Recent Posts

751

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use Desktop Widgets?

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 21, 2007, 07:11 AM »

The only "widget" I currently use is ClocX.
http://www.clocx.net

I used to play with Konfabulator, but when Yahoo bought 'em I sensed a change in the "feel" of the experience -- more corporate, less fun -- and dropped interest shortly thereafter.

752

Living Room / Re: release important information after your death with this service

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 20, 2007, 11:07 AM »

This service would be more useful if there was some kind of USB device that could kill me if I fail to log in for a period of time.

Any pointers?

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Living Room / Re: The worst thing about Macs

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 20, 2007, 11:05 AM »

Nontroppo, thank you for documenting your experiences.  It's the most *useful* thing I've read on the subject, and I thank you for helping me form a new perspective.  I find myself wanting to experiment with a Mac for the first time.

754

Official Announcements / Re: Draw Cody competition - win incredible prizes!

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 05:22 PM »

I love the detail of the little guy outside the spaceshuttle!
I wonder why he's confused, though. Could you ask Audrey, Ralph?

-jgpaiva (October 19, 2007, 05:10 PM)

She says the "little guys" have symbols in the speech-bubbles, one of which is "?".  I believe she is using the site's banner graphic for inspiration.

Next up: Cody in Heaven.  Or, as a great philospher once said, "THIS... is an ex-parrot."  :-)

755

Official Announcements / Re: Draw Cody competition - win incredible prizes!

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 05:08 PM »

Cody in space!

Note the subtle difference in tail feathers and how kind zero-G is to his knees.

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Living Room / Re: how do you represent 'time' in your head?

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 03:17 PM »

Quick answer: I don't think about it much, except as a connected series of events starting when I wake up.  Clocks mysteriously jump ahead whenever look at them.

Thoughtful answer: I subscribe to the "many-universes" theory of the universe, in that everything exists simultaneously, and the billions of decisions I make cause my perception to jump from reality to reality, giving the illusion of linear experience.  Every decision is made the other way by parallel versions of me.  I die many times, every day.  I also win the lottery, get divorced, learn to play the piano, and bake cookies every day.  Some versions of me are deaf & mute, rocking silently in a strait jacket at the home for old Visual Basic programmers.  I have also won the Nobel peace prize and other versions of me have been tried for war crimes -- you get the idea.

Sometimes when I dream these other realities leak over, and I see "the future".

If anyone ever succeeds with inventing a time machine, they will discover causality is what you make of it, that killing your grandparent *is* feasible, and getting back to "your" time virtually impossible.  Despite these issues, sales of the device will skyrocket because nothing is cooler than having a picnic while watching a herd of tricerotopses.  Also, a certain percentage of folks will want to go back in time and have sex with themselves.

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ProcessTamer / Re: Can Process Tamer tame Firefox ?

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 01:38 PM »

Works fine here, too.  Firefox is tamed.

Now if only ProcessTamer could tame that darn System Idle process... it's chewing up 85%!

:-)

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Living Room / Re: Windows performance tips in one spot

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 01:36 PM »

Theoretically Windows wants the paging file to be 1.5 x physical RAM, so by my calculations mine are in the ballpark.  I was surprised that EVERY paging file was that big -- not the sum total of all paging files.

Ah, mysterious Windows.

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Living Room / Re: Windows performance tips in one spot

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 11:34 AM »

Sure.  I just checked and found TWO (not four) page files.  Dunno why there aren't four anymore -- there used to be four when I first built the rig out.  Maybe Windows decided it didn't need the other two?

Drive C: 4989MB
Drive F: 3326MB

This is on a Dell Optiplex GX620 with 4GB physical RAM (3.25GB visible to Windows).

Oh, and with Firefox, Thunderbird, VS6, 1.5GB allocated to disk cache, and a few other small things running this is what my memory usage looks like:

760

Living Room / Re: The worst thing about Macs

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 08:36 AM »

+1 for using "grotesque" in post.

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Living Room / Re: Windows performance tips in one spot

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 08:09 AM »

Half-stroking sounds like an interesting idea, I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference if you keep your partitions (and the MFTs!) defragmented, though? I do have my 74gig raptor partitioned: 16gig for windows+apps, 4gig for source/docs, 50gig for things like games, "scratchpad", etc.

You are correct.  As the drive gets fuller (more full?) this half-stroking business pays less and less of a dividend as the head moves farther afield.  Fragmentation accelerates this effect.

And partitioning a big drive up like you have is the way to go (IMHO) but if more than one partition is accessed simultaneously any half-stroking benefits are lost.

In my case, I have a pair of 500MB 7200RPM drives RAIDed together (RAID 0) via a PCi controller made by SII.  It's broken up into two partitions: one gigantic 900GB block for storing media & backups, and the other a 50GB block set up for temp files and miscellaneous transitory things.  I have my Windows temp file located there, as well as a 2GB pagefile.

In this case, so long as I'm not spooling MP3s or a movie from the big partition, the read-head stays entirely in the small partition, travelling only a wee distance.  Call it: 1/10th stroking.

This sounds wonderful in theory, but I'm not sure the experiment is working as intended.  For instance, I usually *am* listening to music or watching a movie while I work, so the big partition gets accessed often.

Also, I have a huge-ass amount of RAM devoted to file caching (SuperCache II) so the software is mediating disk access and (I think) evening out the physical accesses.  I mean, some temporary file operations generate NO disk activity, where I would expect to hear the drive going nuts.

I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze, though now that it's all set up I'm loathe to rip it all apart and redo it.  It's definitely the fastest drive setup I've had so far, and love it -- but I think I could have chosen the partition sizes at random and gotten similar results.

Oh, and the punch line: the two 500GB 7200 RPM drives (RAID 0) replaced an aging pair of 35GB Raptors (RAID 0).  I can detect no difference in performance or responsiveness, though HDTune seems to think the new array is slower.

762

Older Newsletters / Re: Newletter for October 15 - Codename "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK"

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 07:27 AM »

45,000 newsletters?  Holy dog.

And that's only the folks who elect to receive them.

Mouser: How many DC accounts are there total?  And how many are considered "active" by whatever criteria you choose to apply?

And how can I get each of them to send me 1 donationcredit?

763

Post New Requests Here / Re: REQUEST: Picture Codyfier

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 02:00 AM »

I just uploaded the latest Audrey Maximus to the "Draw Cody" thread.
https://www.donation...30.msg81689#msg81689

Posting here cuz I know not everyone reads every thread...

764

Official Announcements / Re: Draw Cody competition - win incredible prizes!

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 01:50 AM »

Heheheh!  Thanks, y'all.  This new one is my favorite so far.

Medium: dull pencil on computer perf-paper.  Sorry for the contrast; this is the best the scanner could do.

765

Living Room / Re: Versioning of files

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 01:47 AM »

Come on now, I didn't call you an idiot.

No, *I* called me an idiot and put the words in your mouth. :-)

What I may have failed to mention (or did, way back in the mists of time -- I forget) is that I used to use VSS.  Actually, our whole team did.  For three years I lived and died alongside VSS in a six-member development team.  We used it to manage source.  The QA testers used VSS to annotate modules that passed or failed, and management used it to track the status of projects by reading the notes.

For all my whining about VSS's sucktitude, it actually saved us more than cursed us.  The occasional crash or weirdness was worth the end result.  And I KNOW there was no way we could have gotten projects out the door without it.

When I started my business, I began using VSS to manage my own one-developer project, and rapidly became disgusted at how little it returned for my devotion.  I'd forgotten we had a guy in our team who spent 1/4 of his time as the VSS administrator.  A lot of the features I remembered liking in the 6-person environment simply didn't apply here: I rarely forked a project, and almost never rolled anything back entirely.  "Checking out" a module was silly since I was the only guy here, and I had no QA team or managers.

I threw it out and developed my own mechanism, using Office, WinZip, and some batch files.  Two years ago I ditched the batch files and started using SyncBack.

Granted VSS is a pig, and the version we used was an earlier one.  I *know* versioning tools have evolved since then.  If I had some spare time I would love to evaluate the latest crop of tools (one of my favorite pasttimes: downloading cool new stuff) and actually learn what I am missing.

I am NOT saying "these packages suck, my system wins".  I'm simply saying that in my case some custom-built tools fit my workflow better than what I've seen so far.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to respond.  I appreciate your patience with me.

766

General Software Discussion / Re: Is Windows XP too good for Microsoft’s own good?

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 01:19 AM »

And leave out the soul-sucking DRM, please.

k thx bai

767

Living Room / Re: The worst thing about Macs

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 19, 2007, 01:18 AM »

I think humans have a tendency to generalize and segregate based on EVERYTHING.  The "my computer is better than yours" thing is the most convenient and obvious example, because we're all so focused on technology around here.

Gear-heads fight over Chevy vs. Ford, and both camps hate the Japanese cars.

Modern American politics is an exercise in vilifying the other side.

Thog discovered fire 500,000 years ago, and the next day his tribe made fun of the losers who ate their food raw.

The odd thing is, this discrimination ability we share is part of what makes us so creative and successful.  The ability to note differences and act upon them in our environment goes to the core of our existence.  We are, literally, wired in our DNA to play the "one of these things is not like the other" game better than any other creature we know of.  To deny it is silly. 

However, if we could learn to recognize when it becomes overactive and apply the brakes... that would be a very good thing indeed.

And Macs suck.

768

Official Announcements / Re: Draw Cody competition - win incredible prizes!

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 18, 2007, 04:15 PM »

Another one from Audrey, this time with a mysterious piggy bank.

769

Living Room / Re: The worst thing about Macs

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 18, 2007, 04:05 PM »

I don't read nontroppo's post as being accusatory of anyone posting in the thread.  Instead I assumed it was aimed at the classic Mac vs. PC mindset as depicted in the TV commercials.

770

General Software Discussion / Re: Coding Horror: Why Does Software Spoil?

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 18, 2007, 02:53 PM »

Wow, that was a good read.  The article was thoughtful and the comments spot-on.  Nice find.

The only thing I can think of that nobody mentioned was how much *nicer* it is to run old software on new hardware.  Stuff that was slow and resource-hungry 10 years ago runs like a dream on a modern dual-core PC with a gigabyte of RAM.

As a developer (and business owner) the best way I've found to keep customer-driven feature creep down is to make them pay for requested modifcations.    If it's really important to them, they'll open their wallet.  I charge them a token amount, but that's all it takes to filter out the crap.

However, I cannot fathom being a freeware author in this position.  The stuff's FREE and you want more??  I'd go postal in a week.   

771

Living Room / Re: Windows performance tips in one spot

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 18, 2007, 11:45 AM »

"OPTIMISE YOUR PAGEFILE" - everybody has an opinion on this, and most people are wrong smiley. Simply monitor your pagefile usage doing the work you usually do, and see how often it's actually used. Set a somewhat-higher minimum limit (to avoid fragmentation), and don't set a max settting (to avoid running out of paging space).

One thing that made a beeg difference for me: allowing Windows to create multiple page files on separate harddrives.  It's tempting to pick your fastest drive and use that (disabling all others) but after I let Windows handle it I ended up with four pagefiles and less thrashing.

Or get enough RAM and disable the pagefile completely.

No matter how much RAM you have, some (older?) software malfunctions if there is no pagefile, generating messages like "low on virtual memory".  Do this with one with caution.

Moving from a slow disk to a 10k rpm raptor drive did speed up booting a bit, but not very much (application loading times are another matter, though smiley).

Fun fact: A slower drive can actually EXCEED the seek performance of a 10K drive if it is partitioned properly.  The idea is that by creating a small partition the maximum seek distance the drive's head must move is reduced, resulting in smaller random seek times.  Google "half stroking" or "quarter stroking" for relevant articles on the technique.

Of course, if you're lucky enough to have a 10K Raptor, half-stroking will boost its performance, keeping the lead. :-)  Better yet, RAID a pair of 10K's together and half-stroke the array.  (Really!  This works; I've done it.)

Gosh, that sounds pornographic.

772

General Software Discussion / Re: Back up files with a printer and scanner

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 18, 2007, 01:50 AM »

That's it!  Brilliant!
http://www.bmisoluti...er-scanner-318-p.asp

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Official Announcements / Re: Draw Cody competition - win incredible prizes!

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 18, 2007, 12:23 AM »

A couple more Audrey Maximus images, another Cody (this time with coin) and one for you cat people out there.

774

Living Room / Re: Windows performance tips in one spot

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 17, 2007, 09:27 PM »

Tip #1: Buy a faster computer.

That's what it always boils down to, right?  And the one you want ALWAYS costs $3000.

775

Living Room / Re: Versioning of files

« Last post by Ralf Maximus on October 17, 2007, 09:25 PM »

Thanks, f0dder.  The two things you've listed that I can't do with my system are:

1. Graphical view of forked projects.  That would be nice to have, but thankfully, I don't do a lot of forking.

2. "Differential" storage of files.  However this conflicts with my requirement of self-containment; I must be able to carry a complete revision package from PC to PC if necessary, and requiring the whole archive to access the latest changes won't fly.

Now I want to hear from tinjaw.  Tell me why I am an idiot for not doing version control the way you do it.