The area in patheticcockroach.com where the EEG isn't isoelectric
VideoLAN Client (VLC) Media Player version 1.1.2 was released yesterday, 29 July. It’s a bugfix release, as noted in the release notes. PortableApps will likely release their new version soon, but for those who can’t wait here’s an updated version already. As usual, I made it using the previous launcher from PortableApps (1.1.1) on the latest VLC release.
Once again, this is not an official release from portableapps, it’s a custom, “home-made” package. Here you go:
Posted in portable software.
– 2010-07-30
Last Sunday, my Asus M50Vn crashed like I’d never seen before while I was working playing “working” for Wiki4Games: while getting ready in Alien Swarm’s limbo, the PC suddenly shutdown. Not a BSoD, not a freeze, just an immediate shutdown, with the computer switch’s “click”. At first I even thought it was a hardware failure, but I turned it back on without a problem, and it worked fine for the rest of the day. The day after, while doing basic stuff on the desktop (some OpenOffice and such), the screen suddenly went all blue and blinking at the bottom, and I had to do a hard reboot. This time this looked more like software trouble, so I thought about what could possibly have recently changed on that PC. And something had, indeed: I updated the graphics drivers the Saturday just before (because I hoped it would help with the shitloads of crashes I got with the Lead and Gold demo): I upgraded the 197.16 drivers to 258.96. So, well, this was time for a downgrade ^^. And it indeed solved the problem.
So, to sum up, NVIDIA graphics drivers version 258.96 may create trouble on the Asus M50Vn with a GeForce 9650M GT running Windows XP. If you experience random crashes with this notebook and those drivers, try to downgrade to 197.16.
Posted in Asus M50Vn, nVidia.
– 2010-07-27
VideoLAN Client (VLC) Media Player version 1.1.1 was released yesterday, 21 July. It’s a bugfix release, as noted in the release notes. PortableApps will likely release their new version soon, but for those who can’t wait here’s an updated version already. As usual, I made it using the previous launcher from PortableApps (1.1.0 rev 2) on the latest VLC release.
Once again, this is not an official release from portableapps, it’s a custom, “home-made” package. Here you go:
Edit: link fixed. Sorry for the downtime, usually this file host (demo.ovh.com) is more reliable…
Posted in portable software.
– 2010-07-22
As mentioned in the previous post, 7-Zip is a great piece of open-source compression software. Although you’ll most likely want to use the GUI version for daily use, power users may find the command line version useful for batch jobs. The command line version is bundled in the global installation package, so as far as you installed 7-Zip you do have the command line version installed, too.
Since the 9.x versions have been around for quite a while now and the 4.65 version is getting old, we’ll only cover the 9.x versions (at the time of writing, the 9.15 beta offered as a portable application in the above-mentioned post). If you want to stick with the 4.65 version I suggest you have a look as those examples or at the documentation (the Windows batch commands are of course the same but the 7-Zip parameters are a bit different, and also the executable itself has a different name: 7za.exe instead of 7z.exe).
For all those examples, we’ll assume that 7-Zip is installed in G:\UTILITIES\7-Zip\. Also, note that if you want to launch those commands from within a batch file instead of directly from the command line, you need to add an additional ‘%’ in front of ‘%A’ in the for commands. Finally, we are using LZMA2 with the maximum compression level. If you want LZMA, well, obviously just replace -m9=LZMA2 with -m9=LZMA. It’s actually easy to do a lot more customization, just check out 7-zip.chm in your 7-Zip installation folder.
This one will compress every file located within the current directory (one archive per file) and which have a bmp or txt extension:
for %A in (*.png *.txt) do "G:\UTILITIES\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -t7z -m9=LZMA2 "%A.7z" "%A"
This one will individually (one archive per file) compress all files located within L:\My\Folder\ (and all sub-folders) and which have a txt or doc extension:
for /R "L:\My\Folder\" %A in (*.txt *.doc) do "G:\UTILITIES\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -t7z -m9=LZMA2 "%A.7z" "%A"
Also, note that all archives will be placed in the same folder as the file the contain (so there will be archives all around all sub-folders).
This one will compress every folder of the current directory (one archive per first sub-level folder):
for /D %A in (*) do "G:\UTILITIES\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -t7z -m9=LZMA2 "%A.7z" "%A"
To write those commands the following pages were useful:
Posted in Windows, programming.
– 2010-07-20
7-Zip is an open source file archiver with a high compression ratio. Its primary compression method is LZMA, which often compresses better than RAR. Originally developed for Windows, other projects like p7zip and PeaZip made this format also usable on Linux and Mac OS.
PortableApps released a portable version of the latest stable 7-Zip version, 4.65, released in February 2009. Since then, a lot of development has been made but only betas were released yet, thus PortableApps didn’t make new versions. So, as usual, I made a “home-made” package using PortableApps’s current launcher combined with the latest 7-Zip version, and here it is, 7-Zip 9.15 beta portable, as a zip so you’re not screwed if your network blocks EXEs and you can open it simply with Windows Explorer if you don’t have better.
The main interest of the 9.x beta series is the new compression algorithm LZMA2, which compresses quite faster than LZMA if heavily multithreaded, and which generates close to zero overhead when used on uncompressible data.
Posted in portable software.
– 2010-07-01
VideoLAN Client (VLC) Media Player version 1.1.0 (“The luggage”) was released today. If you’re on Windows, upgrading promptly is rather important, as you’re probably running version 1.0.5, which contains some serious vulnerabilities that were fixed in version 1.0.6 (no compiled binaries of this version were released for Windows). Of course, VLC 1.1.0 contains some other interesting new stuff such as hardware video decoding, new codecs (WebM, Vorbis 6.1/7.1, FLAC 6.1/7.1 and more), an extension system, improved speed, etc. Well, in short, it’s worth upgrading, unless you’re a SHOUTcast addict.
As often, it will probably take a few days for PortableApps to update their version, so here is one I quickly packed (and tested on a PC without VLC installed). It’s simply the VLC 1.1.0 release (binary 7-zip version) combined with VLC Portable 1.0.5 from PortableApps.
Once again, this is not an official release from portableapps, it’s a custom, “home-made” package. Here you go:
Posted in portable software.
– 2010-06-22
I ended up installing Fedora 13 from a USB key, and the Live USB creation program I used (UNetbootin) wouldn’t work with anything more complete than the LiveCD. So, a lot of dependencies are missing. For the NVIDIA drivers, the missing stuff was kernel-devel and gcc. For Opera 10.10, it was… Qt 3. So, to make Opera work in Fedora 13 64 bits, you can either yum install qt3 or… get Opera 10.60 beta 1 (which probably relies on Qt 4, already installed if you installed things like VLC).
General tip: to find what dependencies are missing for a particular program:
1. launch it from the terminal, so you’ll get verbose error messages (when you launch a program from the GUI usually you just see nothing if it fails)
2. when you see missing files, use RPM Find to find out what package contains the file you need.
– 2010-06-20
Pioneer One is a free (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license) series. They recently published their first episode on torrent networks and are raising money to produce the upcoming episodes (at the moment they are at $3,400 donated vs a $20,000 goal for the next 3 episodes). For more information, see their official page @vodo.net: http://vodo.net/pioneerone.
Synopsis:
An object in the sky spreads radiation over North America. Fearing terrorism, U.S. Homeland Security agents are dispatched to investigate and contain the damage. What they discover will have implications for the entire world.
Since it can be uncomfortable to use peer-to-peer on some networks, I mirrored the episode on megaupload (merge using lxsplit or hjsplit):
NFO of the 720p version:
░░██████████████████████████░░
░████████████████████████████████░
░████████████████████████████████████░ ┐ ┌ ┌───┐ ┌──┐ ┌───┐
▒███████▒ ▒███████▒ └┐ ┌┘ │ │ │ └┐ │ │
███████▒ ░░░ ░░░ ▒███████ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │
░██████▒ ░▓▓████ ████▓▓░ ▒██████░ └┐ ┌┘ │ │ │ │ │ │
░██████░ ░▓██████▓ ▓██████▓░ ░██████░ │ │ │ │ │ ┌┘ │ │
░██████░ ░▓███████▓ ▓███████▓░ ░██████░ └─┘ └───┘ └──┘ └───┘
░██████░ ▓██████▓░ ░▓██████▓ ░██████░
░██████░ ▒███████ ███████▒ ░██████░
░██████░ ▒▓██████▓▓██████▓▒ ░██████░ ┌──╜ VODO Proudly Presents ╙──┐
░██████░ ░▓████████████▓░ ░██████░ │ │
░██████░ ░▓██████████▓░ ░██████░ │ 'PIONEER ONE' │
░██████▒ ▓██████████▓ ▒██████░ │ │
███████▒ ░██████████░ ▒███████ │ S01E01 │
░███████▒░░ ░████████░ ░░▒███████░ │ │
░████████████████████████████████████░ │ http://vodo.net/ │
░████████████████████████████████░ │ │
░░██████████████████████████░░ └─────────────────────────────┘
▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
█▓▒░ ░▒▓█
█▒░ TITLE..........: Pioneer One ░▒█
█░ DIRECTOR.......: Bracey Smith ░█
█ YEAR...........: 2010 █
▌ GENRE..........: Drama/Sci-fi ▐
▌ RUNTIME........: 36 min ▐
▌ ▐
▌ AUDIO..........: 192kbit AAC ▐
▌ LANGUAGE.......: English ▐
▌ VIDEO..........: H.264 ▐
▌ RESOLUTION.....: 1280 x 720 ▐
▌ SUBS...........: None ▐
▌ SIZE...........: 1118 MB ▐
▌ ▐
▌ RELEASE #......: 005 ▐
▌ RELEASE DATE...: 2010-06-15 ▐
▌ ▐
▌ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▐
▌ ▐
▌ ╗ ╔ ╔═══╗ ╔══╗ ╔═══╗ ▐
▌ ╚╗ ╔╝ ║ ║ ║ ╚╗ ║ ║ ▐
▌ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ▐
▌ ╚╗ ╔╝ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ▐
▌ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ╔╝ ║ ║ ▐
▌ ╚═╝ ╚═══╝ ╚══╝ ╚═══╝ ▐
▌ ▐
▌ VODO works directly with filmmakers to bring ▐
▌ fresh, new films to the filesharing community. ▐
▌ ▐
▌ This work is released under a Creative Commons ▐
▌ license. ▐
▌ ▐
▌ Help make the next episode of Pioneer One ▐
▌ possible. ▐
▌ DONATE @ ▐
▌ ▐
▌ VODO is looking for volunteers to help with ▐
▌ all aspects of the project. Contact us at ▐
▌ . ▐
▌ ▐
▌ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▐
▌ ▐
▌ ╔═══╗ ╔══╗ ╔══╗ ╔══╗╔═╦═╗╔═══╗ ▐
▌ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ╔╝ ▐
▌ ║ ╔═╗ ╠═╦╝ ╠══ ╠══ ║ ╔═╝ ▐
▌ ║ ║ ║ ╚╗ ║ ║ ║ ╔╝ ▐
▌ ╚═══╝ ╚ ╚ ╚══╝ ╚══╝ ╨ ╚═══╝ ▐
▌ ▐
▌ ONEDDL - TPB - MININOVA - TORRENTFREAK ▐
▌ BITTORRENT - FROSTWIRE - LIMEWIRE ▐
▌ ISOHUNT - YOURBITTORRENT - VUZE - MIRO - SCNSRC - PLUBE ▐
█ EZTV - SNT - LEGIT TORRENTS - VEEHD - BITLET - SUMO █
█░ ZEROSEC - PRO TV - SHOOTING PEOPLE - TOK FM - INDIEFLIX ░█
█▒░ ░▒█
█▓▒░▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄░▒▓█
█vodo ion█
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Posted in Uncategorized.
– 2010-06-19
Yesterday I posted about how this Buzus trojan was ruining my evening. Fortunately, I had a fallback Windows XP installation from which I was not only able to manually remove the files I had spotted, but also to try and run various other antivirus scanners: Kaspersky online (the b*tch is disabled), F-Secure online (their online version has an outdated database), then an updated AntiVir which became able to detect part of the files I posted (3 out of 5, as far as I remember), and finally… I decided to give AVG a go.
AVG is one from this quite old trio of big free anti-virus software. The others being AntiVir/Avira (my current antivirus) and Avast!. I tried them all a long while ago, by the time of version 5-6 of AntiVir and AVG, and from this period I remembered how heavy AVG and Avast! were (plus they used to require a registration on their website) while AntiVir felt so light, with a rather miserable GUI that I liked but which used to repulse “basic” users. And I stuck with it until now, even though they “upgraded” the interface to something shiny but heavy like hell, notably because Avast! was still heavier and heavier and because AVG got pretty poor ratings from anti-virus tests during a large period.
But it wasn’t all brilliant. AntiVir saved my @$$, well, I don’t remember of a single time actually. Probably it caught a few highly suspicious files that I was going to check myself anyway, but that remained highly rare. During the same time, it gave me tons and tons of false positives, notably on a lot of things I programmed myself and packed using UPX, and on a lot of trainers (I used quite many of them for Wiki4Games…). It also failed to register that I don’t want it to detect that Abel & Cain installation file which has been sleeping on my PC for ages (and suddenly got detected forever after some update). And finally, it totally missed Buzus, which I only caught thanks to RegRun. When I caught the files and sent them to online scanners (Virustotal and VirSCAN), I noticed that:
After all I’d heard and seen in tests about AVG, I was rather amazed. But considering how I was disappointed with my AntiVir experience, I eventually decided to give it another chance.
First impression: bloody hard to find on avg.com: I ended up searching for AVG free on Google…
Second impression: omfg it’s huge: the installer is more than twice as big as AntiVir: 84 MiB vs 40 MiB (Avast: is 46 MiB)
The installer is ok, it seems to do weird things at the beginning but it turns out to be a good, normal installer with the usual options. No restart needed at the end, the first run update is fast, too. The installed program is, despite the bigger installer, smaller than AntiVir (around 55 MiB, maybe there’s stuff elsewhere though?).
I start by scanning the folder where I had isolated the infected files. They’re all detected and… deleted. Ow, not cool, the default configuration is to slay the infected files. Gladly, I found them in quarantine (they call this the Virus Vault 
), and there are options to disable this “I act without asking you first” behavior. Then I scan the whole infected Windows partition… gosh it takes ages… but it does find what AntiVir hadn’t found.
I finish cleaning and finally can get back to my primary Windows XP installation. There I promptly replace AntiVir with AVG. It detects a keygen on the desktop (bloody false +, hey…) but the whitelist does work and is not limited in size to a ridiculous value like AntiVir. The Cain & Abel installer isn’t detected, too.
So, to summarize:
Looks like AVG is definitely back in the race. At least it’s back on my computer now 
– 2010-06-18
If you’re in a hurry, the download link is at the very end of this post.
As you can guess from my previous posts, I’m a heavy user of portable applications. This allows for use of much more up-to-date software than our understaffed IT team can provide. I like using portableapps.com as my source of portable applications, but the only problem with them is that they usually take ages to release updated versions. I understand that this is because they take great care to release perfectly tested and stable things, but come on, waiting a few weeks after a major release to get the portable version is just… very frustrating. So, I usually “do some stuff” with the current portableapps.com launcher and an updated install I make at home or the program auto-updater (particularly for Firefox and Minefield).
This time I tried with OpenOffice, because the 3.2.1 version launches so much faster than the 3.1.1 I currently use at work (I heard there was some serious bugs with 3.2 so I didn’t test it much, but it seems as slow as 3.1.1). What I did was I took the portable installation of OpenOffice 3.2 from PortableApps, grabbed an installation of OpenOffice 3.2.1 and used it to write over the files of OpenOffice 3.2 portable. Finally, while I was at it I also packed in Java 1.6.0_20. That’s the first time ever I try to include Java in a portable install of OpenOffice, so just, you know, beware
I then tested this on a Windows XP installation without OpenOffice installed but with Java installed. And it seemed to work fine on this particular setting. So, before I finally give you the download link, remember:
All clear? Well, here’s the link (7-Zip archive, 105 MiB): OpenOffice 3.2.1 portable.
Edit: ok, I just tested it at work, and it doesn’t work. My best guess is that my Java version there is too outdated (1.4.2 update 9, FFS…) so I’m leaving the download link available, but know that it probably won’t work for you either.
Edit 2: if you try it, please leave a comment saying if it works or not (and in both case, what version, if any, of Java you had installed on the PC where you tested the app).
Posted in OpenOffice, portable software.
– 2010-06-18
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