Recent Posts

8001

Official Announcements / Re: wtfCody

« Last post by f0dder on October 31, 2006, 05:48 AM »

Oh, 25 of them? *zoom*!

I guess images could be resized to, say, 1600x1200 for the poor fellas that don't have extra broad broadband... not a problem here anymore, though

(And the artwork is goregous )

8002

General Software Discussion / Re: Repairing Windows XP (to restore AutoPlay)

« Last post by f0dder on October 31, 2006, 02:18 AM »

Btw it's probably not svchost itself that's a problem - it's a relatively trivial service managing app, loading service DLL or EXE files. The problem is most likely registry setting based, as a corrupt .exe or .dll file would very likely give much worse problems...

8003

Official Announcements / Re: wtfCody

« Last post by f0dder on October 31, 2006, 01:56 AM »

Oh, excitement!

The screensaver is very cute, but pretty darn huge as well - are the images stored in bmp format? And why is cody scared in the halloween pic? I thought he was all brave and mighty

8004

General Software Discussion / Re: Repairing Windows XP (to restore AutoPlay)

« Last post by f0dder on October 31, 2006, 01:48 AM »

I can't for the life of me imagine why anybody would want autoplay installed

If you end up needing to reinstall (last resort!), I'd recommend checking out www.nliteos.com to handle the slipstreaming process - it can also do a lot of tweaking, but you don't need to do that. Together with the SP2 upgrade and the latest pack from http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/ , you get a base install that's very up-to-date.

8005

Living Room / Re: Windows XP Pro and SP2

« Last post by f0dder on October 31, 2006, 01:45 AM »

Josh: doesn't windows install generally install any and all patches that are available?

I personally use a combination of http://www.nliteos.com and http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/ for my base install, so I don't have to download the hundreds of megabytes of updates since SP2 every time I reinstall - pretty nice stuff. I also use nLite to cut some of the crap out of XP. After install, though, I use windows update, I don't reinstall monthly

8006

Living Room / Re: Brainsplatters 2: Flash Game of the Day

« Last post by f0dder on October 30, 2006, 08:45 AM »

Haha - I considered the same. I ended up just pointing my finger at guy #3 a couple of times, and then the rest was easy - except for the final "boss", which made me quit the game in anger.

Too bad it has those glitches, since it does have some unique charm to it.

8007

Living Room / Re: Brainsplatters 2: Flash Game of the Day

« Last post by f0dder on October 30, 2006, 08:39 AM »

Frustrating.

What makes it really frustrating is that it's not just about being fast - when baddies enter the scene, you can't shoot them until they stand still, and then you have some <500ms time window to shoot them.

This is extremely annoying in are(n)a... 3? "It's a spy, shoot him!", then there's like 4-5 baddies appearing that you need to shoot. Then a small "cutscene" where you see this guy going out of a door, and you can't bloody shoot the fscker until you've seen the cutscene, and have, what, 100ms or so to click you button. FRU STRA TING!
 

8008

Living Room / Zen Bondage: a game that isn't kinky

« Last post by f0dder on October 30, 2006, 07:51 AM »

While browsing http://pouet.net the other day, I stumbled upon "Zen Bondage". With a name like that, I just had to check it out . The concept is pretty simple: you have a rope covered in paint, and have to cover the entire object by, well, bondaging it. This can get pretty tricky!


http://www.pouet.net...prod.php?which=20938

Note that this is a demoscene kinda thing, so it isn't a fully finished game - for instance you don't "win" when you get 100% coverage, you just have to hit escape and select quit, and go on to the next object.

8009

Living Room / More cool multi-touch intuitive screen stuff

« Last post by f0dder on October 30, 2006, 07:47 AM »

Pretty neat stuff - dunno if it'd be universally usable though, some things require more precision than your big, fat fingers can give . I watched this without sound, so I have no idea what he's talking (and gesticulating wildly) about - I just enjoyed the show


http://ted.com/tedta...n&flashEnabled=1

8010

General Software Discussion / Re: Sophos no whiner

« Last post by f0dder on October 28, 2006, 05:15 PM »

JavaJones: if I didn't have restrictive filtering in my router, those attacks would have been direct on my system, rather than something I selectively analyzed. If I had the same filtering but used IE to surf the net (some of the "seedier" sites), same story applies. The two times I've been infected was when I didn't run antivirus, let some friend check hotmail and check a site, and got infected from malware in banner ads.

Considering the kind of sites a normal user visit (and the kind of sites I sometimes visit to analyze stuff), heuristics and behaviour blocking is very welcome. Not everybody visits only clean-room sites from a limited user account using firefox in vmware

It's a bad move that Microsot blocks these kinds of things, since malware willfind a way around it. And same goes for driver signing - if I went Vista, I'd have to run in "developer mode" to run 3rd-party drivers for things like daemon-tools, ext2fs (linux) filesystem access, etc. Bad bad.

8011

Living Room / Re: Productivity killer: Line Rider (Flash game)

« Last post by f0dder on October 28, 2006, 08:31 AM »

Cute idea, but I suck at drawing

8012

Living Room / Re: "Pong... Not just a game" - A true classic

« Last post by f0dder on October 28, 2006, 08:03 AM »

Classic move

8013

Living Room / Re: Strange statues around the world

« Last post by f0dder on October 28, 2006, 07:59 AM »

Nice - some of those statues are really amazing... And then there's the just plain amusing perv ones, like the on in pic 22-23-24.

Great find!

8014

General Software Discussion / Re: Sophos no whiner

« Last post by f0dder on October 28, 2006, 07:53 AM »

JavaJones: heuristics is useful for detecting a piece of malware that has been edited slightly (either hex edited or just some minor source changes), or packed/crypted with some random tool - static checks fail there.

I analyze malware every now and then, and it's nice seeing that Kaspersky's heuristics catches at least some of it, since the code is never allowed to run that way.

I haven't had any significant false positives for years - only thing is that some low-level asm code (like "SEH in asm") is detected as "virtools" by Kaspersky and some other scanners, which is pretty lame - there's nothing virus-related to those. Other than that I've had a few false positives while developing my packer/krypter, but that is some pretty suspicious code

After heuristics, there's than behavioral blocking - the last line of defence (since this happens on code that has been allowed to run on your machine). This can stop malware from injecting code in other processes and all kinds of other stuff.

An example: when adding random-IV to fSekrit, I needed to save a bunch of copies of the same text with same encryption key, to see if it worked. Kaspersky alerted me that "this process might be a trojan dropper" and offered me to shut it down.

8015

Best Text Editor / Re: Please correct EmEditor review

« Last post by f0dder on October 28, 2006, 07:36 AM »

Suggestion: Either use YYYY-MM-DD format, or switch to a completely unambiguous DD-mmm-YYYY format (ie, something like "15. October 2006").

8016

General Software Discussion / Re: Sophos no whiner

« Last post by f0dder on October 27, 2006, 04:51 AM »

Sophos said its products protect computers from attacks by studying a virus's resemblance to older, related viruses, not by examining how the attack interacts with the machine.

In other words, they're only detecting based on known viruses, not doing behavioral blocking? Bad bad.

As I've said before, take a look at http://www.resplendence.com/hookanalyzer . Kaspersky (who aren't whining but leaving it to the bigger companies) have a *lot* of hooks, in order to have good protection. daemon-tools have hooks, etc.

Remember: malware authors will find a way to do their hooking, Microsoft will not be able to keep up with patches, and in the end only the end-users and developers will be hurt. Sure, the bar will be raised a bit, but that's it.

8017

Living Room / Re: Want to save gasoline? Lose some weight.

« Last post by f0dder on October 26, 2006, 07:29 PM »

Haha

8018

General Software Discussion / Re: Two New Internet Explorer 7 Reviews

« Last post by f0dder on October 26, 2006, 05:31 AM »

By the way....

[attachimg=#1][/attachimg]
http://fredericiana....m-redmond-with-love/

8019

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« Last post by f0dder on October 25, 2006, 09:51 PM »

Plasma Man: it would be pretty useful to have a set of criteria for comparison, indeed - and the ones you list aren't half bad.

Anyone up for doing a *real* comparison?

8020

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« Last post by f0dder on October 25, 2006, 09:10 AM »

Actually this is very useful thing. Not the search by mp3 bitrate, but, say, search by file's Subversion status. Say, I can with couple key presses find all files that are not in SVN repository yet... This is what X2 does for me.

-wasker

I assume you use TortoiseSVN then? - that's the beauty of X2, instead of requiring specific plugins, it works with standard explorer extensions.

The "extract custom icon overlays" feature of X2 is really nifty with TortoiseSVN, and it's nifty that you can turn it off as well (since it does slow down things). As a compromise, I've configured Tortoise to only check status for my D:\ partition, where I have my source code, documents, ...

I tend to only have {name, size, extension, modified} columns, since that's what I need for file management. Many tab types slow down stuff (things like MP3 info massively so!), and I don't really need that stuff.

Oh well, the TC mindset just isn't my thing

8021

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2006, 06:47 PM »

Hm, I don't use mouse when using X2... it has plenty of hotkeys. Perhaps not as configurable as TC, but I haven't looked into that - the default hotkeys suit me perfectly

And TC doesn't seem faster (at least not when I turn off "extract custom icon overlays" in X2). Fonts etc are configurable in X2 as well.

FireFox, its extensions and speed beats Opera

-gussan

FF beats O in number of extensions, but certainly not in speed

Wasker, let me ask you something, X2 can search inside mp3 files, for example and give you the encoder used or the bitrate of the file? With TC you can, using Content Plugins.

-gussan

That's the kind of stuff I personally hate in a file explorer - and a thing that I used to turn off in WinXP explorer because it annoys the hell out of me.

But it all comes down to how you like using things. I don't like my file management util to handle ftp and archiving, FlashFXP and WinRAR do a better job for me - cetera.

Josh: you'll need to look at HKCU\Directory and HKCU\Folder - be cautious, though, not many explorer replacements are up to the task of being associated with those keys. Even with xPlorer2 there's a few glitches under XP, because of just how much XP uses explorer namespace extensions for lots of management tasks... but it works okay for me.

8022

General Software Discussion / Re: Two New Internet Explorer 7 Reviews

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2006, 05:23 AM »

2gig ram, amd64x2 4400+, 2x160gb maxtor sata disks in mirror (not the fastest disks these days, but not shabby either). KAV6 with on-demand scanning. Launching something that should be "small" or "trivial" (like display driver config or a humble web browser) should be done in less than one second, otherwise it annoys me.

Certainly isn't the case with ATI .net driver panel, nvidias panel (even the "old" one), firefox...

8023

Post New Requests Here / Re: Disable command line varibles in running processes

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2006, 02:05 AM »

There's no general way to do this, no, since /whatever could really be, well, whatever, and implemented however

So you're left having to find a specific way for your specific problem... which we can't help you with before you tell us what your problem is

8024

Post New Requests Here / Re: Disable command line varibles in running processes

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2006, 01:39 AM »

That's a pretty vague and confusing question...

8025

General Software Discussion / Re: Two New Internet Explorer 7 Reviews

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2006, 01:38 AM »

dk70: 2 seconds (or "counting to two") is a loooong time for me - and about the time FF takes to load. With IE6, I can't even count to 1. Of course the comparison is not entirely fair, since IE6 is pretty Vanilla... But Maxthon loads just as fast, and has a lot of the features the FF brings. And this is second-time launches, when program code is in filesystem cache.

Why do I close my browser? Well, when I don't use it, I dont' see any reason it should take up screen space, nor a place in the task bar or a little icon in the tray. Nor sit in memory, for that matter. Perhaps somewhat of a pedantic thing.

The sluggish load time of FF is just one of those small annoyances - not something I'm going to bother setting up a ramdisk to solve - and sure is a smaller annoyance than the much-more-often-targetted exploits in IE >_<