Recent Posts

7251

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

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

Hum, perhaps I should make a little package with the process-related tools I've written. Thing is, they're very much in a "usable by f0dder" state right now - no GUI, and even the console mode interface isn't the most user-friendly available.

I'll give it a little though.

7252

Developer's Corner / Re: C# -- Help Needed -- Where is CRC.EXE - .NET SDK Installed

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 05:24 PM »

There's probably some registry entr{y,ies} you can check for installation location, and perhaps even a nice way of detected the most recent version available - I have the following. Dunno if they came from Visual Studio, or dotNET updates from Windows Update...

[Select]

15-01-2007  00:55    <DIR>          v1.0.3705
24-01-2007  22:31    <DIR>          v1.1.4322
08-02-2007  12:50    <DIR>          v2.0.50727

7253

General Software Discussion / Re: Network/application traffic inspection

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 12:39 PM »

There's almost always a bit of traffic going on, windows machines are very "chatty", trying to do network discovery of other computers etc... "netstat" can show a lot of info, iirc also which service from a svchost process that has the connections going.

To be more thorough than that, you'll want some traffic analyzer. Been years since I used those, so I'm not up to date there, sorry.

7254

Living Room / Re: Help! PC hanging on first boot

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 11:13 AM »

Humm, I dunno how likely a PSU is to burst into flames , but I'd be worried if the fan starts messing up. It's normal for recent PSUs to change their fan speed depending on how heavily they're loaded, but from your descriptions is sounds more like the fan (or perhaps the PSU itself?) is starting to malfunction. If the PSU is malfunctioning, it might be delivering unstable voltages to your motherboard, check the "hardware monitor" in your BIOS and see if it looks relatively stable (even my expensive antec PSU doesn't hit the right voltages 100%, and it also fluctuates a bit... I think it's around 0.1-0.2 volts off).

Single beep from BIOS stage is normal, to indicate that it actually works and your CPU isn't fried

Is the "gibberish on screen" just a lot of techno-jumbo text, or does it look like screen corruption? Any error/warning messages? CMOS corruption can happen if your CMOS battery needs replacement and you haven't had the wall socket the box is connected to powered on. It's not necessarily a problem (though if it keeps happening, you should get the battery changed), and it might be a good idea to review the BIOS settings and see if things are a-okay.

When the machine actually hangs, is that (almost) always when windows is about done loading? Might not be a heat problem since your CPU fan keeps working, but it might be a good idea checking the heatsink to see whether it's clogged up with dust. Could also be voltage problem as mentioned previously. Could be bad RAM, might be an idea to run memtest86 on it for a while, after checking other things. Might also want to check graphics card fan/heatsink.

There's so many things that can go wrong with computers, *sigh*.

7255

Developer's Corner / Re: The Best Introductory Language

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 09:58 AM »

Assembly is not a good choice for the first language. You get completely lost in details, and a lot of people get pretty frustrated that they spend a lot of effort for almost no return. You need to learn programming first, then you can continue with Machine Architecture. And if people are introduced to assembly too early, they tend to become brain-damaged and obsess over each and every tiny little irrelevant detail.

I'd even argue that assembly is pretty irrelevant these days, unless you want to get into the embedded field, or audio/video codecs.

All that said, I do think some exposure to assembly (or rather, machine architecture as a whole) later on is a good idea if you want to be a full-fledged programmer, and not "just" a dotNET/delphi/bcb/vb/etc program interface designer.

7256

Living Room / Re: Help! PC hanging on first boot

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 09:51 AM »

Do you get any beep codes from the BIOS? (assuming you have your pc speaker (the cruddy little one inside the computer casing) connected). Does it hang, or does it "black out"? Does it happen in the BIOS startup sequence, or while windows is loading?

And yeah, be sure your fans are working... I don't think a duron would melt down within seconds as long as there's a heatsink on it, but even those old CPUs get rather hot, so eventually your cpu could end up fried if the fan isn't working.

7257

General Software Discussion / Re: Good (free) encryption... without any trouble ?

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 07:51 AM »

A solution like AxCrypt that decrypts your documents to plaintext to edit them and then does re-encrypt and wipes the plaintex isn't going to be super safe anyway. Sounds weird that you've had BSODs from TrueCrypt, I've always thought it was a pretty stable product... are you running Win9x by any chance?

<shameless_self_promotion>If you just need .txt file encryption, you could check out http://fsekrit.donationcoder.com </shameless_self_promotion>

7258

Living Room / Re: 14 Surefire Ways to Annoy Users

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 07:45 AM »

• Adding tons of useless features and end up bloating a once-useful app beyond recognition, without at least providing a lean "core version" (Nero!!!)

7259

Developer's Corner / Re: C# -- Help Needed -- Where is CRC.EXE - .NET SDK Installed

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 07:41 AM »

For me, it's located in %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\{version}.

7260

Living Room / Re: Onslaught: Flash Game of the Day

« Last post by f0dder on April 20, 2007, 08:22 PM »

Level 113 with 66.6million points is the best I've done yet. There isn't any sound in this one, is there? Didn't realize until now.

I still think that somebody on DC should team up and make a "really most coolest" tower defense game.

Anyway, time to finish A Scanner Darkly and catch some sleep.

7261

Living Room / Re: Onslaught: Flash Game of the Day

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

Pretty nice game, got to level 102 by chaining lasers. The trick with them is to keep firing speed in sync - if you can't update at least four laser tower firing speed before a wave hits, don't do it. Only upgrade range on a very few "edge" towers, since the rest will only be chaining to the nearby neighbor.

The thing that really annoys me about all tower games I've played is that the targetting AI is lame - imho it should always be the farthest advanced unit that is targetted.

7262

General Software Discussion / Re: Don't call it "the tray"!

« Last post by f0dder on April 20, 2007, 12:35 PM »

Stumbled on this little article on slashdot today, and couldn't help but snicker because of the following quote:

There should now be a shiny red gem appearing in the notification area (Windows refugees, think "system tray") near the upper right of your screen. Right-clicking that icon gives you several useful options.

(emphasis is mine)

7263

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

« Last post by f0dder on April 20, 2007, 08:30 AM »

Here you go

"trimall.exe" automatically trims all processes, has no GUI or status indication or whatever (thus the small size). It still won't trim system processes, and on a multiuser system it will probably only trim other people's processes if you have an administrative user account.

7264

General Software Discussion / Re: RANT: High Software Prices!

« Last post by f0dder on April 20, 2007, 03:17 AM »

Perhaps the chinese have just, as a people, realized how much Vista blows? 

7265

General Software Discussion / Re: software patent hell: .ogg is doomed?

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2007, 05:25 PM »

Bothersome.

Imho patents aren't a bad idea, and not for software either - but they're too long-lived, too generic, and some companies are just way too greedy.

7266

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2007, 10:12 AM »

Oh, sorry, I actually did think your avatar tagline was a joke - hope I haven't offended you

Right-click "command prompt here" is quite the easiest, but "stat->kør cmd.exe" would work as well (you'd have to "cd path\where\trimws.exe\is\saved" afterwards, though). A batch file is basically just a list of statements that you could enter in cmd.exe.

You create a batch file by saving a (plain ascii, as produced by notepad or other "pure text" editors) text file and giving it .bat instead of .txt extension. The stuff in the code box was for copy-pasting into notepad and saving to a .bat file... all it does is run "trimws *", which means "trim all processes" - the "@echo off" part is just so it doesn't echo the commands being executed to the console.

I can cook up an "autotrim" version for you if you'd like, but it'll be after tonight's work at post.dk is done.

7267

General Software Discussion / Re: foobar...honestly...WTF?! WTF?!

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2007, 07:40 AM »

30k songs still shouldn't amount to 100 megabytes of in-memory metadata... that's some very sloppy code and data structures then!

7268

Living Room / Re: Latest Apple Mac vs PC Commercial: PCs suck because of all the software choices

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2007, 07:39 AM »

The reason why Microsoft bought out Virtual PC was so they could sell software to Mac users...copies of Windows, Office, Visual Studio, games, etc.

-app103

I don't think so - I find it more plausible it's for running XBOX games on the XBOX360... macs have been running on x86 processors for quite a while now.

Macs are cute enough, I just hate their commercials and the smug part of the userbase. There's a couple of people at work I'd like to give a friendly little nudge with a sledgehammer ^_^

7269

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2007, 07:35 AM »

Curt, if you're too lazy to open a cmd.exe console, save the following in a batch file in the same folder as trimws (call it dothefunkytrimmingyeahyeah.bat or whatever )

[Select]

@echo off
trimws.exe *

Would be pretty easy to cook up a version that does trim-all-processes and doesn't require commandline, and I could fit that in 4k or less

7270

General Software Discussion / Re: Fast Explorer: Tweak Your Context Menu

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2007, 05:12 PM »

Ah, I thought this was something to tweak which shell extensions are loaded, to make explorer faster... but it's just a more organized menu?

7271

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2007, 05:08 PM »

Btw Curt, do check out the app I attached a few posts ago - it does the same as the "intelligent" mode in FreeRAM XP Pro, but is a lot smaller in size and doesn't need to stay running all the time.

7272

General Software Discussion / Re: Softpedia's 100% FREE Award

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2007, 05:04 PM »

*grin*, I'm not a PHP wiz either, but I know it's doable and don't think it's too difficult, unless they have a zillion different sites they redirect from.

7273

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Archivarius

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2007, 05:03 PM »

Notice that it was estimated size, I didn't let it index yet. 300gig code would be ludicruous, source code isn't extremely big. Dunno how much source I do have lying around, locate32 is acting up a bit on my attempt to find out .

I guess one of the big sinners is the massive amount of .chm and .pdf ebooks I have lying around.

7274

General Software Discussion / Re: RANT: High Software Prices!

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2007, 04:48 PM »

nosh: you mentioned µtorrent, so I'll make a short out-of-topic comment here. µtorrent is probably coming to and end, ludde has stopped developing on it (can't blame him) after the purchase by bittorent inc., so there's no guarantee it'll keep being a decent, lightweight and badware-free program.

7275

General Software Discussion / Re: Softpedia's 100% FREE Award

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2007, 08:02 AM »

Do NOT do a 404 error, that'll just make users think your website is b0rked.

Instead, detect if the referrer is softpedia - if it is, put up a page informing the user that softpedia hotlinking and stealing bandwidth etc., but offer a link where they can download the software.