Recent Posts

451

Post New Requests Here / Re: Google video to AVI, Beta testers needed!

« Last post by db90h on March 04, 2006, 01:54 AM »

Can't you just use Google Video Player to download the (high quality) GVI? It saves it the video locally, and is of better quality than the FLVs I think. Of course, GVIs are just DivX (usually stored as AVI) with content protection, so are easily convertable to straight DivX /w virtualdub, or may already be in a DivX ready format in some cases.

http://video.google.com/playerdownload.html

452

Finished Programs / Re: Move Installed programs from one drive to another.

« Last post by db90h on February 23, 2006, 08:00 PM »

No performance issues at all... none.

It uses the same mechanism as subst does, but is more capable since it can handle folders as well as volumes.

I've published an alpha version for those who want to test and give feedback. It seems to work quite fine as-is, but be warned it is not final.

www.bitsum.com/shjunc.asp

453

Skrommel's Software / Re: Compression: BigByte

« Last post by db90h on February 23, 2006, 07:50 PM »

With all 1's this is not really possible.  With a string of random characters it would be a more accurate measurement of real world performance.

-LuckMan212 (January 01, 2006, 09:10 AM)

Actually, neither would represent real-world performance. Real-world benchmarking would require compilation of various common file formats. Compression targeted towards a specific file format(s) does much better than an algorithm not targeted for them. Therefore, if you were to do tests on pseudo-random or arbitrary data, the best performing compression algorithm would not necessarily be the best performing algorithm on real-world data sets.

454

Finished Programs / Re: Move Installed programs from one drive to another.

« Last post by db90h on February 23, 2006, 08:45 AM »

This is a perfect use for SHJunction (coming soon). Using it, you can 'link' folders so that they actually reside on a different drive. This way, you don't even have to change the paths. I'll let more coherent people describe what I'm talking about. When SHJunction is released a notice will be posted in this forum.

455

Find And Run Robot / Re: Beta version of v2?

« Last post by db90h on February 22, 2006, 07:53 PM »

November, 2008

Oh, you wanted a serious answer.. my bad

456

Living Room / Re: Companies paying people to say good things about their products on forums

« Last post by db90h on February 22, 2006, 02:51 PM »

Oh, you mean this is wrong?<g>

The number of companies doing this is larger than we could imagine.

The solution? Other than publicly castrating companies that get caught, there isn't much that can be done.

457

Living Room / Re: Browser Wars Mega Review ...

« Last post by db90h on February 22, 2006, 02:48 PM »

The author of this well-written article ends up doing exactly what I did:

Switching (back) to Opera after a short-lived flirt with FireFox. I also switched to Maxthon after being frustrated for a time with Opera's GMail rendering (something they are working on).

But I can't do without Opera now that I've experienced how much better it magically makes images and fonts look, how much smoother the scrolling is, and all the little built in nick-nacks that are just plain cool (built in IRC client, RSS feeder, BitTorrent protocol).

In addition to Opera's compelling features, Firefox lost me with 1.5. Clearly the weight of OpenSores (f0dder's term) is coming down on the project, as you can see its move towards chaos. Please, no flames, I'm not here to debate this.

I think that any person who gives Opera a chance will become hooked on it as I have.

But getting people to give it a chance is another matter. Most people won't ever use anything but IE. Getting so many people to try Firefox was the result of an amazingly exuberant media blitz, the like of which may not ever happen again. But even with this amazing blitz, most people never tried Firefox, and fewer switched to it.

Opera needs to fix the few rendering issues it has with street-web, then somehow initiate a large media blitz. Perhaps millions in advertising is the only way. But then how are they going to make money? Beats me. They have some commercial interests in embedded and PDA environments, so maybe that'll save them.

Go Opera. You made a believer out of me.

458

General Software Discussion / Re: looking for some archivers, which needn't to be installed

« Last post by db90h on February 20, 2006, 02:32 PM »

Oh.. ic... for 99% of archivers, here's the best solution:

1.) Install on your box at home.
2.) Copy the installation folder to CD/disk.
3.) At work run from CD/disk or copy to your box.

I'd imagine WinRar would work fine like this. Most archivers don't need to register any COM components or anything, so will work fine even if not installed.

And then there's console mode utilities like PKZIP 2.5, which don't require installation at all.

459

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Executable Compressor Programs

« Last post by db90h on February 20, 2006, 01:33 PM »

I've already tested PECompact and ... it still has a big problem with DLLs !!!

-Gerome (February 10, 2006, 04:11 PM)

It would be wonderful of you if you could provide me examples of these DLLs. I compress all my DLLs with PECompact and it is designed and tested to work with DLLs. If there is a set of DLLs it isn't working with, I'd really like to know so I can address the errata.

If you'll give me uncompressed examples, I'll give you a free commercial unlimited license of PECompact and a license of Process Lasso .

Thanks.

460

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Executable Compressor Programs

« Last post by db90h on February 20, 2006, 01:32 PM »

Well, my only gripe with compression is specific to certain apps, as compression forces all code into RAM at startup and stops another running instance share any working set..

-nontroppo (February 10, 2006, 11:37 AM)

Virtual memory management is a complex affair. In the end, the penalty from having all code loaded into RAM at start-up isn't a penalty at all. Of course the pages will be paged back out as warranted, or with PECompact you can have them paged immediately back out.. but the fact is that loading the entire image at once is often better than using a demand loading scanario.

With modern hard drives and other storage mediums, its better to take an initial 'swipe' (read) of all a module's image, instead of having to go back to the disk several times to read portions as they are referenced. When read all at once, especially on an unfragmented disk, the read is quick and painless. When read in bits and pieces over time, the hard drive must relocate to the necessary clusters since it probably has gone off reading other data in the interim.

And, of course, with a compressed program the initial read of program data is 10-40% (on average) of what it would have been.

In the end, on modern computers this often makes for faster load-time.

Regarding shared memory: PECompact ignores sections marked as shared. Those not explicitly marked as shared will indeed not be shared (copy on-write) across instances. However, in the vast majority of cases this memory won't be shareable anyway and is quite a small chunk of over-all virtual memory use by an application.

461

General Software Discussion / Re: looking for some archivers, which needn't to be installed

« Last post by db90h on February 20, 2006, 01:23 PM »

Care to elaborate on your particular needs?

462

Developer's Corner / The fear of change

« Last post by db90h on February 19, 2006, 03:04 PM »

A fear of change is natural for any person, as change is stress (by definition), work, and uncertainty. Programmers are no exception to this rule, but have the unfortunate luck of being in an industry that changes constantly.

Indeed, there is no stopping evolution and innovation in technology. Change seems to be inherent in any modern technology, as technology is a means to improve efficiency, and improvements to technology further improve this efficiency. Market forces themselves will always drive change in technology.

There is no escape for the programmer. He (or she<cough>) is forced to deal with change or find their skillsets in a state of perpertual decline in need by the market, in usefulness to the consumer, and in support for by complimentary technologies.

Yet so many programmers don't seem to recognize their own aversion to change and instead curse new technologies with irrational arguments whose true root is in the fear they have of change.

But technology evolves so quickly with so many fads that it is impossible for even the most diligent programmer to stay up-to-speed with all emerging technologies. Therefore, a programmer must choose carefully which new technologies he or she commit to learn. So, resisting change is good up to a certain point, as it reduces the liklihood of wasting time on technological fads.

Its when this resistance to change prevents programmers from ever evolving, leaving them stuck in some war against innovation itself, that it becomes detrimental to the programmer, and society at large.

A good example is the fanatic x86 assembly language programmer who refuses to admit that assembly language programming is of increasingly less viability. Such a programmer stands firm on their irrational arguments, refusing to admit that a good C/C++ compiler will out-optimize the vast majority of their efforts.

How many times have we C++ programmers cursed Visual Basic guys. Sure, they are all lamers, but the fact is that they often fulfill the requirements of a project in less time and effort than the same project done in C++. Languages that make programming easier, despite the merits (or lack there-of), are so often condemned just for making things easier for new programmers. This says something itself about our human nature, but I digress...

And now .NET is on the horizon. Its been here for a while actually, and is constantly improving. It has its advantages and disadvantages, as does any programming platform, but managed code in general, and .NET in particular, has proven itself to not be some fad. Its clearly the future, and we need to embrace it instead of fear and resist it.

What we've worked so hard for so many years to learn will eventually become antiquated; this is an unstoppable market force. We can fight it, but we can't stop it. In the end, its best to take what we've learned and use it in the pursuit of mastering the latest programming technology.

Fortunately for us old unmanaged programmers not all is lost. C++ is still C++, even if its .NET. VB is till VB, even if its .NET.

The market makes our transition to new technologies as easy as possible, since this is in the best interest of the work-force at large. But no matter what the particular situation, change will always seem more difficult and scarier than it actually is.

A good programmer must be ready to learn new technologies and abandon previous technologies. He must accept change as an unstoppable force, embracing it for the increases in efficiency it provides, instead of condemning it with irrational arguments that only thinly mask the fear of change.

463

Living Room / Re: xp dual boot raid 0 insanity cool down

« Last post by db90h on February 19, 2006, 02:23 PM »

I had missed the part where you had said you couldn't find PS/2 ports on your motherboard.. yep, they should indeed be there .

Indicidentally, if you really want to hide drives in XP (or any NT based OS), you simply need to unmap it. This is done through Control Panel(classic)/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Manager. Right click on a drive mapping and you can remove its mapping. By mapping, I mean like 'D:', or 'E:'.

A cool feature of NT/NTFS is that you can also map drives into folders of other drives. i.e. "c:\drive2" can reference some totally different partition. Drives can be mapped to multiple locations too, as you'll see.

In addition, a related feature, junction points, aren't so readily exposed by the OS to the user, but allow you to create 'virtual folders', in that a folder points to another folder. i.e. "c:\myfolder1" is actually "d:\somefolder". SysInternal's Junction utility will create these junction points for you.

For my own set-up, I always map the folder "c:\dev" to my development partition. This way I have a static path to my development projects no matter what partition they are really on.

Oh well, I'm off topic. These virtual folders are very useful, but Microsoft has so far not made them so readily apparent to users because it seems to confuse the average Joes, and Mrs. Joes.

Tootalloo. Good luck on ur dual boot experiments. You might consider just using VMWare to host client/guest OSes under a primary host OS. This makes it really easy to create snapshots of the installations, revert them to a specific state, and isolate the OS from your physical computer. Someday this will be what we all do, as virtualization is improved at the hardware level by new CPUs. For now though, client OSes still run quite smooth..sometimes smoother than the host OS, since VMWare will, by default, force more client virtual memory to remain resident in RAM than under normal conditions.

And of course there is VirtualPC, which is arguably easier to use than VMWare.

464

Living Room / Re: xp dual boot raid 0 insanity cool down

« Last post by db90h on February 19, 2006, 02:06 PM »

My 3.6 cents would be:

1.) Don't worry with hiding drives. System Restore will not get confused. Long expanation: I've never heard of a case of system restore having issues with dual-boot setups. That said, if you reconfigure system restore settings, the changes might be partially propogated to the other OS installations, as the system restore data is going to be stored on the partitions to which its applicable, and therefore may be shared between all OS installs. Its usually ok to share this data, since the partition's image is the same no matter which OS you are booted to.

Furthermore, Windows NT based OSes are designed to allow for dual-boot.

So, don't worry so much.

2.) If your drive backup program (and/or BIOS) doesn't see the USB keyboard/mouse, simply use the neato USB->PS2 adaptors included with every USB HID device ever created .

465

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Executable Compressor Programs

« Last post by db90h on February 10, 2006, 10:28 AM »

Sometimes ......size does matter.  We are working on a program and the executable is about 24MB.  We want to shrink it down as much as possible so it can be downloaded or emailed.

-jdd (January 14, 2006, 12:35 PM)

For most executables of this size, PECompact performs best anyway.. particularly v2.76b. I won't re-iterate the very intelligent arguments others have made here.. but you need to not choose a packer that creates a 0.1% smaller executable without evaluating it as a whole.

466

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: pandora.com - Internet radio for EVERY taste! FREE!

« Last post by db90h on February 05, 2006, 07:10 PM »

Ya want Internet Radio ....

A current Winamp offer is FREE XM internet radio. All XM stations. 

Download and install the free version of Winamp 5.x, browse the internet radio stations, and there ya go.

Enjoy!

467

General Software Discussion / Re: does anyone of you believe in defragmentation programs?

« Last post by db90h on February 05, 2006, 03:42 PM »

(Virtually) no matter what u do to ur hard drive, it will live long beyond its usefulness. So, I'd so no. But heat generation ,as the article mentions, is a concern along these lines, since it could push your system over the threshold and crash, in theory.

If you don't care about perfromance degradation, then don't defragment. You don't have to care about making your system faster, just not letting it get slower.

Now let's all get together and be teacups.

468

General Software Discussion / Re: does anyone of you believe in defragmentation programs?

« Last post by db90h on February 05, 2006, 02:59 PM »

XP has some boot optimization and prefeteching that may have affected some of their benchmarks. Maybe not though, who knows.

Just because hardware is faster doesn't mean you shouldn't defragment. If you don't defragment your drive will eventually get to a state of severe fragmentation, and as they acknowledge, severe defragmentation does affect performance substantially (their 44% fragmented drive test).

Its a good idea to keep your page file and registry hives defragmented as well, something PerfectDisk's offline defragementation can do.

Nobody in their right mind will say defragmenting hurts performance. That says it all.

p.s. I'm a little teacup.

469

Living Room / Re: Is this offesive?

« Last post by db90h on February 04, 2006, 08:41 PM »

Just goes to show you what percentage of people who develop kids software, books, and cartoons are actually quite sick ;o. This is nowhere close to appropriate. I can't believe they've gotten by with it. Expose it to the media and they'll die a quick death.

470

General Software Discussion / Re: How fast is Microsoft? (Re: Has any one held off on upgrading to Firefox 1.5

« Last post by db90h on December 20, 2005, 12:05 AM »

Consumers don't care how much Microsoft pays in royalties/fines/licensing fees. We are talking about product quality, not anything else. I won't try to defend Microsoft further, as there is no winning such an argument here.

471

General Software Discussion / How fast is Microsoft? (Re: Has any one held off on upgrading to Firefox 1.5?)

« Last post by db90h on December 19, 2005, 05:57 AM »

If history is any judge, Microsoft is last to respond, but do so best. From Windows to the XBox. People don't give Microsoft enough credit.. but, it's hard to be a fan of 'big brother'.

db90h

472

General Software Discussion / Re: Has any one held off on upgrading to Firefox 1.5?

« Last post by db90h on December 18, 2005, 08:45 PM »

Yes, Microsoft isn't sitting idly by and letting this happen. You can bet they are going to look closely at what has made Firefox popular (other than it being open-source), and emulate those things in IE 7. In fact, IE 7 beta already has tabbed browsing and a download manager (I think).

Opera is good, if it would just render pages like IE and Mozilla do. They (OperaSoftware) are so concerned about W3C standards that they miss the bigger picture -- IE compatible rendering is the real standard. Opera is definitely fast and has better font and image rendering (somehow). Its lack of a good plug-in/extension architecture is a big disadvantage though. I've come to love the extension support of Firefox.

J

473

General Software Discussion / Re: Keynote Closes...

« Last post by db90h on December 12, 2005, 03:26 AM »

I totally understand where this guy is coming from.

474

Best Firewall / Re: agnitum outpost v3 - the horror?

« Last post by db90h on December 01, 2005, 04:09 AM »

I agree. Like all things tainted and twisted by money, ZoneAlarm's formerly superior software has become bloatware designed only to part people from their hard earned money.

Most people don't need anything more than the built in XP firewall. As of SP2, XP offers some protection against unauthorized outbound traffic, but if there were to be anything people might need in combination with XP, its what ZoneAlarm used to be -- a tight little outbound traffic monitor. 

Oh.. and for those people still running anything but XP (or server 2003), please don't reply saying 'what about people who aren't running XP?'. If you aren't running XP, its time to upgrade. Get over your fear of change and just do it.

Anyway.. Creating a very simple one wouldn't be so difficult at all. Making it secure, compatible, and user-friendly would, however, be a daunting task.

475

Unfinished Requests / irc client filter

« Last post by db90h on July 13, 2005, 11:15 PM »

I hear of someone wanting to protect themelves from the extremely foul language used on some irc channels on efnet. They need it for xchat. U got xchat code already, right mouser? Not sure who it is that has such incredibly bad language as to mandate an actual censor ;p.

I'm sure they'd appreciate it .

Thanks,