Recent Posts

8701

Living Room / Re: hard drive resurrection [I'm desperate!]

« Last post by f0dder on April 23, 2006, 04:46 AM »

Did you try the ebay drive *before* doing the PCB transplant?

8702

General Software Discussion / Re: Privacy solution for external USB drive?

« Last post by f0dder on April 23, 2006, 04:45 AM »

Jeff, if you could make do with just some text files, you could use my fSekrit program - it sounds like you do need binary files, though. If you don't want to / can't install drivers, a transparent solution will be very hard to come by - and anything that looks transparent but doesn't use drivers means plaintext temporary files >_<

8703

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?

« Last post by f0dder on April 22, 2006, 07:00 AM »

Alley cat - real classic: http://www.abandonia...ownload/AlleyCat.htm

8704

General Software Discussion / Re: Privacy solution for external USB drive?

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2006, 08:23 AM »

If you use NTFS on the portable drive, you can use windows' built-in EFS encryption... doesn't work on "Home" editions of XP, though.

8705

Basic / Re: What flavors of basic?

« Last post by f0dder on April 20, 2006, 08:52 AM »

Perhaps start with a single section and see if there's demand for more? One lesson we learnt at http://www.asmcommunity.net is that too much fragmentation makes people confused.

8706

Developer's Corner / Re: the OS 3d engine Irrlicht just released it's 1.0

« Last post by f0dder on April 20, 2006, 04:18 AM »

Sou should remove the www. from the sourceforce link

8707

Backup Guide / Re: Acronis now does backup of individual files/folders

« Last post by f0dder on April 20, 2006, 04:16 AM »

Acronis has had file-level backup for a while... and I agree with Carol that it's pretty basic. If it only didn't sometimes confuse what to include in an incremental backup, it would suit my needs perfectly though (but it doesn't, and thus sometimes a daily incremental backup is a couple of gigabytes - ouch.)

8708

Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - Special visual effects : how to render raindrops onto a JPG

« Last post by f0dder on April 20, 2006, 04:15 AM »

Yes, I know - iirc they added asm blocks in v6. Before that, only "inline machine code" was possible, which looked a lot like what FBSL does. Ie, something like...

[Select]

function getBP:word; inline($8b/$c5);

8709

C / C++ / Re: C++ Programming Resources

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2006, 01:04 PM »

A bit on the techier site, but really good: http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/

Also, I would recommend Microsoft Visual C++ 2003 toolkit over the GNU compiler - it produces better code and has better C++ compliance. http://msdn.microsof...sualc/vctoolkit2003/ . Requires more setting up than dev-c++ though.

If you want something lighter than a full-blood IDE, I can recommend http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net - it has C/C++/... syntax highlighting.

There's also http://www.codeblocks.org/ instead of dev-C++, worth checking out.

8710

Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - Special visual effects : how to render raindrops onto a JPG

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2006, 07:11 AM »

OpenGL depends on your video card and almost not on your CPU speed, so...

Fine ...it's still faster than you think, without the "asm" code.

-Cpilot (April 19, 2006, 07:01 AM)

I think you misunderstood me, btw - I'm not saying it isn't fast, just that the sample would be more interesting *without* the "byte blocks of machine code". If it was at assembly code instead, at least it would be readable. But it would be more interesting to see this with "native" FBSL code, still.

8711

Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - Special visual effects : how to render raindrops onto a JPG

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2006, 06:57 AM »

Would be nicer if it could be done without machine code - or even if FBSL just supported assembly instead of turbo pascal-style machine code blocks

FBSL is pretty damn fast, it'll render openGL seamlessly.
I think Mike was just showing off a little. 

-Cpilot (April 19, 2006, 06:41 AM)

OpenGL depends on your video card and almost not on your CPU speed, so...

8712

Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - Special visual effects : how to render raindrops onto a JPG

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2006, 06:16 AM »

Would be nicer if it could be done without machine code - or even if FBSL just supported assembly instead of turbo pascal-style machine code blocks

8713

Living Room / Re: Firefox CPU usage

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2006, 06:11 AM »

Btw, a thing that means high CPU usage in any web browser: flash. Flash is soooo badly programmed.

8714

Living Room / Re: Is it safe to try new freeware?

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2006, 03:09 PM »

Was a pretty nice mini-article - should probably be more info on VM's like vmware, virtualpc (bochs, qemu aren't up to speed), and perhaps some of the sandbox apps (though they seem a bit flaky). VMWare is definitely the super-safe way to test things, especially with it's machine snapshot feature.

8715

General Software Discussion / Re: Backing up to protect against operating system or hard drive failure

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2006, 08:04 AM »

Heh, you should fear filesystem crashes... they happen very rarely, but when they hit - they hit *hard*. ATi vide drivers are known to cause problems, for instance.

8716

Living Room / Re: Firefox CPU usage

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2006, 08:03 AM »

FFox does have insane memory usage compared to IE tho.

-f0dder (April 18, 2006, 07:50 AM)

"A lot more" is true regarding the possibilites of FF vs. IE though too!

-brotherS (April 18, 2006, 07:59 AM)

True... but you can get sorta all that functionality by using some other IE-based browser like Avant or Maxthon - I'm on the fox, though, because it's still not as targetted as IE (and no, I don't have any illusions that FF's code is much better than IE's). I'd be on Opera if it didn't have misc. rendering bugs and it had better adblocking + a few more things, it's faster and leaner and meaner than FF.

8717

Borland C++ Builder Contest / Re: ScummVM Front End by Shed of BCB-Tools

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2006, 07:52 AM »

<3 ScummVM 

I wouldn't call it an emulator though, it's more like a "lucasarts custom game format player" - they have their own virtual machine/scripting language. Quite impressive, considering just how old some of their early adventure games are!

8718

Living Room / Re: Firefox CPU usage

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2006, 07:50 AM »

Sorry I can't help with the CPU usage problem, but Mark sent me this link the other day from LifeHacker showing you how you can reduce the RAM that Firefox uses up. It's pretty neat to see it go from 150MB down to 6-8MB just by minimizing it:

http://tech.cybernet...firefox-memory-leak/

-Deozaan (April 17, 2006, 10:55 PM)

If you do that, watch Process Explorer closely. If it's a hack that pages out memory to disk, it's NOT worth it ("unused RAM is wasted RAM" + swap is slow). FFox does have insane memory usage compared to IE tho.

8719

General Software Discussion / Re: Backing up to protect against operating system or hard drive failure

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2006, 07:48 AM »

RAID1 doesn't help you against filesystem crashes, just like it doesn't help you against deleted files or virii... RAID1 is a dumb mirror that only protects you against physical hardware failure. (Yeah, I use RAID1 too).

8720

Living Room / Re: Is it safe to try new freeware?

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2006, 10:09 PM »

Bookmarking, will read when I get back from job.

8721

General Software Discussion / Re: Backing up to protect against operating system or hard drive failure

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2006, 10:07 PM »

I think this sounds like the best of all (asside from putting apps in C). With the page file at the outer most ring of the HDD platters it theoretically gives the best performance (I think) and being the only file should keep it from gettting fragged.

-Hirudin (April 17, 2006, 07:53 AM)

...On the other hand, it might induce more seek-time. Then again, drives are made of multiple platters. Then again-again, unless you use (memory)sucky Adobe programs, you shouldn't need the paging file.

I still vouch for keeping docs/source/data on a separate partition. It doesn't matter extremely much these days with pretty stable filesystems like NTFS, but a "combined" partition like brotherS's does get more traffic and abuse. If you have docs/source/data on a separate partition, that wouldn't be affected by a FS crash on the "high activity" partition.

8722

Developer's Corner / Re: Nice short article on how people quickly scan pages and its implications

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2006, 06:15 AM »

Obviosly the reading pattern will have something to do with how the layout of the site is done. I'd be much more interested in some tests that show how easily users lose interest / are confused by various site layouts. For example, something like slashdot tries to cram too much information onto the screen - but it's still only a pretty mild case.

8723

Official Announcements / Re: APRIL SOFTWARE DRAWING RESULTS - POSTED!

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2006, 06:09 AM »

* f0dder does a happy little dance

8724

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Tweak Tool?

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2006, 03:21 AM »

When writing long forum posts, they go to notepad and get a ctrl+s. I almost always start out in the quick reply, sometimes move (ctrl-a, ctrl-c, ctrl-v) to the "normal" reply (if I need to attach files etc), sometimes to notepad. I've had a browser crash/stall on me too many times with long posts.

I haven't used and tweak utilities for a while; there's only a few that I find interesting, and those are applied at system install time with the help of www.nLiteos.com and some custom scripts I've written in http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/

8725

Living Room / Re: TCPA ... Scary stuff

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2006, 03:17 AM »

Things are changing...

* f0dder does a scared little dance.