Recent Posts

6501

General Software Discussion / Re: File synchronization: moving away from incremental backup (HELP!)

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 04:48 PM »

I really like the "filter driver" feature. f00der : does that seem to translate into real performance gain (mirroring time) ?

-Armando (November 10, 2007, 04:22 PM)

I haven't tested it extensively yet, and I'd say it depends on what you're doing (although I can't imagine it would ever be slower than other methods). If you have some large files, it definitely should be faster, since only the changed portions are going to be synced. And not having to scan a potentially deep folder tree for changes on a fs-change event notify can also save time.

6502

General Software Discussion / Re: File synchronization: moving away from incremental backup (HELP!)

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 11:41 AM »

Wow, MirrorFolder looks insanely cool.   And for $39 US it seems reasonable.  I assume buying a single license allows one to synchronize to another workstation/server?  The FAQ doesn't say.  My excitement would diminish a bit if I have to buy a license for the target PC/server also.

-Ralf Maximus (November 10, 2007, 11:31 AM)

Can't see why it should require a license, you're only installing on the client machine... and the app does seem to be UNC path aware (I mapped drive X to a server path, but the GUI shows the UNC path drive X is mapped to. I did the drive mapping because I couldn't find a way to enter user credentials, only straight UNC paths).

This is a heavy duty piece of low-level engineering, BTW.  Installing as a volume filter means if MirrorFolder isn't 100% solid 100% of the time you'll become friends with the BSOD.   I learned this with SuperCache-II, which is also a volume filter.

-Ralf Maximus (November 10, 2007, 11:31 AM)

Yup - that's why I installed under vmware and not on my main box. Haven't stress-tested it, but it does work. And there's both 32- and 64-bit versions available, which gives me at least some confidence.

It does suggest that it be tested thouroughly in the target environment before making a decision.

-Ralf Maximus (November 10, 2007, 11:31 AM)

That too - once I've done preliminary testing here, I'll have to install it on one of the museum's PC's and let it run in trial mode for a couple of weeks, and spot problems. Hope it doesn't interfere with things like antivirus etc.

But it sure does look promising!

6503

Living Room / Re: To wide-screen or not to wide-screen

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 10:06 AM »

mouser: sure, widescreen would be nice for sidedocking stuff (although for something like vs.net with a dock on both left and right size, I find the code window to be quite wide enough on 1280x1024 non-widescreen) - the problem is all those apps that do not have sidedocks, and become ridiculously wide when maximizing.

I'd rather have two normal monitors over a single (or even two) widescreens, any day. But okay, choice between a single normal or single widescreen... I'd probably take the widescreen and jgpaiva's gridmove.

6504

Living Room / Re: To wide-screen or not to wide-screen

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 09:00 AM »

I wonder how many of the resident "widescreen-haters" here uses applications that has sidebars/panels, like oh I don't know, just about every IDE available? Because if you do, I don't understand how you can stand using such programs on a 4:3, or even worse, 5:4 monitor. A dual-monitor setup can't help you with such things either, so a widescreen is the only reasonable solution.

really good point.. one of the reasons i dislike these new sidebar widgets is because of the screen real estate they use.. but i can see how using a widescreen monitor could basically eliminate that problem.  food for thought and good point.

-mouser (November 10, 2007, 07:45 AM)

If they're detachable, as they should be, you can simply move them to a secondary monitor - presto, no need for widescreen

6505

General Software Discussion / Re: SyncBackSE vs. SuperFlexible

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 08:59 AM »

tranglos: was your external USB enclosure by any chance connected via FireWire and not USB? Delay-write errors for firewire is a known issue (I've been-close-to losing my share of data because of it, thanks for GetDataBack!), because of some buggy firewire controller chips...

But I guess it could be caused by the MF filter driver, the problem with the firewire case iirc has to do with the controller saying "I can handle X size requests" but the drive only being able to handle some smaller amount. If the MF filter driver "blindly" copies i/o request packets to the destination, perhaps it sends some that are too big. Worth investigating.

I wouldn't trust an external drive (USB or FireWire) for "always-on", and even less as an auto-sync destination... I've seen several computers where external USB drives sometimes lose connection for less than half a second - enough time that the drive icon would blink out and back in existance in explorer, and a file copy would give one of those "retry?" dialogs. But nothing I've lost data because of...

I'll take a look at ShadowProtect and the jpsoft offering, but I must say that MF looks appealing, and has okay pricing.

and a few (SecondCopy) have an option to run a job whenever files change, but this still isn't true real-time mirroring. (SecondCopy is actually a little too eager, as it starts the backup job while the changing files are still open, e.g. being written to disk, and SC cannot handle that. You can configure a retry delay, but it would be better if SC just knew to wait a bit for files to become available without reporting an error.)

-tranglos (November 10, 2007, 07:20 AM)

Ugh, if it triggers as soon as the filesystem notification even is triggered... that would be awful. Especially because you don't get a list of changes, but have to scan the entire tree.

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General Software Discussion / Re: compare text files

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 08:36 AM »

The reason I originally chose Compare It! "compared" to Beyond Compare / Ultracompare is that I found its heuristics to handle moved sections better (as well as better within-line comparison). One can also use Regex pre-parsing or input plugins prior to matching to improve matching efficiency.

-nontroppo (November 10, 2007, 07:24 AM)

That's nice to know

6507

General Software Discussion / Re: Is Windows XP too good for Microsoft’s own good?

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 05:45 AM »

- Applications were improved. MS Paint (see Paint.NET for what it should be) and Notepad for starters. Also Firewall, Clipboard viewer and some others.

IMHO notepad does exactly what it needs to do - simple text files, extremely light-weight. Only real gripe about is is you can't have a status bar in wordwrap mode. For anything else, use a real text editor

Same goes for the built-in firewall, it blocks incoming attacks, and that's all you need. Don't waste system resources & confuse the regular end-users with something more complex. The suckers who think they need outgoing protection will bitch no matter what, anyway.

Other than that, I tend to agree with you.

6508

General Software Discussion / Re: SyncBackSE vs. SuperFlexible

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 05:41 AM »

MirrorFolder http://www.techsoftp...com/backup/index.php There are many real-time mirroring apps, but this one has won me over.

-tranglos (November 05, 2007, 04:24 PM)

Do you know of any other real-time sync/mirror apps that work in the same way as MF (ie., syncing only the changes, instead of doing a full filecopy on change)? MF looks like a very bloody nice program, and might just be the answer to my needs, but I wouldn't mind having something else to compare to

The service takes about 7 MB, so it's not tiny, but it seems to be highly reliable. I'm not sure if mirroring is the right thing for me, since if you make a bad change and save it, the mirror will go bad too (although MirrorFolder can also zip up previous versions of the mirrors it creates on schedule).

-tranglos (November 05, 2007, 04:24 PM)

Compare it to anything else, and you will call it tiny . The mfsyncsv doesn't take any CPU time when it's not syncing anything (literally - CPU time and context switches don't go up), it uses only 1meg of private bytes, etc.

There's also a shell helper thing, but I'm not sure if it's necessary. Still, that one also sits idle, and takes ~1.3meg private bytes. Not bad!

Thanks a lot for mentioning MirrorFolder!

6509

General Software Discussion / Re: File synchronization: moving away from incremental backup (HELP!)

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 05:27 AM »

I've checked out MirrorFolder a bit, and it seems very very very promising.

As far as I've been able to tell, the best the other applications can offer is detecting modified files via filesystem events - this has two problems. One is that Windows' fsevents only tell you that "there's a change somewhere in the tree you're monitoring", not WHAT has changed - which means you have to scan the entire tree upon notification (unless you resort to dirty tricks like reading the NTFS journal). The other problem is that you have to synchronize the entire file, even if only part of it has changed (probably not too big a problem for my uses, but still...)

MirrorFolder is cool, though. It can install a filter driver that monitors changes, so only the changes are synced - ie., changing 10 bytes in a 10gig file only pushes those 10 bytes to your sync destination. And it even works with network shares (couldn't find a way to set user credentials, but mapping at network drive worked like a charm). The driver is 73kb and the server is 118kb, so it's not exactly bloatware either.

I will have to do some further testing of this, but MirrorFolder seems like a natural winner for my purposes, if it doesn't impact performance too much, and (of course!) is stable. But I expect the filter driver approach to have pretty decent performance. The only nag I have about MF is that they call the filter drive method for "RAID-1", which is wrong and misleading and doesn't give the technique enough credit

Still, if anybody has other suggestions, keep 'em coming!

6510

General Software Discussion / Re: OS Religious Wars...

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 05:09 AM »

Christ, stupid bush messes up things as always - doesn't every moron and their dog know that you have to use your LEFT hand when doing the wormsign? *sigh*

6511

Living Room / Re: Today is my birthday- when is yours?

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 05:07 AM »

Congrats - do something you enjoy!

October here.

6512

General Software Discussion / Re: Perfect Software?

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 05:01 AM »

"Hi World"? Why do something THAT bloated, when we know the correct lUNIX way is not to output anything on success?!
 

6513

General Software Discussion / Re: compare text files

« Last post by f0dder on November 10, 2007, 04:59 AM »

Even better, you could open the first file and select the first line of text. Go to the 2nd file and search for that text; make a note of where it appears (or not) in the document. Repeat for each line of the first file, then swap files and start over.

-Ralf Maximus (November 10, 2007, 12:15 AM)

...or you could use one of the compare apps, which are 1000x easier and better and faster

6514

Mouser's Zone / Re: Mouser - a plea from your users!

« Last post by f0dder on November 09, 2007, 06:51 PM »

You should call it Android or Cyborg instead of Robot, sounds so much sexier

6515

Developer's Corner / Re: Implementing VoIP to a simple program...

« Last post by f0dder on November 09, 2007, 06:48 PM »

I think you'd be better off looking for a freeware VOIP programs, or sucking it down and using skype... VOIP isn't a trivial thing to program if you want it to be more than a toy to be used on a LAN.

6516

General Software Discussion / Re: compare text files

« Last post by f0dder on November 09, 2007, 07:28 AM »

There's several, including free and paid software. One of the favorite commercial offerings among fellow DonationCoder members seem to be Beyond Compare, which is a quite decent piece of software. The free WinMerge is also quite good.

6517

General Software Discussion / Re: File synchronization: moving away from incremental backup (HELP!)

« Last post by f0dder on November 09, 2007, 07:24 AM »

Ralf Maximus and tomos: both SyncBack and SuperFlexible seem to be run by a scheduler, instead of doing transparent mirroring... while this could be enough if it's 100% invisible in the background, it still requires checking each file in the "monitored" hierarchy for changes, instead of using filesystem event notifications?

Reading the versus-thread was a good idea though, I will be checking into FileHasmter, MirrorFolder and Second Copy, as those three might be closer to what I need.

Remember, I just need to sync/mirror userdata to \\server\backup\<username>, I don't need any incremental backups/versioning, ftp support, compression etc - all that will be handled by another piece of software responsible for backing up the server.

yksyks: thanks for the link, but we've already settled on a remote backup host (we're moving to fiber internet, and that company also offers remote backup). We need around 100-200gigs of space (and more every year), so transferring the baseline backup will be done by techs from the company, instead of taking a lot of time with a limited 5mbit upload

6518

General Software Discussion / Re: Perfect Software?

« Last post by f0dder on November 09, 2007, 07:00 AM »

I'm still using ACDsee32 v2.4 - anything later I tried was bloated and slow... 2.4 is lightning fast and does what's necessary for a graphics viewer

6519

General Software Discussion / Re: Google OS already here, with hardware?! Well, sort of.

« Last post by f0dder on November 08, 2007, 09:54 AM »

Ever tried running MSOffice-produced HTML through a validator? ^_^

6520

Official Announcements / Re: November Discounts and Giveaway

« Last post by f0dder on November 08, 2007, 09:53 AM »

The CPU will always be woken N times per second because of the clock tick.

If you're speaking of THE CLOCK, the crystal-driven heartbeat of the CPU, then that's what the HLT command supposedly stops.  The CPUIdle website itself explicitly says it issues a HLT statement to work its voodoo.

-Ralf Maximus (November 08, 2007, 09:13 AM)

No, the clock tick is a separate tick with programmable rate, known as the PIT (programmable interrupt timer) - and iirc, modern CPUs have local APIC timers which are better. You don't turn off those when HLT'ing.

According to this MSKB article, NT's Idle thread is a real process that simply does nothing (if I understand it correctly).  Where does HLT fit into this?

-Ralf Maximus (November 08, 2007, 09:13 AM)

Not a process but a thread - which only gets scheduled when there's nothing else to schedule. This thread basically runs HLT in a loop (obviously it won't loop while HLTed, but looping is done so it does HLTing again when re-scheduled).

I'm not discounting what you say; I'm not qualified.  I gave up assembly language years ago and only know what I read from the Intel & MS docs.  But CPUIdle is doing *something* and according to them it's driven by the HLT command.

-Ralf Maximus (November 08, 2007, 09:13 AM)

9x didn't do HLT in it's idle loop afaik, so CPUIdle made a lot of sense back then.

CPUIdle might be doing HLT at *other* times than the idle thread to keep power consumption down, but that would affect performance a bit, and be slightly retarded, especially considering the power-saving/speed-changing stuff recent processors have.

6521

General Software Discussion / File synchronization: moving away from incremental backup (HELP!)

« Last post by f0dder on November 08, 2007, 09:49 AM »

At the museum, I'm currently using a backup where each client machine does incremental backups to a file-server, using Acronis TrueIimage. For various reasons (including bugs & quirks with TI), this is no longer desirable. In fact, I don't want to do traditional backups from the client machines to the server.

We're going to outsource backups to a secure data facility, after all having backups on the server is no good if the museum burns down. So, the new scheme I want to run is client machines *synchronizing* files to the server, and the server being backed up incrementally to the remote facility.

So, what good synchronizing programs are out there? I have a few requirements:

• MUST BE ROBUST!
• Unobtrusive, must run entirely in the background
• Must be able to handle open files in a sensible way
• Preferably light on resources
• Preferably something that auto-detects changes, (no full harddrive scans)

EDIT: some clarifications, I do not need the following:

• Backup functionality - that will be handled by another piece of software
• Revisions/Incremental sync - I just want "plain and simple" file sync
• Compression - again, handled by backup software on the server

6522

Living Room / Re: Technology Myths

« Last post by f0dder on November 08, 2007, 08:51 AM »

imho you need some database layer abstraction, at least you certainly don't want to sprinkle your code with SQL strings all over.

-f0dder (November 06, 2007, 05:29 PM)

Of course I want a (one, singular) data abstraction layer. But I don't know why I would want a second one so that I'd have the opportunity (say) rephrase all of my stored proc calls to work through Oracle.

-CWuestefeld (November 06, 2007, 06:19 PM)

My database needs have always been pretty simple, so I've never worked with stored procedures - syntax of those are probably different from db to db, but invoking them pretty similar?

I don't think so. I know the target is SQL Server, and I have another SQL Server available to me for development; why in the world would I want to develop against something different, and risk getting to production only discover we'd made a mistake?

-CWuestefeld (November 06, 2007, 06:19 PM)

Obviously depends on what you're doing - for a big and complex project, it's not feasible switching to a different db provider (banking software, anyone? ), for smaller systems it can be nice being able to demo features on a laptop that doesn't have a network connection.

Supporting multiple database backends is, again, probably not something you want for complex systems, but for simpler stuff (web community, blog, simple shopping system, and things of similar scale) it's nice enough if you can just plug it into whatever's available.

BTW, I definitely don't want SQL strings all over. In fact, my rule is NO SQL strings anywhere -- everything goes through a stored proc (although I haven't quite figured out how to square this with LINQ, if indeed I decide to use it).

-CWuestefeld (November 06, 2007, 06:19 PM)

Haven't tried using LINQ, but the snippets I've seen look pretty nice compared to spaghetti SQL strings... good enough that I probably wouldn't mind using it. And I guess it's a bit more portable than stored procedures?

But I guess stored procedures are run on the db server, and can thus have some efficiency benefits compared to pulling data out of the db and processing client-side...

6523

Official Announcements / Re: November Discounts and Giveaway

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

Ralf Maximus: the NT idle thread already does HLT, so CPUIdle doesn't have an advantage there.

The CPU will always be woken N times per second because of the clock tick. Recent linux kernels have the option of running "tickless", which means a timer tick is only generated when necessary, not N times per second - but that didn't seem to have any advantages on x86 systems.

An external interrupt will always bring the CPU out of the HLT state (unless NMIs are masked, of course), and because of the timer tick, your system won't sleep indefinitely even if there's no other external interrupt signalled.

Btw I'm pretty sure more recent processors (intel speedstep, amd cool&quiet) have more to it than just HLT, at least you have to choose the correct "power mode" in windows for it to be effective... I'd rather use that than installing third-party software.

Again: cpuidle was fine for 9x, but why use it on NT?

6524

General Software Discussion / Re: Google OS already here, with hardware?! Well, sort of.

« Last post by f0dder on November 08, 2007, 08:29 AM »

All the various linux distros is one of the things that I don't like about the linux community. It would be better if all those man-hours of work were concentrated into a bunch of fewer distros, and really get the ball running. Including more standards. For a distro like slackware, what happens when Pat. Volk. dies? Remember when he got seriously ill?

Don't have to sacrifice tweakability for fewer distros with more talented people working on them.

6525

Living Room / Re: To wide-screen or not to wide-screen

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

I wonder how many of the resident "widescreen-haters" here uses applications that has sidebars/panels, like oh I don't know, just about every IDE available? Because if you do, I don't understand how you can stand using such programs on a 4:3, or even worse, 5:4 monitor. A dual-monitor setup can't help you with such things either, so a widescreen is the only reasonable solution.

-Dirhael (November 07, 2007, 07:42 AM)

Tear-off boxes, perhaps? But okay, not every piece of software supports that.

Even without tearing off toolboxes, and having a bar on each side, I have quite enough space on 1280x1024 with visual studio... but I don't believe in extremely long source lines.