Recent Posts

5801

fSekrit / Re: LATEST VERSION: fSekrit 1.35 shrinkwrapped!

« Last post by f0dder on January 28, 2008, 09:19 AM »

If I try create a new file starting from a read-only one by clicking on the "New" option, the new window has the option "make read-only" available, implying apparently that the new file about to be created is not protected, and yet I am unable to enter any text from the keyboard or import any text. Am I missing something? Thanks for a wonderful and very useful piece of software.

-simonrl (January 28, 2008, 09:09 AM)

The whole way "read-only" works is something I've been planning to redesign for a while, it is not intuitive at all! You have to start with a new note, enter your text, and only then do you enable read-only. After that, you can use "Save As" or "Exit", to get your file saved.

5802

Living Room / Re: Mini How-To: How to make your PC go to silent standby (S3 mode)

« Last post by f0dder on January 28, 2008, 08:49 AM »

oldfart: well, many many years ago, power management was pretty buggy - including the stuff that needed to be done at BIOS level, not just Windows. So I guess it made sense as a general advice back then. For the last several years, things have generally worked pretty well though, as long as you're on Windows and have proper drivers.

So no reason to run LocalCooling unless you like the stats and want to help them make money

5803

Living Room / Re: Ah, the brilliant comedy that parody brings via the Nazis (NSFW)

« Last post by f0dder on January 28, 2008, 07:10 AM »

Too bad the movie title has been translated, "Der Untergang" sounds so much nicer. \o_

5804

Living Room / Re: Mini How-To: How to make your PC go to silent standby (S3 mode)

« Last post by f0dder on January 27, 2008, 03:39 AM »

I reckon battery lifetime stories will change depending on who you ask, there's probably both money as well as religion involved.

A thing I can say about the topic, though, is that after a couple of years of almost exclusively connected-to-socket operation, my mum's laptop would last less than 15 minutes om battery. And some months back, it would no longer power on, until I removed the battery.

So, personally, once I scrape money together for a laptop, I will be running it off battery, and only connect it to socket when battery is near drained.

Local Cooling was already mentioned here at DC... doesn't do anything fairly useful. Apart from making money.

5805

General Software Discussion / Re: Program to extract / filter out content from XML files?

« Last post by f0dder on January 26, 2008, 04:24 PM »

Hehe, I love your strike-throughs, tinjaw ^_^

Incorporating Python in other languages, ho humm. I'd personally go for something a bit more light-weight like LUA, but Python is a darn nice language (and set of standard libraries!) for a lot of stuff.

5806

Living Room / Re: Mini How-To: How to make your PC go to silent standby (S3 mode)

« Last post by f0dder on January 26, 2008, 04:21 PM »

Well, keep in mind that a laptop in standby will drain your battery. Slowly, but surely.

"But I always leave my laptop on wall power when I'm home!" - don't, you reduce battery lifetime.

5807

General Software Discussion / Re: Attention Mod

« Last post by f0dder on January 26, 2008, 08:41 AM »

I always launch URLs from my topic reply email notifications before hitting "show unread", by the way.

5808

Developer's Corner / Re: Looking for webservice to convert svn repo to zip

« Last post by f0dder on January 26, 2008, 07:34 AM »

Exactly - and it's very important to stress that the innermost file has to use the "store" method (ie., no compression), otherwise double-zipping will end up giving worse results

Here's an example what fSekrit source ends up at:

[Select]

Name Size
src.rar 58.1 kB
src_normal.zip 161.6 kB
src_store.zip 527.8 kB
src_store_zip.zip 114.4 kB

5809

Developer's Corner / Re: Looking for webservice to convert svn repo to zip

« Last post by f0dder on January 26, 2008, 07:26 AM »

You could use a little trick when all you can use is zip, to achieve solid compession: double-compress. But use the store method for the inner zip file. This is more or less equivalent to applying gzip/bzip2 to a tar archive.

5810

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 26, 2008, 07:04 AM »

Personally, I feel safe enough with a NATing router and XPSP2 firewall - this keeps me from the annoying drive-by attacks and even if a friend would bring an infected laptop to my place. Since I don't run outbound protection, I'm a bit more likely to notice strange behavior; sure, most malware probably would be detected by most outbound protection, but oh well.

Oh, it's also pretty nice that 64-bit OS adoption has been so low, makes it less interesting for malware authors to target

5811

General Software Discussion / Re: KDE 4 out, and my, it looks gorgeous!

« Last post by f0dder on January 26, 2008, 07:00 AM »

But seriously, this oversizedness and tendency to leave large pools of blankness is everywhere in apps that have originated on Linux. It's wherever you look, check out the screenshot of Nvu, the Gecko-based, cross-platform HTML editor:

http://images.linspi...ManagerInSidebar.jpg

-tranglos (January 25, 2008, 11:17 PM)

Oh gawd, that image makes my eyes bleed. So...much...wasted...space >_<

Seems typical of graphical linux apps. So much blank space, oversized buttons and borders, etc. Ugh.

5812

Developer's Corner / Re: Looking for webservice to convert svn repo to zip

« Last post by f0dder on January 26, 2008, 06:57 AM »

I don't see bandwidth and anything else being a problem, unless you want the service to run from a different server than the repository.

.tar.gz sizes wouldn't be too bad if you just want to check out a single revision, as source code compresses very well (as long as you use solid compression like tar+whateve, rar, 7zip etc. - zip sucks).

5813

Developer's Corner / Re: Looking for webservice to convert svn repo to zip

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 07:45 PM »

You should be able to do it yourself pretty easily with some python code on the server end? *nudge nudge*

Btw, I recently integrated subversion with the Vanilla forums, pretty darn nice to get forum notifications whenever somebody checks in new code.

But i digress, sorry for the off-topic

5814

General Software Discussion / Re: Attention Mod

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 07:42 PM »

I (very!) often miss private messages, for some reason - even though they do crop up in my email client. I dunno if I overlook them, or if I actually do read the email notify and then forget about it. But it happens all the time . So something to "alert" me via forum PMs certainly wouldn't work. For some reason, I don't forget about regular emails as easily, though

Dunno about the mod idea... I personally usually get around to most threads since my main way of browsing the forums is the "show unread since last visit", so unless there's a very dull thread title, I usually see stuff

PS: I'll see if I can find time to reply to your PM tomorrow, CodeTRUCKER, I only read (or re-read?) it right now, but I'm heading off to bed

5815

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 07:31 PM »

Well, if you want outbound protection to be effective at all, you can't do with just blocking outgoing traffic - you need a more complete suite that also block injection etc. Suddenly this isn't just a firewall but a fully fledged intrusion detection system. And I'll have to bow my head and mumble that such a thing can be effective - but never just outgoing firewall in and by itself.

I prefer not running that though, and keep on my toes. It's a shame becoming lazy because you think you're protected by a firewall, and not noticing when you've been breached. Also, outgoing firewalls tend to either come with a lot of default rules, or be overly annoying to configure (where some users end up clicking 'yes' without knowing exactly what they're doing). But that's the old regular-user vs. power-user thing.

Personally I still believe that if you end up getting infected in the first place, and you're getting infected from something that's nasty enough to be a problem, it's going to be sophisticated enough to breach whatever software firewall you're running.

5816

General Software Discussion / Re: Current IE8 build renders the ACID2 Test correctly!

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 07:22 PM »

Lashiec: it has nothing to do with laziness, it has everything to do with politics.

5817

Living Room / Re: Mini How-To: How to make your PC go to silent standby (S3 mode)

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 09:39 AM »

Keep in mind that S3 consumes a bit more power than off (although not THAT much, since you don't "really get off" unless you pull the plug out of the socket, or flip the switch on your PSU) - see my PowerSlave thread.

And also keep in mind that if the power b0rks while in standby, it's almost as bad as if you hard reboot while the machine is on, only difference is that in standby, at least your filesystem buffers have been flushed.

And also keep in mind that sometimes windows has trouble resuming from standby, although that's really hardware/driver related. So be careful!

I wouldn't recommend standby during the night, use hibernate and unplug your system, you get lower power consumption, and guard against power surges as well. But do use standby when you're leaving your system for more than a few minutes!

5818

General Software Discussion / Re: Program to extract / filter out content from XML files?

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 08:18 AM »

I dunno if there's XSLT libraries/bindings for Python (there probably are), but I know there's several C/C++ libraries, so you don't need a browser. (Afaik XSLT depends a lot on XPATH to do that translations?)

Thing with XPATH is that you can use those * operators, so you can locate the sub-tag you want. But I'm not that familiar with it yet

5819

General Software Discussion / Re: TheBat email client v4 (early alpha) - some observations

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 07:00 AM »

S/MIME never worked for me in TheBat!, tells me that the messages are invalid or something...

-f0dder (January 25, 2008, 06:44 AM)

this is strange, we must use it in communicatiion with government institutions and it works for years... They have OE, so in The Bat! it is needed to select MS Crypto API and The Bat! will use certificate store of Windows

-marek_mikus (January 25, 2008, 06:54 AM)

Yeah, we have something similar, although S/MIME is not enforced. When I cilck on the little padlock icon on an S/MIME message, I get to enter my passphrase. Then the list of file attachments for that mail include a couple of new files. If I try to click any of those, I get an error box saying "Can't decrypt this message. Failed to parse PKCS#7 data object.".

Virtual folders are a cute enough idea, but if the search is powerful & intuitive enough, I don't need them.

-f0dder (January 25, 2008, 06:44 AM)

why search if You have virtual folders created for the most used searches? :-) I have many accounts, so I have virtual folder for all Inboxes in all accounts and only todays messages are displayed. Second virtual folder is for company employees, third for all flagged messages, fourth for my projects etc.

-marek_mikus (January 25, 2008, 06:54 AM)

Yeah okay, that's pretty useful. For my needs, simply filtering incoming messages and dropping to another mailbox folder is good enough.

5820

General Software Discussion / Re: TheBat email client v4 (early alpha) - some observations

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 06:44 AM »

S/MIME never worked for me in TheBat!, tells me that the messages are invalid or something...

Virtual folders are a cute enough idea, but if the search is powerful & intuitive enough, I don't need them.

5821

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 06:39 AM »

Hm, dunno if the SIDs are irrelevant in a Novell setting (christ, are there people still running that? ), but just for good measures I wouldn't leave machines on a LAN with identical SID.

Even if NewSID does the trick for you, it would still be nice to have an efficient portable registry tool

5822

General Software Discussion / Re: Program to extract / filter out content from XML files?

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 06:16 AM »

I guess your Python solution is using regular expressions, and you're running into / afraid of running into trouble?

A solution could be XSLT/XPATH - you can do some very powerful stuff that way, and pretty easily. Heck, once you get into it, XPATH is simpler than regex, but probably even a bit more powerful in the XML processing domain.

5823

General Software Discussion / Re: TheBat email client v4 (early alpha) - some observations

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2008, 06:13 AM »

Humm,

I'll upgrade to 4.0 when it's final & stable, but I dunno if I will pay for 4.1. Instead, I'll probably migrate my entire existing email base (including the couple of years from PMMail2000 that I have in .rar files) to some mail archive/indexing system, and change client to Thunderbird with IMAP. IMAP is friggin' great.

I've found that I don't really use m/any of the more advanced TheBat features, the menus are too crowded, and I sometimes find it a bit difficult to find whatever setting I'm looking for. I also don't like how difficult it is to get mails exported to a standard format (you have to go folder-by-folder, Ctrl+A, export to mbox... no automated way of doing it).

On the other hand we have Thunderbird, with a very nice & clean interface, probably all the features I need, with an extension system that seems pretty well-thought?, and using mbox files by standard. No, mbox files aren't the best solution once your number of mails grow, which is why I'll be moving off messages to an archive/indexing system on a monthly or quarterly or whatever basis. But mbox does have the advantage of being a very++ standard format.

5824

General Software Discussion / Re: Time to Wipe this Machine! Clean install? Or XP Repair?

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2008, 06:30 PM »

Yup.

Make an image of the drive (the free DriveImage XML seems pretty okay for this), then a format of the system partition, and a clean reinstall. A repair "install" might just do the trick, but you're better off with the minty-fresh new install feeling, even though it means installing all those apps and fixing settings once again.

Slipstreaming is easy with nLite, and if you're running English 32bit XP, you can also integrate RyanVM's update pack.

5825

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2008, 06:18 PM »

Afaik, sysprep is free, as long as you have a genuine & validated windows?

Sysinternals' NewSID could perhaps be of help?