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5376

General Software Discussion / Re: Evaluate Server 2008 Enterprise for 240 days

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2008, 09:54 AM »

I still wonder if there's much use in doing the server->workstation thing, though.

Also keep in mind that some products require more expensive licenses if you want to run them on a server OS, and some of the free antivirus products will refuse to install.

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

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2008, 09:53 AM »

XP64 is based on win2k3 server, yes.

Some things can wind up a bit slower - for instance, foxit reader renders a lot slower on XP64 than XP32, for some weird reason (GDI+ problem?). Native x64 applications can run faster, but don't necessarily; depends on whether they can make use of the extra & wider registers. Memory footprint of applications can grow somewhat, but it generally isn't very much.

As things are now, 64-bit windows is a bit more resistant against some types of malware.

Basically, I started running XP64 because I didn't need XP32... after getting a new box with 8 gigabytes of memory, I run XP64 because I need it

As for drivers, you might not be able to find it from your laptop vendor, so you need to figure out what hardware you have, and grab drivers from the individual sites of the producers.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What kind of free license for a library?

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2008, 05:12 PM »

Iirc your notice requirement is incompatible with the GPL - but you're best off staying away from that junk anyway. Also, if you only plan on releasing a .dll and not source, GPL is entirely no-go.

There's probably an existing license that at least comes close, so you could hunt around, and add a few clauses of your own if need be here's a list of opensource licenses, perhaps one is close enough that you can copypasta it

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

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

Python! Python python python!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Memory Address Space

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2008, 04:55 PM »

Btw., prior to service pack 1, XP would let you access 4 gigabytes of physical memory - after that, it was reduced to 4 gigabytes of address space. Microsoft claims it's because of compatibility, but I think marketing (the server versions...) had a finger in the play as well.

There isn't really any problem with even more than 4 gigs of memory on 32bit OSes, and XP supports PAE, you still only get 2 gigabytes (or 3, with a boot.ini switch and specially flagged applications) per-application, though.

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Developer's Corner / Re: Latest Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) Column: UI-First Software Development

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2008, 08:06 AM »

However, I do think something needs to be added.  Speaking as someone who has fallen into this trap before - it's important to realize that although "to the end user, the interface is the application", as a coder you should as much as possible separate the user interface from the guts of the application.

-mouser

Amen! And this is an extremely important point. With the "RAD" (which really should be called RUID) tools like Delphi, BCB, VB etc. it's way too easy to intermingle your GUI and core logic, and this becomes really messy. Keep your "OnClick" (etc.) routines simple, calling into separate modules.

"Showing the life-looking prototype to the customer or managers can spell disaster. They will percieve "almost finished" application and you can't say or do anything to explain otherwise. The easiest way to avoid this is to have mockups that clearly don't look even close to the real thing."

Hm, hadn't considered that - interesting point.

5382

Living Room / Re: Cylon Mania Blazes Back in Battlestar Galactica

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2008, 07:20 AM »

The similarity is striking

5383

Living Room / Re: Odd Windows XP installation problem WRT boot options

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2008, 07:18 AM »

Let me guess - you have mixed IDE and SATA drives?

The best option is leaving only the to-be system drive plugged in, and do a reinstall. Changing system drive letter post-install is pretty risky, since there's a lot of places you need to fix up.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Memory Address Space

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2008, 07:16 AM »

That one doesn't cut it either, it's just normal memory usage statistics...

What Cuffy wants, if I'm not mistaken, is a map of the physical memory address space and/or a map of process address space... not just showing how much memory is used/free, but showing "this chunk is free, this chunk is allocated, this chunk is memory-mapped to a hardware device" etc.

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Find And Run Robot / Re: What New Major Feature is Most Important for you in Find and Run Robot?

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2008, 07:13 AM »

If we are going to use indexing (in any manner), it should be built in. Requiring the install of a third party program to use a feature in the primary program is bad, in my opinion.

-Josh (April 04, 2008, 05:53 AM)

It should be implemented with a plugin, and preferably based on locate32. Why? Because locate32 does a pretty good job, and there's no reason for reinventing the wheel.

But it should be done as a full plugin, the current locate32 plugin which calls locate.exe isn't 100% optimal, and sometimes hangs a bit.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Any app to auto-replace Notepad ??

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2008, 07:05 AM »

Hm, can you give an example of a message, or would that contain confidential information? Is it like one long line? - word-wrap word-splitting can be pretty 'costly' in Notepad++ (well, scintilla).

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General Software Discussion / Re: anyone know a commandline tool to add a line of text to end of a text file?

« Last post by f0dder on April 03, 2008, 06:08 PM »

kartal: if you use something like "echo blah >> file.txt", the last-modified will be changed, creation date shouldn't... also, not all tools will be good for this, I'm afraid SED and AWK would read in the entire existing file before appending the line? Bad if you're dealing with huge files

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General Software Discussion / Re: Any app to auto-replace Notepad ??

« Last post by f0dder on April 03, 2008, 06:02 PM »

*shrug* - most apps that are bruteforced to use notepad.exe tend to be installers, and for those I can live with notepad... but hey, if you absolutely insist on replacing notepad.exe, that's fine with me

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General Software Discussion / Re: Memory Address Space

« Last post by f0dder on April 03, 2008, 06:01 PM »

Looks like an interesting tool, Joker! - doesn't do the address-space part, but the cache stats look nice

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Find And Run Robot / Re: What New Major Feature is Most Important for you in Find and Run Robot?

« Last post by f0dder on April 03, 2008, 05:56 PM »

I wouldn't want to see indexing in FARR, but I wouldn't mind better integration with locate32... and those two things are quite different in scope, really. Also, it would be nifty if FARR cached it's results (along with filesystem change notification)... yes, Windows FS Cache does an OK job, but FARR native caching would still be better.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Any app to auto-replace Notepad ??

« Last post by f0dder on April 02, 2008, 05:12 PM »

Curt: is there any real reason you want to replace notepad.exe , instead of simply changing .txt filetype association to use your other editor? That's a much simpler & cleaner way of handling things...

Shades: EDI messages? What's that?

Notepad++ is a mighty fine editor, and I use it myself. It has a limit on max line-length (at least before things become very messy), but that's a trait of the Scintilla edit control used; it's focus is handling source code well, not dealing with log files of several hundred megabytes

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

« Last post by f0dder on April 02, 2008, 05:06 PM »

Assembly has come useful multiple times in debugging my programs (as well as reversing other people's). It's been useful in writing more efficient code (both by writing it in assembly, but also for high-level languages, by choosing better structure layouts, organizing algorithms differently, etc.)

In my opinion it's a waste of time writing full applications in assembly (aside from the initial learning experience), you don't get much advantage over writing in C/C++ (people claiming "size! speed!" are just ignorant of how to use programming tools properly).

Dunno if there's much reason to learn MSIL assembly, except if you want to write an obfuscator or reverse-engineer existing programs. As far as I know, you won't really see any speed gains by hand-crafting MSIL - except for very specific stuff, like runtime code generation, where you'd probably be better off using a native module, anyway

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General Software Discussion / Re: Memory Address Space

« Last post by f0dder on April 02, 2008, 04:58 PM »

Heh, that diagram sounds very over-simplified - there's a lot more to it than that. And apart from the address space issue, there's also the "how much physical memory will the OS use", etc.

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Living Room / Re: RAM PROBLEM?

« Last post by f0dder on April 02, 2008, 04:55 PM »

I had trouble mix-and-matching memory back in the K6-2 days, but it worked OK for my Pentium4. I generally wouldn't recommend it, though, because results vary so much between chipsets (or, in case of integrated memory controller, CPUs), motherboard, memory modules, etc.

It so wonderful that computers don't have better diagnostics of wtf the problem is. A lockup like you described could be because of a bad PSU, a flaky motherboard, overheating CPU, because you're mixing memory modules, and even more things.

I'd do as carol suggests, run with the 1gig stick and see if you can do that error-free for a while. And just for completeness, state which motherboard model you have - somebody might know about specific problems

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

« Last post by f0dder on April 02, 2008, 08:30 AM »

Yes, you can code x86 assembly on a 64-bit x86 machine. If you're going to run 64-bit windows on it, you have the choice of writing either 32- or 64-bit assembly code, since 64-bit windows still supports 32-bit applications. Iirc the situation is the same with linux. If you're going to run a 32-bit OS, you're limited to 32-bit code.

For a 64-bit assembler, I'd suggest either FASM or the NASMX project. FASM has the advantage of very quickly adopting new instruction sets, so it has been the choice if you needed to use bleeding-edge features (like intel's VMX/Vanderpool instruction set).

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General Software Discussion / Re: Memory Address Space

« Last post by f0dder on April 02, 2008, 08:25 AM »

The solution is obviously moving to a 64-bit OS

Btw, even 32-bit x86 OSes have been able to use >4GB ram since "like, forever" (iirc PAE was introduced with pentium pro), but Microsoft decided to not support that on non-server OSes for market segmentation compatibility purposes , even though XP activates PAE mode to take advantage of hardware no-execute protection.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Memory Address Space

« Last post by f0dder on April 01, 2008, 09:19 PM »

You can stuff 4 gigabytes of memory into the 32bit system address space - but you can't . The problem is memory-mapped devices and (other) reserved memory areas. (But you knew that).

As for graphing current use, that becomes pretty complex once an operating system has booted. I don't think I'd want to even attempt it on windows... under DOS, you can query the "e280 map", which will show reserved regions etc. But that's probably before PCI/AGP devices have been mapped...

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General Software Discussion / Re: Sony BMG Sued For Using Pirated Software

« Last post by f0dder on April 01, 2008, 06:57 PM »

Hm, I have a Lite-ON LH-20A1S, and I must say I'm somewhat disappointed with it; if I burn at 16x to 16x-certified Verbatim media, I often get coasters (burn seems to succeed just fine, but on inserting I get an error message along the lines of "no reference position found"). Burning at 12x SEEMS to work, but I'm burning at 8x just to be safe >_<. I had a Pioneer something-something before that, which also had trouble with 16x. I wish my plextor PX-716A hadn't died on me, while it was supposed to do 16x but never did more than 12x, at least it didn't create coasters.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Creative Labs

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

Damage is done - I know I'll never buy a Creative soundcard again. In fact, I decided to scrap my old Audigy in favor of onboard sound for my new box, to avoid driver trouble (XP64) and have more airflow in my case. If there had been less EMI noise on the Audigy than the onboard sound I would have kept the Audigy, but there wasn't.

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Coding Snacks / Re: Window Tags

« Last post by f0dder on April 01, 2008, 05:58 PM »

Sounds like a useful idea - also, an ALT+TAB like thing just for the tagged apps would be useful. I think the "add tag" hotkey would have to be something a bit more obscure than ctrl+t though, since that's used by many apps for "open a new tab"