grack.com

From a suggestion in one of asa’s posts, I just took a quick look at Forumzilla.  My first impression is that it’s a pretty cool concept - it would allow me to reduce my number of running applications by one.  I’ve been running SharpReader for some time and it’s certainly a memory hog, especially when you get a fair number of feeds in it. 

Forumzilla has a different concept than SharpReader, however.  Instead of each feed having its own, individual, leaf-type folder, Forumzilla lets you pick one of your mail folders to drop a particular feed in.  While this is a cool concept, I think I would prefer to have something similar to the new bookmark manager for handling the feeds:

Is there a good cross-platform, storage virtualization application available?  I want a magical, automatically-clustered-and-redundant service that concatenates all of the free space within an entire network into a single “megadrive” and makes that available as a shared drive to all systems.

Ideally, it would allow you to “hotswap” computers in and out of the ad-hoc array, mirroring the data between nodes as necessary to ensure that more than one copy of all data is available at all times.  I suppose this is similar to the approach that Google has been taking with their distributed file system.

Far Cry works great in Transgaming’s Cedega.  Chalk up another (recent!) game for Linux.

Make sure you use the Loki Installer rather than the .msi-based setup program.  It’ll copy the files to the correct spot on your drive and create a launcher executable for the game.  Fire it up and enjoy!

I keep seeing these so-called “Get the facts” and they’re ticking me off with their blatant misrepresentation of facts.

The one I just saw compared the price of Mainframe Linux with the price of Windows Server 2003.

Uhh…  isn’t that a little unfair?  What about comparing PC Linux with PC Windows Server 2003?  Are they afraid to do this thing head-to-head on the same platform?  If you read the test, they are using Samba 2.2.x and Apache 1.2.x - not 3.0.x and 2.x, the latest versions respectively.  Wouldn’t it be fair to compare the newer versions of the applications with Windows 2003?  Or perhaps the older versions with the equivalent of Windows 2000?

I discovered a deadlock in some code using the ThreadPool to do some database connectivity tests.  It turns out that some of the database code in the .NET framework uses the thread pool to get database connections.  This results in deadlocks when spawning too many threads trying to open database connections.

Microsoft needs to add a parameter to the QueueWorkItem method that specifies the approximate number of additional threads needed by a work item.  This could ensure that the appropriate number of threads were free before starting the item.

Looks like it’s back to the custom thread pool implementation again….

Fired up WineX 4.0, aka Cedega, to play some Tribes 2 tonite.  What an amazing accomplishment - it runs perfectly, and fast to boot!

Running Windows games under Linux: one more reason never to dual-boot.

Here’s some home-grown Adblock patterns for your enjoyment (save as “adblock.txt” and use the import option on the Adblock preferences screen):

[Adblock]
http://*.atwola.com/*
http://*.atdmt.com/*
http://i.cnn.net/*.js
*/partner_backlinks.js
http://*.googlesyndication.com/
http:/*.imrworldwide.com/*
http://*.questionmarket.com/*
http://*.bluestreak.com/*
http://images-aud.slashdot.org/*
http://ads.*.com/*
http://*.tribalfusion.com/*
http://*.serence.com/*
http://*.burstnet.com/*
*advert*
http://*.tangozebra.com/*
http://ads.*/*
http://*.doubleclick.net/*
http://*.adtech.*
http://*.subsitesadserver.*
http://*.msads.net/*
http://us.a1.yimg.com/*/a/*
http://*.cecash.com/*

I managed to get the majority of the wood cuts done for my MAME cabinet today.  It took about an hour to mark each piece out, then about two hours of clamping the aluminum guide and running the circular saw.

Before I started the project, I never would have guessed how much work it would turn out to be.

The last cuts are going to be the cabinet sides.  Fortunately it’s better to cut both sides at the same time - this ensures that even if you make a mistake the cabinet sides will still match.

An interesting comment posted by one of my readers:

Blocking ads is very nice and all, but you do expect most websites to provide free content don’t you? For most content websites, advertisements are the only way to cover their bills (and maybe even make a little profit). If you and everyone else block these advertisements, content websites will either have to close or go paid-subscription only. Would you like this? I think not, so how about uninstalling that Adblock extension, and viewing a few advertisements now and then?

Dennis assumes that I have some moral obligation to view ads on a site because I am viewing the site itself.

CNN.com, before and after installing Adblock.

It takes a bit of getting used to (remember your old DOS wildcard days?), but it’s pretty easy to come up with good patterns to block 90% of all ads within about 20 minutes.

In a word - still really amazing!  Oh wait, that’s three.  Well, Firefox sure deserves all three anyways!

Install it today - even though the promise of automatically installed spyware sure is mighty appealing.

I’ve got a couple of .NET desktop apps running on my work system (with a gig of RAM nonetheless) and it seems like they are always the applications that are sucking up the most memory.

I run Sharpreader at work for a couple of interesting feeds and it hovers around 70MB when open!  Minimizing it seems to reduce the working set to 2MB, but it’s still using 69MB of virtual memory while sitting there.

A GUI monitoring tool that I wrote for Draco.NET seems to take up 30MB (plus 30MB of swap) all the time while it’s sitting in the taskbar.  It’s basically just a WinForms app that calls a remoting service - no fancy tricks.

All my readers, please note that this is constructive criticism (as well as a fix!) for the new theme, not an emotional rant or complaint.  Ben Goodger has done an awesome job in getting Firefox ready for 0.9.

The first time I fired up Firefox 0.9, I wasn’t too happy with the new, default Firefox theme.  However, It turns out that it mostly the awkward spacing that was making the icons look out-of-place.  As strange as it seems, reducing the spacing makes the entire theme look a lot better.

The underdog team has made it to game 7 of the finals.  “Flames fever” has pretty much devoured the city.

We’re in for a game tonite.

Having been using CVS for the last four years in a commercial environment, I’m certainly pretty comfortable with it.  Branching and merging is tricky (sometimes painful) as usual, but losing file history on rename is a killer.  WinCVS has been the gravy on top that keeps us using CVS.  Anyone who might have had the misfortune of trying to work with command-line rcs or cvs knows how much more productive a GUI makes things.

I’ve been evaluating alternatives in the next generation of free SCC applications.  Given the above issues I’ve had with CVS, my requirements are: