Recent Posts

6226

Living Room / Re: 32bit vs 64bit Vista performance comparison?

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2007, 04:46 AM »

Carol: some 32-bit software might break, but I haven't seen that myself.

-f0dder (November 24, 2007, 07:11 PM)

FYI, On the Ecco Pro Yahoo group, users have reported that Ecco Pro 4.01 (latest version, a 32 bit app) does not run on Vista 64

-PPLandry (December 14, 2007, 11:49 AM)

What about Vista32, and XP64?

64bit OS is one possible problem, Vista is a lot of possible problems

6227

Living Room / Re: Applications Stealing Focus...

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2007, 10:21 AM »

It's outright evil. And alas, even with the "don't steal focus" stuff added in XP (or whenever), it's still possible to steal focus if you call the right APIs in the right order.

6228

General Software Discussion / Re: Software to help share files between home/work?

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2007, 08:00 AM »

If you're dealing with ASCII text files, subversion 

6229

Developer's Corner / Re: Physics in a GUI

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2007, 07:58 AM »

And f0dder i think it's unfair to call this a "gimmick".. it's a gimick when some company tries to pawn off some silly technology as "the next big thing"..  this is a guy saying "let's explore some interesting new idea and see if there is any value in it"

-mouser (December 13, 2007, 06:59 PM)

Sorry, let me clarify: I was thinking of <whatever app> having "Now with physics-based interface!" as one of it's sales lines... along the lines of iWhatever, whateveX, Now with omfgvista support!, etc.

Didn't mean to dis this particular thing or out-of-the-box thinking. (though I still doubt it's very useful for an UI ).

6230

Living Room / Re: PipeBytes: Simple Internet File Transfers

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2007, 07:45 AM »

I so totally skimmed... I missed that it wasn't stored on a server. 

-Renegade (December 13, 2007, 10:27 PM)

Not stored on, but buffered through - still 'meh'.

6231

Living Room / Re: How often do you reboot your primary workstation?

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2007, 07:44 AM »

hibernation is quite slower to resume from than standby, but it does power off the PC... although it's not that big a difference with non-laptops, on my desktop it's like 9W standby, 6W powered off (unless I hit the wall socket to get 0W).

6232

Living Room / Re: About Rudeness in Forums

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2007, 07:42 AM »

Heh, for incivility, try alt.lang.asm - you'd expect assembly programmers to be knowledgeable, but nah

6233

Living Room / Re: PipeBytes: Simple Internet File Transfers

« Last post by f0dder on December 13, 2007, 06:27 PM »

Hm, does it stream through their server, or directly from client to client? Probably through their server...

6234

Developer's Corner / Re: Physics in a GUI

« Last post by f0dder on December 13, 2007, 06:25 PM »

I think it's one of these "oh, that's cute, but..." gimmicks that gets old pretty quickly... unless they've found a completely unthought-of way to integrate it, where it makes sense rather than just being cute

6235

Living Room / Re: VectorMagic: Convert Bitmaps into Vector Art (Free)

« Last post by f0dder on December 13, 2007, 06:23 PM »

Wow. That's some pretty good quality - especially for a web site.

-Renegade (December 13, 2007, 05:59 PM)

Probably because the web site forks out to a "real program" in the background, dontcha think?

6236

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista’s ReadyBoost benefits on your Windows XP machine with eBoostr

« Last post by f0dder on December 13, 2007, 06:22 PM »

This does seem like a similar situation, although to me the answer is "it's the bus, stupid!" The flash memory used in USB Drives may be faster than (some) hard drives in the abstract, but the speed of the USB2 bus ultimately limits their performance. So it's probably unlikely that flash RAM caching is faster or better than plain ol' disk caching in most modern machines, even leaving aside the wear and tear on the flash drive.

-Jimdoria (December 13, 2007, 12:28 PM)

Negative, USB2 has 480mbit/s bandwidth, and while you cannot get it all dedicated to a single device, I've been able to pull at least 35mbyte/s to an external usb2 drive. The flash pendrives are slow compared to harddrives, and even their random access time isn't that hot, unless you buy the slightly more expensive models.

Dunno if it's the controller chips they use on the pendrives, or the memory itself... but I guess there's a reason an 8gig pendrive is cheaper than an 8gig solid-state disk

6237

General Software Discussion / Re: Fantastic: XsX Alphablended Cursors

« Last post by f0dder on December 13, 2007, 06:20 PM »

urlwolf: do you, by any chance, have a recent Nero version installed? I've heard it b0rks the control panel for a lot of users.

6238

General Software Discussion / Re: The MAIN reason EVERYONE should use EverNote!*

« Last post by f0dder on December 13, 2007, 06:19 PM »

f0dder - I don't know what an "atomic save" is, but I have had my kids pull the power on the PC randomly in testing EN as I was typing and somehow everything I had typed up to the shutoff was held in integrity, so some kind of "save" was afoot.

Even if there are no crashes on your end, has anyone ever lost a post because the server was reset (or any other reason) where you lost a post?  Again I'm not trying to spam EN on anyone, but I have also never experienced anything negative in using EN.  I was just hoping to help others avoid the hair-pulling frustration of the darker side of computing and be more productive. 

-CodeTRUCKER (December 13, 2007, 10:27 AM)

"Atomic save" means you don't touch/modify/fsckup the original file until you're 100% sure you can't fail (and thus corrupt data). Usually it's done by saving to a tepmfile, and when that's successful (and disk buffers are flushed), you delete the original and rename the tempfile (yes, I still need to implement this myself in fSekrit, I'm such a lousy person).

And yes, I've had a browser crash/timeout/whatever, which is why I compose longer forum posts in Notepad++ (until I pull myself together and find a decent bbcode editor), along with the It's All Text! addon

6239

General Software Discussion / Re: The MAIN reason EVERYONE should use EverNote!*

« Last post by f0dder on December 13, 2007, 08:53 AM »

Do you really see that many BSOD that it is a concern? I haven't had but maybe two in the past three or four years. BSODs on WinXP should be a /very/ rare occurrence these days and should only result when you update or install a device driver.

-tinjaw (December 13, 2007, 07:02 AM)

Not to mention that if EverNote saves changes so often that "a BSOD shouldn't be an issue", it's going to do a lot of disk writes... what if a BSOD happens as the database/whatever is being saved? Sure hope it does atomic file saving

6240

General Software Discussion / Re: FireShot-Firefox plugin

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2007, 06:42 AM »

If you need a bit more than just capturing the screen, then fireshot might be a better solution.

-fireshot (December 12, 2007, 06:21 AM)

Yep, yours does seem to offer a lot more features, but generally I just need to snap a page

I'll check out FireShot though.

6241

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista’s ReadyBoost benefits on your Windows XP machine with eBoostr

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2007, 05:43 AM »

The site does look like the typical snake oil site, offering very little information of what it really does. If it simply does a "disk cache on disk", well, who cares. You'd need a really fast disk to store the cache on, and then you'd be better off putting that disk in your system instead. But it sure does have pretty icons.

6242

General Software Discussion / Re: FireShot-Firefox plugin

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2007, 05:37 AM »

The one I'm using is Screen grab!, works for me (sucked when it used java, since the runtime takes a while to start up, but recent versions support gecko canvas).

6243

General Software Discussion / Re: Fantastic: XsX Alphablended Cursors

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2007, 05:27 AM »

I swear that link wasn't there yesterday

Bad page design anyway, too easy to overlook the upper-right-corner part even if it's there.

* f0dder goes back to the corner to scowl.

 

6244

General Software Discussion / Re: FireShot-Firefox plugin

« Last post by f0dder on December 11, 2007, 08:47 PM »

Seems more advanced than the extension I use, perhaps it's worth checking out.

Can't even remember what the extension I use is named, heh (on a laptop right now), but it used to require Java and be slow & sucky, until it started using the Canvas object, after which it went snappy and useful and no-nonsense ^_^

6245

General Software Discussion / Re: Fantastic: XsX Alphablended Cursors

« Last post by f0dder on December 11, 2007, 08:37 PM »

f0dder...strange...I thought people would be able to figure it out by reading the URL in screenshot and actually manually typing it. 

-Nighted (December 11, 2007, 06:45 PM)

That's a lot more work than simply clicking a link, though... and since it's an image, you can't just copy/paste text to address bar. Also, the main page at the site looks like a placeholder, with no links to the cursors, so I had too google to get to the page.

6246

Living Room / Re: A question for the linux guys (slocate/updatedb related)

« Last post by f0dder on December 11, 2007, 05:58 PM »

Update:

strace log of updatedb from slocate was around 35 megs (iirc)... the log from mlocate's version is around 18.3 megs, and it seemed to run snappier. Furthermore...

[Select]

ayanami f0dder # strace -o /tmp/updatedb-strace.log updatedb
ayanami f0dder # hdparm -C /dev/sda /dev/sdb

/dev/sda:
 drive state is:  standby

/dev/sdb:
 drive state is:  standby

6247

Living Room / Re: A question for the linux guys (slocate/updatedb related)

« Last post by f0dder on December 11, 2007, 05:47 PM »

Oh, didn't know there was yet another lodate package, heh... gentoo installs slocate by default. I guess slocate does a stat() or similar of the /mnt/raid dir to have it included, this probably wakes up the drives, and then slocate proceeds to ignore the folders below that.

I tried straceing updatedb, but since absolute paths aren't shown, I'd have to actually manually parse the output to see if the lines grepping "raid" are actually /mnt/raid or something else. I'll read th  article you linked, and will consider mlocate - worth a shot anyway.

Thanks so far

6248

General Software Discussion / Re: Fantastic: XsX Alphablended Cursors

« Last post by f0dder on December 11, 2007, 05:40 PM »

nighted: please URLify the image, I had to google - no good for lazy boys

http://www.entis-design.com/cursors/

6249

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista SP1 Hot new feature - Hotpatching

« Last post by f0dder on December 11, 2007, 09:00 AM »

to how Linux applies its updates without needing a reboot?

-Lashiec (December 11, 2007, 08:51 AM)

Nah, linux just doesn't keep in-use files exclusively locked. After doing an "update" on linux, you'd still have to re-start services, otherwise you have new on-file and old in-memory versions of the software.

The hotpatch technology patches in-memory images without having to restart anything.

6250

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista SP1 Hot new feature - Hotpatching

« Last post by f0dder on December 11, 2007, 08:20 AM »

It isn't exactly new functionality though