Recent Posts

5926

Living Room / Re: What should I do with my audio CDs?

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2008, 09:30 AM »

You rip your CDs once, with EAC+AccurateRip, to FLAC. EAC is slow, but you only do this once, and if you have a huge CD library, you do bits at a time.

This is your loss-less storage, your sacred library of music with no quality loss, which is much easier to backup and handle safely than your CDs.

Sure, FLACs don't play everywhere, but with the speed of today's processors, it's pretty fast to export part of your media library to whatever-bitrate MP3 for your portable player.

5927

Living Room / Re: The Rule of 3 Drives: How to Build your Next PC

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2008, 09:25 AM »

Interesting topic. I plan to get one of those SSD drives for my operating systems. The prob is they are really expensive right now and you have to know which one to buy because there are old and new models. Makes this kinda complicated. I for one will wait until reliable benchmarks are available.

-ghacks (January 11, 2008, 08:46 AM)

The benchmarks available right now are reliable, and they show... that unless you really need the "no moving parts", power consumption (or really need the random-seek performance) aspects of SSDs, they're not worth the price, yet.

But in a couple of years, prices should have dropped and technology should have improved so much that they beat regular HDDs in all ways... and I'm looking forward to that

5928

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Locate 3.0 - great *FAST* HD search tool!

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2008, 07:11 AM »

vixay: yeah, I started thinking about the names returned in locate vs. how the files are acessible to the user, a while after I checked this thread last, but forgot about it. I guess somebody would have to implement a "remapping" feature in locate, either in the database/updater, or the client-side locate.

5929

Post New Requests Here / Re: USB explorer (to avoid viruses and optimised performance)

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2008, 07:09 AM »

If you turn off autoplay, double-clicking the drive will not launch the autoplay program, but instead open the drive in explorer. Notice that there's a difference between "autoplay" and "auto-insert notification".

5930

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Locate 3.0 - great *FAST* HD search tool!

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2008, 07:06 AM »

I find everything runs fine when they are all switched on but as soon as some of the paths are not available Locate takes ages to load - worse even if I remove the network paths from the index or even rebuild my DB from scratch using only local discs Locate still waits ages when you try and load it.

-Carol Haynes (January 11, 2008, 05:41 AM)

Yeah, I'm bitten by this thing as well, since I spin down the harddrives on my fileserver - when using locate, they spin up. It should be possible to run locate in a "don't check if the files still exist, only return results" mode...

5931

Living Room / Re: is someone stealing my bandwidth?

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2008, 06:35 PM »

Isn't that what I said? Sorry if it wasn't clear.

-Carol Haynes (January 10, 2008, 06:23 PM)

I just interpreted it as unsecured WiFi networks being illegal, not that the WiFi owner has full responsibility for the traffic (which could be very bad in the case of pedophilia, terrorism, whatnot).

5932

Living Room / Re: What should I do with my audio CDs?

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2008, 06:15 PM »

I keep my CDs, since my NAD C512BEE sounds jut a bit better than my creative audigy (or was it audigy2?) soundcard (and the covers are pretty and they do represent quite substantial investment).

I do rip all my CDs though, but not to MP3 - flac . Yeah it's bigger, but with the harddrive sizes of today, I really don't want to lose quality.

5933

Living Room / Re: is someone stealing my bandwidth?

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2008, 06:13 PM »

May not seem like a big deal but it is ... if someone sits outside your house (or your neighbours) stealing your bandwidth and do something illegal (like downloading child pornography, uploading/downloading copyright music of video, running file sharing software for nefarious purposes) it will be you that the police come after because everything will track back to your IP address. OK so you may live somewhere that it is unlikely but some criminals literally drive around searching for unsecured bandwidth.

Some people have got into serious trouble with this in the UK and some countries are now starting to look at making unsecured WiFi networks illegal.

-Carol Haynes (January 10, 2008, 11:42 AM)

Wasn't UK law changed so the person owning the WiFi is responsible for the data traffic, even if it was hax0red by someone else, or was that just a proposal or a nightmare of mine?

5934

Living Room / Re: What kind of tagging system would be appropriate for DC?

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2008, 07:42 AM »

I think an opt-in bad-language filter is an okay idea. Personally I'd love for it to use the 'censored' smiley, as it's soooooo cute

5935

Living Room / Re: What kind of tagging system would be appropriate for DC?

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2008, 07:13 AM »

Well, parts of your ideas are okay, but I reaaaaally dislike the "Content Pledge" idea. Gives me the creeps, to be honest.

5936

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: quick windows search tool

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2008, 06:31 AM »

techidave: FARR is only really meant to index a relatively small amount of folders (like start menu, program files folder, and perhaps your "my documents" folder), since in the current versions it will always re-scan all the folders every time you search. This works OK most of the time because of windows filesystem caching, but still...

You really ought to check out locate32. It works by indexing your drives (which is pretty fast), and afterwards it can find locate things more or less instantaneously. REALLY good stuff.

5937

Post New Requests Here / Re: USB explorer (to avoid viruses and optimised performance)

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

Simply disable autorun and you're done.

5938

Living Room / Re: Beware Domain Searching at Network Solutions!

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2008, 06:20 AM »

Renegade: what kind of domains does it construct, and with what interval? Does it do entirely random gibberish, or does it concatenate dictionary words?

5939

Living Room / Re: What kind of tagging system would be appropriate for DC?

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2008, 06:19 AM »

I don't like the direction this is going.

It's sounding more and more like censorship and filtering out "bad stuff" (eyes of the beholder etc.) than designing a general-purpose tagging system. I'm all for a general tagging system, but not this.

5940

Living Room / Re: Your Small Form Factor system for a mere $200

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2008, 05:42 PM »

Pretty cute

I need a VMX capable core2 processor and ~2 gigs of ram for my upcoming testbox though, so I'm opting for this antec casing. Whole system will set me back ~$666... will hopefully be able to purchase it friday or next week, without having to sell my soul for it

5941

Living Room / Re: Beware Domain Searching at Network Solutions!

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2008, 05:41 PM »

Nasty creeps.

The organization ruling the .dk domain, www.dk-hostmaster.dk, allows you to do domain searches/lookups for free... and you can bet they don't do any nasty trickery. Doesn't every TLD have an official + professional organization like that? :/

5942

Living Room / Re: iPod Touch - any opinions?

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2008, 09:48 AM »

Remember that if you unlock the iPhone, you will have to be very very very careful when updating it, if you don't want a very expensive paper weight. Personally I'd stay clear, two other big reasons being cost and the whole touch-touchy thing that jgpaiva also mentioned. Heck, I even (often!) send text messages from my cellphone while not looking at it.

If I was going for a MP3 player (and I probably will in a few months), SanDisk Sansa models look very appealing... free of the apple crud, and supports SD Micro expansion cards (in addition to the built-in up to 8gig flash ram).

5943

Developer's Corner / Re: My Application...

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2008, 08:22 AM »

Notice that if your thread function exits, the thread is destroyed - generally, a thread will keep looping, often doing "wait for event; process; repeat;".

BCB doesn't have it's own support functions for threading? If it does, it might be best to use those (there can be some "advanced issues" involved that requires per-thread data and other nastiness).

Also, again I must state that if you need to access global variables in read/write fashion, you need synchronization; synchronization bugs can be very hard to spot, and many of them will not show unless you have a dualcore (or quadcore or...) machine, but will blow up at the least expected time

5944

Living Room / Re: is someone stealing my bandwidth?

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2008, 06:26 AM »

I agree it is very easy to spoof, but they would have to know what MAC address to spoof. That's a lot of combinations and I can't think of a way to find out the MAC address of my machines since they are in a fixed set up and not broadcasting or searching for other ports (most of the connection is wired except between the 2 bridges, and the occasional laptop)..

-iphigenie (January 09, 2008, 06:24 AM)

They just need to sniff a little traffic, and then they have your MACs..

5945

Living Room / Re: is someone stealing my bandwidth?

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2008, 05:20 AM »

Ugh, no WPA? Isn't it possible to change your network layout? It's a really bad idea to run without WPA or WPA2 if you're living in a city. As Carol noted, MAC filtering will only keep your neighbor out, not people who are looking for free WiFi... and it's those people you should be concerned about.

5946

Developer's Corner / Re: Article Convinces Me To Move To vi(m)

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2008, 06:50 PM »

Why pico instead of nano? And why no VIM? If I had to do coding, I'd certainly prefer VIM over nano

And why the heck are you forced to access systems remotely for a programming class? O_o

5947

Developer's Corner / Re: Article Convinces Me To Move To vi(m)

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2008, 06:29 PM »

Heh, the graphic referenced at the end of the article is both hilarius and probably true:
http://www.bemroses....et/images/curves.jpg

-tranglos (January 08, 2008, 12:55 PM)

Heh, I find their Visual Studio curve silly.

Personally I tend to do nano when I'm on *u*x, since I only need very simple config editing, and the first editor I got comfortable with was pico (which nano mimics/surpasses). I'm comfortable enough with VIM if nano isn't present, but for some reason 'nano' is hardwired in my fingers when I start the mental "launch editor" thought train.

I tried VIM for a while on windows, and there's features about it that's pretty nice, but I ended up with Notepad++ at the end of the day (well, the VIM adventure lasted a month or so...). Why? VIM is heavier than N++, and doesn't really offer me much I can't do easily enough with N++; I can easy cut/delete/duplicate current line, delete current word, delete to end of line etc. It might require some ctrl+whatever combinations, but that's not really too bad, and in VIM I'd have to exit insert mode anyway. I also find selections a bit more intuitive in N++. Oh, and it's easy for me to write a plugin if I want to, although it does require writing a DLL and restarting N++, there isn't any scripting language.

I'll read the article when I have time, though

5948

Developer's Corner / Re: My Application...

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2008, 09:38 AM »

lol, i have no idea how to sychronize access to global data... is running FTP in a background thread classified as access to global data? this is entirely new to me

-Codebyte (January 08, 2008, 09:24 AM)

Not necessarily... but if, for instance, your GUI can add a filename to a queue, and the FTP thread grabs filenames from the queue, you will need to synchronize access... check out EnterCriticalSection + LeaveCriticalSection API calls.

5949

Developer's Corner / Re: My Application...

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2008, 09:18 AM »

Threading is simple, anyway.

Right until you need to synchronize access to global data. Then it becomes potentially hellish.

5950

Developer's Corner / Re: My Application...

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2008, 09:01 AM »

Unfortunately, I'm not a BCB programmer. I asked about Indy because I am a Delphi programmer. I don't think a Delphi example would be of much help to you.  Maybe another BCB programmer on the forums can provide a small example on threading in BCB.

-jazper (January 08, 2008, 08:44 AM)

Will probably help more than you think - Delphi/ObjectPascal and C++ aren't that different, syntax-wise, and afaik BCB and Deplhi use the exact same VCL (in fact, I recall BCB shipping with a command-line Delphi compiler, probably to facilitate compiling the VCL or third-party components).