Recent Posts

7526

Living Room / Re: Best choice for server-side game programming

« Last post by f0dder on February 20, 2007, 09:11 AM »

Multi-User Dimensions?

If you mean MUD, then you'll need to write a real game server. You probably could fudge around and make something PHP-based, but I don't think it would be pretty.

As for running a MUD on your home machine, this shouldn't be a problem at all. Even a small ADSL connection should be able to serve "quite a few" people, and just be a bit careful when coding (ie., use safe datatypes and avoid buffer overflows) and you'll be fine.

7527

ProcessTamer / Re: MS Word2000?

« Last post by f0dder on February 20, 2007, 08:54 AM »

When does word2k jerk up to 100%? O_o

It's one of the leanest word processors (with that capacity) I've used, it even ran fairly well on a pentium-mmx-200/64meg ram... I've seem some initial slightly-high usage when opening a document (spellchecking?), but apart from that...?

Describing when this happens might help finding a solution

7528

Living Room / Re: Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability

« Last post by f0dder on February 20, 2007, 08:50 AM »

The conclusions are interesting that heat and usage is not a very good predictor of failure.. I guess basically the take-home message is what we all suspect: failure of disk drives is unpredictable - so backup your stuff regularly!

-mouser (February 19, 2007, 08:22 PM)

Heat and usage might not be absolutes, but in my humble experience with a much more limited amount of drives than google , excessive heat and the kind of disk usage where there's a lot of head movement (ie, fragmented files as opposed to long linear unfragmented) reads/writes) do wear down drives faster.

7529

Living Room / Re: Best choice for server-side game programming

« Last post by f0dder on February 20, 2007, 08:48 AM »

Applets are downloaded and run by the client, and can thus be hosted more or less anywhere (some free hosts have limitations on the types of files they let you store).

If you want to do something server-side, you need a decent host. Things like the non-realtime space conquest games can be implemented with some server-side scripting language and a database (usually php+mysql), and while you might not be able to find a free host that supports this, you can certainly find some cheap ones that do.

If you want to do something interesting, you need to run real, live code on the server... and then it comes down to which programming language(s) you're most comfortable with. Usually things like that are programmed in C/C++, but you could do java, dotNET, whatever. You're not very likely to find free hosting that lets you run code, though, and for paid hosting it's probably not going to be cheap.

7530

Living Room / Re: Agree with Bruce Eckel?

« Last post by f0dder on February 20, 2007, 08:43 AM »

MS actually has released part of the necessary source. Haven't looked into it myself, so I dunno how much code it is and what the license is, and of course they could change things around at some point in the future.

It would make sense for them not to do so, though. The more platforms supported, the bigger chance of income from people who want visual studio because the alternatives aren't as good...

7531

Living Room / Re: Extended Character Aascii Art questions

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2007, 04:13 PM »

Thing with extended ASCII is that it depends on on the codepage. Notepad doesn't download fonts to your printer afaik, it probably just selects whatever is close to "courier new". Good old .nfo files display correctly in dos codepage 865, which is different from the windows standard. As for getting correct printing - no idea.

But for viewing, I suggest Kwazy Webbit's NFO Scroller, from http://reteam.org/tools.html . Never got around finishing my own, so I gave him my cp865.bin and rendering code, and the end result is nice

7532

Official Announcements / Re: Upgrading the forum tonight to SMF 1.1.2 - Possibilities of minor turbulence

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2007, 06:36 AM »

Seems to work fine from here so far

7533

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is it so hard to find a decent image organizer?

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2007, 03:55 AM »

I kinda like Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 2006. It's a bit "dumbed down" and probably not powerful enough for you, but it's interface is pretty, and it's simple enough that even a computer almost-illiterate I know can use it. I dunno if it can still be purchased though, I remember it was a bit hard finding it even at www.microsoft.com .

7534

Living Room / Re: One of the better if not best examples of flash based navigation

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2007, 01:57 AM »

Okay, first thing about the site that I notice is that it resizes my browser window. That's already bad-bad. The site is very cute, and I guess "it works" for a company like that. But it's still nowhere as easy and efficient as regular html, can't be bookmarked, sucks for accessibility, etc.

IMHO, flash should be used exclusively for advertisements and games, at least for the web.

7535

What's the Best? / Re: Anti-Virus Package

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2007, 01:50 AM »

Kaspersky is neat enough, and I certainly like the pro-active/behavioral blocking stuff that can catch stuff if it's (pretty good) heuristics fail. And their use of "has this file already been scanned?" database is great

-f0dder (February 18, 2007, 04:13 PM)

Out of curiosity what happens if a file is in the database but is silently changed by a virus or other malware?

-Carol Haynes (February 18, 2007, 06:26 PM)

Basically, won't happen. A piece of malware would have to go kernel-mode and specifically attack KAV, which is more bother than it's worth it for general malware. If someone was specifically targeting you, it could be viable, but then you have much bigger problems imho

7536

What's the Best? / Re: Anti-Virus Package

« Last post by f0dder on February 18, 2007, 04:13 PM »

Kaspersky is neat enough, and I certainly like the pro-active/behavioral blocking stuff that can catch stuff if it's (pretty good) heuristics fail. And their use of "has this file already been scanned?" database is great (after they went from NTFS streams to centralized databases), NOD32 doesn't have that (well, it keeps it in memory, but not on disk).

I still haven't decided whether to go for KAV or NOD at the museum; NOD is a bit faster and leaner, and slightly cheaper as well. I do NOT like their default adding "this message has been scanned" to incoming and outgoing emails, though; it's a false sense of security, and spoils anti-spam engines.

7537

Living Room / Re: How Google Killed Search

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 05:09 PM »

This does show one big point, though: you need to know how to search

7538

General Software Discussion / Re: CD Ripping

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 05:06 PM »

I'm not interested in ripping copy protected games or applications, only in gaining fair use of my legally purchased CDs - dunno if AnyDVD, CloneDVD/CD, Alcohol or whatever can help there; they seem focused on data. I want (as close to as possible) bit-perfect copies of my audio.

Plextools is supposed to be good, but even for non-protected CDs it gives me different results on every rip, and we're not just talking a few bits here and there. Pretty weird.

It should be noted that I don't have the usual problems with only one track showing up, only audio tracks showing up, or whatever - plextool's "enable single session" works pretty well for that, and so does EAC's alternate TOC detection. The problem is the actual ripping, which is damn slow, and doesn't seem to generate very good rips (well, exact rips - I don't seem to get pops and clicks, though).

Of course for non-protected CDs, everything flies. I wish I could get dbPoweramp to generate cue/wav though, it's pretty darn fast, and seems to have very intelligent error detection/handling, unlike EACs pretty bruteforce method. Would be worth registering if it did

7539

What's the Best? / Re: Anti-Virus Package

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 04:55 PM »

Well, with BitDefender, back when there were still Win9x machines, those would generally have a BSOD a day. The XP machines, with HT enabled, at least a BSOD a week. With HT disabled, no BSODs, but still weird behaviour during updates. Wouldn't recommend that software to anyone.

Good old ThunderByte AntiVirus, TBAV. It was a pretty nifty piece of software back in the DOS days, the first scanner I experience with heuristics support, and a powerful cleaning module (even if some versions could be tricked). Kinda lost it when moving to windows, though... they never really got there.

dk70: even if you don't download warezzz, visit smut sites, don't open suspicious emails et cetera, heuristics and an "always-active" (as opposed to manual scans only) engine is necessary. And it needs to have a kernel-mode driver and not just ring3 hooks. Otherwise, all it takes is one single exploit, and you're doomed.

Unfortunately, turning off java, javascript and moving away from IE is not an option at the museum.

7540

Living Room / Re: Apologese - I will be offline for a while ...

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 04:46 PM »

In Denmark, when online shopping, there's a 14-day no-questions-asked full return warranty, since you haven't had a chance to "check it out before buying", no questions asked. Product still needs to be in decent condition though. This does mean that I could buy a harddrive, use it temporarily for saving some data, and then return it. Dunno if that goes for software too, and shops wouldn't be happy if you did it often I guess

On top of that, there's a 1-year (or was it changed to 2-year?) warranty against the "I didn't do anything but it stopped working" flaws. Which of course doesn't cover spilling coffee into a laptop, but it does cover a motherboard that suddenly stops working. Might require filling a RMA and waiting a bit, though.

7541

Living Room / Re: Apologese - I will be offline for a while ...

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 11:00 AM »

IMHO it should be the company that has the "customer contact" that should have the main responsibility for shipping replacements. It's the one you did business with, and it's the one that certainly has an office branch in your country...

7542

General Software Discussion / Re: CD Ripping

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 10:27 AM »

Well, I don't have scratched CDs, but I do have copy-protected ones. No audible artifacts isn't not good enough, I want AccurateRip matches! . I know this is rather anal, but I rip to lossless format with archival in mind, so I want it to be as good as possible. Which is a bit hard with audio, since it's just about impossible to get 100% exact extraction.

I guess doing a burst extraction of the copy protected CDs could be interesting, to see just how bad it goes - but I'll still have to find some decent audio editor and do some analysis.

7543

General Software Discussion / Re: Need some help in recovery data from a damaged external HDD

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 08:50 AM »

If you run into trouble another time, do not try tricks like delete/re-create partition, that can be pretty dangerous!

As to what could have happened, hm. I've experienced that for my USB2 enclosure, sometimes it will lose it's connection for half a second, then re-appear, causing XP to do it's stupid drive scan to see what kind of files are there, and pop up the "what do you want to do" dialog. I don't think that has caused any data corruption (yet?) though.

For firewire (which my enclosure also supports), it's a different story. The explanation is rather long, but google for firewire "delay write" if you're interested - this can lead to quite some data corruption.

The tool I've used with most success so far has been GetDataBack. It's extremely slow, but has given me >90% recovery rate. But ugh, both MFT and it's mirror destroyed?

7544

Mouser's Zone / Re: 1.1.2 FALSE PATCHING

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 08:44 AM »

Could you stop spamming about these things, obviously in the wrong forum section as well? If you're concerned about board safety, PM mouser. Or you could drop it in "living room", for any who might care. And please learn how to format text decently.

7545

What's the Best? / Re: Anti-Virus Package

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 08:40 AM »

Kasperski - tested it but I hated what it did on the filesystem, storing checksums and stuff in the ntfs streams. that caused huge havoc with several other utilities and was an absolute nightmare to clean up. I'm sure that you can install it so it doesn't do that, but it didnt bother to give me the choice and that really caused me more annoyances than it was worth.

-iphigenie

Only thing I experienced problems with was Rootkit Revealer... and as for getting rid of, there was an option on uninstall. And I'm pretty sure you were given the choice, it's an install option. Might not be very well explained, but it was there. Recent versions have moved away from per-file NTFS streams anyway, and use a couple of central databases instead.

Bitdefender - the one i got this year (yup, it was a special deal). it's quite light on the CPU and quite inobtrusive once you tell it to hide the status windows. Works really nicely scanning pop incoming mail (doesnt do imap that i could see). It is a bit inflexible though - it keeps wanting to quarantine my remote administrator executable, and for some files (for example games with those 60 minute tryout system) it will block access but not let you delete them either via itself or via any tool. I have similar annoyance with the firewall component.

-iphigenie

You don't have a Hyper-Threading or Dual-Core CPU then, and aren't running Win9x? The amount of BSODs I've had because of BitDefender is quite high (I'm servicing 10-15 machines at a museum). It also routinely fails to re-launch after applying an upgrade, and whatnot. The net result is I've had to turn off hyperthreading on all the machines.

Fortunately, the license period is over, so I'm off to shop new... will probably be NOD, as it's a bit cheaper than KAV, and those two are the only ones I really have faith in.

7546

General Software Discussion / Re: CPU Usage shoots up to 100% !?!

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 08:26 AM »

Yeah, UltraDMA is what you want - if they were in PIO mode, just about any disk activity would slow your system to a crawl... even if it was a much beefier system than what you have.

7547

General Software Discussion / Re: Brillant Text Editor (search functions)

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2007, 08:25 AM »

Per-locale translation tables (to handle accents and the like) is probably also a good idea... unless you wanna go full unicode

7548

Living Room / Re: Knology Connection Speed Test

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2007, 04:22 PM »

~430kb/s grabbing arch-0.7.2.iso from darkstar - not bad . I guess kernel.org is having a bad day, I usually get good speeds from there...

7549

Living Room / Re: Knology Connection Speed Test

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2007, 04:01 PM »

Heh, that's just plain silly

Anyway, I just tested kernel.org, fetching 2.6.20 full, with plain firefox (no download manager). Cancelled the download when I had reached 320kb/s. With a download manager, or when grabbing torrents, I usually hit ~420kb/s or so.

7550

Living Room / Re: Knology Connection Speed Test

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2007, 03:47 PM »

Very imprecise here, which is typical of those pretty tools

It lists me as 1.91mbps/437kbps, while I'm on a 4096/512 line...