Recent Posts

7551

General Software Discussion / Re: CD Ripping

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

Nope, a second-hand NAD 314 stereo amp, and a NAD C521BEE CD player, which seemed like a good quality/price compromise. Hooked up with a couple of B&W DM601 S3 speakers, and a couple of (old!) Pioneer S-Z92 speakers (which deliver a the bass that the B&Ws lack). All in all produces pretty decent sound for our 50m² flat

Now, back on subject
Unfortunately dbPoweramp doesn't give identical rip results for the Iron Maiden CD on my LiteOn and my Plextor drive, and neither are matched in the AccurateRip database, and I haven't found a way to produce one big .wav + .cue sheet either

On the plus side, for non-protected CDs it rips very fast. It also rips lots faster than EAC for the protected IM CD, and while my results don't match AR, at least the results are *consistant* between rips on the plextor. Will have to look at the output waves with some editor, and listen for clicks and hisses as well.

7552

General Software Discussion / Re: CD Ripping

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2007, 12:09 PM »

I've read a bit about dbPowerAmp, and it sounds pretty interesting - I don't think I'd use the standard version, but the one called "reference" with it's special error detection seems pretty interesting. I'll have to do some tests (especially with copy-protected CDs, which is the reason I even checked it out at all) and will get back later... it seems like dbPowerAmp ref is able to read my Iron Maiden: Dance of Death CD, which EAC estimated would take ~6 hours to rip, and probably didn't even handle error-free.

7553

General Software Discussion / Re: Your chance to contribute to the betterment of the world for all Vista users

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2007, 06:55 AM »

Perhaps this is a security hole? Imagina a program that can run with all exe files, look for specific information, and then run the .exe file as normal. You'd never notice.

-justice (February 15, 2007, 06:49 AM)

Trojans have done similar things in the past... not a very hard thing to detect, really.

7554

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2006 / Re: Do wallpapers aid your productivity?

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2007, 06:38 AM »

Add guidelines to any image to show different resolutions. This is what my desktop looks like. I have my resolution set to 1280 x 1024 and have an image on my desktop with guidelines for 640 x 480, 800 x 600, and 1024 x 768. What this does is let me see how much of a screen an applications window will fill.

hey now that is clever.. i've never heard of that idea before. very clever.

-mouser (February 07, 2007, 11:53 PM)

Helps if you do any kinda of application development or web development work...

-Veign (February 08, 2007, 09:49 AM)

WinScraper - really handy tool.

7555

Living Room / Re: All my applications crash... in sequence!?!

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2007, 06:08 AM »

It could've been a lot of things, since you have a lot of things running

But my guess would be things that involve drivers, services, or hooking of various kinds, or the interoperability between such apps; zonealarm, avg, admunch, hijackthis, and probably a number of other things. Wouldn't surprise me if it was zonealarm.

7556

Developer's Corner / Re: Amazing looking forum software -- AJAX/Web 2.0 at its best

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2007, 06:00 AM »

Vanilla looks pretty nice actually - but also pretty vanilla. I would miss emoticons and avatars on a vanilla-vanilla forum . Searching and the like does seem nifty though.

7557

General Software Discussion / Re: Your chance to contribute to the betterment of the world for all Vista users

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2007, 05:46 AM »

FYI, the "hex" part in "exefile"=hex(0) means "binary value", but most MS apps tend to support binary, dword, string for a lot of registry entries.

Weird that Vista allows you to change something that crucial that easily - I don't even get an "open with" on XP, even if I shift+rightclick my EXEs. On the other hand, I do have WinRAR context menu items if it detects the exe has a supported archive type embedded... but I digress, sorry.

7558

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2007, 05:40 AM »

Could you check device manager->IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, have a look at the settings for your IDE channels, and tell us whether your devices are set to DMA or PIO modes?

7559

General Software Discussion / Re: correction of distorted grid in image ??

« Last post by f0dder on February 14, 2007, 05:36 PM »

Hm, dunno if a specific app exists, but photo morphing software might do what you need? Usually you set up some control points (has always been a grid for the stuff I've played with), and can then move those control points around... dunno if it's accurate enough for your uses.

7560

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 14, 2007, 05:35 AM »

RegEx *could* do what is asked for, but it would be extremely tedious construct.

SoundEx searching, customized for different languages, does indeed sound like what you want. Would probably be nice if it showed a list with all hits (including some context), and let you goto that line, instead of the regular "find next" tediousness.

Iirc GNU aspell has internationalized/table-based soundex?

7561

Living Room / Re: Swords and Sandals 2: Flash Game of the Day

« Last post by f0dder on February 13, 2007, 07:50 AM »

Site doesn't work here

7562

General Software Discussion / Re: Geogebra - (free software) Calling all maths teachers!!!

« Last post by f0dder on February 13, 2007, 02:59 AM »

Looks great, both as in being useful but the visuals as well. Too bad it's Java, but I can live with that for something like this. I think it's going to be great for my younger brothers

7563

Living Room / Re: Flea Circus: Flah Game of the Day

« Last post by f0dder on February 13, 2007, 02:47 AM »

Cute, like a primitive version of lemmings

It's Java, though, not flash - and the sound is horribly out of sync on my machine, and the speed seems to be too fast. I'm still playing it though ^_^

7564

General Software Discussion / Re: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

« Last post by f0dder on February 13, 2007, 02:43 AM »

 

7565

General Software Discussion / Re: CD Ripping

« Last post by f0dder on February 13, 2007, 02:38 AM »

Well, a guy that used to do plextor firmware recommended plextools as well, but my experience still stands - it wasn't able to accurately rip, at least not in burst mode. I rather prefer secure ripping over speed anyway, so EAC it is.

As to why audio data is hard to extract, iirc it is because audio CDs don't have some synchronization data (not error correction data) that data CDs have. I guess the reasoning was "music just needs to be played back at 1x speed, and we'd rather have more available space and do without the sync data". A CD usually has 74min capacity, which would be 74*60*44100*2*2 bytes, or ~746MB - when used for data, the capacity is only ~650MB.

There is some error-correction done in cd players, which is why a scratched CD I have plays perfectly in my NAD player, but can't be ripped 100% on my computer.

7566

Living Room / Re: DonationCoder.com IRC Channel

« Last post by f0dder on February 13, 2007, 02:27 AM »

Most IRC servers do open proxy scanning now, which is what you're experiencing. This is done because an amount of malware installs open proxies, which scriptkiddies can then use to connect to the net via your computer, and thus be more or less anonymous. The same kind of malware also tends to connect to irc which can then be used as a control channel.

That's why open proxy scanning is done. Then, why does your firewall flag it? Because scriptkiddies also do open proxy scanning, to see if there's some victims they can abuse. Pretty lame that it's being blocked as  "malware-Phatbot" when it should be "proxy scan" or similar.

7567

Living Room / Re: DonationCoder.com IRC Channel

« Last post by f0dder on February 11, 2007, 08:21 AM »

pressing the link won't work, jgpaiva - it gets http://ized. (and that link obviously won't work either, hehe).

7568

General Software Discussion / Re: CD Ripping

« Last post by f0dder on February 11, 2007, 08:19 AM »

If you have a Plextor drive, PlexTools is accurate and fast.

-jared1999 (February 11, 2007, 08:13 AM)

Fast yes, accurate no, unfortunately.

Found out the hard way. Ripping the same (clean, perfect, non-copyprotected and unscracted) CD multiple times produced different .wav output. And it wasn't just a few bytes of header info, it was a lot of bytes. Nothing that I could hear, but definitely visible.

EAC, on the other hand, and how much I hate to admit it, produces perfect rips for me every time, and it's verifiable because it supports the AccurateRip plugin.

7569

Living Room / Re: Rebuilding My Laptop

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2007, 03:17 PM »

I used to do XP on an athlon700/512meg, was quite okay... so you don't need all that fancy stuff, althuogh it helps

7570

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Why Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.tal

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2007, 09:12 AM »

And the memory usage investigation continues. Josh's very low memory usage values were because he uses a more recent Process Explorer than I do, and only looked at the "Physical memory" status. So, I upgraded to PE10.21, and did a little investigation. I also confirmed that trillian indeed does do the SetProcessWorkingSetSize() hack - setting breakpoints in OllyDebug shows the following:
toolkit.3401C411 - on startup
toolkit.3401B7AC - on minimize

The mem stats are right before the initial SetProcessWorkingSetSize() call during startup phase, right after, and right after the process has "recovered":


Just for fun, I whipped up a little utility for trimming other processes, and ran it on Miranda. This is a bit less precise than with trillian, since the process isn't in a suspended state, but it still gives normal-use, right-after-trim, recovery-after-trim:


All this shows what?
1) trillian uses dirty tricks to camouflage it's memory usage
2) trillian does, in fact, use more memory than miranda

PS: this is still with miranda logged on to msn+icq, trillian not connected. Memory usage is expected to rise a bit more if I actually log on with trillian.

7571

Living Room / Re: physmo: I want!

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2007, 09:04 AM »

kfitting: my guess is payware, and my hope is cheap. I've signed up for their email notify

7572

Living Room / Re: Rebuilding My Laptop

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2007, 07:54 AM »

www.nliteos.com + http://www.ryanvm.ne...msfn/updatepack.html - I use that for XP, should work for 2k as well. As for which services are safe to disable... test with vmware 

7573

Living Room / Re: physmo: I want!

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2007, 07:44 AM »

hehe, very good.

-nudone (February 10, 2007, 07:43 AM)

Condoned by the nude one! guuuut, very guuuut!

7574

Living Room / physmo: I want!

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2007, 06:18 AM »

This game looks pretty sweet, can't wait for it to be released!

7575

Developer's Corner / Re: Why AJAX is Preferred for RIAs over Java

« Last post by f0dder on February 10, 2007, 05:08 AM »

SUN made many mistakes - imho one of them was to force MS to remove their JVM from Windows, especially since they couldn't produce one that was as fast and lightweight.