Recent Posts

7776

Living Room / Re: Roxik Pictaps - Let your Drawings Dance - Brilliant!

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2007, 08:33 AM »

Wonderful - http://roxik.com/pictaps/?pid=a115338

7777

Living Room / Re: How do you spend your time on the computer?

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2007, 07:41 AM »

... doing excel charts of our power consumption and calculating how much we'll have to pay for it.

-f0dder (January 09, 2007, 03:49 AM)

thanks f0dder - first good laugh in a couple of day    
(reminds me of me doing Excel charts of all my shortcuts ... )

-tomos (January 09, 2007, 03:54 AM)

It sounds a bit silly, but it actually IS useful - I live in cold&dark old scandinavia, so it was pretty relevant to figure out how much more power we use in the winter compared to the summer. Fortunately (and a bit surprising), it's been pretty linear over the whole year

I collect stuff as well, and lots of it. I think my downloads folder is 4-8 gigs (or more? not at home right now). And there isn't any pr0n, MP3s (except for a few odd random ones - but no pirated full albums or the like), gamez or similar in there. At least I only collect virtual stuff, you should see the amount of physical junk my mother collects

7778

Living Room / Any creative/crazy musicians around?

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2007, 04:01 AM »

I just got a crazy idea for a cute little project (screensaver/intro kind of thing), and I need some music for it...

So, I was thinking, there must be somebody on DC doing music. And perhaps even somebody doing something chiptune-ish in .xm format. Now, the crazy part: Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here - the chiptune version. Anybody up for the task?

7779

Developer's Corner / Re: Joel Spolsky's Recent Essays Opposing Simplicity

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2007, 03:53 AM »

Hehe yeah, it's pretty cute. There's also some nice stuff in the blog in general... iirc it's from one of the operators in #c++ on EFnet.

7780

Developer's Corner / Re: Joel Spolsky's Recent Essays Opposing Simplicity

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2007, 04:55 PM »

Somebody who's not buying into the "Spolsky is a guru" crap: Joel On Software: Please Get Off of Software - good read, imho.

7781

General Software Discussion / Re: Goodness! Is there NO Win utility to do "DIR /S/B C:\ZZZ\*.JPG > RESULT.TXT"?

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2007, 09:51 AM »

Once upon a time, I even wondered if some kind person might make a WinGUI shell for it 

-rjbull (January 10, 2007, 09:39 AM)

* f0dder looks around for Skrommel

7782

Living Room / Re: Scam-O-Rama: Ridiculously Bad Attempts to Scam People Out of Something

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2007, 09:36 AM »

 

7783

General Software Discussion / Re: NetLimiter alternative?

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2007, 08:57 AM »

Check out cfosSpeed - doesn't just do speed limiting but some "quality of service" like packet reordering too.

7784

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: an indication that "start-up" is finished

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2007, 08:53 AM »

Skrommel: try adding a call to SetThreadAffinity to your AHK script and limit it to run on a single CPU core, that might solve the negative timings.

7785

Living Room / Re: Within A Deep Forest - oldschool game

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2007, 09:16 AM »

Oooooh, nice!

Thanks for letting us know. I'll have to try not getting sucked into this after work, or I'll never get to bed ^_^

 

7786

Developer's Corner / Re: Difference between programming for Linux and Windows?

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2007, 04:48 AM »

Fortunately, todays BASICs aren't as bad as the original; you can do relatively structured programming in BASIC today, rather than the intertangle GOTO mess and line numbered source of yore.

There's still problems with the mentality, though. I can't remember the specifics since it's many a years since I had to deal with VB, but if you look at some problems and the recommended solutions - christ. No doubt that things can be done cleaner, but when the general responses on "teh intarweb" (or even a teacher) are kludges, things are bad.

There's also a lack of expressiveness in the BASICs I've seen. This again leads to kludges ("use a DLL"/"write it in inline assembly") rather than working with the BASIC language itself. Either you have a pretty bare-bones BASIC that isn't much interesting, or you have one of those frankensteinian BASICs that includes everything and the kitchen sink - or you have to rely on external libraries, probably written in C.

There's hybrid BASICs, but then you might as well use a better language

It might not be total brain damage to learn some programming with one of the more modern BASICs, but you'll have to ask yourself how much of the knowledge you can re-use if moving on. Especially if it's one of the frankenstein BASICs with a zillion library functions to make life easier.

7787

Living Room / Re: How do you spend your time on the computer?

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2007, 03:49 AM »

I'd have to agree with nudone. It can be summed up as "trying to convince myself that I'm just about to do something relevant" - aka procrastinating.

This involves surfing forums, checking out links, idling on IRC, playing the occasional game, and doing excel charts of our power consumption and calculating how much we'll have to pay for it.

7788

Living Room / Re: Why Blurring Sensitive Information is a Bad Choice for Hiding It

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2007, 05:47 PM »

Good point, mouser - so to make it clear: yes, I'm joking, I'd be very surprised if mouser did anything backdoorish in any of his apps.

Anyway, alpha channels - tyically 8 bit of information per pixel, used for transparency, but theoretically you could put anything there (although the pictures would render funnily in programs that support alpha; I don't know if you can somehow specify a PNG file that has the alpha channel but set to "don't use").

7789

General Software Discussion / Re: disk/filesystem benchmarking

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

Nope, might check it out a bit later. Seems like a tool you need to take a lot of care when using - and I'm not sure it would be very representive in my case (you really need an OS on another physical disk (not just partition) than the disk/partition you want to test).

7790

General Software Discussion / Re: Goodness! Is there NO Win utility to do "DIR /S/B C:\ZZZ\*.JPG > RESULT.TXT"?

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2007, 05:12 PM »

I am not saying the trick played by D.Opus and xPlorer2 are bad one, they are simply shell to DOS function and is DOS dependent. In a way, new guys who are born after the DOS day, do you want them to learn DOS again just to be able to do the DIR thing?

-tslim

Shell, not DOS

But yeah, I guess you're right apart from that. MS designs for the majority of users, the majority of users probably don't need file listings like this... and 3rd-party tools can always (and have been) written

7791

Living Room / Re: Why Blurring Sensitive Information is a Bad Choice for Hiding It

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2007, 05:10 PM »

Damn, I bet that Screenshot Captor author speculates in getting all our personal information!! 

-TucknDar (January 08, 2007, 01:00 PM)

Yeah... do take a look at the alpha channels of those .png pictures!

7792

Living Room / Re: Why Blurring Sensitive Information is a Bad Choice for Hiding It

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2007, 09:25 AM »

Well, you can often guess which tool a person used (photoshop, gimp, paint shop pro). And most effects are probably implemented similarly anyway.

7793

General Software Discussion / Re: Goodness! Is there NO Win utility to do "DIR /S/B C:\ZZZ\*.JPG > RESULT.TXT"?

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2007, 09:23 AM »

rjbull: unless the tool is very ugly and reads the disk directly (which I doubt), it should work under NT, and on NTFS as well. "This option will only work under an operating system which provides the long-name API." - this sounds a lot like it will work

7794

Developer's Corner / Re: Difference between programming for Linux and Windows?

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2007, 09:13 AM »

BASIC: Beyond All Sense, Incomprehensible Crap. Donald Knuth, iirc, has quote where "BASIC" and "brain damage" go together. Yes, fortunately today's BASICs are less hideous than the original ones, but it's not something you should touch unless you have to (ie., VB required for a job).

7795

Developer's Corner / Re: Difference between programming for Linux and Windows?

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2007, 09:05 AM »

Josh: you do get a lot of control with the WIN32 API, though - thing is you don't need it most of the time. You can probably do (most of) the same under *u*x, but then you need to hunt down multiple functions to get the same effect; somewhat clearer code, but more user<->kernel transitions.

Then there's the issue of library hell - which is much worse than windows DLL hell has ever been. And if you're a commercial developer who's not into the GPL commie club, it gets much worse - either pay for special commercial license of libraries, or rewrite functionality that's on windows to begin with.

And good luck shipping a binary, with all the various library versions around, which are sometimes incompatible ABI-wise.

Documentation - sucks. manpages are horrible, texinfo only slightly better, so you end up googling trying to find a html'ized version. And no, "aprospos" isn't really a solution.

That said, platform specific stuff can usually be abstracted if you think about the problem in the right way. Even for advanced stuff like I/O Completion Ports, FreeBSD has /dev/kqueue and linux has /dev/epoll ... well, if the user has a recent enough kernel version (I be there's more people running 2.4 kernels without epoll than people running win9x , though ).

7796

Living Room / Re: Why Blurring Sensitive Information is a Bad Choice for Hiding It

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2007, 08:42 AM »

I think that there's also another issue: wouldn't the person who made the bluring algorith be able to reverse engineer it and get the original text?

-jgpaiva (January 08, 2007, 05:16 AM)

No, it's a lossy operation, so you won't be able to get the exact original. (Well, a malicious blur-tool author could do trick things with alpha channel in a 32bpp image, or perhaps some palette tricks for 8bpp, to make it a bit easier to get at original-ish data, but... that's pretty far-fetched).

7797

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: customizable replacement for "safely remove hardware" icon

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2007, 04:38 AM »

Just a side note: you probably won't be able to safely remove the drive that the tool resides on, due to how windows works (just like you can't write to the .exe of a running process).

7798

Living Room / Re: Why Blurring Sensitive Information is a Bad Choice for Hiding It

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2007, 03:39 AM »

Pretty interesting.

Blurring is so much prettier than just blocking out, though

7799

Developer's Corner / Re: C# Microcontroller

« Last post by f0dder on January 07, 2007, 04:04 PM »

Hm, I'm not fond of neither Java nor C# for microcontrollers, but you don't need to resort to assembly - there should be plenty around you can program with C.

You might want to check out the 'electronics' subforum of www.asmcommunity.net/board/ . The forum is, obviously, pretty assembly-centric, but there's a couple of people who have been dealing with microcontrollers and the like there, they might be able to point you in the right direction.

7800

General Software Discussion / Re: Goodness! Is there NO Win utility to do "DIR /S/B C:\ZZZ\*.JPG > RESULT.TXT"?

« Last post by f0dder on January 07, 2007, 09:33 AM »

You can always open a console window under windows - command.com (DOS app) for win9x, cmd.exe (win32 console) for NT. And even NT, that isn't DOS-based like 9x is, still has DOS emulation.

I really love xplorer^2 since it allows me to write shell commands in the location bar, that run in the context of the current folder. If I'm in [/b]d:\src\proj\fsekrit[/b], I type $dir *.cpp /s /b in the location bar, and up pops a window with the files. - and it's not even a console window, since xplorer^2 redirects input/output and handles it itself