David Grant

ccmexec.exe was using a lot of CPU and I/O. Disabling the "SMS Agent Host" service gets rid of it.

Google Chrome will thrash to disk a lot to disk, at least in version 0.2.149.27, build 1583 (the first publically available beta) in Windows XP. It is so bad that my entire computer locks up a bit and becomes unresponsive. Disabling phishing and malware protection seems to stop the thrashing:

I modified an nginx init.d script and created an init.d script for trac.d. I run tracd and then forward traffic from trac.davidgrant.ca to trac's port (using nginx) rather than using cgi or fast-cgi. Please let me know if you have any problems with this scripts and I will fix it.

I don't use svn in Windows much but when I do I usually use TortoiseSVN. I haven't been very happy with it lately. With TortoiseSVN installed, Windows Explorer take 5-10 seconds to start and during that time I can't use the task bar because it's a part of explorer.exe. While I like the Explorer integration idea, I'm not sure if I like how everything in Tortoise involves at least a right-click on a folder. Also, sometimes it's nice to see all your working copies in one window, although the working copies may be spread out all over your hard drive.

I got all excited to try this new Cuil search engine today but was extremely disapointed. The only thing Cuil does well is sucking. The first thing I did was to search for my name to see where on the front page it would show up (on Google I am the first hit). I was a bit surprised when I did not see my home page on the first page, second page, or third page. Maybe my site is not indexed at all. So I decided to search for one of my most popular posts, my Latex Resume Template post. Not only did it not come up but this great resource on LaTeX resume templates was also missing.

Let's look a little deeper and see how shitty Cuil really is. Try searching for "latex resume template" (obviously, remove quotes). The same search for latex resume template on google is orders of magnitude better. It doesn't take very long at all to notice the differences...

I have an old Linksys WRT-54G v3. I have ran various different firmwares over the years, but performance was never a big deal. I was mainly looking for something that allowed to me to access all of the devices features and a nicer frontend than the one that Linksys provides. At one point I was using different firmwares for QOS when we were sharing our connection with some other people in our building. Anyways, I had been using X-Wrt (white russian) for quite some time. It is basically a nice user-friendly version of OpenWrt.

I gave TinyXP Rev 09 a try recently as a guest in VirtualBox. (I do have a legal license for Windows XP, so while that definitely doesn't make downloading TinyXP legal, I feel that morally speaking it's ok).

I wasn't able to browse for shared folders at \\vboxsvr as I expected. It is, however, possible to map these folders to drives using the "net use" command:

net use z: \\vboxsvr\david

That worked perfectly. Have fun!

First of all, USB will not work in VirtualBox if you are using the Open Source Edition (OSE) of VirtualBox. Get the full closed-source edition of VirtualBox from their website. There are many differences between the open-source edition and the closed-source version and one of them is USB.

I finally got USB working with Windows XP running as a guest inside VirtualBox running on a Ubuntu Hardy host. First find out what the group id of the vboxusers group is:

I hosed my entire home directory on this server last night with an incorrect rsync command. I tried syncing my svn repository to the server like this:

rsync -az -e ssh --delete /var/svn/repos/ servername:/home/username/

About 99% of tourists piss me off. A while back we went to a non-all-inclusive and although those places usually attract somewhat different crowd, there are clearly not enough rooms in the all-inclusives to hold all the annoying ones. While reading the reviews of the place we were going to, one of the reviews was ok until the end until I read this:

Snorkel past Xcaret ... AWESOME REEF ... find someone on the beach in Playa to take you, there are people at booths along the way that will take you. Count your change, people try to rip you off. Bargain for everything including food, cab fare, snorkeling.

I've used Kubuntu for a long time. In fact I had never used plain Ubuntu except for once a long time ago on an old laptop but then I promptly removed it because it caused the laptop to overheat badly (it was painful on the thighs) and so I went Gentoo, my bread-and-butter distribution. I never liked Gnome for some reason. I never had good experiences with Gnome in Debian or Gentoo. KDE always seemed to work a lot better out of the box. It might be because KDE is an all-in-one solution whereas Gnome is a bit more modular and made up of metacity, gnome-panel, nautilus and a bunch of applets.

I love Google Reader and I love reading about the latest in technology, politics, you-name-it, but I have a ridiculous number of feeds and they are just too much of a time sink. I need some way to clean them out so I can have more time to do other more important things.

Last time I blogged about Firefox (2.x), I was complaining about how much memory it was sucking up. I have read about how many memory leaks were supposed to have been fixed in Firefox 3 but I had to see it to believe it. So after suffering again from low memory while running VMWare and Firefox (whose memory consumption regurarly climbs to 500MB) at the same time, I decided to upgrade and leave Firefox 2.0 for good.

I had one of those Rockstar Energy Drinks today. I was in 7-Eleven and none of the usual drinks looked very appealing. I also felt a bit tired and so drinking an "energy drink" seemed like a good idea at the time. A while later I found myself at work getting very little accomplished. I was fidgety, uncomfortable, and overall, in a weird state of mind. For some reason I had no idea it was the energy drink that was the culprit.

All this time I've been taking the political debates in Canada for granted. No matter how bad they might be, they're actually not half bad compared to the debates in the US. Last night's Obama/Clinton debate on ABC was one of the worst. Crooks and Liars has a great video highlighting some of the worst moments of the debate.