Recent Posts

6201

Developer's Corner / Re: Free icons for developers

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2007, 07:09 AM »

Crystal Clear Icons - Icons from the Crystal Clear icon set by Everaldo Coelho. The icons are licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

-PhilB66 (December 07, 2007, 10:38 PM)

How can you release icons under the GPL/LGPL? :-s

Does that mean that if I use those icons in my app, my whole app would fall under the LGPL? Crazy.

6202

Living Room / Turning a so-so movie to a hilarious comedy

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2007, 07:07 AM »

You really gotta love those Asian DVD pirates.

6203

Living Room / Re: Firewire/iLink speeds set to increase to 3.2Gb/s

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2007, 06:48 AM »

... ultimately resulting in "Delay Write Failures" and data corruption. Google for "firewire filter driver".

-f0dder (December 18, 2007, 06:36 AM)

it *was* in connection with external drives that I read it and the words "data corruption" were used so maybe same problem -
it was enough to put me off at the time (never did get an external HDD enclosure anyways so...)

-tomos (December 18, 2007, 06:42 AM)

Yeah well, that wasn't the fault of FireWire itself but some lame bridging chips, and can be solved with the help of a filter driver (I even think MS ended up providing one?). FireWire-400 was faster (even on my enclosure with buggy bridging chip + filter driver) than USB2-480.

6204

Living Room / Re: Firewire/iLink speeds set to increase to 3.2Gb/s

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2007, 06:36 AM »

but over the last couple of years I've read again and again (but where ) that firewire is not as dependable as USB

-tomos (December 18, 2007, 03:19 AM)

Hm, never heard anything like that... the only firewire problem that I know of (and have been bitten by!) is that some bridge chips used in external HDD enclosures were buggy, and would report it's own max transfer size instead of asking the harddrive and returning the smaller of the two, ultimately resulting in "Delay Write Failures" and data corruption. Google for "firewire filter driver".

6205

General Software Discussion / Re: WinTasks Pro ... Windows Explorer is a trojan - yeah right!

« Last post by f0dder on December 18, 2007, 06:34 AM »

I am not disputing that explorer.exe could be spoofed/hacked as a trojan (though I would expect Windows SFC to notice that such a core module of the operating system has been modified illegally - that is what SFC is for after all) but the purpose of the warning is to get you to download two Uniblue products, install them and then buy them.

-Carol Haynes (December 18, 2007, 06:00 AM)

I don't think SFC would react on an explorer.exe that doesn't overwrite the original... you could drop it in system32\drivers to make it appear legit.

For those items in its database it mostly seeks to worry you into download completely unnecessary extra software for a 'free scan' - which basically means download trial versions of their own software - so it less security related than marketing - and that marketing is based on fear - shoddy IMHO.

-Carol Haynes (December 18, 2007, 06:00 AM)

I read that as free scam

6206

Living Room / Re: Firewire/iLink speeds set to increase to 3.2Gb/s

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2007, 06:50 PM »

* f0dder yawns.

Anyway, from everything I've seen, firewire has an advantage over USB in that it's better able to dedicate bandwidth to one high-speed device; so firewire-400 beats usb2-480.

Btw, individual disks still can't even saturate SATA-150, so SATA-300 speed only matters once you go RAID... and even then, it's only for the controller, not the individual drives, that it matters.

6207

General Review Discussion / Re: VPN/SSH Tunneling software

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2007, 06:46 PM »

Ugh, passphrase in plaintext in a batch file? Baaad bad. You should use pageant and pubkey auth instead. Btw, MyEnTunnel is okay handy for managing SSH tunnels.

6208

Developer's Corner / Re: RFI: Win32 API or WMI means of manipulating multiple video displays/monitors

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2007, 06:29 PM »

You need to open display settings etc. just to extend to an external monitor? All the laptops I've seen have either had a nifty little hotkey for it, or it's been available through a right-click tray icon (intel GMA integrated graphics, at least).

6209

Living Room / Re: 100,000 users!

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2007, 06:24 PM »

umm..
don't you know the easy way to check your id# is to get out your wallet or purse and check on your membership card?

-mouser (December 17, 2007, 11:41 AM)

Hm, I don't think I got one of those - but I do have the lovely cody figurine

6210

Living Room / Re: 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2007, 09:24 AM »

One of my biggest disappointments: flash- and hybrid drive performance (or the lack of it), especially considering their insane pricetags. But it'll hopefully get better & cheaper, to the point where we'll all go zooooom.

6211

Living Room / Re: 100,000 users!

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2007, 09:09 AM »

I, on the other hand, caught DC when it was relatively new. Member number 430

-Josh (December 17, 2007, 08:53 AM)

I have more posts than you, though!

6212

Living Room / Re: 100,000 users!

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2007, 08:45 AM »

who is member #100000?

-iphigenie (December 17, 2007, 04:01 AM)

Easy, check out the member page URL, and drop in the number yourself: beerlover

Other prominent user IDs:
#2, mouser
#3, Jibz
#42, GBark

I'm a relatively late joiner, #4340, f0dder , and I'll leave it to you guys to check #25k, #50k and #75k yourselves ^_^

6213

fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.35 for your testing pleasure.

« Last post by f0dder on December 17, 2007, 05:43 AM »

Doh - I only had the safeguard in save(), not saveas() 

I'm uploading beta2 right in a second.

6214

General Software Discussion / Re: Choppy video playback in full screen

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2007, 05:30 PM »

So any player has crappy performance, not just Windows Media Player? Tried Media Player Classic?

6215

General Software Discussion / Re: My Stupid Windows Question for the Day!

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2007, 05:06 PM »

There's some registry entries that need fixing if you want to rename those special folders. Iirc it's also possible to turn off the generation of them with the policy editor, or manually fixing some registry keys as well. They bother me.

6216

Living Room / Re: 100,000 users!

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2007, 08:54 AM »

When will we need to balance the load? Can the servers still handle it? And with so many users, doesn't take longer and longer to send out the newsletters?

-housetier (December 16, 2007, 07:32 AM)

Nah, not since we bought some processing time from the STORM network...

6217

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you 'capture' a BSOD?

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2007, 08:40 AM »

read something on TweakGuides about Windows absolutely needing one, irrespective of mem size

-nosh (December 16, 2007, 07:42 AM)

Not really true, you can disable it completely on WinXP (and probably later versions as well, meaning win2003 and Vista) and things will run just fine - if you disable paging file on win2k and earlier, the system will generate a minimal paging file and throw a warning on boot, though.

Obviously you'll run into trouble if you exhaust physical memory, and the system might not be able to save crash dump information without a pagefile, but I've been running without for sevaral years on xp32 and now xp64, with 1gig of memory in the beginning and 2gig for quite a while. With 1gig I had problems every now and then with some games, but haven't had any problems since I upgraded to 2gig.

6218

Living Room / Re: Tell me why I have to be a PowerSlave?

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2007, 06:36 AM »

I know what it's like though... My electricity bill is insane. But I'm still too stubborn to turn off my computers. I hate rebooting.

-Renegade (December 15, 2007, 10:42 PM)

Standby helps. Obviously it's no good if I'm on IRC/whatever, but I've started using standby when I'm leaving the computer for some time period, after all it's only 3W more than turning it off... and waking up from standby is fast. When I'm away for a long period (like, sleeping, going to work, or anything longer), it's a full shutdown and flipping the power switch on the PSU.

It's actually been a lot less of a bother than I would have expected it to

6219

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you 'capture' a BSOD?

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2007, 06:33 AM »

Probably a graphics driver issue, or possible corrupt ram, or an issue with your PSU, or... yes, computers are wonderful. But most definitely not because of VGI->DVA adapter, and not because you're running dual monitors either (except that running two monitors will use more video ram).

If you do get a BSOD, windows should be able to save the BSOD information, as long as you have a paging file on your system drive. Also, it's helpful to not have the system automatically reboot on BSOD, check system properties -> "advanced" tab -> "settings" button in "startup and recovery" group, and remove the tick in "Automatically restart". That'll give you more time to read the BSOD while it happens

6220

Living Room / Re: 100,000 users!

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2007, 08:36 PM »

100k? Darn, we're moving closer to site sellout, email addresses etc.

Just kidding, I love this place (and it's users)

6221

fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.35 for your testing pleasure.

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2007, 05:27 PM »

Yeah, unicode will obviously be a problem whereever in the fully qualified pathname it appears - anybody still doing non-unicode programming should be shot

6222

fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.35 for your testing pleasure.

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2007, 04:54 PM »

Unicode support is only for the text itself, I'm still using *A instead of *W APIs... full unicode (ie., filenames) is scheduled for a later version (probably with separate builds, for the poor win9x people).

I'll see if I can get right-click popup imlemented soon, so there can be a final 1.35 for christmas (but why don't you use keyboard shortcuts anyway? )

Thanks for reminding me!

6223

fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.35 for your testing pleasure.

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2007, 03:40 PM »

justice: I can't reproduce the "save empty note crashes" bug with neither the version uploaded at the top of this topic, nor the development version on my harddrive. It's a known bug for earlier versions (fixed in 1.3) - if you can reproduce this with 1.3 or any later version, please tell me how - I get the "I utterly refuse [...]" messagebox as intended.

6224

General Software Discussion / Re: Anyone else having random reboots with Firefox 2.0.0.11

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2007, 09:18 AM »

Hmmm, that sounds very very weird, a usermode program shouldn't be able to cause hard reboots like that. It must be a flaw somewhere in a device driver, although that sounds very weird as well... Which graphic card + driver version do you use, Carol and john_doe123? Firefox does allocate a fair amount of resources, so perhaps you have a graphics driver with a GDI resource bug or something? That'd be my best guess.

2.0.0.11 running stable here with "a bunch of" extensions, XP64 Pro, GF7600/163.75 drivers (and that's although I'm afraid those drivers are either pretty bugged, or my graphics card is going to die in the next few months).

If the problem persists try rolling back to a previous version and running that for a few days just to make sure it isn't an unrelated problem like faulty RAM.

It's been 100% stable here before and after UPXing the binaries.

-nosh (December 12, 2007, 12:54 PM)

Heh, I wonder why you bother - it doesn't really make firefox start faster... But okay, it was already discussed here.

6225

General Software Discussion / Re: Fantastic: XsX Alphablended Cursors

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2007, 04:54 AM »

I'm running with the Entis Cursors now as well, and I think I'm gonna stick with them. First time in 5+ years I've used custom cursors... but they are lovely