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Recent Posts

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8826
Living Room / Re: BitTorrent - why bother?
« Last post by f0dder on March 28, 2006, 07:36 AM »
The world of torrents is pretty chaotic. You have to make sure you're "connectable" (ie, if you have a NAT router or firewall, you need to punch holes open for the BT client). Then you also need to make sure you upload at a decent rate to your peers, but not too much or your downstream will die because of upstream traffic.

Then there's the whole business of finding "good" torrents. If you're dealing with legal stuff, that shouldn't be too hard. For shady stuff, you need private trackers otherwise your speed will be abysmal.

uTorrent is certainly the best windows client I've found. It does what needs to be done, no more and no less. No bloat and great speeds. Supposedly it's cache system needs some rewriting to be suitable for 100mbit connections to the internet, but... :)

The torrent technology is great when applied correctly, though. It allows for great speeds, great availability, corruption-checking on the fly (ie., you don't need to do .sfv verification as you often need with FTP), et cetera. Unfortunately some companies are abusing torrents - like blizzard, who don't really have massive enough servers, but depend on their peers. Their tracker for WOW updates is usually swamped after an update is release, and their client SUCKS so much that I used to manually extract the .torrent file from it, and used with uTorrent.
8827
General Software Discussion / Re: Easy slipstreaming tool ...
« Last post by f0dder on March 28, 2006, 07:25 AM »
I've been using nLite for a while, since it's nice stripping the fat out of WinXP. Add some apps of your own + a bit of scripting, and you can have a fully customized windows installed to a bare machine in less than half an hour.
8828
General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?
« Last post by f0dder on March 28, 2006, 07:22 AM »
Registry cleaners are ho-humm too. Registry lookups are very efficient in NT because of the way the structures are stored, so you won't get much performance just because there's "fewer keys to look through" (even if this was the case, consider that you'd probably remove only a few hundred of the many thousand existing keys).

What you can really benefit from, though, is to make sure your registry is 100% defragmented... oh, and there might be some benefit related to COM object cleanup too...
8829
General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?
« Last post by f0dder on March 26, 2006, 04:49 AM »
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/7900/freeramxppro3252006120011pmver.jpg

Free Ram XP Pro - http://www.yourwaresolutions.com/
Freeware application to free and optimize your computer's RAM (Random Access Memory), resulting in an increase in system performance and productivity. Automatically configures itself for ease of use and also features advanced options and customizability.

Hrm, these programs JUST DON'T WORK. Period. All they do is to page stuff out. Pay heed to the wisdom of FreeBSD: "unused RAM is wasted RAM". The memory defragmenters, cleaners, et cetera are nothing but system pessimizers...
8830
We seem to do the same bookmark things, then, mouser :)
8831
Living Room / Re: Here's a blood boiler
« Last post by f0dder on March 25, 2006, 10:14 PM »
Grmbl.

I hate kiddies. As if it wasn't easy enough to get the info you need, now they sell kits? *sigh*
8832
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Buzzsaw - free background HD defragmenter
« Last post by f0dder on March 25, 2006, 10:13 PM »
Yeah, it was DisKeeper, which seems to be highly overrated.

It would be interesting to do before-and-after shots of the fragmentation map and most-fragmented-files overview in PerfectDisk after running dirms/buzzaw (starting with a PD 100% defragged volume, of course).

Fragmap is a good overview, and filefrag gives pretty nice "hard data" :)
8833
I'm currently struggling on whether to think this whole thing is a good or a bad idea. From a purist viewpoint it's bad, since you should sort your bookmarks into sub, sub-sub, sub-sub-sub (etc.) categories. But from a pragmatic viewpoint, it's useful - even if you do subgroup your bookmarks.

This is one reason why explorer-style links-to-bookmark-URLs is nice; this would probably be more complicated for firefox et al.
8834
Living Room / Re: hard drive resurrection [I'm desperate!]
« Last post by f0dder on March 25, 2006, 01:11 PM »
Yup, Baseman speaks the truth. When doing recovery, I tend to use an imaging app to image the entire drive (or as much of it as I can), instead of restoring individual files. It's faster as well as less stressful for the drive (you get a linear start-to-end instead of a lot of head movement). Once you have the image file, you can start recovering files from it...

the key points are: grabbing image file instead of imaging file should be less stressful for the damaged drive, and once that's done you can restore files from the image. NEVER EVER do any kind of in-place "rescue".
8835
Post New Requests Here / Re: commandline datestamp favorites
« Last post by f0dder on March 25, 2006, 10:46 AM »
:tellme: Do you get two digit year stamp?
Nono, don't worry, it was just in response to mouser's original post :)
8836
The substitution probably can't be done directly within a regexp, but regexp means you can identify the text to be substituted easily and safely, but without having to parse XML...
8837
fSekrit / Re: Progress report etc.
« Last post by f0dder on March 25, 2006, 10:16 AM »
Another guy from work had his VISA stolen as well. The guy who abused it has been stupid enough to walk into a bank and withdraw from it, so it should only be a matter of time before he's tracked down. Also, it was abused online for about $1000 - it took him a few days before he realized it was stolen.

I hope it's the same guy that stole mine, it would be nice having the guy tracked down and fired. From my bank statements, I can see that my card was abused for Denmark's largest ISP's music-download service. TDC is known for having pretty skilled technicians (and facist logging), so I would think their music service has fascist logging as well. If a guy is dumb enough to walk into a bank with a stolen card, he'll be dumb enough to order online stuff from home (thinking that "I'm safe if I don't order physical stuff to my home address").

8838
Living Room / Re: Food that just isn't "right"
« Last post by f0dder on March 25, 2006, 10:12 AM »
Eek! :P
8839
Hm, it sounds like something that would be very simple to do with a scripting language that supports regular expressions. PERL, anyone? :)
8840
Post New Requests Here / Re: commandline datestamp favorites
« Last post by f0dder on March 25, 2006, 10:10 AM »
Four-digit year stamp is preferable... makes the file sort much more naturally if you have pre-2000 files :)
8841
fSekrit / Re: Is the application part of the file encrypted also?
« Last post by f0dder on March 25, 2006, 09:19 AM »
A decent file-comparison tool would also have clued you in - even the built-in "fc" command of windows works - fc /b file.original file.new. I prefer a decent hex editor and things like http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/ though :)
8842
Sounds very useful!
8843
fSekrit / Progress report etc.
« Last post by f0dder on March 25, 2006, 09:08 AM »
Hey everybody,

thought I would give a little status/progress report on the next version of fSekrit. I had originally planned to have the next version ready by the end of March/start of April so it could be included in the DC newsletter.

Unfortunately, the last two weeks have been really shitty. Last week, my VISA credit card was stolen at work, and has so far been abused for about $85 (I discovered the theft and blocked the card within 12 hours, but international credit card use sometimes take a week or two to show up on bank statements). My bank will cover this, but it took over a week before I got a new card, and you realize how dependent you are on those things.

A month ago, I sent in my phone for repairs - the "joystick" on it was fubar, something that appearantly happens with all k500i phones (happened to both my brothers, they got theirs repaired for free). But appearantly mine was damaged due to moisture (as if! it's a mechanical problem!), so I'd have to pay $45 just to get the phone back - unrepaired!

Tuesday I fell down from some packages and bumped my head and trashed my arm. Not too bad, I could work again the next day, but bad enough that it's still a bit stiff and strained so heavy lifts are a bit painful. Unfortunately, heavy lifts are what I do most of the time at work.

Thursday, my old "backup" cellphone was stolen at work. I switched clothes at a toilet, and had left the phone near the sink while I switched. Of course I forgot it there, and 15min later after talking with my boss, I realized I had forgotten it... and it was gone. Not a big deal either, it was a crappy phone that only cost me $1, I needed another phone anyway, and I had all my contacts stored on my PC anyway.

At least I got a nice amount of cash in tax refunds, so I went to buy a new phone, some clothes, and other misc. stuff. After 50min I returned to where I had parked my bicycle, and... it was gone. Which really sucks, since I don't have insurance yet, and I have to bike to work since it's so early in the morning there's no buses.

On top of this, I have had a pretty tight schedule the last week; mum's birtday a couple days ago, and celebrating my dad's birthday later today. Both involves an amount of hours of train travel, and unfortunately I don't have a laptop, so the travel time can't be used constructively.

All this has drained my energy, and all the administrative crap involved in talking with bank people, the police, finding an insurance company etc. has taken a lot of time. I'll do my best to have something ready soon, but I'm not sure I can get it done in time for the newsletter.

The upcoming version will have a few bugfixes, menu items for functionality already there in form of keyboard shortcuts, and probably some mouse right-click stuff too. The main new features will be search and replace.

For a future release, I have unicode/utf-8 support planned, as well as some features that will make fSekrit even safer than it is now, while at the same time making save more convenient (none of the exit-reopen stuff that makes the window "flash" and forget cursor position). I'm also thinking about a "mass-conversion" tool for text files, but that will be external to avoid code bloat. And I've been pondering about making fSekrit a "suite" of small useful encryption tools, like self-extracting encrypted files.

So, just a little update so you don't think I've been slacking off.
8844
Living Room / Re: hard drive resurrection [I'm desperate!]
« Last post by f0dder on March 25, 2006, 08:41 AM »
Mineral oil is a bad idea, harddrives are NOT vacuum sealed. Freezer works, but should only be done when the drive shows up in the BIOS (etc., PCB works)... because once you've frozen the drive, it's a matter of time before it dies. It can be valuable when you have a really quirky drive which you *have* to rescue data from, though :)
8845
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Locate 3.0 - great HD search tool
« Last post by f0dder on March 22, 2006, 02:58 PM »
Ah doh, slate and rainy day look pretty much alike :)
8846
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Locate 3.0 - great HD search tool
« Last post by f0dder on March 22, 2006, 02:38 PM »
unrelated, but... "rainy day" windows theme, eh? Thought I was the only one ;)
Huh? :D

I suppose you are talking about the first image in my first post in this thread? If so, read that line above that image again :)

"Rainy Day" color scheme, not windows theme, sorry :) (ie, desktop properties -> apperance tab -> color scheme dropdown).
8847
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Buzzsaw - free background HD defragmenter
« Last post by f0dder on March 22, 2006, 02:09 PM »
The best I've come around is PerfectDisk, which really *does* make a difference. O&O Defrag and "that other popular commercial defragger I can't remember the name of" don't make much a difference compared to windows own utility, in my experience.

The best defragger I've ever seen was the one from Nuts & Bolts for win9x. It did a lot of planning beforehand, so it didn't have to shuffle data around as much as other defraggers do - it was much more intelligent, thus doing a quicker job even though it was as least as thorough as the others.
8848
Developer's Corner / Re: Do you use a good office chair when programming?
« Last post by f0dder on March 22, 2006, 02:00 PM »
I used to have a pretty lousy wooden chair, but after I moved in with the gf I now have a more decent office-style chair :). Still not top-notch, but decent enough. No-name brand etc.
8849
Living Room / Re: How long will it take you to adopt Windows Vista as your OS?
« Last post by f0dder on March 22, 2006, 01:56 PM »
I dunno how much the new XML-based file formats will really matter. Sure, XML is easier to parse than a binary format, but afaik Microsoft decided not to make the necessary schemas open after all. WinFS and other "interesting" things were dropped anyway, which is probably good since they didn't really make much sense and would have made the system even more bloated than it's already going to be.
8850
Living Room / Re: Samsung unveils 32GB Flash-based HDD killer
« Last post by f0dder on March 22, 2006, 01:53 PM »
...but search time should be reduced from miliseconds to micro/nanoseconds.
That is called "Locate" --> https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=1385.0

SCNR :D

You misunderstood - and I've should've used "seek time" instead of "search time". Iirc on harddrives this means the time between the read/write head is told to move to a position and when it's actually there. This *greatly* affects drive performance when dealing with multiple file operations at one time, or dealing with heavily fragmented files.

But yes, it also has an effect on filesearch, since filesystem meta information tends not to be located in one big blow, and thus read/write head movement is needed :)
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