Recent Posts

4826

Developer's Corner / Re: Best way to sync programming projects?

« Last post by f0dder on August 28, 2008, 12:24 AM »

Subversion looks pretty simple, I am giving it a shot now.

-wreckedcarzz (August 27, 2008, 06:53 PM)

And don't give up if it feels a bit bothersome - the time invested in getting your head around source control is well spent!

4827

Official Announcements / Re: August 26 had some slight downtime -- thanks to gothic for fixing it

« Last post by f0dder on August 28, 2008, 12:22 AM »

Hm, connection tracking... that's a iptables/firewall feature, right? Sounds nasty if such a crucial part of the system is bugged :/

4828

General Software Discussion / Re: Which Software to Password Protect a Partition on a Hard Drive?

« Last post by f0dder on August 28, 2008, 12:18 AM »

Run a backup script/program automatically when you're logged-in and the encrypted partitions/volumes are mounted. Don't do image-based backups but rather do file-based, and backup to a "secure location". Dunno how much bother that really is?

4829

Developer's Corner / Re: Best way to sync programming projects?

« Last post by f0dder on August 27, 2008, 06:09 PM »

Since you're saying programming projects, forget about the regular sync software. You need source/version control. It's the only way to fly, really!

subversion is probably the best way to go atm, it has a lot of momentum and support, on multiple operating systems, and it's old enough to be pretty stable. You can install a "svnserve" daemon on your XP "server", and then do regular commits from your client machine.

It's only slightly bothersome to do the initial setup, and then it takes a bit of work getting into the "mindset" of using version control, but it's extremely worthwhile.

4830

Official Announcements / Re: August 26 had some slight downtime -- thanks to gothic for fixing it

« Last post by f0dder on August 27, 2008, 06:05 PM »

So, what caused the glitch, pray tell?

4831

Living Room / Re: Insert Char into String - I "Hit the Wall" ...again.

« Last post by f0dder on August 27, 2008, 05:59 PM »

Dude, you're passing a "char *string" to your function. Go redesign the code now. Either you pass a std::string (or std::wstring), or you pass along a buffer-length argument... and make sure to check for it.

Also, instead of trying to sanitize strings for use with SQL queries, have a look at bound arguments - much safer.

4832

Living Room / Re: If somebody offers you swapping your PC for a mac cold turkey: would you do it?

« Last post by f0dder on August 27, 2008, 05:54 PM »

If I had to swap my machine - no way in hell.

If I was offered a reasonably mac, for free, with the catch that I had to use it exclusively at work, I might do it. It'd kinda make sense if I ended up working at a mac shop. But I don't think I'd ever switch exclusively to mac, I just feel too much at home with Windows.

4833

Developer's Corner / Re: How to choose programming language?

« Last post by f0dder on August 26, 2008, 12:30 AM »

I was talking about Blender (check it out at blender.org), a 3D modeling program written primarily in C and C++ with some python for scripting. I love what they have done with the GUI of that app. I had a similar vision for my own project, before finding Blender.

-Ketracel

Yeah, I know about Blender3D, I was just reading your post as if it was supposed to be an implementation of the C language, which confused me

The GUI for Blender looks pretty, but has somewhat of a learning curve since it doesn't really work like standard GUIs. I guess that's OK for something like a 3D modeler, as the focus is on working efficiently once you become familiar with the app. But imho for most apps, familiarity is important.

re VB... I dunno... lol, oh and also, I'd like it to be platform agnostic (Mac/*nix/Win). Can VB do that? :-)

-Ketracel

Not really, I was just saying that speedwise, probably anything goes :-)

Personally, I'd probably go for C++ - partially because it's my primary language, partially because it's available just about everywhere (and you do say you want portability). Add some cross-platform GUI framework to avoid a lot of pain. Other languages might be less painful to develop in, but C++ has the advantage that a lot of people know it - that could be important for an open-source project.

4834

Living Room / Re: Fedora Code-Signing Server Breached

« Last post by f0dder on August 25, 2008, 08:13 PM »

"It appears" - that could mean the attackers have clouded their tracks. And even if the passphrase hasn't been snatched, there's other nasty-stuff^TM that could have been done. Pretty nasty when stuff like this happens

4835

General Software Discussion / Re: Delphi 2009 (And C++ Builder 2009) Released

« Last post by f0dder on August 25, 2008, 07:22 PM »

Robust Unicode support is one of the big things

-mouser (August 25, 2008, 09:59 AM)

It's amazing it's taken them until 2009 to do this, though? :-s

4836

Developer's Corner / Re: How to choose programming language?

« Last post by f0dder on August 25, 2008, 09:10 AM »

If you're dealing with stock trading, you're going to be doing some (inter)network communication - this will be your bottleneck, completely dwarfing code speed. You could probably choose Visual Basic as language without any problems

C++ code can be notoriously difficult to read and understand for anyone other than the original coder. And even the person who wrote the code can get tangled up. Or so I've heard. So I'd prefer a "cleaner and leaner" language for the reason that many eyes will go over the code.

I dunno who make this argument today, apart from diehard zealots of other languages? Code can be an unreadable mess in any language, if not written by a competent programmer. C++ has features that makes it possible to write cleaner and easier-to-follow than C code... if written properly.

As well, I've done enough research to know that other languages, for example, python, can be as fast as C++ (with the right tweaking - psyco). Then there's C - with an incredible open source implementation in blender.org

Uh, C implementation in blender.org? What?

4837

General Software Discussion / Re: Which Software to Password Protect a Partition on a Hard Drive?

« Last post by f0dder on August 24, 2008, 12:06 PM »

"Password protecting" a partition never works.

The only thing that really does work, and is very efficient, is encryption. TrueCrypt rocks. It's free and it works like a charm.

4838

Living Room / Re: Beware the Google Threat - Big Fat Ass Brother (BFAB)

« Last post by f0dder on August 24, 2008, 11:54 AM »

How does Googlelon or Googlevore sound.. lol.. but that's what I was meaning.. Big G may become bigger than them all.. And then the gov will own it by then ofcourse..

-mitzevo (August 24, 2008, 03:49 AM)

Google can do a lot of datamining, but they still don't have their trunks in every ISPs backbone connection

4839

fSekrit / Re: A version of fSekrit to handle small binaries?

« Last post by f0dder on August 23, 2008, 03:17 PM »

Well yes, I could use some text representation of binary (uue, base64, yyenc, ...), but I'd still need a way to flag that "this is supposed to be a binary", and I'd need to do... whatever-stuff... to support multiple files. So either I make a hack of pretty epic proportions, or I make a lot of code rewrite for something that's probably handled better in an already existing application.

I'm just not sure it's worth it, unless you can come up with compelling reasons why there's no other application fitting your needs

4840

Living Room / Re: Evil, evil trojans and virii

« Last post by f0dder on August 23, 2008, 03:29 AM »

Yeah, MySpace is host of evilness. Dunno what's worst, though - the malware, or all the i-want-to-poke-my-eyes-out horrid HTML?

4841

Living Room / Re: Beware the Google Threat - Big Fat Ass Brother (BFAB)

« Last post by f0dder on August 23, 2008, 02:15 AM »

That is scary! How real is this?

-alivingspirit (August 22, 2008, 05:28 PM)

Real enough. And more efficient than the wikipedia article says

4842

fSekrit / Re: A version of fSekrit to handle small binaries?

« Last post by f0dder on August 22, 2008, 08:51 AM »

I'm afraid it would fall outside the scope of fSekrit, and would require a fair amount of code. AFAIK there's already some other tools around that are capable of handling binary files (AxCrypt sprigs to mind), but I have no experience with any of those

4843

Developer's Corner / Re: C++0x: The Dawning of a New Standard

« Last post by f0dder on August 22, 2008, 08:21 AM »

I think stuff like UTF8 literals is a mistake - internationalization resources really should be moved to external files.

I wonder why nullptr is necessary, '0' is clean enough in source code? (but perhaps this is template-magic related).

Dunno about regex being a core part of the language; it's useful, but you won't know about the speed of implementations if you're doing cross-platform stuff, so you're probably better suited using a thing like PCRE...

Threading and TLS support is a big win, I just hope the ABI for it is non-retarded.

foreach and lambda support is going to be cooooool

As a whole, I'm pretty mixed on C++0x. There's a bunch of good stuff in it, a bunch of whatever stuff, and a bunch of stuff that I feel will make the C++ platform somewhat bloated and a lot more effort for vendors to deploy. Also, it's a bit too late, and if you want to do cross-platform code, you probably won't have C++0x available on a lot of the platforms you're writing for...

4844

Living Room / Re: Evil, evil trojans and virii

« Last post by f0dder on August 22, 2008, 08:11 AM »

Stop using IE, and start using firefox with and ad-blocker and possibly also noscript. You might want to use a tool like DropMyRights to run your browser in an even more safe mode.

4845

Living Room / Re: Beware the Google Threat - Big Fat Ass Brother (BFAB)

« Last post by f0dder on August 22, 2008, 08:09 AM »

I still wonder why people are so darn paranoid about cookies. Get an ad blocker, and possibly noscript if you're paranoid about flash exploits (like me ), but cookie blocking? Come on, that's going over the top.

I'm not particularly fond of the way we're being watched, but google is my least concern (I don't do gmail) - I'm much more afraid of things like Carnivore. And tbh, if I have to watch ads, I'd rather have ads that might actually interest me - so yay google analytics.

4846

General Software Discussion / Re: Your most used SPECIAL programs

« Last post by f0dder on August 22, 2008, 08:05 AM »

Nice output quality yeah, but it was the syntax that tipped me off . Does this mean that the program installs as many weird-ish programs "all over the place" and that it's pretty big? Or have they managed to condense and "self-contain" it? (I've used miktex on windows, and that felt... alien. Kinda like a unix program backported to windows ).

4847

General Software Discussion / Re: How to clone large HDDs?

« Last post by f0dder on August 21, 2008, 10:50 PM »

4wd: that's obviously a case where you can get pretty messed up, indeed. But that's quite a different procedure from a simple clone

Btw, sucks that they replaced your drive as well. AFAIK, all drive manufacturers have master reset codes they can use, so you didn't have to lose data just because the board fried.

4848

Living Room / Re: Odd FF3 Problem... sucking up bandwidth

« Last post by f0dder on August 21, 2008, 10:38 PM »

The thing you need to tell us is whether this is just a momentary spike, or if it's like that all the time you're running firefox. As other people have already suggested, there's legitimate reasons for a (relatively) short spike at startup.

4849

Living Room / Re: Teh best Flash gaem EVAR!!

« Last post by f0dder on August 21, 2008, 10:20 PM »

JEEEEBUS that was random! 11min20sec. Kinda enjoyed it though, fits well with a five-in-the-morning-ish mindset

4850

General Software Discussion / Re: How to clone large HDDs?

« Last post by f0dder on August 21, 2008, 09:57 PM »

At least, I had a recent backup and the old drive is now in the housing, so I can still read from it.

-PPLandry (August 21, 2008, 09:46 PM)