Recent Posts

4201

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on December 24, 2008, 10:03 AM »

Apart from the boot-time BSODs on XP64 with newer nvidia drivers (I guess that's the price to pay for running a "niche" versions of Windows), I haven't experienced driver-related crashes for quite some years. Both of my brothers run ATI cards, and they have BSODs every now and then. *shrug*. And the LargeSystemCache=1 data-loss crash that ATI drivers had (or still has?) was nasty enough that I haven't run ATI cards for quite a while. I'm with Carol, they all make sucky drivers, in one way or the other.

The one advantage I remember ATI drivers having was that displays still had full acceleration when using screen rotation - with nvidia (at least 2 years ago, haven't used rotation for a while... back when I had a radeon 9600 and a 15" TFT that could rotate) the rotated display felt sluggish, as if acceleration had been turned off, or at least heavily degraded.

4202

General Software Discussion / Re: Calendar Math, which language to use?

« Last post by f0dder on December 24, 2008, 08:23 AM »

You'll definitely want something with decent calendar support (which rules JAVA out, imho ) - and involving a scripting language (for easily and rapidly updating calendar rules without having to re-build the app) sounds like a really good idea. Personally I'd start by looking a bit at JavaScript, since it's one of those things I haven't gotten around to using yet. I know it has date routines, but dunno how easy they are to use.

I assume your target OS is Windows, and Windows comes with a calendar control by default. it's not superfancy (it's the same you get when you doubleclick the clock in the tray notification area), but at least it's somewhere to start.

4203

General Software Discussion / Re: Cannot open Paint on Vista

« Last post by f0dder on December 24, 2008, 08:18 AM »

It is hard for me to believe that it should not be possible, well EASY, to find a (new) version of msPaint somewhere at Microsoft's, to download & install.

-Curt (December 24, 2008, 07:01 AM)

The small apps that come with windows (paint, calc, ...) generally aren't updated very often, probably to the extent that they only see updates on major OS releases. Some of the somewhat bigger bundled components (movie maker, media player) do receive updates, but those are handled via windows updates.

4204

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on December 23, 2008, 03:50 PM »

Superboy: https://www.donation....msg143660#msg143660 - the card I mention there is realtively low-cost and has 2xDVI.

DVI supposedly has somewhat better quality. You might not be able to spot the difference though, unless you're going to use KVMs. VGA/D-SUB signals are analog and often suck through KVMs, whereas DVI is digital.

4205

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on December 23, 2008, 01:55 PM »

Carol: he isn't gaming, so he doesn't need the GPU power (or power consumption ) of dual cards in crossfire.

I'm personally not too keen on ATI/AMD GPUs because their drivers have behaved very naughty (BSODs with data loss) when using the LargeSystemCache=1 setting. Nvidia drivers kinda suck these days too, the last couple I've tried have given boot-time BSODs, so I'm using older versions.

Matrox cards are way too expensive to even consider, imho. What about the ASUS EAH3650 SILENT/HTDI/512M? Looks like reasonable price, and has two DVI outputs (and can even do HDMI with audio via a DVI->HDMI converter). And it's passively cooled, meaning less noise... haven't checked reviews or benchmarks on the card, it was just what I found from "passively cooled, 2xDVI, reasonable price" criteria

4206

General Software Discussion / Re: 3rd party software raid 1 in Winxp

« Last post by f0dder on December 22, 2008, 07:11 PM »

Carol: does that involve hacking system files? In that case, I wouldn't recommend it

4207

UrlSnooper / Re: No admin rights - cannot install - Any alternatives ?

« Last post by f0dder on December 22, 2008, 09:00 AM »

URL Snooper requires a driver component, so there's not much you can do without admin privileges, I'm afraid.

4208

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Release: keydb

« Last post by f0dder on December 22, 2008, 08:58 AM »

Sounds like a decent enough default - although I'd probably go for 256 bit "just coz"

4209

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 51

« Last post by f0dder on December 22, 2008, 05:19 AM »

#6: I hope there won't be any more TLDs being introduced, I think it's a bad idea, and in reality nothing more than a money-making scheme; if you're a big international company, there's already a lot of TLDs you have to consider registering, in order to avoid squatters.

#10: fscktards. How can a trademark like that be granted? Prior art, anyone?

#11: they can't win. As long as the content is playable and doesn't require a super-sekrit hardware device, it will be broken. And even if it required such a device, chances are it would be broken anyway. The media fscktards should learn that DRM only hurts legitimate users and costs them silly-money to implement.

4210

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Release: keydb

« Last post by f0dder on December 22, 2008, 05:10 AM »

Since it's used for storing (possibly) critical information, you should probably document how the information is secured - ie., is encryption involved? (And if so, which kind and how).

4211

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009: The Challenge Graphic

« Last post by f0dder on December 22, 2008, 05:04 AM »

The nude one rocks

4212

General Software Discussion / Re: 3rd party software raid 1 in Winxp

« Last post by f0dder on December 22, 2008, 04:40 AM »

Try searching the board for MirrorFolder, it has an operating mode where it uses a Filter Driver to replicate changes in a RAID-1 like fashion. It works at file rather than block level (which means you can make it mirror only part of a filesystem hierarchy), but thanks to the filter driver approach it only mirrors actual changes: ie, 1 byte modified in a 10gig file only causes that one byte to be updated, not the entire 10gig file being synced¹.

Other than that, I dunno. You might want to google "RAIDCore", but I'm not sure that runs without a hardware adapter.

#1 - to be pedantic: of course you get a full sector update since that's the smallest addressable unit on a harddrive.

4213

General Software Discussion / Re: Cannot open Paint on Vista

« Last post by f0dder on December 21, 2008, 11:09 PM »

https://addons.mozil...S/firefox/addon/1865 , hope that one works for you

4214

General Software Discussion / Re: Cannot open Paint on Vista

« Last post by f0dder on December 21, 2008, 11:04 PM »

I would probably be a lot grumpier person if it wasn't for ABP filtering the web that I see, I can definitely recommend it

4215

General Software Discussion / Re: Cannot open Paint on Vista

« Last post by f0dder on December 21, 2008, 10:39 PM »

http://www.getpaint.net/download.html isn't too ad-covered? (Or perhaps adblock plus is just efficient? ). Decent enough program, imho.

4216

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009: The Challenge Graphic

« Last post by f0dder on December 21, 2008, 04:51 PM »

Wonderful, as always

Text should probably be repositioned though, to avoid being hidden behind the handle?

4217

General Software Discussion / Re: Is it finally time to abandon IE?

« Last post by f0dder on December 19, 2008, 06:14 PM »

But you are not! Sun leaves the older version on your machine, to be exploited by anyone that wishes to do so. The end result is a backdoor for malware that is as wide open as ActiveX on IE 5.5 & older.  Most people don't know they have to go and uninstall the old version after updating.

-app103 (December 19, 2008, 05:17 PM)

Ummm, I know that development environments like eclipse allow you to target previous JRE versions in order to do compatibility testing, but doesn't the browser pick & use the latest JRE? Or can java applets specify a specific JRE version to use?

4218

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on December 19, 2008, 06:09 PM »

superboyac: in my opinion you only need one raptor drive (unless you're going to set up a RAID MIRROR for data safety (and remember that mirror is a supplement to, not a substitute for, backups)). If you go for a 150gb velociraptor, you have more than enough space for OS + programs + documents, and you can use whatever other drive for bulk data storage. Other drives are plenty fast as well these days, and some of the larger drives beat the original raptors in term of sustained data transfer rate (although not seek time).

With a decent case that reduces vibrations, the 10k rpm of the raptors is not a problem at all. The only time they make some noise is when the read/write heads move a lot, which should only happen on badly fragmented partitions, or when you do multiple I/O streams on a single drive. And even then, it's a relatively pleasant click/clack noise that, although slightly loud, isn't annoying like the high-pitched rotation whine you can usually hear from drives (but which I, strangely enough, don't hear from the raptors... perhaps the 10k rpm noise is too high-pitched? Or my case dampened enough?).

4219

Living Room / Re: A rant on religiousness about OSes

« Last post by f0dder on December 19, 2008, 11:16 AM »

A journalling filesystem won't save you from data corruption, imho. It will save you from having a fubar inconsistent filesystem, yes, but not from corrupted files. What happens if you have a power outage halfway through updating some big index file?

That said, iirc ZFS supports inexpensive versioning/snapshots, which could be at least part of the solution to avoiding file (as opposed to filesystem metadata) corruption.

4220

Living Room / Re: New Body Spray For Men

« Last post by f0dder on December 19, 2008, 08:22 AM »

That's some of the weirdest stuff I've seen in a long time :-s

4221

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft Update. Worth it?

« Last post by f0dder on December 19, 2008, 08:16 AM »

I've used Windows Update since day one, and have never had a problem with it myself.

At the museum, a couple of computers got flagged as "OMG! PIRATE COPY!" (even though they weren't) by WGA, but that's really a problem with WGA and not WU as I see it.

4222

General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2008, 07:15 PM »

True, there's a difference between raw disk reading speed, and scanning documents. Both because locating a file and opening it requires reading filesystem metadata, and because files can be fragmented - reading lots of small files (or very fragmented big ones) is slower than reading one single big unfragmented file. And then there's also the CPU overhead of parsing the file contents.

But still, 1GB/hr sounds ludicrously slow.

4223

General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2008, 06:44 PM »

Don't worry, programmers don't always use the clearest language to express themselves.

1GB/hr sounds pretty slow to me, and like a pretty arbitrary figure. Surely it should depend on harddisk and CPU speed, as well as the content being indexed? Unless they're artificially limiting the indexing speed?

Harddrives are fast today, and even a disk that's some years old should be able to read 50MB/s, and really a lot more. If we reduce that to 40MB/s to factor in disk fragmentation, and generally being pessimistic, that would still be 140GB/hr. RAM speed is measured in several GB/s (even for old DDR-1 RAM), but of course there's some CPU processing done and index file being written, but even if we pessimize by 10x, that would still be 14GB/hr

Of course these are just figures pulled more or less out of the blue air, but 1GB/hr seems weird to me.

4224

General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2008, 05:18 PM »

"Indexing" means "scanning documents to build the index used for fast searches" - so once the indexing is done, the actual searches (or "index table lookup", kinda) should be blazingly fast.

4225

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2008, 12:58 PM »

mouser: if you get an over-dimensioned PSU, it's not going to run at very high efficiency, and will thus waste power. It's better to get a PSU that's "a bit beyond" what you need (so you run at something like 80% capacity when under full load), and of course go for a PSU that can deliver stable voltages at that watt consumption.

I went for a 750W PSU for my system, which I kinda regret - it's way overkill.