Recent Posts

5051

General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?

« Last post by f0dder on July 06, 2008, 06:41 AM »

If you have enough RAM, you likely won't feel much of a speed difference - windows does tend to page out stuff even when not strictly necessary, though, so you can save some disk access. I've personally run without pagefile since I got 1gig of memory, but you really need 2gig to do it without problems. These days I have 8 gigs, so running with pagefile seems pointless

Btw you can only disable the pagefile if you run XP or newer, win2k can't.

5052

Living Room / Re: The 10 most annoying programs on the Internet

« Last post by f0dder on July 06, 2008, 06:28 AM »

Worried about Genuine Advantage?  GET LEGAL.  It hurts nothing and reveals nothing if you are running a legal copy of Windows.

-y0himba (July 05, 2008, 10:41 AM)

Except that it sometimes invalidates perfectly legit windows install - this has happened a couple of times at the museum where I admin stuff. And it's bothersome having to install a bloody useless plugin just to be able to get certain downloads from the MS site.

Windows Update works, period, probably one of the few things they have done right.  MS hater or no, it does have it's advantages.

-y0himba (July 05, 2008, 10:41 AM)

Windows Update is nice, it's the auto-rebooting and constantly-appearing "you have to reboot to finalize update" that's annoying. Oh, and the few times when an auto-downloaded hotfix starts causing BSODs.

5053

Living Room / Re: Comic Strip Generator (and March Caption Contest Announcement!)

« Last post by f0dder on July 04, 2008, 07:31 AM »

It looks pretty nice indeed, the only thing that's a bit fuzzy is the "f0dder's winning contest entry" part, but even that isn't too bad. Thanks for the mug again, I'm enjoying it (or it's contents ) right now

5054

Living Room / Re: Comic Strip Generator (and March Caption Contest Announcement!)

« Last post by f0dder on July 03, 2008, 09:15 AM »

As promised, here's the mug shot - as the jpeg filename says, "it helps in the mornings".



Thanks plenty, now I can pour (almost) the entire contents of my bodum coffee thingy in a single cupmugful, instead of 3-4 small puny cups 

(Yes, I need a haircut and a beard-trimming).

5055

Living Room / Re: Switching to Linux; how do you not flop back to the world of Windows??

« Last post by f0dder on July 03, 2008, 07:45 AM »

jgpaiva: I like the way up-arrow does the search of previous commands - if I want to go to the previous command, at least the entire line is cleared completely by a single hit of ESC. Ctrl+D closing the shell is more of an inconvenience imho, too easy to hit it by accident and so little hassle typing "exit". Not adding backslash on dir-completion is one of my few gripes with cmd.exe, but since I almost always start a shell by typing "$" in xplorer^2's address bar, I don't need dir-completion very often (I've considered RE'ing cmd.exe to add the backslash, though ).

5056

Living Room / Re: Switching to Linux; how do you not flop back to the world of Windows??

« Last post by f0dder on July 03, 2008, 07:11 AM »

I can tell you that I almost never use the Windows command tool because it is such utter useless crap that it makes me beg for a gui.

-Edvard

CMD.EXE isn't as powerful as, say, bash... but who cares? If I need scripting, I prefer firing up a full-blown language like Python, instead of suffering any kind of limited shell scripting. As for "all the small tools", those aren't part of the shell, and lots of the *u*x tools are available for windows as well.

The only thing I find lacking in cmd.exe is somewhat more complex file matching patterns - then again, most of the time I need any of those, I tend to need scripting as well.

True, it would be nice to have easy-to-use graphical tools to configure the video display or manage the startup environment in a more sane manner, but saying it's not grown-up or telling me that a few shiny buttons and menus can and should replace the Linux command line is like telling a seasoned NASCAR gearhead that he could improve his pit time if he installed an automatic transmission...

-Edvard

No trivial operation should require dropping to a console. I view installing drivers, setting up a secondary monitor, managing services/daemons etc. as trivial operations.

I use cmd.exe a lot on windows. But thankfully, there's a lot of management stuff doable easily from GUI, with nice keyboard shortcuts - makes it even faster to keyboard my way through things than having to type a lot more in a shell.

5057

DC Gamer Club / Re: Diablo 3 announced!

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2008, 06:34 AM »

i agree - D1 was such a fun outing. also the graphics for D2 was a bit let-down as the max resolution was only 640*480 if i remember correctly.

-lanux128 (July 02, 2008, 06:29 AM)

Iirc it was 800x600 if you ran it in the 3D-accelerated version? Doesn't seem to be mentioned on wikipedia. Oh, and the Necromancer class was crippled, the skeletons just didn't scale up with level at all

5058

DC Gamer Club / Re: Diablo 3 announced!

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2008, 06:19 AM »

I hope the gameplay is a bit more like #1 than #2 - many of the skills in #2 were just plain silly, most of the mobs were too easy (but then some bosses were *super* hard), etc.

5059

Living Room / Re: Just needed to clear my 666 post count

« Last post by f0dder on July 01, 2008, 05:44 PM »

Veign, you will forever bear the mark of the beast!

5060

DC Member Programs and Projects / Re: WinKey Enhancement Project (WEP)

« Last post by f0dder on July 01, 2008, 08:28 AM »

jgpaiva: might be selfish, but reserved it is.

5061

DC Member Programs and Projects / Re: WinKey Enhancement Project (WEP)

« Last post by f0dder on July 01, 2008, 07:50 AM »

Two things...

1) WEP isn't the best abbreviation to use, since googling tends to bring up topics about this WEP.

2) <Win>+singlekey shortcuts are actually reserved for the operating system, so remapping them can clash with future windows versions.

5062

Find And Run Robot / Re: [bug] very unfriendly handling of missing drive

« Last post by f0dder on July 01, 2008, 07:47 AM »

Imho if it was caused by a reference to a now-noexisting partition (whose drive letter is now mapped to your CD), this isn't really a FARR bug

-f0dder (June 30, 2008, 09:10 PM)

I do not want to quibble, but imo one thing that distinguishes a good program from a mediocre one is the ability to handle external error conditions gracefully. Since FARR is not merely a good, but a a great program, we certainly  don't want any unfriendly error handling!

-jdmarch (June 30, 2008, 10:39 PM)

Well, if you try querying a location on a network path that's not available, you will face a long time-out period. This is windows standard, and afaik there's not much you can do about it, except not trying to query network paths.

5063

Developer's Corner / Re: Parallel compilation for Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 with dual / quad core

« Last post by f0dder on June 30, 2008, 09:14 PM »

Hmm, the official /MP switch wasn't added in 2005? Can it really be that it wasn't added until 2008? Not even as an undocumented option in 2005? Only problem with /MP switch is that it's stored in your .vcproj file, which is somewhat unhandy when multiple developers are working on a project (ie., some on single-core laptops, some on quadcore workstations).

After googling: apparently /MP works in 2005 but was buggy. Iirc I used it without problems, though. For commandline builds, scons ftw, anyway.

5064

Find And Run Robot / Re: [bug] very unfriendly handling of missing drive

« Last post by f0dder on June 30, 2008, 09:10 PM »

Imho if it was caused by a reference to a now-noexisting partition (whose drive letter is now mapped to your CD), this isn't really a FARR bug - but the effects are certainly annoying nonetheless.

Results are much worse with shortcuts to other computers (that have gone offline) - not an issue with FARR right now though, because UNC paths are ignored.

5065

Developer's Corner / Re: Programatically determining your IP Address...

« Last post by f0dder on June 30, 2008, 10:08 AM »

Whatismyip.com also have a single line IP page for automation

http://www.whatismyi...mation/n09230945.asp

-mediaguycouk (June 30, 2008, 09:36 AM)

Times out here...

5066

Developer's Corner / Re: Cross IM service

« Last post by f0dder on June 30, 2008, 10:07 AM »

Btw, unless you're going to be doing this for the learning experience, you might want to check out Miranda.

5067

Developer's Corner / Re: Cross IM service

« Last post by f0dder on June 30, 2008, 08:40 AM »

If you have access to the protocol, it's "easy enough" - which still means lots of work and potential bugs. If you get a ready-made library (which any SDK probably will be), it should be "pretty darn easy".

If you need to reverse-engineer the protocol... well, forget about it. It's doable, but since you're asking how hard it is, you wouldn't be ready for it yet

5068

Living Room / Re: Picking the right mouse for gaming - suggestions?

« Last post by f0dder on June 28, 2008, 05:31 AM »

* f0dder goes on a rampage about the lack of quality mice without a zillion buttons, and without right-handed-only form factor.

5069

General Software Discussion / Re: Proprietary media formats — time to get rid of them!

« Last post by f0dder on June 28, 2008, 05:25 AM »

s/Virtual Machine/WHINE.

5070

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 Bug

« Last post by f0dder on June 28, 2008, 05:23 AM »

Ugh, disabling browser caching in order to satisfy AM?

5071

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 Bug

« Last post by f0dder on June 27, 2008, 08:29 PM »

I have a similar problem when trying to view pages on my local server through my external IP address - but using the internal IP works just fine, and people from the outside can view through the external IP just fine as well. This also happens with IE6 though, so the problem probably isn't related, and might be due to my httpd setup.

Just thought I'd mentioned it anyway.

5072

Developer's Corner / Re: Programatically determining your IP Address...

« Last post by f0dder on June 27, 2008, 07:47 PM »

Doesn't have to be *that* tough - as long as you have libraries that handle HTTP connections and regular expressions.

Basically, fetch a page (for instance http://checkip.dyndns.org/ or http://ip-address.cc/), try to match the Regular Expression you have designed for scraping the IP, and if it succeeds - you have the IP. If you want to code everything by hand, it will be complex. But if you have HTTP and RegEx libraries, it's a pretty quick job.

5073

Developer's Corner / Re: Digital Signature to verify Publisher...

« Last post by f0dder on June 27, 2008, 07:20 PM »

I totally agree with your reasoning f0dder. And indeed, my research served a specific purpose, it was for a piece of software that quite a lot of big companies pay annually for (a number with 4 to 5 zeroes behind it, depending on their size)...so there was already a level of trust and with self signed cert's also an increased level of safety.

-Shades (June 27, 2008, 07:11 PM)

Yes, for some very specific situations, a self-signed cert can be safer than blindly trusting root CAs. But you need to design your software just right, otherwise it's a train wreck on it's way - and self-signed cert certainly isn't a good idea for regular web sites.

5074

Developer's Corner / Re: Programatically determining your IP Address...

« Last post by f0dder on June 27, 2008, 07:06 PM »

Don't go for line numbers - read up on regular expressions

You might want to find a few of those services, and try them in round-robin if the first one fails.

5075

General Software Discussion / Re: NewEgg

« Last post by f0dder on June 27, 2008, 06:02 PM »

I have no idea how those files ended up encrypted. It would take quite a few accidental keystrokes for it to happen through explorer... and the metadata corruption theory is a long shot as well.

Windows works in mysterious ways, baby