooth on my laptop's Intel video chipset, it's smoother than some of the other clones, and enjoyable to use.

Imho expose goes beyond just eye-candy, it seems pretty darn useful when you have a whole bunch of applications open and need to switch beyond your last few used apps (which Alt+Tab handles OK). The (live) previews, combined with the AppIcon overlay, makes it pretty fast to locate the application you're interested in, and it's wonderful that Switcher is so keyboard-friendly.

As much as I hate to say it, Exposé is one of the nice features coming from Apple (but I wouldn't be surprised if they nicked the idea from some other place ).

3249

General Software Discussion / Re: JkDefrag further developed as MyDefrag

« Last post by f0dder on September 03, 2009, 01:03 AM »

MilesAhead: the .exe file takes command-line arguments - so you can launch it with "C:" and have it only defrag that partition

3250

Developer's Corner / Re: Mask/Forge Hard-Drive Properties?

« Last post by f0dder on September 02, 2009, 12:34 AM »

A friend just recently asked me if there was a way he could forge the properties of his hard-drive so that it would look like it had nothing on it. I told him it wasn't possible but now I'm thinking I could be wrong.

-alivingspirit (September 01, 2009, 08:22 PM)

Theoretically, there's a bunch of different things you can do on a running system - but as soon as the disk is checked from a linux livecd, in another machine, (...) there's nothing you can do to mask the fact that there's stuff on the disk.

His best bet for safety would be TrueCrypt, but that's probably more than he wants/needs, and has some problems of it's own