windows

I just tried Windows 8, and to be honest it's pretty awful. It looks like it's meant for running on a touch screen but if you are a desktop user it's horribly awkward to use. I'm not sure if it's a bug but getting the task bar thingy (what's it called?) to show up on the left-hand side of the screen is very difficult. I seem to have to hover on the top-left corner and wait for an icon to appear, then move downward, then the whole task bar thingy will appear.

Doing development, or more specifically deployment in a Windows 64-bit environment can be a frustrating experience. Let's start with a simple example from MSDN about the File System Redirector:

The %windir%\System32 directory is reserved for 64-bit applications . . . Whenever a 32-bit application attempts to access %windir%\System32, the access is redirected to a new directory, %windir%\SysWOW64

I use 32-bit explorer in 64-bit Vista because of a few problems that use 32-bit explorer extensions and therefore don't work in the default 64-bit explorer. So I call the explorer.exe in the SysWOW64 directory (confusingly, the apps in the SysWOW64 directory are 32-bit apps).

%systemroot%\SysWOW64\explorer.exe /separate /n,/select,%HOME%

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

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:

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 have had endless problems since I tried using Cream (a bunch of crap on top of gvim). Here are some of them: