Recent Posts

5201

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Take Command Console LE from JPSoft

« Last post by f0dder on June 04, 2008, 09:05 AM »

steeladept: I'm quite aware of the difference between 4NT and NT4 - I was just nit-picking a bit, since there's no such thing as a "dos box" since the demise of Win9x. Even on Win9x, you really should be saying "console window" instead, since there's a lot of apps running console that aren't DOS apps...

5202

fSekrit / Re: Fonts?

« Last post by f0dder on June 04, 2008, 08:59 AM »

I think I only mentioned it in changelog.txt - here's a paste:

- you can now specify a custom font. I haven't added a GUI setting for this,
  but it's tweakable from regedit. You can create fontface:string and
  fontsize:dword values under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\flork.dk\fSekrit .

...guess it might be time to add a font selection dialog to fSekrit.

5203

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Take Command Console LE from JPSoft

« Last post by f0dder on June 03, 2008, 06:01 AM »

mwb1100: "dos box" -> "console window"... there's no DOS in NT

I used to use jpsoft's 4dos a lot back in the win9x days. Heck, on my 486 I didn't feel like running win95, so I used a manually stripped-down version (15-25meg install or so?) with "shell=4dos.com", just to get the better memory protection, multitasking and disk cache that win95 offered over plain MS DOS

It's a shame the windows console (not cmd.exe, the shell, but the actual console code) is so (relatively) limited on windows, and that fullscreen capabilities have been removed on Vista and XP64

Anyway, cool freebie!

5204

Living Room / Re: Drinking Vinegar?

« Last post by f0dder on June 03, 2008, 05:47 AM »

steeladept: I was definitely thinking about the "regular" kind of vinegar (white or balsamic doesn't matter too much wrt. drinking it straight ), and read the post table as "drinking{verb} vinegar", not "drinking{qualifier} vinegar".

5205

Living Room / Re: Drinking Vinegar?

« Last post by f0dder on June 01, 2008, 04:11 AM »

We have drinking yoghurt in .dk, but never heard of drinking vinegar - and it sounds like a really bad idea to me. Vinegar is a biiiit to acidic for your whole system, generally, and which decent properties does it have?

5206

Living Room / Re: Mintcamp: a new blog of interviews with developers and web designers

« Last post by f0dder on June 01, 2008, 03:27 AM »

Skrommel is obviously a traitor to programmers!

Q. Any advice you’d give to new programmers?
A: Get some sleep! And a girlfriend!

-http://www.onecore.net/skrommel-%e2%80%93-1-hour-software.htm

Everybody knows that programmers wouldn't get anything done with sleep and a girlfriend!

-Deozaan (June 01, 2008, 02:26 AM)

Weeeeell... I actually get more stuff done when I'm spoken for >_< - one of the reasons I went single again was that I didn't have enough time for coding. And now that I have the time, all I do is sleep

5207

Living Room / Re: Where else do you go except DonationCoder

« Last post by f0dder on June 01, 2008, 03:24 AM »

http://www.asmcommunity.net , if you're into that kind of thing
(oh, and http://www.flatassembler.net )

5208

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Disktrix's UltimateDefrag V1 released as freeware !

« Last post by f0dder on May 31, 2008, 08:19 AM »

Curt: it's probably an error at your end that you only got 9kb. That RapidLinks site seems pretty dubious to me - as others have mentioned, most likely warez.

5209

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your boot time?

« Last post by f0dder on May 31, 2008, 04:32 AM »

Ah, new motherboard - that usually means new chipset, and a BSOD about boot device not being available... a repair-"install" might very well fix that, yes

5210

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Disktrix's UltimateDefrag V1 released as freeware !

« Last post by f0dder on May 31, 2008, 04:30 AM »

Curt: lots of people have files larger then 4 gigabytes - DVD images, for instance. Some games also have huge data files, although many games do split the resource wads into less than 2gig chunks, probably for FAT filesystem compatibility...

And it's not that we hate "your new program", but we are prettttty concerned about the tacky tactics of the company.

5211

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your boot time?

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2008, 10:27 PM »

Shades: that method should really only be used if you're in a hurry... it can leave many a problems (malware, drivers, hosed windows files (of the type not in %SystemRoot%), et cetera. It's good when you are in a hurry, but it's not a substitute for a reinstall... you're better off with imaging apps or an unattended setup. But yeah, that's more bother

5212

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Disktrix's UltimateDefrag V1 released as freeware !

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2008, 10:17 PM »

The UltimateDefrag GUI is a joke... it's an oversimplification of how harddrives work, and in reality a more classical view is a lot less misleading.

It is true, however, than (on most harddrives) access speed is slower as you move from logical sector 0 to logical sector "the end of the drive" (my raptor goes from ~90MB/s to ~55MB/s). Which is a bit funny, considering most drives have multiple platters, and if a really-simple layout was used, you'd expect speed to drop, the start from max again as a new platter is used, etc.

Even if UD was a decent product, I wouldn't use it because of the GUI, and the infamous NTFS "optimization" trick they charged cash for. Oh, and I'm not that great a fan of product names including the word "ultimate"

5213

Living Room / Re: $7.5 to optimize XP NTFS Drive access : rip-off or not ?

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2008, 05:38 PM »

saved 300megabytes? Whoa, that's about 1% (not bad, actually, considering that MP3 files are already compressed, and it's usually hard to gain much on already-compressed stuff).

NTFS compression should be used (if at all) on stuff like executables and text files...

5214

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your boot time?

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2008, 05:36 PM »

Oh, you'll have to find an OEM CD then - and I wonder if that's even legal. It's so damn annoying with those preinstalled systems; most of the time there's a recovery partition (but not always, and then you're SOL). Sometimes, if you're lucky, there's a re-install CD, but it's never a clean XP, there's always all the crapware included >_<.

Pure OEM CDs do exist though, but again - even though you paid for the XP license when you purchased your system, I dunno if it's legal to just grab an OEM CD

5215

General Software Discussion / Re: Comodo, Webroot and ZoneLabs bundle Ask Toolbar and Search Assistant

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2008, 09:41 AM »

Even then, as I said in that other thread, we really have a problem if SECURITY software bundle toolbars from external companies, even more considering that such software is payware (unless they restricted the toolbars to the free editions), but I guess they must have a good reason to do so.

-Lashiec (May 30, 2008, 09:14 AM)

Agreed - and I don't like it at all, even in the free versions.

5216

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your boot time?

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2008, 08:19 AM »

Hmmm, "the tower can only hold 2x512mb" - which motherboard do you have? Even 15-month old motherboards should be able to support RAM block sizes > 512meg. But anyway, even adding another 512meg block would help you a lot - I dunno if that would end up more expensive than getting 2x1024meg blocks though, prices of some of the older memory modules have risen because they aren't manufactured anymore (you don't want to buy DDR1 ram today ).

You can't install directly from the old OEM CD? (If you do, make sure you have the SP2 or SP3 full installer lying on a CD/whatever, and unplug your network until the service pack has been installed, and the firewall turned on - otherwise your machine will be infected somewhere between 10 seconds and 10 minutes after install).

5217

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your boot time?

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2008, 07:57 AM »

Curt: what type of RAM do you have in your system? You can get 2 gigabytes of DDR2-800 RAM for less than DKK400... and less than DKK300 for DDR2-667. Much better spent than the ~DKK200 for the Pro version of eBoostr, imho...

(Oh, and a reinstall of XP might be a good idea if it's so unstable )

5218

C / C++ / Re: Managing Large code with Object Oriented Programming

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2008, 07:29 AM »

One important rule: always do some pondering, considering, and design before you start chunking out code. For anything but the most trivial projects, things won't go according to plan and will be rewritten several times during project lifetime, but having thought a bit about stuff beforehand helps you not get lost as easily, and adapt to changes better.

I didn't do much planning ahead with fSekrit , since it seemed that it was going to be such a small and easy program. It was, but I'm now facing rather large rewrites in order to get full unicode support, because I didn't plan ahead (fixing all API calls and static buffers was easy-peasy, but there's a couple of classes that definitely aren't unicode-friendly).

The Design Patterns book by Gamma et al is a must, imho.

Scott Meyer's "effective C++" and "more effective C++" have some good tips on what to do and what not to do in C++, but it's more on a smaller scale. Still valuable, though.

I can't really recommend "Large-scale C++ software design", as it is outdated, dry, and repetitive. I wish somebody would do a 2008 version of it, since a lot has happened in the last ~12 years.

5219

Living Room / Re: New Adobe Flash Player Security Exploit Reported Today (tuesday may 27)

« Last post by f0dder on May 29, 2008, 06:13 PM »

Well, it seems they already fixed it in the latest version, those are good news!

-Lashiec (May 29, 2008, 06:11 PM)

I'm keeping ScriptBlock, though

5220

Living Room / Re: Why do children love CAPS LOCK?

« Last post by f0dder on May 29, 2008, 05:43 PM »

CWuestefeld: my oh my, seems like I forgot the <sarcasm> tag

5221

Living Room / Re: New Adobe Flash Player Security Exploit Reported Today (tuesday may 27)

« Last post by f0dder on May 27, 2008, 08:55 PM »

I'm not sure if that's the exploit that's been used, but if so - then it's relatively old. No telling how long it's been silently exploited by 0-day blackhats before it reached the wild, though... banner ads are scary. One compromised banner ad server, and even the cleanest sites on the net can get you infected.

5222

Living Room / Re: New Adobe Flash Player Security Exploit Reported Today (tuesday may 27)

« Last post by f0dder on May 27, 2008, 05:58 PM »

Ehtyar: thanks for that word of warning, if it's not been fixed, that basically means FlashBlock is useless.

I never installed NoScript because I don't find flash to be that intrusive, as long as I'm running AdBlockPlus. I did consider it a few times, because I had the nagging feeling that sooner or later, somebody would find a 0day exploit for flash, and we'd be in royal trouble. But out of lazyness (whitlisting, *sigh*) I never did it.

Is the exploit that's now in the wild based on the NULL pointer exploit? Pretty nasty stuff.

5223

Living Room / Re: Running an external command from with Microsoft Word?

« Last post by f0dder on May 27, 2008, 10:06 AM »

Wouldn't something like that be blocked with default security settings?

5224

Find And Run Robot / Re: Urgent security notice for all FARR plugin writers

« Last post by f0dder on May 27, 2008, 08:02 AM »

Centralized storage would be cool.

-electronixtar (May 27, 2008, 02:20 AM)

Let me clarify, often people like their passwords encrypted, and I wondered if many plug-ins were needing log-ins and passwords then if FARR handled that and the encryption then it's centralized and carries the FARR seal of quality.

-Perry Mowbray (May 27, 2008, 07:47 AM)

Probably wouldn't be a bad idea to add this to the FARR core - and with an option of having the passwords stored either in a file (with some basic encryption, no need to go overboard with AES etc. since it's going to be reversible anyway, just make that perfectly clear to the users), or in the windows "secure storage" thing (protected & encrypted part of the registry, iirc).

5225

Find And Run Robot / Re: Urgent security notice for all FARR plugin writers

« Last post by f0dder on May 27, 2008, 07:20 AM »

ps another question: If 3 plugin use 3 FScript.dll, then there's 3 copy of FScript.dll in memory?

i believe that is right.. until and unless ecaradec (the brilliant fscript author) decides to make a multi-script fscript version.  that's probably best discussed on the fscript thread though.

-mouser (May 27, 2008, 03:04 AM)

Should only have one instance of script.dll in memory, unless one of the plugins decide to create a new process that then in turn uses fscript.dll. And even then, windows does copy-on-write sharing of DLLs system-wide.