Recent Posts

5351

Screenshot Captor / Re: Snapshot : DVD Movie in Windows Media Player 11

« Last post by f0dder on April 10, 2008, 05:51 PM »

Iirc at least one of the commercial screensnappers can handle overlays, but I'd go for mediaguy's advice and use a player that can take screenshots... much easier and less expensive

5352

DC Gamer Club / Re: Assassin's Creed (PC version) contest

« Last post by f0dder on April 10, 2008, 05:45 PM »

I've heard that the game is pretty unstable - and not just the pirated versions, mind you. So tell us whether it works smoothly or if there's issues with it

5353

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox : frames and other graphics disappear in DonationCoder.com's layout

« Last post by f0dder on April 10, 2008, 05:44 PM »

Armando: do you, by any chance, use a "crap cleaner"/tempfile-deleter application? And have you tried manually locating the firefox cache and deleting the files, and see if it gives the same result?

5354

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

« Last post by f0dder on April 10, 2008, 05:42 PM »

Python is just fine on Windows, works like a charm.

I probably wouldn't use the language for developing full applications, but it's great for scripts and stuff that needs a bit more power than a simple shell script. Python + pycurl + regular expressions make it very comfortable to do all sorts of data mining

5355

DC Gamer Club / Re: Assassin's Creed (PC version) contest

« Last post by f0dder on April 10, 2008, 07:16 AM »

Lucky bast!

5356

Developer's Corner / Re: Software protection and registration.

« Last post by f0dder on April 10, 2008, 06:25 AM »

I hate online activation, it's damn painful to deal with.

I've just gone through the pain of installing Kaspersky antivirus 7.0 on ~10 PCs (with 5 more to come). While it's activation scheme is relatively painless, it still becomes quite an annoyance when you need to go through it for a lot of machines, and keep track of which machines use which registration numbers... their online shop didn't offer ordering an arbitrary amount of licenses, so I ordered 3x5 copies, which means 3 license numbers. ugh. Yes, I should probably have went for the centrally-administered option, but that was more expensive.

I'm with mouser, if you want protection don't go for the latest & greatest & potentially unstable, go for what means the least hassle for your customers.

5357

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox : frames and other graphics disappear in DonationCoder.com's layout

« Last post by f0dder on April 10, 2008, 06:18 AM »

I've seen this happen when I've manually deleted the firefox cache, this gets the browser pretty confused.

5358

General Software Discussion / Re: HowTo EASILY create image backup?

« Last post by f0dder on April 08, 2008, 05:04 PM »

Curt: indeed, a RAW dump is a RAW dump. Same size as partition, not content.

That's why you do a non-raw dump, and only get the actual content size... this should be just fine, unless you have some very special needs.

5359

Living Room / Re: Do you collect anything?

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

I am a recovering book collector.. expensive habit 

-mouser (April 08, 2008, 09:06 AM)

Yeah, it can be - I've almost run out of (programming related) books that I want, though.

5360

Living Room / Re: Do you collect anything?

« Last post by f0dder on April 08, 2008, 08:53 AM »

I collect software and broken relationships

5361

General Software Discussion / Re: HowTo EASILY create image backup?

« Last post by f0dder on April 08, 2008, 08:49 AM »

If you look at the XML files generated by DI XML, you'll see that it includes file and folder information. But it also does seem to keep the files fragmented etc... I don't know if the file/folder names and information is just to be able to browse the backup files "offline", or if it's because the image file isn't actually a 1:1 image of the partition you're backing up: backing up my 4GB source partition results in a 1.9GB image file, without compression - so it obviously only backs up used parts, I don't know if this includes filesystem metadata information or not.

A RAW backup in DI XML, on the other hand, generates an image file the same size as the partition, and a much smaller .xml file without all the per-file information.

5362

General Software Discussion / Re: 1 Tera Byte CD..

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2008, 06:32 PM »

Hehe, I remember something similar *way* back when I messed up a FAT partition slightly with a disk editor. Corrupted filesystem metadata can be funny sometimes...

as for ISO editing programs, UltraISO seems pretty competent.

5363

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Find and remove duplicate files

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2008, 06:28 PM »

Thanks for answering my questions - I still think byte-by-byte is (a bit too) paranoid and should be left as a togglable option, but I value your safety concerns - very nice that you can't delete the last copy of a file etc.

5364

General Software Discussion / Re: HowTo EASILY create image backup?

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2008, 06:23 PM »

Once the disk image is done it contains just the same as the original disk in binary form, so all filenames should be there exactly the same upon eventual restore process. This applies to all real disk image applications (but not backups).

-yksyks

DriveImage XML actually works quite differently from that - the XML file contains file & directory names, et cetera. I don't know if the filesystem metadata part is even extracted from your drive...

- so I take it (hope) that XML per nature supports Unicode? The problem inside my little head is that NOwhere have I found any info regarding DriveImage versus Unicode. Seems it only were tested by Americans...

-Curt

XML by itself doesn't support unicode, but it does (just like HTML) allow you to specify the "character set". DI XML specifies "UTF-8" encoding, which is a form of compact unicode... so I assume it supports it OK

5365

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Find and remove duplicate files

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2008, 09:47 AM »

It seems a bit wasteful doing byte-by-byte checking if you're using a secure hash - after all, the cryptographic hashes are designed so a single bit difference should yield a large hash difference... but I guess byte-by-byte is an OK option for the paranoid people

I assume you start off by only considering files with the same size, not blindly calculating hashes for every file?

5366

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Find and remove duplicate files

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2008, 09:16 AM »

Clone Tools uses a byte by byte scan on the files to determine if they are duplicates.

Does this mean you keep doing byte-by-byte compare of one file to the "suspected clones", or are you doing the smart thing and comparing MD5/SHA/... hashes?

5367

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: IMAP filtering.

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2008, 08:59 AM »

And it's impossible to change the server software?

I'm not sure how much work it would be to whip something together - there's already existing IMAP libraries one can use, and depending on the level of filtering you need that could be a pretty simple job... since it's supposed to run on a windows server, somebody could probably slap together some C# components to do the task pretty quickly.

5368

General Software Discussion / Re: HowTo EASILY create image backup?

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2008, 08:51 AM »

Well, it's actually an XML file with desription + metadata, and some binary files for the actualy image data... but you do still get huge XML files (~10meg for 1.7gig worth of system-drive backup).

Curt: XML is an "eXtensible Markup Language". That's a fancy name for "a structured text file that can be used for a lot of different stuff". The format is similar to HTML, but more strict, and it doesn't define tags like HTML does.

The idea behind XML is that it's more-or-less human readable, since it's stored in text format, but that it's also efficiently machine-readable (because it's structured). So instead of people using a zillion different file formats with custom parsers, you could use XML for basically everything, with your own Schema. The DriveImageXML .xml files actually have a description of the schema embedded in them, so if you find a DIXML backup 10 years from now, you have enough information to read the files...

The downside to XML is that it's a lot less efficient to read & parse than a binary file, so it's generally not so usable for huge data structures.

5369

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: IMAP filtering.

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2008, 07:17 AM »

IMHO this is better implemented either server-side, or with rules in each user's mail client. Solutions already exist for both. Doing continuous client-side polling & filtering wastes bandwidth and CPU cycles.

But it's doable, and if you don't have control of server or user client software, it might be the only option, I guess.

5370

General Software Discussion / Re: mp3 Audio OUTPUT volume normalizer? Any such thing?

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2008, 05:57 AM »

Does mp3gain re-process the audio stream, or does it just add a 'gain' tag to the files? And wrt. normalizing to different dB levels, does this require re-processing, or just changing some player settings?

Imho you'd need both per-track and per-album gain levels, and choose one depending on the mode you're currently listening - trackgain can be horrible if you're listening to an entire album, if it hasn't been "loudness-mastered"

5371

Living Room / Re: BEAT THIS! ;)

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2008, 05:48 AM »

f0dder

Renegade and you at least have a  semi -plausable excuse.

-ljbirns (April 06, 2008, 08:03 PM)

Well, I was 300+ km from home, attending a big family party / 60-year's birthday... and I seriously considered buying a laptop for that occasion

5372

DC Gamer Club / Re: Saga - An MMO RTS

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2008, 06:22 PM »

He went to bed already? Gosh, mom must've been on his back

Sounds like the game is pretty rough around the edges... is it supposed to be focusing on large epic battles, teamwork, ... ? - the fact that it's persistent sounds very interesting, I was a bit disappointed with WOW, I thought it was going to feature stuff like "game masters" that could whip up quests on the fly, that you'd be able to buy houses, etc etc etc.

5373

Living Room / Re: BEAT THIS! ;)

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2008, 05:20 PM »

This weekend, I spent... *counts using fingers*... ~40 hours in a row without using a computer at all

5374

Developer's Corner / Re: coding x86 assembler on a 64 bit machine??[coding on a x64]

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2008, 01:10 PM »

So there is definitely some in compatibility! Right now my compaq is so screwed up with the various audio drivers that the volume control shows up and songs play but with NO SOUND! even with full volume!

Hm, that could be because of a missing/wrong "HD Audio Bus" (or something  similar) device... I've had quite some trouble with that, but that goes for 32-bit Windows as well.

Ok, a little more off topic, i'm sorry, would Xp64 be able to get drivers for me online? If i connect?

Not very likely, no... only some drivers are managed by Microsoft this way.

With a laptop it might be quite a quest finding the right drivers, but imho it's worth it. In daily use you won't see much of a performance difference, neither positive nor negative. But XP64 lets you test both 32- and 64-bit code, which makes it easier to write portably. And if you need the speed the extra & wider registers offer you, 64-bit is nice (you can't access those from 32-bit code, even though your CPU is 64-bit).

5375

Living Room / Re: Vista source code leaked!

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2008, 10:00 AM »

If they could at least just be a bit realistic, it would be more fun... Vista doesn't mess with firefox etc. And it does a lot more than just FlickerLED(), it's more like ThrashDriveByIndexing().

* f0dder sighs.