Recent Posts

5701

Living Room / Re: Love - You have 4 minutes to choose your perfect mate

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2008, 06:42 PM »

Sorry, fodder - I don't speak German! However, I'm not sure what prompted me to write "dubbed" as normally Showcase subtitles foreign movies...

-Darwin (February 15, 2008, 10:51 AM)

I don't do German either, I only know a few phrases like "Arbeit macht frei!" (my boss says that sometimes ), and "Wir mussen die juden ausroten!" (from a soutpark episode where cartman goes nuts) - apart from that I can understand a tiny bit of it, but that's it. I just tend to hate dubbing, and even for japanase I would prefer subs any day. I think my dislike for dubbing approaches pure-breed hate, probably because of all the really really bad german dubbing I saw back in my preteen days when we had satellite TV. Ugly.

5702

Living Room / Re: Love - You have 4 minutes to choose your perfect mate

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2008, 10:22 AM »

Dubbed
Subbed ftw!

5703

Living Room / Re: KITT returns!

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2008, 10:21 AM »

...as long as it's just KITT and not David Hasselhoff - he should stick to singing, his real talent

5704

Living Room / Re: The SSL certificate industry is a messy business

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2008, 06:52 AM »

housetier: I think the question being asked is "why use cacert instead of a self-signed certificate, when cacert's root cert isn't included with browsers?".

5705

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Scanahand RC1 Released

« Last post by f0dder on February 14, 2008, 07:42 PM »

Pretty cute idea.

Does it generate bitmap fonts, or does it go all the way and convert your handwriting to vector fonts?

5706

Jibz's Tools / Re: Dina font in size 7, 6.5 or 6 ?

« Last post by f0dder on February 12, 2008, 06:45 PM »

Hmm, I think it would hard to make it smaller; 8px is already very small, and it's a pretty great job making all the characters look so well. Cramming all symbols into less pixels?

Are you running a < 1024x768 resolution?

5707

Living Room / Re: KVM switch w/DVI?

« Last post by f0dder on February 12, 2008, 06:43 PM »

mwb1100: the multi-input idea is pretty brilliant, I would've never thought of that myself! - do you know what the really embarrassing part is? My primary monitor has both DVI and D-SUB . Obviously I don't have a detachable D-SUB cable lying around, but I think I have one at my mum's place.

The OSD menu is slightly inconvenient to navigate, but considering the desk space and money I can save... too bad there's no excuse for rushing out and getting a 19" TFT then . Lemme see if I have some DonatioI can send your way :^)

PS: I'm still interested in suggestions for DVI switchboxes.

EDIT: am I stupid or what? - the switchbox cables obviously worked just fine for connecting the analog input of my primary monitor to the testbox! - the monitor OSD is a bit annoying to use, but at that price...

5708

Living Room / Re: KVM switch w/DVI?

« Last post by f0dder on February 12, 2008, 08:08 AM »

Yeah, the only DVI capable KVM I found at the shop I usually use was a Belkin, and at that price I might as well get a new DVI 19" TFT, and use that + my DVI 17" for my main box, and the analog 17" TFT for the testbox - only slightly more expensive.

A KVM would save some desk space, though...

5709

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 beta 3 expected today

« Last post by f0dder on February 11, 2008, 06:31 PM »

How is application load speed compared to FF2? That's one of my main gripes with FF...

-f0dder (February 11, 2008, 06:20 PM)

You mean your gripe wasn't that 1 instance of Firefox opened to "about:blank" could eventually soak up a half GB of RAM?

-Renegade (February 11, 2008, 06:24 PM)

Nope, never had that bad memory leaks for me - but of course I tend to close firefox between each read-forum-topics-and-follow-trails-of-links spree

5710

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 beta 3 expected today

« Last post by f0dder on February 11, 2008, 06:20 PM »

How is application load speed compared to FF2? That's one of my main gripes with FF...

5711

Living Room / KVM switch w/DVI?

« Last post by f0dder on February 11, 2008, 06:19 PM »

With my new computer, for some reason the PS/2 keyboard I have go all screwy when used through my 2-computer EDiMAX KVM. Not that bad, I thought, since I actually prefer two physical keyboards, and only use the KVM for switching one of my monitors.

Unfortunately, the KVM switch is powered by, you guessed it, PS/2 ports. Both my new main box and my testbox only has one PS/2 port (for keyboard), and both act screwy if the keyboard is attached through the KVM. So, I can't use my old KVM anymore, and no it has no plug for AC power, and no I don't feel like soldering up something myself

Also, since the KVM uses standard VGA/D-SUB (analog) connection, the image on the monitor was a bit fuzzy. So I'm looking for a KVM with DVI support (digital, so there should be no fuzz) supporting two computers at at least 1280x1024@70Hz - audio, usb, keyboard, mouse etc. isn't that important, as I only really need the video switched over.

What are my options? And are DVI capable KVMs so expensive that I might as well buy a new TFT for the testbox?

5712

C / C++ / Re: Exploring C++

« Last post by f0dder on February 11, 2008, 06:35 AM »

#1: "#include <file.h>" does exactly the same thing as opening file.h and copy-pasting it where the "#include <file.h>" statement is located. No more, no less.

#2: preprocessor directives are the things that start with a "#" hash sign. It can be used for preprocessor macros (you generally want to stay away from those), pragmas to control compiler-specific behavour, the classic #ifdef/#endif, and perhaps the most important, #include.

#3: you use loops when you need a loop?

#4: cin,cout are C++ iostreams, which are a lot more flexible than C-style scanf/printf (they let you write your own output formatters, and a lot more). They also have the potential to be buffer-overflow safe, which scanf/printf don't.

#5: type checking is done all the time by the compiler, to ensure you don't shoot of your leg doing something stupid. C has pretty weak strong type checking, C++ has relatively strong but not over-insane type checking (contrast that to Pascal which has 'char' and 'byte' types that need typecasting >_<). You use typecasting when you need to convert one "unrelated" type to another - this doesn't happen often with decently designed C++ code, but happens a lot if you need to interface with legacy C code. Prime example is using the PlatformSDK for Windows.

#6: dynamic binding/polymorphism... let's say you have a whole class of output streams you can support (to file, to console, to network, to memory...). You design an interface class for this, with all virtual functions. You can't instantiate this interface class directly, but you can instantiate the concrete derived classes (ie, FileStream, NetworkStream, ...), but all code that uses the streams can use the GenericStream class interface. Using dynamic binding, the "generic" calls are bound to the "concrete" calls of the class you're using.

That explanation was probably a bit confusing, but it's pretty simple in practice.

#7: a reference variable is similar to a pointer variable, but they're not equal. One thing is the syntactic sugar: with a pointer, you need to do "*ptr = value" or "ptr->field = value". With a reference, you can simply do "ref = value" or "ref.field = value". Also, references can't be reassigned, and they don't take up any additional memory - the are the variables they refer to. Think of them as aliases.

#8: namespaces are wonderful basically, they were created to avoid polluting the global namespace, and having variable/function/class name clashes in large projects, or when using libraries. If two people wrote functions called SuperFormatter(), you'd usually be in trouble, but if they were put in separate namespaces, you aren't.

PS: is this a homework assignment?

5713

Living Room / Re: Making a dream PC for cheap (as possible) - help anyone?

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2008, 07:06 PM »

Btw, just for fun I tried undervolting the Q6600... idle power consumption doesn't really change (I guess the speedstep/whatever stuff in intel CPUs lowers speed as well as voltage?), but with lowest voltage (can't remember how low the BIOS went ), 4 cores maxxed use only ~156W. I haven't tested whether it delivers the same speed (I think it should, since I didn't change clock frequency), and I have no idea whether it's stable (would have to run for half a day or so).

But it's interesting that there might be 10-12W saved by undervolting...

5714

General Software Discussion / Re: ImgBurn v2.4.0.0 released 10th Feb - and it supports audio CDs

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2008, 05:22 PM »

Spotted this earlier with the help of Website Watcher

Pretty nice, now there's even less reason to use any other burning app for me. I just hope ImgBurn will never go down the road of useless feature bloat. Definitely not saying that audio-cd and mp3 support is feature bloat, though, even if some people might feel that the app should only be able to, well, burn image files :]

5715

Living Room / Re: Making a dream PC for cheap (as possible) - help anyone?

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2008, 01:09 PM »

Well, I hope to be able to upgrade to a Q9450 when they hit the streets here (I have a brother that could use the Q6600 with his current rig...), but I really needed a new box

Power consumption for the new system could be a lot worse:

pretty idle:   106.7W
1 cores maxed: 136.5W
2 cores maxed: 152.5W
3 cores maxed: 162.5W
4 cores maxed: 168.0W

...that's the same harddrives and graphics card as the powerslave test, but a Q6600 (2.4GHz) CPU and 8 gigatebytes (4 x 2gig sticks) of RAM. NOT bad, imho.

5716

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Portable Registry Tool(s)

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2008, 08:18 AM »

How about RegReplace at http://www.delphi32.com/vcl/4080 ?

-skrommel (February 10, 2008, 08:03 AM)

That could come in handy - but a 64bit version (or a couple of special Wow* API calls) is necessary for it to be usable on 64-bit windows...

5717

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Batch read nfo files in RAR archives

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2008, 07:18 AM »

You pirates!

5718

Developer's Corner / Re: Microsoft's "Rich Signature"

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2008, 06:50 AM »

Did you try the Internet Archive?  If it was indexed, there should be a copy there...

-Rover (February 09, 2008, 09:54 PM)

In my experience, the internet archive is pretty bad at indexing forum topics... but I didn't try.

All the info we really needed was contained in RichSignature.txt attached above I think. Nothing more to know it, but thank you

-Ehtyar (February 10, 2008, 12:36 AM)

Still, it would have been nice to find the original asmcommunity posts about it. Oh well.

5719

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2008, 06:48 AM »

What?  No mention of Jane of the Jungle?   

-Rover (February 09, 2008, 09:39 PM)

Wasn't it Jill? At least that's what I played

5720

General Software Discussion / Re: Thoosje Quick XP Optimizer

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2008, 07:14 PM »

* f0dder hoards his goodies

5721

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2008, 07:14 PM »

Sacrifice was nice, but daaaarn it got mind-numbingly difficult >_<

5722

General Software Discussion / Re: Thoosje Quick XP Optimizer

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2008, 01:12 PM »

[/b]DisablePagingExecutive=1[/b] is a win even with relatively small (by today's standards) amounts of memory. I think I used it even back when I had less than 512 megabytes of memory? (but still not enough memory to disable paging completely). Paging drivers and kernel components to disk should sound pretty self-explanatory bad to everybody, I think. The reason it's being done at all is that NT was designed when systems had very little memory.

And windows tends to page things out to disk a bit aggressively, or so it would seem to me. DisablePagingExecutive=1 helped my system "recover" back to a usable stage (ie., stop disk thrashing from pagefile read/write) sooner, on the low memory systems, when I had exited something very resource intensive like a game/whatever, it was definitely measurable. Sure thing, turning that setting on meant that games/apps had slightly less RAM available for their use, but I was happy to sacrifice that to avoid the "thrashing recovery" after running intensive stuff.

I still have the setting on, but have been running without paging file ever since I got a gigabyte of memory, so I don't feel it's effects at all. This box has 2 gigabytes of memory, and it has never been a problem running without paging file. As soon as I can get my act together and transplant harddrives + graphics card, I will be running from a quadcore with 8 gigabytes of ram (there goes my savings...) and hopefully I'll never ever need to even consider using pagefile again

5723

General Software Discussion / Re: TheBat! 4.07 released

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2008, 10:17 AM »

Hmmm, new releases that fast? Not a good sign.

And ugh, from the whatsnew.txt:

# Headers and free space in windows have nice gradient background;
# Buttons in the header filed also look much nicer because they also support gradients;

First they add the useless draggable toolbars, and now even more useless background gradients? I think I'll move to Thunderbird instead >_<

5724

Developer's Corner / Re: 18 Monospace fonts comparison screenshot

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2008, 09:37 AM »

Btw, I do have a LCD/TFT screen (two of them actually) - I just can't stand cleartype. Regular font smoothing is okay for most apps, though. But for some reason, I haven't found anything I can tolerate for coding, except Dina...

Hm, Inconsolatas does show up in NP++ after I rebooted my system today, weirdness.

Dunno if it's a NP++ or font or... whatever... problem. Time to go shopping

5725

General Software Discussion / Re: How many of you use encryption?

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2008, 07:59 AM »

I've experience no performance hit and have no other major drawbacks to report either. But I haven't yet tried any CPU-heavy activities like gaming.

-Nod5 (February 09, 2008, 07:53 AM)

Shouldn't make much of a difference, games tend to pre-load most data, and not do much disk loading until you progress to a new level.

The system encryption supports passwords only, not keyfiles. I hope they add some smart support for that in the next version so that the bootloader at startup autosearches for a file with a certain name on any connection usb device and then tries to use that as a keyfile.

-Nod5 (February 09, 2008, 07:53 AM)

Passphrases are secure enough for TrueCrypt - keyfiles wouldn't really bring any security advantage, and if not protected by a passphrase, it'd lower your security.