Recent Posts

7801

Living Room / Insane DIY water cooling

« Last post by f0dder on January 06, 2007, 09:48 AM »

This is probably the most comprehensive watercooling I've seen yet



(do check the link above, the real product is much better than his mockup sketch )

7802

General Software Discussion / Re: disk/filesystem benchmarking

« Last post by f0dder on January 06, 2007, 06:52 AM »

Holy zoooooming christ!

With the old RAID Mirror, VS2005 took ~10-20 seconds to start up. Running from the Raptor drive, that's down to 2 seconds!!!

Both are timings from freshly defragged partitions... of course the raptor does have an (unfair) advantage in that windows is freshly installed without too much crud. Timing from the RAID was without any antivirus software installed, though.

I'll have to try again once I've got the system more loaded, but things do seem sweeeeeeeeeet so far! And the drive is really silent, I was afraid of 10,000rpm but appearantly that's no problem. It's (a good deal) more noisy when there's heavy head movement (as in very random seek patterns, copying a non-fragmented 4gig file doesn't cause this), but that's not a problem to me; besides I've had much noisier drives in the past, and it's probably fixable with "acoustic management" anyway.

Yay, very good purchase so far!

7803

General Software Discussion / Re: disk/filesystem benchmarking

« Last post by f0dder on January 06, 2007, 05:17 AM »

Okay, I got it working. It wasn't MBR or partition-boot or active/bootable flags or anything like that. Instead, I had to change the drive access mode from "auto" to "large" in the BIOS settings (and those are the only two settings, btw) - then everything worked like a charm. Sucky BIOS

On a side note: don't "safely remove hardware" on a drive that's part of a raid array. Should go without saying, but I was curious - good thing the raid is a mirror, not a stripe... otherwise "rebuilding array" would be a lot less fun...

7804

General Software Discussion / Re: disk/filesystem benchmarking

« Last post by f0dder on January 06, 2007, 03:53 AM »

Well, HD-tach is freeware for personal use only - you gotta pay if you use it for magazine reviews/whatever. And you have to pay extra if you want write tests.

I think the error has something to do with BIOSes getting confused when there's both PATA and SATA drives in the system, especially if you have your PATA drive as primary master, and SATA drive in port #1. I had a LOT of trouble with my dads computer with sata disk + pata dvd as well.

I use nLite as well, and integrating their drivers - I had to do that when I installed to my SATA RAID mirror, for obvious reasons (I don't have a floppy drive, and seeing your mirror as two individual disks isn't very helpful ).

I'm going to try moving the plextor to primary slave or secondary master, see if that helps...

And yep, access time is what's going to be most beneficial - though extra linear read speed isn't bad either

7805

Living Room / Re: Ladybug gets even

« Last post by f0dder on January 06, 2007, 01:42 AM »

Pretty sweet - but why does she have to be so evil towards the flies? They ain't done her no evil!

7806

General Software Discussion / Re: disk/filesystem benchmarking

« Last post by f0dder on January 06, 2007, 01:32 AM »

I eventually re-remembered HD-tach, which is pretty nice - free version doesn't do write tests, but read test is nice enough to get a good indication of drive speed anyway. Yup, got the 16meg model.

Performance does seem decent:


But getting Windows installed on the drive always ends up with "Cannot load operating system" - *grmbl*. Somehow mixing SATA (the raptor) and PATA (my plextor DVD) always ends up giving trouble; funny enough RAID seems less problematic, probably because it shows up as a SCSI drive.

7807

General Software Discussion / Re: Remoting Software Questions

« Last post by f0dder on January 05, 2007, 07:09 AM »

Hm, I still think I read somewhere that LogMeIn is either based on VNC or uses [an enhanced version of?] the VNC protocol, but can't find anything right now...

7808

General Software Discussion / Re: disk/filesystem benchmarking

« Last post by f0dder on January 05, 2007, 07:00 AM »

Thanks, at least that's a starting point

Doesn't seem too comprehensive, and it's annoying that there isn't some "report window" to copy-paste from... but it'll do for now. Thanks! 

7809

General Software Discussion / disk/filesystem benchmarking

« Last post by f0dder on January 05, 2007, 05:17 AM »

Hey everybody,

finally scraped some cash together and got me a shining new disk: a 74GB Raptor drive. Of course I now want to benchmark the drive, and I don't really know which non-pay tools are any good? I know there's a free lite version of SiSoft Sandra, but nothing happens when I try to launch it

7810

Living Room / Re: Enigma - One of my most favourite games

« Last post by f0dder on January 05, 2007, 12:46 AM »

Enigma seems like something I should check out

7811

General Software Discussion / Re: Remoting Software Questions

« Last post by f0dder on January 05, 2007, 12:42 AM »

Iirc LogMeIn uses VNC?

7812

General Software Discussion / Re: Remoting Software Questions

« Last post by f0dder on January 04, 2007, 03:30 PM »

It is a bit annoying only being able to have one logon user, that's probably the single biggest disadvantage of RDP to a workstation.

Also, you "take over the box" with RDP, sometimes it's nicer to keep the local user logged in, so s/he can see what you're doing. Iirc there's a commandline switch for this, but didn't mess much with it.

I haven't found anything else that matches RDP in speed and ease of use, though - it's king of the hill in this regard.

For RDP across the internet, I'd recommend running through a SSH/SSL tunnel or via VPN.

7813

General Software Discussion / Re: SandBoxie! Best Security Tool 2007?

« Last post by f0dder on January 04, 2007, 03:11 PM »

SexyLilDarkPaw: iirc there was a break-out bug for sandboxie that was fixed - so it might happen again. Never feel too safe! Heck, it might even be possible with VMWare since it tries to run as much code natively as possible for speed reasons, I've never heard of a break-out though.

QEMU is nice, but somewhat slower than vmware - there's an "acceleration module" for it that used to be closed but iirc was opened up, haven't gotten around to testing it yet. Some linux people say it causes kernel panic for them, *shrug*.

I'll have to check out sandboxie myself one of these days, it does sound like a nifty way to check out new software without the hassle of a full VM

7814

General Software Discussion / Re: Motion Jpeg (.mjpeg) player or convert to mpg?

« Last post by f0dder on January 04, 2007, 04:32 AM »

I don't think sony/ericsson includes software for their 3gp or whatever format either - and I haven't yet found an app that handles those very well either.

Btw, you might want to try getting hold of MediaPlayerClassic, VideoLan, and... what was that final player name, can't remember. Some of those are a bit better at playing back 'unconventional' formats than standard windows media player.

7815

General Software Discussion / Re: Motion Jpeg (.mjpeg) player or convert to mpg?

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2007, 08:20 AM »

Perhaps http://www.virtualdub.org/ could help as well - it's one of those "swiss army knives". But it's been a while since I used it, and I only used it for .avi files and with proper codecs installed.

nudone: (anal mode, sorry) there's no DOS in NT, what you're opening is a shell (in a console window). Again, sorry for being anal, but mentioning DOS in NT irks me a bit

7816

Living Room / Re: A Woman from Inside Out

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2007, 12:21 AM »

Ah.

I was almost a bit scared of clicking this thread

Like many of those sketch videos: impressive. And a funny way to draw

7817

Living Room / Re: Spluch: Piggy bank with a life

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2007, 12:21 AM »

Haha, that's pretty cute!

7818

Living Room / Re: Public transport, anno 2007

« Last post by f0dder on January 02, 2007, 05:45 PM »

Darn, hadn't seen that one mouser - there's some really great ones there!

7819

General Software Discussion / Re: SandBoxie! Best Security Tool 2007?

« Last post by f0dder on January 02, 2007, 05:29 PM »

Nice, I didn't know about the templates!

Btw,

or even run malware or viruses without consequences.

-SexyLilDarkPaw

Still be careful though - while this is what sandboxie is designed for, and it seems very good at it, sometimes bugs are found that allows malware to break out of sandboxes. If you're actually doing malware research, it's still safest to use a dedicated computer or full virtualization like vmware.

As a tool to make web surfing safer and app testing less hassle free, sandboxie does seem like a win, though!

7820

Living Room / Public transport, anno 2007

« Last post by f0dder on January 02, 2007, 09:51 AM »

I think mouser should appreciate this one

7821

Living Room / Re: What is the DonationCoder.com Internet Citizens's Club (Cody's Club) ??

« Last post by f0dder on January 02, 2007, 09:09 AM »

MAKE YOUR TIME!

7822

General Software Discussion / Re: 3D directX

« Last post by f0dder on December 30, 2006, 08:33 PM »

Windows98 is generally a bad idea unless you have a very old and slow box - or if you're not a programmer, only do simple things, and remember to save your documents often

7823

Living Room / Re: Some thoughtfull worries about google misbehavior from FireFox developer

« Last post by f0dder on December 30, 2006, 09:12 AM »

Another great point, if this was all that Google did I would not have concerns, but taken in the context of their other activities, does it not leave room to question their motives and future plans?

-Farmsteader

Of course, be sceptic - it's just that the "big brohter" page at google-watch seemed to jump to some not-that-logic conclusions instead of seeking the logical explanation...

I think there's things that are more scary & deserve more attention than google, though. Like the brainwashed extreme-right and the (often overlooked) extreme-left movements. Especially the latter, since it's more socially acceptable, and could end up actually posing a threat. Oh well, that's starting to sound like politics, and that's a thing to avoid on donationcoder.

7824

Living Room / Re: Some thoughtfull worries about google misbehavior from FireFox developer

« Last post by f0dder on December 30, 2006, 08:11 AM »

Non-profit ad-free search engine? Never going to happen. You need massive amounts of storage and processing power to build a decent search engine. If something came up that claimed to be 100% free with no financial interests, I wouldn't be scared. I'd be very scared.

I don't think google is the great messiah, and I feel a bit insecure about the amount of data they're harvesting (especially with gmail and other services). But I'd rather have google have that than MS, Yahoo, ...

Oh, and I wouldn't midn working at google - speaking with some (ex) employees, it sounds like a pretty decent work atmosphere with good pay and job opportunities.

Being sceptical (not paranoid!) is a good thing, google-watch seems a bit fuddy though - things like "Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington." comes off to me as rambling nonsense; perhaps they just want some know-how on how to, say, secure data? But no, simple & rational explanations won't do.

7825

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

« Last post by f0dder on December 29, 2006, 08:41 PM »

...and new Miranda might actually be better for file xfer since they say they've implemented uPNP - we'll have to see, though.