I just use a program called ForceWindowVisible, since it happens often enough.
Posts made by dtfinch
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RE: Bringing a window back on-screen
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RE: DDoS Network Managers susceptible to SQL-Injection
A couple weeks ago I noticed the logging service for our firewall might have an injection vulnerability when it encountered an IP where the reverse dns returned "don't use" as its domain name. I don't know where to begin.
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RE: Google is a douche
"newrelic" "jetty" "maven"
Probably 9/10 of my google searches look like that.
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RE: Ubuntu's Amazing New Invention
@Cassidy said:
What's it like? I dumped Julia (Mint 10) onto a USB pen for this Lenovo netbook and was quite impressed with it (ubuntu that's got common apps installed, basically - quite idiot-proof) so did an install to an SD card and (after some pissing around with ATI drivers) have full compiz with wobbly windows, transparent backdrops and rotating cube.
Contemplating dropping onto the desktop in my office also, but not tried any other Mint variants.
Installing Wine build dependencies was harder on LMDE than it was on Ubuntu, and I couldn't find a good debian Wine repository, so I had to hunt down each package individually rather than saying "apt-get build-dep wine1.3". I also ended up installing Firefox manually because they were still stuck on version 4 or 5, but they finally moved up to 9 last week. And it was a pain getting XFCE to stop reopening old apps from the last session on startup, resulting from a bug (#7915) where it'd ignore the option of whether or not to do so.
The first update I did on LMDE upgraded the kernel without upgrading the nvidia drivers, and they stopped working. There was a forum post I was supposed to know about and read saying to expect that and how to work around it. But since I didn't read it, I ended up removing their nvidia packages and installing the drivers manually. The update also broke a bunch of media related packages because they moved those to a different repository, also explained in the post. But all is well now.
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RE: Ubuntu's Amazing New Invention
For now I'm sticking with Linux Mint Debian Edition with XFCE, with composition disabled and one panel at the bottom. I haven't had to adapt to a new UI metaphor since Windows 95, and I hope to keep it that way.
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RE: HTML5/JavaScript! The future of cross-platform development!
Our employer wanted an iPad app (but we didn't have a Mac, I didn't know Objective C, and I hate Apple in general), and we tried to convince them to let us do either a mobile-friendly web app or an android app, because of the app store requirements more than everything. But they were pretty insistent, and bought me a Mac Mini and a developer account to make it happen. I prototyped the app in html and javascript with jquery for animations, and after some study ported it to Objective C. Animating UI elements in UIKit is apparently very easy, and the app came out better than expected, sooner than expected. It was denied on our first submission though, not for any quality issues, but for being too marketing related. It was a catalog app for outside sales reps, and Apple makes no accommodations for iOS apps that are business related, but for distribution to non-employees. To distribute anything to non-employees, even to business partners, you need app store approval, which is difficult for niche business apps that lack broad appeal. We did convince them to rereview it though, and they finally approved it.
Apart from the submission/review ordeal, native was the right way to go. After our initial denial, I tested my html prototype on the iPad to see how hard it'd be to make that work, and it was painfully sluggish. Any time an image was being loaded (very often being a catalog app), it would freeze up until it was done, and jquery animations would often jump to the end without any smooth animation in between.
Next they want an Android version, which they initially refused, and they want to keep the html prototype for the web, so in the end I'll be maintaining at least 3 versions of this thing in different languages.
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RE: Hyperactive sleep
Back in my classic ASP (which has no sleep()) and Jet/Access days, I had a sleep function that would ping localhost, which was used to wait and retry once more when it couldn't open the database, despite being opened with adModeShareDenyNone. It seemed better than grinding at the cpu.
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RE: Adventures in implementing a MySQL dump/restore progress bar
You could print out the file size as it grows instead of trying to guess percentage.
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RE: Linux is SO MUCH MORE superior!
Sync operations on Linux have been a little off the last couple years. For me the problem was usually that ongoing writes in another process would cause sync() to stall indefinitely, waiting for all writing to stop instead of just the writes that were pending when sync was called. So if you had some sort of backup or other large file copy going on, even at low i/o priority, dpkg, firefox, and such would often freeze for very long periods of time. dpkg calls sync once after every file written, as if that would help much if the power went out when a package was only half installed because it took too long, and Firefox would sync after every sqlite transaction, as if the user would care if they lost the last couple seconds of browsing history in an outage.
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RE: Really simple authentication
I recall being guilty of something similar, though it was very long ago and I can't find the source.
IIRC I had an associative array of the destination url encrypted with the hashes of each user/password combination, indexed by a second hash. That way, we could give everyone different logins, and it could detect bad logins rather than just sending them to a 404.
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RE: Yourbrowsermatters.org
If you still use IE6, they have nothing to say to you anymore.
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RE: Heard over the cube walls
SQL Server Management Studio (2005 at least) does exactly that when you modify a column in table design, rather than generate the appropriate alter table alter column command. Though it does use alter table for just adding or removing columns.
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RE: What Could Go Wrong
Our last ERP system (~30 years in the making, which we used from 2006 to 2007) used the "delete and reinsert without transactions" method of updating data, which I discovered while investigating why our major customers kept disappearing from the database. And when querying any table in the system, you had to filter by a "record type" field or else you'd get corrupt garbage because they had a habit of pointing several tables to the same data file (Pervasive PSQL allows this), so when you queried one, you got records from them all, but with the fields from the other tables being misaligned. Their own code (in ACUCOBOL-GT, which their sales reps conveniently didn't mention) combined all the fields back into a single text field so it was all the same to them, and merging the tables let them query parent and child rows together in one query without any joins.
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RE: What the hell use is that!?
I'm using sharpdevelop, so I'd have to use the command line option. I did mess with that option a bit but hit some roadblock (can't remember what) and decided I had wasted enough time on it already. I had written the persistent dictionary replacement at home (in monodevelop) on my own time, feeling that I couldn't really justify doing it on paid time, and getting it to work without the delay was using up my time at work. Oddly I didn't notice any delays running it on mono at home.
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RE: What the hell use is that!?
My main dislike with XmlSerializer is that it for each new type you give it, it spends about a second of cpu time writing, and compiling, and loading a temporary class to perform the serialization. Sure, it speeds up benchmarks where you might serialize a million objects, but for the typical case, it means serializing just one object takes about one second. It seems all the .net serializers are like that.
I suppose the delay is alright for a long running web service where it happens only once. But it can be annoying if you use serialization in a desktop app, not realizing ahead of time how much it's going to add to load time.
In my case, I ran into the problem using the PersistentDictionary class that comes with the ESENT Managed Interface. Seeing how slow it was, and wrongly blaming ESENT, I set out to write my own persistent dictionary, and didn't realize the serializer was to blame until I was pretty much done.
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RE: Just Run It
Sometimes ionice helps if it's i/o intensive, since nice only affects cpu priority.
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RE: Prefixes - but at what cost!?
I haven't done it in my own databases, but the large ERP system we use (with just over 500 tables, half of them empty) has 3 letter prefixes on every column, unique to each table, so that every column name is unique in the database. It saves them from having to prefix full table names or use table aliases in their SQL, as you would if you had identically named fields in two or more tables used in a query. And every primary key in the database is a guid, though many tables are clustered by natural or ordered alternate keys or by foreign keys.
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RE: One of my top 10 WTF days
Well, now with "SET IMPLICIT_TRANSACTIONS", it warns me when I close the query window that I have uncommitted transactions, asking if it should commit them, even when the only query I ran was a select statement. Who commits a select?
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RE: One of my top 10 WTF days
Today is the day I enable "SET IMPLICIT_TRANSACTIONS" in SQL Server Management Studio. Though I can't recall ever making that mistake, having made a habit of typing the where first.
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RE: I can't wait to watch this movie!
The actual frame rates should be 24000/1001 and 30000/1001.
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RE: WebP - Google's muddying the waters, AGAIN
JPEG 2000 didn't handle predictable patterns and noise as well as jpeg did, because it had to encode every bump individually rather than encoding the frequencies. Most/all of the demo images were carefully selected for their smooth surfaces and general lack of texture.
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RE: I hate Chrome
Time to switch back to Chrome I guess. I hate pages that have timer loops in their unload events, or use unload events in general. And I seem to remember one of the most upvoted feature requests being to have Chrome block those, but I don't have time to look it up.
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RE: Web Unteacher
Reminds me of this snippet I wrote several years ago to pop up an input prompt from javascript running under wscript.exe (which lacks "prompt()").
function vbesc(s) { return (""+(s||"")).split('"').join('""').split("\n").join("\"+vbcrlf+\""); } function prompt(a,b) { var c=WScript.CreateObject("MSScriptControl.ScriptControl"); c.Language="VBScript"; return c.Eval("inputbox(\""+vbesc(a)+"\",\""+vbesc(b)+"\")"); }
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RE: Too much, too young, too fast
I took a programming class in high school (1999) that taught Javascript, Visual C++, and then Java. My final project was to build a small web browser with its own html rendering (plain flow layout, no tables, no css, etc). Previous years they taught C and Pascal. College felt like a couple steps back for a while.
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RE: Apple display hardware support: Supported or not?
I normally add -fomit-frame-pointer when compiling a release build of something.
compiling my own (g++ 3.4.5)
g++ -O2: 45 seconds
g++ -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer: 34 seconds
Java 1.6.0.7: 24 seconds
-O3 made no difference.
However, I've never seen a non-trivial Java program that performed anywhere near as well as its C/C++ competition. Look at Azureus/Vuze vs utorrent for example. Maybe part of it's the coding style that Java encourages. But I've also never gotten good GUI responsiveness out of a Java program, no matter how simple. -
RE: Go to sleep, now, you little fool
Once in my lifetime, I felt the need to use sleep() in ASP.
Since no function exists (why would anyone need to sleep in ASP?), I had to write my own.var wsh; function sleep(n) { if(!wsh) wsh=Server.CreateObject("WScript.Shell"); wsh.Run("ping -n "+n+" -w 1 127.0.0.1",0,true); }
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RE: Let's append Redundantly?
I recall using "<\scr"+"ipt>" before. I can't remember what it was for, or why the hell I would have written a script tag from script though. The wtf that stood out to me was the client side vbscript.
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RE: Synchronised failure of all/most 30gb Zunes
They ran out of days. A patch is on the way to add more.
Oh, and suggestion that's coming out from places - today's the 366th day of 2008. What's the odds that someone didn't think about leap years?
Every programmer knows that years last 365.2422 days.
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RE: American Express WTF
It'll take an average of 1.4 trillion login attempts to find your random 8 character password. They'll disable your login after the first 3 or so.
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RE: Time Machine
Why was old stuff being deleted so soon with no way to recover?
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RE: Really, what version of Flash player should I be using?
You got further than I did. Last time I tried CNN video with Firefox 3 it said I needed Firefox 1.0 or higher. Haven't gone back since.
TRWTF is you're still using Flash 8.
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RE: The Time Space Continuum
Any special reason you can't start parsing the files while they're still being written to?
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RE: 'for' loops and time
It's been a while since I've seen an O(n*m) radix sort.