Recent Posts

5251

Developer's Corner / Re: Forking in Open Source Projects - Debate

« Last post by f0dder on May 17, 2008, 11:15 AM »

Other examples are the particular mods of certain Miranda plugins, that always implement newer and more advanced features compared with the original plugins, and end up being backported into the main plugin. Actually, the developers seem to like this, as it means the plugin is being improved in ways the original authors would have not followed (lack of time, lack of interest, etc.)

Thing is, this shouldn't be done as a fork, but by submitting patches to the original author, or (in case he's inactive), taking ownership of the project. Forks confuse people, and waste time.

5252

Developer's Corner / Re: OpenSSL Vulnerability?

« Last post by f0dder on May 17, 2008, 11:05 AM »

While an somewhat innocent mistake I find it very worrying that the Debian developers would make code changes in such a critical library

-Eóin (May 17, 2008, 11:01 AM)

Very much so, especially because they simply removed those "oh, they're making trouble" lines instead of trying to fix the problem. And considering how nazi Debian are about STABLE, this is extra troublesome.

5253

Developer's Corner / Re: Forking in Open Source Projects - Debate

« Last post by f0dder on May 17, 2008, 04:59 AM »

Imho forking is a bad thing, and usually shows that a project is ill, whether it's because it's lead by too big egos, the codebase is a horrible mess, or whatever.

Forking means wasted effort, now there's suddenly (at least) two projects to maintain, but you basically still have the same pool of developers to work on the projects. Better to cooperate and not waste time. Yeah yeah, "you can always backport", but that's not always trivial, and it's more work than cooperating properly.

5254

General Software Discussion / Re: XPPro SP3

« Last post by f0dder on May 16, 2008, 07:50 PM »

The problem with these is that a 30 day trial does me no good if my key doesn't work. I downloaded the SP3 VL ISO, since I used to have an MSDN subscription and got XP SP2 with a Volume License. I thought it would work with the SP3 disc but apparently it doesn't. So now I'm back to trying to figure out how to get SP2 to update to SP3 without destroying Windows/Microsoft Update. . .

-Deozaan (May 16, 2008, 07:40 PM)

That sounds weird - unless somebody has grabbed & pirated your SP2 VLK (massively), it ought to work with SP3? Contact Microsoft!

5255

Developer's Corner / Re: OpenSSL Vulnerability?

« Last post by f0dder on May 16, 2008, 05:59 PM »

This is the DEBIAN AND RELATED DISTROS (like the *ubuntu family) related bug, right, not a general OpenSSL vulnerability?

If so, the idea is that if your PRNG isn't seeded with random-enough data (the worst example being seeding it with a time(0) call, effectively using the current data as a seed), hackers/crackers can substantially reduce the time it takes to brute-force the protection. This has happened with at least one software protection scheme as well, there was a fully-working keygen out for asprotect some years ago, for example.

5256

Living Room / Re: PIN-code

« Last post by f0dder on May 16, 2008, 05:54 PM »

There's at least a few banks here in .dk that offer those pin-reminder sheets, and some even include them in the envelope when they send you your debit cards. I always tend to forget the 'system' I pick for it, though, whereas even if I forget the PIN, it's hardcoded in my fingers.

5257

Living Room / Re: To Compress or not to compress

« Last post by f0dder on May 15, 2008, 09:23 AM »

NTFS compression uses a LZW variant, so I guess it's roughly comparable to .zip - too lazy to test, though. The format-time option probably just sets a flag in the volume header saying that "by default, every file on this volume will be compressed" - the compression certainly is file-based (but again, it is inheritable on folders - ie., if you mark a folder for compression, new files and folders created in there will automatically be compressed).

Now, think about what happens for non-static files... if you want to write some data in the middle of a file. NTFS compresses in cluster sizes  (and only works with cluster sizes of <= 4kb) - changing the data in a cluster could mean it will now take two clusters after compression, instead of a single one. What does this do for fragmentation?

5258

Living Room / Re: What to do when you receive bootleg videos?

« Last post by f0dder on May 14, 2008, 09:36 PM »

Definitely report to both paypal and ebay. Piracy is one thing, but profiting from piracy, and not making it obvious he's selling counterfeits? That's outright disgusting.

5259

Living Room / Re: To Compress or not to compress

« Last post by f0dder on May 14, 2008, 09:28 PM »

Afaik there's no "full drive compression" with NTFS, pretty much died out with stacker/doublespace back in the DOS days. NTFS does support per-file compression though, and it can be inheritable for directory structures - so in theory I guess it could be applied automatically for a whole drive.

I only use it selectively, though, since some data just doesn't compress well, and your boot files must NOT be compressed (or NTFS-encrypted, for that matter). Theoretically, with a fast CPU, it can be an advantage on some types of files, because systems are often disk I/O limited. Source code (mainly static stuff like the huge collection of PlatformSDK headers) compress pretty well...

In reality, however, I haven't seen much speed improvement from this. It might help with the initial build of a program after a cold boot, but after that, the necessary files tend to be in filesystem cache, and the disk isn't involved at all. Also, you don't gain that much disk space from the compression, and drives are cheap these days. Last, iirc there's some fragmentation-related issues once you enable NTFS compression, but I can't remember the details and I'm not in the mood for googling it up 

5260

Living Room / Re: Suck An Egg RIAA

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

Trent Reznor has made available a new set of the 24/96 wave files, and also a flac version of them. Apparently the original wavs were not really 24 bit, apart from 2 tracks.
For those interested, there's a thread at the Hydrogenaudio Forums with the details.

-Cynic (May 14, 2008, 03:50 PM)

Pretty darn cool, unless they're imposters (doesn't seem that way, though), to see actual nin-related people posting at HA about the issue

5261

Living Room / Re: Pixel art by the bucketload

« Last post by f0dder on May 14, 2008, 06:01 PM »

Mmmh. pixel art is lovely

5262

Living Room / Re: An idea for the forum regarding disclosure

« Last post by f0dder on May 14, 2008, 05:56 PM »

Other forums have a policy about not allowing URLs in the first post (or the first few) - not too annoying, but given the nature of DonationCoder, it's often perfectly valid to start your very first post with an URL... *deep thought mode*

5263

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Bits - ActMask - Drive Encryption - problems in encyption claims

« Last post by f0dder on May 14, 2008, 08:18 AM »

I use full-disk encryption on my external harddrive, and I've played around with boot-partition encryption in vmware - which, so far, works just fine.

I haven't done any speed-hit benchmarks though, and those would be interesting; with my CPU, the encryption should be able to run at full disk bandwidth without problems, so the question is if there's any programmatic bottlenecks in the TrueCrypt driver.

5264

Developer's Corner / Re: Programming in the Linux operating system: where to start?

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

Well, they're probably spending more resources on things like c# and the like, but imho that's at least partially because the dotNET languages are still relatively new and developing, especially the platform as a whole, with all the libraries. On the other hand, C++ is somewhat more of a static target, although C++0x will change that - and still just about every C++ compiler has some conformance bugs etc.

ASM is still being used too, and it won't go entirely away either, but it's been pushed mostly to (the relatively low-end) embedded stuff, to where you need to squeeze out every last drop of performance, and to hobbyists... not like back in the early 1990'es where many apps needed at least some assembly here and there to maintain decent performance. Even though compiler intrinsics for the fancy instruction sets have gotten better, even I can usually beat the output with hand-crafted assembly - and I'm by no means an optimization expert.

Imho it should be forbidden to write web-facing stuff in C, especially if you insist on using str* function and manual malloc/free

5265

Developer's Corner / Re: Programming in the Linux operating system: where to start?

« Last post by f0dder on May 13, 2008, 07:47 PM »

There's a lot of talk of people who have hit the ceiling of what C++ is capable of and where it's going (besides MS development of it slowing almost to a stop...)

-Edvard (May 13, 2008, 07:36 PM)

Hm, MS development of C++ slowing to a stop? They've enhanced the compilers with every version including vs2008, they've added a work in progress C++0x expansion pack, etc...

Also, I daresay it's only in the most recent years people are beginning to really harness the power of the C++ language

Not implying it's the one-and-only language to learn, since that would be silly, but I still see it as something with a great many years to live.

5266

Living Room / Re: Proof mouser never sleeps...

« Last post by f0dder on May 13, 2008, 06:00 PM »

It's understandable that they do this, considering how food prices in general are rising... but it does suck, and I don't like the way manufacturers are going on about it.

5267

General Software Discussion / Re: Best free firewall for Windows?

« Last post by f0dder on May 13, 2008, 05:47 PM »

Dunno about Comodo - this zine (scroll down to part 7, Comodo) doesn't inspire that much confidence... I have a friend who works with security (protecting, not blackhatting) who finds these kinds of articles amusing, and URLs me every now and then

5268

Living Room / Re: Windows XP SP3 due for release .... (don't hold your breath)

« Last post by f0dder on May 11, 2008, 07:23 PM »

If the TCP/IP patcher has any form of intelligence, it will search for a "magic byte sequence", instead of doing hardcoded address patches... so it might very well work for the SP3 version. I'd try it in a virtual machine before a live system, though

5269

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Bits - ActMask - Drive Encryption - problems in encyption claims

« Last post by f0dder on May 11, 2008, 06:52 PM »

I visited the developer's homepage to learn more about the product.  There's virtually nothing there -- only the same stuff that is reprinted at GAOTD.  With something as ciritcal as encryption, I'd want more information about the product.  Frankly, I'd be scared to install and use it.

-TomColvin (May 10, 2008, 11:24 AM)

Amen to that!

And how that TrueCrypt supports Full-Disk Encryption of boot volumes, I wouldn't even consider anything else.

5270

Post New Requests Here / Re: Vista times out while watching movies

« Last post by f0dder on May 11, 2008, 06:48 PM »

Hm, decent movie players should turn off screensaver/sleepmode temporarily, while they're playing...

5271

Living Room / Re: Why is all audio on websites so freakin loud?!

« Last post by f0dder on May 10, 2008, 04:24 AM »

Range compression <3... or not >_<.

5272

General Software Discussion / Re: I think ive worked out a way to turn a virtual machine into a bootable one?

« Last post by f0dder on May 08, 2008, 04:04 PM »

Well, I was thinking in the lines of vmware esx/gsx server, which basically boots the VM without an OS (although in reality, iirc it uses a heavily modified linux as base OS). So you still don't _really_ go from a vm image to on-the-hardware...

5273

General Software Discussion / Re: I think ive worked out a way to turn a virtual machine into a bootable one?

« Last post by f0dder on May 08, 2008, 03:52 PM »

oh
i was worried there might be something like that.

why dont the VM people make a way of being able to boot from virtual machines aswell. Im sure EVERYone (by everyone i mean alot of ppl) want it

-relequestual (May 08, 2008, 03:16 PM)

The enterprise does it, but that has an enterprise pricetag associated with it

Doing what you're describing might work, I know people that have transplanted a disk from an AMD machine to an Intel - obviously boot-time RAID wasn't involved, only standard adapters.

5274

Living Room / Re: Winamp 5.53 Release

« Last post by f0dder on May 07, 2008, 08:30 PM »

I also stuck with 2.95 (or something close). The later versions got too bloated for my taste, and I finally realized that I really need a player for, well, playing music, not having a pretty skin or fancy visulizations. Ended up with foobar2000, which isn't perfect by any means, but it has good sound quality and supports cue-sheets decently.

5275

Screenshot Captor / Re: Slowed Down My PC

« Last post by f0dder on May 07, 2008, 08:37 AM »

It shouldn't happen with ATA100 cables!

-Carol Haynes (May 07, 2008, 08:34 AM)

Actually, if you have drives on the same interface (cable), it still can - windows will see, for instance, the CRC errors from a scratched DVD, and doesn't distinguish them from a bad cable.... and then it drops the the DMA to PIO for both devices on the cable. OTOH, I've never seen DMA->PIO revert from a bad cable