Recent Posts

6351

General Software Discussion / Re: Hard Drive Diagnostic Software

« Last post by f0dder on November 26, 2007, 05:21 PM »

Humm, it might be possible to write a trivial script to check which files have problems - iterate through the entire drive, and try reading each file entirely. On failure, spit out filename and move to next file. Would take a while, but would probably work... and should be trivial to hack together in, say, Python.

6352

C / C++ / Re: Exploring C++

« Last post by f0dder on November 26, 2007, 05:19 PM »

Notice that OpenGL isn't 100% cross-platform - you need some per-platform init code, and to do anything interesting you need extensions, which also requires a bit of platform specific code to use.

6353

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

« Last post by f0dder on November 26, 2007, 05:18 PM »

I know i'm bump'n an old thread,but this looked like the purest locate thread ...

Just letting fans of this application know along with a new update,the author of locate looks like he's kicked it into hypermode and now has a new site w/ forum.I see alot of visitors in the stats at the bottom of donationcoders forum and would highly recommend all you "lurkers" out there to give locate a try.  

-tinyvillager link=topic=1385.msg87 :Thmbsup:764#msg87764 date=1196107913

Oooh, thanks for telling - I hadn't added locate32 to website watcher, so wouldn't have noticed myself!

6354

Living Room / Re: Seriously, wtf is going on with Apple's Mac vs. Pc ads?

« Last post by f0dder on November 26, 2007, 05:17 PM »

Hehe, sorry for the threadjacking - perhaps a moderator should split the SP3 related stuff to a new thread?

Anyway, wrt. XPSP3 having 10% performance boost... perhaps they tested an old install of SP2 against a fresh install of SP3? Or does anyone have a link to a rigorous test with adequate testing description?

6355

General Software Discussion / Re: Hard Drive Diagnostic Software

« Last post by f0dder on November 26, 2007, 07:40 AM »

Humm... drive vendor diagnostic tools typically will not work when the drive is attached via USB or FireWire, but requires you to attach via SATA or IDE - and typically only works when connected to the "main" IDE/SATA ports, not RAID ports etc...

The quick SMART scan typically doesn't tell you anything, or at least nothing you don't know (the one thing that is worth watching for is "reallocated sector count", nonzero means get rid of the drive... but you should have detected that because of clicking noises before seeing it on SMART stats).

If you run a full surface scan (could be called differently in the diagnostic tool), each sector of the drive should be checked, and afaik this will also kick in sector reallocation for bad sectors. Problem is, I dunno if you can get a list of the sectors that have been reallocated, and even if you did... I don't know a program that will tell you which files on the filesystem contain those sectors.

Sorry, this was a lot of text and not much help, I'm afraid :/

6356

Living Room / Re: Seriously, wtf is going on with Apple's Mac vs. Pc ads?

« Last post by f0dder on November 26, 2007, 07:20 AM »

SP3 has had several leaks.

-Josh (November 26, 2007, 07:14 AM)

Yeah, I know that there's various (pirated?) beta leaks, but who in their right mind would use a beta version of a service pack, except for testing on a virtual machine to know what to expect for production servers?

6357

Living Room / Re: Seriously, wtf is going on with Apple's Mac vs. Pc ads?

« Last post by f0dder on November 26, 2007, 07:06 AM »

Hm, "XP SP3 v.3244" - is that one of those beta servicepacks? I didn't think SP3 was final yet?

6358

C / C++ / Re: Exploring C++

« Last post by f0dder on November 26, 2007, 05:53 AM »

Since you're on windows, consider looking at VC++ 2008 Express instead of devcpp/mingw - it's a more fully-featured product, and it's free.

As for cool C++ graphics and winamp visualisations, get comfortable with C++ and you IDE first...

6359

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

« Last post by f0dder on November 25, 2007, 08:37 PM »

A decent Vector Graphics editor for your own computer would be InkScape, which can also do vectorisation (tracing) of bitmap images.

-f0dder (November 25, 2007, 08:17 PM)

Does InkScape do as good (or better) of a job as Vector Magic appears to do?

-tinjaw (November 25, 2007, 08:25 PM)

Haven't tried Vector Magic and only played a little with InkScape, but it seemed to do a reasonable job, considering how complex a task this is. You do NOT want to do too much editing on the resulting vector graphics, though

6360

Living Room / Re: Blog Piece: Trend Watch: P2P Traffic Much Bigger Than Web Traffic

« Last post by f0dder on November 25, 2007, 08:36 PM »

If p2p was efficiently hampered, you'd see a massive decrease in fast ADSL lines

If EVERYONE were to abuse p2p... collapse... hmm. Perhaps. There's already a lot of 10/10 and 100/100, even some gigabit, "seedboxes" being used, coupled with the ever faster home connections (relatively inexpensive fiber with 10/10 as standard and even more available is becoming every more available). But we can already see that from the graphs

6361

Living Room / Re: Blog Piece: Trend Watch: P2P Traffic Much Bigger Than Web Traffic

« Last post by f0dder on November 25, 2007, 08:26 PM »

It's really sad the open-source guys haven't embraced torrent technology; whenever I've found a project with a torrent release (usually that would be stuff large enough to warrant the "complication" of p2p vs. a simple download, like a linux or bsd iso image), either the tracker has been down, or I have gotten really lame speeds (as opposed to some of the university http servers that host the distros and can easily reach 2mbyte/sec).

The people involved in distribution should really get together, I'm sure they could save a considerable amount of bandwidth and system load if a considerable amount of them set up torrent servers instead of the traditional ftp and http for their ISOs. Would also make distribution to the sites very easy & automated, if set up properly.

I wonder if the Trend Watch takes encrypted (SSL/TLS, torrent protocol-encryption, and SSH tunneled) traffic into account... I have a feeling that things like encrypted FXP between scene topsites has slipped out of this trend. And even if it doesn't quite live up to the combined trickle of all the p2p "end-users", it ought to amount to something

No wonder that whole net neutrality debate started.

6362

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

« Last post by f0dder on November 25, 2007, 08:17 PM »

What hasn't been mentioned yet (probably because it's DUH DUH DUH DUH++!) is that Vector Graphics are wonderful if you need to scale things up or down; there isn't any pixelation or other extrapolation artifacts, things just look smoooooth (well, if the vector is done well - obviously vector graphics born that way rather than converted tend to do a bit better).

A decent Vector Graphics editor for your own computer would be InkScape, which can also do vectorisation (tracing) of bitmap images.

6363

General Software Discussion / Re: What’s Your Backup Strategy?

« Last post by f0dder on November 25, 2007, 10:59 AM »

First of all, I have a RAID Mirror. This is not suitable for backup, but it gives some protection against harddrive failures. Peace of mind. Apart from that, some of my programming projects are under version control, but not all of them.

And this is where things get embarassing: I haven't done regular backups of any kind since I moved out on my own, because I left the fileserver with my mum & brothers.

I've finally manage to scrape enough money together (a little over US$590) so I can build a new fileserver, including 2x320gig (yep, RAID Mirror) storage. With this in place, I'll move my subversion repository to this fileserver... and setup an automated backup job from my workstation to the server (not exactly sure what kind yet, but I'll figure out), and do automated pushing of the svn repo from my fileserver to the old server at my mother's place.

The subversion repository is obviously some of the most valuable data I have, which is why I'll push it nightly to the other server. Local backups don't help if your apartment burns down, or the server is stolen.

6364

General Software Discussion / Re: What are the MAJOR linux players?

« Last post by f0dder on November 25, 2007, 09:09 AM »

Deozaan: hot-swap of motherboards and CPUs obviously require special hardware components. I'm not if there's x86 solutions that allow hot-swap of mobo or CPU, but hot-swap of pci-x (and prolly pci-e) should be possible - but obviously requires support both from the motherboard and the device. Hot-swap of harddrives is the same. PSU hotswap is possible as well.

But once we're talking memory, cpu or motherboard, things become messy, and I don't know much about that stuff. One of my friends was talking about hotswapping CPUs on a big server, but I'm not sure whether that was one of the high-end x86/Opteron thingies, or some special HP/SUN/whatever iron.

6365

General Software Discussion / Re: Upgraded to 64-bit XP, need virtual CD/DVD drive

« Last post by f0dder on November 25, 2007, 09:04 AM »

Crush: it seems that the adware is only installed if you choose to, but I try to steer clear of things that come with adware. Also, d-t has a bunch of code for avoiding game copy protections, I don't really need that and would rather use a product that doesn't have it...

So far MagicISO/MagicDisc seems to fit the bill, comes without spyware, doesn't have anti-protection stuff, and is freeware. Don't see much reason for d-t x64, although that might change if MagicDisc turns out to be buggy when put to more use... don't think so, though.

6366

General Software Discussion / Re: Going back to XP

« Last post by f0dder on November 25, 2007, 09:02 AM »

Even though I'm no great fan of Vista, I have to chime in on "windows BSODs are usually the fault of third-party drivers"... of course that doesn't change your user experience very much

That said, a lot of things have changed in Vista, so there's probably still some bugs in their own code that Microsoft needs to weed out. Dunno how big changes the driver model has seen, apart from the graphics subsystem - and the graphics subsystem is supposed to run largely in usermode now, so a crash shouldn't take down your entire system.

Oh well, ho hum.

6367

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

« Last post by f0dder on November 25, 2007, 08:59 AM »

Thanks - that is useful info. If you decide to go the 64-bit XP route do you need a new installation key for XP or can you change base without having to buy the product again?

-Carol Haynes (November 25, 2007, 06:13 AM)

That's a good question - I honestly don't know whether 32- and 64-bit XP versions differentiate between keys. Iirc the 32- and 64-bit versions were priced differently, so I wouldn't be surprised.

6368

General Software Discussion / Re: What are the MAJOR linux players?

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2007, 09:49 PM »

Humm, major players? I guess it depends on how you define "major"...

Slackware, redhat/fedora, centos, debian, suse, ubuntu, gentoo... those are some of the big and/or old players. If you want "easy desktop usage", there's probably other to consider instead. The name pclinux springs to mind, but I have no personal experience with it.

Personally I run an oldish slackware on one server, archlinux on another, and will most likely be doing gentoo when I build my fileserver. Ubuntu doesn't seem like a bad bet at all if you want a desktop.

6369

Developer's Corner / Re: Visual Studio 2005 or 2008?

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2007, 09:46 PM »

IntelliSense fixes by itself would be enough reason to upgrade - the blog entry I linked above does sound promising. But from reading the vcblog, it does seem like most 2008 enhancements are for dotNET. I ended up on one of those link-following cruises, and it's pitiful that intrinsics are still pretty lousy; yeah, they added support for new instructions, but there's still code generation problems. Might as well write external assembly and link that in, at least you know what you're going to get.

Also a shame that, seemingly, IDE as well as compilers are still exclusively 32bit. Sure, you can target x64, but the tools are 32bit. I would be interested in seeing whether the additional registers of x64 could do something for compiler speed...

But all in all, if there's intellisense fixes and the IDE is a bit snappier, and no new significant bugs are introduced, it'll be worth it.

6370

Living Room / Re: Seriously, wtf is going on with Apple's Mac vs. Pc ads?

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2007, 08:58 PM »

Artists are fruity.

6371

Developer's Corner / Re: Visual Studio 2005 or 2008?

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2007, 07:20 PM »

Time to dig in!

VS2001 was pretty flaky, VS2003 was fine, and VS2005 has been very fine as well except for a few glitches here and there - the service pack for VS2005 fixed some and added a few more, ho humm. Haven't had trouble with any of the compilers, though.

Haven't even looked into what VS2008 is going to bring, neither IDE nor compiler, my main hope would be for the IDE to be a bit lighter on resources, and have the bugs fixed...

Heh, can't believe I forgot about the existance of the Visual C++ Team Blog, I should add it to website watcher . This post about performance improvements is interesting.

6372

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

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2007, 07:11 PM »

Carol: some 32-bit software might break, but I haven't seen that myself. My guess is that it'd mainly be things that's very dirty, and would have already broken on 32bit XP on a 64bit CPU running on PAE mode with DEP turned on. Also, 16bit support is completely removed, this affects some old installers (yeah, 16bit installers for 32bit apps - wonderful).

I haven't been running 64bit for very long, but so far everything works just fine. While you generally don't need to upgrade 32bit apps (only sensible reason to do so is for apps that can take advantage of it), you will need 64bit drivers for all your hardware, and that can be a trouble for some peripherals.

You can run xp32 in a vm just fine (and surprisingly enough, you can even run xp64 in vmware on a xp32!), but it wouldn't make that much sense, unless you need 16bit stuff... since obviously vmware doesn't help much wrt. driver peripherals.

As for 64bit xp being slower, dunno... could have been when drivers where immature. Code size does increase a bit, but not as badly as it could have, thanks the the instruction format (RIP-relative addressing rather than fixed 64bit offsets, for instance), but that is still pretty little, and data files (which is the size hog) don't magically grow

6373

General Software Discussion / Re: Upgraded to 64-bit XP, need virtual CD/DVD drive

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2007, 07:05 PM »

I like Alcohol and use it for mounting disc images all the time. Though, I haven't required 64-bit, so I'm not sure it fits that requirement. I can't see why it wouldn't though.

-Deozaan (November 24, 2007, 06:50 PM)

Just burning images isn't a problem, 32-bit software can still do that on a 64-bit OS. But mounting an image, as in having it show up as a fully-fledged (albeit virtual) CD/DVD drive, requires drivers. 32bit drivers don't work on a 64-bit OS... so unless there's a 64-bit version of alcohol (at least the drivers, usermode components can still be 32-bit), it won't do.

Building drivers for 64-bit should be as simple as a recompile, but many developers are ignorant and write code that isn't 64-bit clean

6374

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

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2007, 06:09 PM »

Not just a load of 64-bit apps - but apps that actually take advantage of 64-bit and has a performance gain

6375

Living Room / Re: Finally I tracked down my wife!

« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2007, 05:56 PM »

Hehe, pretty cute thing

Spoiler

They really should have used lossless compression for the screenshots in the flash movie, the jpeg compression makes it very clear that it's not an actual JAVA applet but a flash movie. Of course the short loading time and "flash player" right-click menu is also pretty telling, hehe.