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6601

Developer's Corner / Re: Good Article For Beginners On Version Control (w/ Pictures & Examples)

« Last post by f0dder on October 25, 2007, 06:38 PM »

something's missing..
where the picture of the user screaming at the computer screen when he can't get the thing to check out properly because of some nonsensical error?

-mouser (October 01, 2007, 07:42 PM)

* f0dder remembers mouser trying to set up subversion on the server.

on linux the commandline main svn programs are fine -- but if you are hosting an svn repository, do expect to struggle a little to get it up and running initially.

-mouser (October 02, 2007, 09:56 AM)

Well, if you do have some unix/linux experience, subversion is actually extremely easy to set up. Especially if you have a distro with a decent package manager (and you choose to use it). All it takes is running svnserve with a few well-explained command-line parameters, and "svnadmin create" to create a repository.

What's harder, and requires reading the handbook, is choosing a decent layout. And this can be hard when you're starting with subversion, I know I certainly messed up myself: first I thought I'd use a single repository for all my stuff. Once I moved to repo-per-project I didn't think about stuffing files in a "dev" (or "trunk" or "current" or whatever you want to call it) subfolder, etc...

And then there's of course getting into the habit and mindset of using version control, which tends to be the hardest, at least for some people. But it's nice once you get everything clicking into place.

The thing that remains for me, personally, is some commit log dicipline, deciding on some tags to add, and a format that's easily grepable so I can write a changelog.txt automagically...

6602

General Software Discussion / Re: Vanilla: a nice, strange forum

« Last post by f0dder on October 25, 2007, 06:30 PM »

I think Vanilla could be a decent choice for a small amount of users, especially if you're dealing with not so tech-savvy ones that don't have a lot of requirements... but as I said the last time this was brought up, it's a bit too vanilla in it's vanilla configuration

6603

Living Room / Re: Password Cracking Made Easy Thanks to the GPU

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

There's still plenty of 8-char passwords out there, and some revisions of the NT password system are flawed and limit the effective size of your passphrase even if you have a very long one - so there's plenty of situations where this can be useful for badguys.

It's mostly interesting because it shows how powerful GPUs have become these days, though, since anybody doing password cracking would be utilizing rainbow tables instead, which are much much much much faster than bruteforce attacks.
 
edit: nice to see that Jeff Atwood talks some sense, this could way too easily be overhyped into a big scare. 12-character passwords are reasonable, imho.

6604

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: A simple program to reset the bad sector list in NTFS MFT.

« Last post by f0dder on October 25, 2007, 06:22 PM »

Humm, shouldn't any decent imaging program refrain from copying the bad-sector list?

6605

Screenshot Captor / Re: A couple of small requests

« Last post by f0dder on October 25, 2007, 05:56 AM »

as for #2, i can look into it, but you know you can already just copy the IMAGE to the clipboard and then ctrl+V in explorer to have it create Clipboard Image.bmp in the directory.  Not as good as creating a copy of the png, but if that's sufficient there it is.  can you tell us why on earth you would use this feature?

-mouser (October 24, 2007, 11:14 PM)

Plain laziness - useful if I have "\\server\web\images" open in my explorer already... but "explore at screenshots" would be fine enough, and would spare you from COM hell

6606

Living Room / Re: USB Doomsday Device Hub - Fun for the Office

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2007, 06:05 PM »

:-D

6607

Living Room / Re: "HDD Not Included"

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2007, 08:02 AM »

Carol, I have something similar for IDE drives, but that still doesn't take care of the hotplug aspect...

6608

Living Room / Re: Versioning of files

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2007, 06:49 AM »

Wraith, in case you have used subversion or other free solutions, can you tell us what makes it better?

It seems to get the stuff subversion supports, you'd need the enterprise edition, which pops in at $49/user. svn is free, and has both commandline, IDE integration, internet (as well as local) support, etc.

6609

Living Room / Re: "HDD Not Included"

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2007, 06:47 AM »

The device in the first post would be very handy for 3.5" IDE drives, as those normally can't be hot-swapped... and I have a bunch of them lying around. Getting them in and out of a portable USB case certainly is hellish.

For SATA drives (which can hotswap), I'd definitely go for the device carol shows, since you benefit from full SATA speed, with less cable clutter and "fumble opportunities"

6610

Living Room / Re: Elephants electrocuted in drunken rampage

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2007, 06:44 AM »

Oh gawd, drunken electrocuted elephants with nuke-hurling monkeys 

6611

Screenshot Captor / A couple of small requests

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2007, 06:43 AM »

On the right-click context menu of the tray icon, I'd love a "Explore at screenshot directory", that does exactly the same thing as the same item in the file menu.

If possible, without too much horrible COM hell, it would also be nice to have a "explorer file-cut last screenshot", so I could open explorer and simply ctrl+v paste the file... but that feature isn't as important, and probably hellish to code.

6612

General Software Discussion / Re: hard: find a word on a window, highlight it

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2007, 06:38 AM »

Sorry for this out-of-topic, but I simply couldn't resist

6613

General Software Discussion / Re: Can Open Source apps compete with commercial ones?

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2007, 09:36 AM »

Wise words, mouser.

The only time I really value open-source (for it's openness, instead of valuing the application) is times where I'm not too fond of, say, storing data in a proprietary format. While that might not apply to word + friends because Microsoft is so huge, it does matter for smaller companies. So I choose subversion for source control (I believe this can compete with closed-source version systems), winrar for archives (while not strictly open-source, there's specs + code for archive decompression).

This also matters for in-house or custom solutions - where I don't particularly care for traditional open-source licenses in the fascist-nazi-zealot way, I do appreciate having source available, and I do think that everybody designing custom solutions ought to provide source for the client.

But this is getting slightly off-topic

6614

General Software Discussion / Re: Can Open Source apps compete with commercial ones?

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2007, 09:01 AM »

TheBat, here... but I've set up ThunderBird for most of the guys at the museum, where it works okay-ish. There's been a few weird things though, like ThunderBird deciding to create a new account for no good reason, and being bothersome to get it to use and re-index the old mailbox stores...

6615

General Software Discussion / Re: hard: find a word on a window, highlight it

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2007, 08:49 AM »

It's not going to be an easy task, for the exact same reason that doing "scrolling screen capture" is so damn hard - various applications handle things differently, even when there's no good reason to do so. THEORETICALLY you should be able to simply send a WM_GETTEXT window message to toplevel windows, but that won't work for formatting etc... and even if this would work, getting the screen coords of the text is another bother.

6616

General Software Discussion / Re: BBed, a stand-alone BBcode editor that really works!

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2007, 08:15 AM »

The post does have a link, but it's not very obvious

And the screenshot, simply grabbed from the link:

6617

General Software Discussion / Re: Unique way to make Firefox load faster

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2007, 07:54 AM »

Ralf Maximus: one of the "has to be decompressed to disk" used to be the case with ELF compression, and iirc they had some lame excuse like "linux is a properly protected OS unlike windows" - but afaik these days, they learned how to do in-memory elf decompression.

Yes, a low-memory situation could force other applications to the paging file, and the decompressed-to-memory executable can of course be paged out as well (as opposed to discarded and re-read, as normal executables are handled).

Unpacking didn't take a long time back then either (compression is slow but decompression is very fast, that's one of the traits of the class of compression algorithms generally used by exe packers) - and disk drives were MUCH slower back then (who where remembers PIO modes?).

6618

General Software Discussion / Re: Can Open Source apps compete with commercial ones?

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2007, 07:00 AM »

Notepad++ is lovely, partly because it's so light-weight. It might not have the same featureset as ultraedit, but I don't really miss anything in it... and it does sport plugins.

Locate32 is wonderful as well, really does speed up searches (I know, I know, I should try one of those indexing/desktop search things).

6619

General Software Discussion / Re: Unique way to make Firefox load faster

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2007, 03:58 AM »

Remember that you need a reboot (or other way to flush the filesystem cache) before you do your timing.

Indeed compressing executables mean that their memory can't be shared. Pretty bad if you're running multiple instances of something, especially if it's in a terminal server environment.

UPX and other exepackers indeed don't decompress-to-disk, that would make them useless.

If you're using a virus-scanner that can't scan into UPX executables, get a different scanner, as the one you're using is useless. This also means that, if you're using a virus scanner that doesn't suck, UPX'ing executables can slow down startup time quite a bit.

When UPX'ing an executable speeds things up, it means the executable is horribly bloated and has a crazy loading pattern. The problem isn't really with disk speed as MrCrispy says, but that executables are "demand-loaded" in 64kb chunks... if windows did a one-blast read of the executable instead, things would be different.

EDIT: doesn't seem to speed up things here anyway, as slow as ever to boot up. The ff devs really ought to spend some time fixing bugs and leaks, and tracing ff startup to optimize it, instead of adding new features.

6620

General Software Discussion / Re: fast and reliable unzip, unrar, etc tol

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2007, 03:38 AM »

WinRAR has the best GUI of any compressor I've seen... simple, to-the-point, no big flashing annoying icons.

I basicaly need something faster and something with more faetures and without some GUI annoyances of winrar

-kalos

More features? - especially for command-line options, WinRAR is one of the most fully-fledged compressors I've come around. And it supports encryption, NTFS streams, and NTFS security attributes... not something you see in every compressor!

What is it you want, really?

6621

Living Room / Re: Clever Programmerisms

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2007, 09:44 AM »

"premature optimization is the root of all evil" - but premature pessimization can be just as bad.

6622

General Software Discussion / Re: fast and reliable unzip, unrar, etc tol

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2007, 09:41 AM »

I dunno if other companies can do a better job that WinRAR with regards to error tolerance and fixing, but it's possible (although not very likely) that better speeds could be achieved. Only WinRAR will handle compression of RAR archives though, since rarlabs aren't interested in licensing the compression code.

WinRAR is plenty fast and stable though... dunno why you want something "more reliable"?

6623

Developer's Corner / Re: Leak-testing / Memory Profiling Question: What tools can you recommended?

« Last post by f0dder on October 21, 2007, 06:19 PM »

Heavy pricetag... but less heavy than BoundsChecker, I guess :|

6624

Living Room / Re: these new cheap core 2 due laptops - any good?

« Last post by f0dder on October 21, 2007, 12:12 PM »

mouser, you have a good point about main-use vs. secondary machine usage of the laptop.

I'd never go for a laptop for my main machine, even if you get one of those oversized monsters that'll hardly last half an hour on battery, they're still not as powerful as desktop machines, but tons more expensive.

I'd still worry about CPU power though, and I'd still go for a dual-core solution... simply because I'd still be doing development on-the-go, and because dual-core CPUs are so widespread now that it's hard to get a box that isn't dualcore - on the other hand, I don't want (nor need) a top-of-the-line CPU in a laptop, though.

Small screen and low weight. please. And as much battery power as possible (which rules out heavy graphics and fast harddrives - who needs fast or large drives on a non-primary machine anyway?) - faster drives (more rpm) means less battery life too.

I disagree with your #5 though, mouser - you can't always plug in a laptop, and too low battery life makes it unusable for, well, portable use. Which is the main use of a laptop, imho.

Lots of ram too, never hurts being able to create a large ramdisk instead of using the slow harddrive.

6625

Official Announcements / Re: ZillaRank: An improved search for smf forum

« Last post by f0dder on October 21, 2007, 11:38 AM »

Do you construct the SQL strings safely, using placeholders? Any possibility of SQL injections?