Recent Posts

5826

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2008, 06:15 PM »

BTW, something I remembered about outbound protection is that, even if f0dder point about that such ability is useless once your computer has been compromised is a good one, is that thanks to it, you can prevent the malware from sending sensitive information to its creator.

-Lashiec (January 24, 2008, 05:07 PM)

...unless the piece of malware is nasty enough that it evades the firewall/HIPS/whatever.

5827

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2008, 06:14 PM »

Well thank you for trying f0dder, I don't suppose spook keeps backups from that long ago eh? 

Ehtyar.

-Ehtyar (January 24, 2008, 05:07 PM)

Dunno, really - Hiroshimator had backups of the old ASP forum database (the one Iczelion himself threw together), which has been integrated with the current forum. There's been various hacks and editing-out and whatnot, so a few things here and there have unfortunately been lost... I guess Lingo's edits went unnoticed long enough that there weren't any backups.

Yet a reason for keeping posts under revision control or similar!

5828

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2008, 05:19 AM »

This goes back to 2003/2004. Unfortunately "lingo" edited out the post where he described the whole thing >_<, and I don't know if anybody has that old backups of the forum. A shame, really.

http://www.asmcommun...ex.php?topic=11182.0
http://www.asmcommun...ex.php?topic=14699.0

5829

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: SendMessage Plug-in

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2008, 05:04 AM »

I use either GUIDs or something very specific for my windows classes, that way I know for certain I won't clash with anything else. Of course this isn't as important as a lot of developers probably think, since the window class namespace is per-process and not shared, but hey

5830

Living Room / Re: Name the screensaver.

« Last post by f0dder on January 23, 2008, 05:07 PM »

I thought I had seen this somewhere earlier on DC.

Did a board search for the URL Eóin finally found, and came up with this thread

Oh, and yeah, multi-monitor support would be swell. And anti-aliased lines

5831

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 23, 2008, 05:04 PM »

Iirc the post at the asmcommunity did contain a bit of information on what's contained, but it's been quite some years ago

5832

General Software Discussion / Re: NTFSearch

« Last post by f0dder on January 23, 2008, 05:02 PM »

I find that locate32's indexing -- and even farr's searches (without taking the launch history into account) for that matter -- already very fast. Even XYplorer, when I last tried it was pretty damn fast! What do they use instead? and how slow would they be, compared to that NTFSsearch tool...? Do you know, f0dder? Zero3K?

-Armando (January 23, 2008, 12:13 PM)

Locate32 indexing does feel pretty fast indeed, and it doesn't even use any fancy tricks - in fact, it even uses (iirc) a depth-first instead of arguably slightly faster breadth-first indexing. I guess the reason it's so fast is that it doesn't try to index metadata/file contents, but only the basic stuff.

My guesstimate is that reading the NTFS metadata directly (like ndff and ntfssearch) is roughly as fast as locate32, perhaps a bit slower. Totally unscientific guesstimate. So I guess indexing could be sped up quite a bit by reading NTFS metadata directly. Thing is, this only works with NTFS and only for local drives, and considering how fast locate32 already indexes... well...

5833

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 23, 2008, 05:07 AM »

The topic appeared several years ago at the ASM Community, dunno if it's possible to dig up the stuff (should be easier after we installed Wordzillas search mod ), one of the members iirc reverse-engineered link.exe enough to prevent generation of the information.

I started work on a little tool to nuke the information post-link time, but never really finished it (as in, it nuked a hardcoded amount of bytes at a hardcoded file offset, so it won't work for all EXEs).

5834

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 23, 2008, 05:01 AM »

Hm, doesn't Ghost come with a tool for setting unique Machine ID?

There's also the option of using Microsoft's sysprep before making the image, but I've never played with that...

5835

General Software Discussion / Re: NTFSearch

« Last post by f0dder on January 22, 2008, 05:16 PM »

Hm, there was a Russian guy who did a NTFS search in this lowlevel way as well. I wonder if this German app is a rip-off, parallel research, or something?

Anyway, a thing like this would imho be most useful as an (optional!, since it could very well break with next NTFS revision) indexing module for an app like locate32, rather than used as your main search.

5836

Coding Snacks / Re: Idea: TCP/IP Configuration Save/Restore

« Last post by f0dder on January 22, 2008, 05:12 PM »

Thats a neat little app, but it doesn't do most of what I want.  It doesn't have the ability to save the current config, only to apply saved profiles.

-Tekzel (January 22, 2008, 10:43 AM)

Yeah, it's a bit of a shame it doesn't allow you to save current config. I wonder whether it's because the author doesn't know how to read it, and only knows how to do netsh.exe calls to change config?

5837

Coding Snacks / Re: What language is the best for a new programmer to start with?

« Last post by f0dder on January 22, 2008, 05:08 PM »

A full application might not be feasible to do portably, but portability is important when you're writing library routines. And even if you don't aim to make your SuperApp^TM portable, it doesn't hurt keeping portability in mind, as it (imho) helps you think a bit more componental/modular, and leads to cleaner code.

As for O'Reilly, their books are a mixed bag. Some are pretty good though. My bookshelf has most titles by Addison-Wesley.

5838

Coding Snacks / Re: Idea: TCP/IP Configuration Save/Restore

« Last post by f0dder on January 22, 2008, 08:35 AM »

Oh, I think I'll grab that program for future use - I was just in massive IP switching bat country today, having to deal with bringing a laptop from one net to another, then configuring brand new access points, then... etc.

Thanks

5839

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 22, 2008, 08:32 AM »

Seem like I got it wrong, indeed - I though the ticks were the new stuff, since tick comes before tock... but oh well

5840

General Software Discussion / Re: Outlook & 2GB PST limit

« Last post by f0dder on January 22, 2008, 01:19 AM »

Hm, does outlook corrupt on 2GB boxes? Does this affect only outlook or OE as well? And is this an outlook problem, or does the company do something stupid like use the FAT filesystem instead of NTFS?

5841

Coding Snacks / Re: What language is the best for a new programmer to start with?

« Last post by f0dder on January 22, 2008, 01:15 AM »

Yeah, those books are beyond the beginner - but imho required for anyone who wants to get serious about C++

5842

General Software Discussion / Re: Prompt Uninstaller is extremely fast!

« Last post by f0dder on January 21, 2008, 06:19 PM »

Darn, those evil GPL violators

I wish XP-and-later built-in add/remove programs didn't try to be so smart... they do all sorts of scanning, which is why it's slow. A couple of links to The Old New Thing^TM:

How does Add/Remove Programs get the size and other information?
Why did the Add or Remove Programs control panel try to guess all that information?

5843

Coding Snacks / Re: What language is the best for a new programmer to start with?

« Last post by f0dder on January 21, 2008, 06:12 PM »

Hm, I think Ruby is still too young to promote this way. (And implementations are still semi-buggy and heavy).

Even Python is a relatively new-fangled language, but it has some years of baggage and has matured a lot. And it seems the standard libraries have also evolved a bit beyond very thin wrappers above the native API, which wasn't really all that portable.

5844

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 21, 2008, 06:10 PM »

Well, Penryn is actually only the "extreme" series of the 45nm core2 generation, but it has become the codename for the whole generation... confused? Don't be, the same happened when Conroe was used as the codename for 65nm core2.

Memory controller integration will be for the next "tick" of intel's tick/tock development model - so not this 45nm generation.

Will be interesting to see what integrated memory controller does for Intel... it didn't give AMD that much advantage, but perhaps Intel will "do it right" and achieve massive performance boost?

5845

Living Room / Re: 64 Bit CPU - Is it worth it?

« Last post by f0dder on January 21, 2008, 06:12 AM »

And what is it with the Sun JAVA developers that cause their JVM to be so horribly slow and inefficient? I believe that's the real reason the whole lawsuit against Microsoft's JAVA implementation was launched, because it made Sun look incompetent.

5846

Living Room / Re: Home Backup Protection

« Last post by f0dder on January 21, 2008, 05:17 AM »

That's a joke, right?

Or isn't there any safe torage requirements for guns in the .us?

5847

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 21, 2008, 05:14 AM »

The 45nm dualcores have just arrived on stock in my shop... I had made an old order for a E8400 chip, but cancelled the order in favor of an (on stock) E6550 because I needed a test machine capable of VMX *now*. Appearantly, the order didn't get cancelled properly though, and today I got an SMS that it was ready for pickup.

That quadcores are still set for end of january, though. And they will still be LGA775 and will work with just about any of the current LGA775 motherboards, unlike AMDs Phenom with AM2+ which doesn't work as well on AM2 as it was supposed to.

The 45nm "Penryn" series from Intel that's just arriving (a bit incorrect to call it Penryn I guess, since that's the 'extreme' CPUs, the dualcores called Wolfdale and Quadcores called Yorkfield) are the "tock" of the development cycle. The next "tick" is supposed to bring the memory controller into the CPU, and that might require a new socket interface.

5848

Living Room / Re: Making a router biased to a certain PC?

« Last post by f0dder on January 20, 2008, 07:14 PM »

This requires traffic shaping, either using QoS or based on things like IP addresses. And typically, your stock end-user routers are very limited in this regard

5849

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 20, 2008, 07:07 PM »

Is there a truly portable encryption system that allows someone to access an encrypted file on any system via a usb drive?

-Josh (January 20, 2008, 04:32 PM)

Humm... I think TrueCrypt comes close, because it's free and portable. Dunno if there's a "volume explorer" usermode app for it, or if it requires driver install, though?

5850

fSekrit / Re: LATEST VERSION: fSekrit 1.35 shrinkwrapped!

« Last post by f0dder on January 20, 2008, 01:50 PM »

Trick about passphrases is that you need to be able to memorize them, though, otherwise you end up writing them down on a piece of paper or whatever