Checksum Arcanius

Ever wanted to remove that driver for the hardware you no longer have installed? Well, with this information [techrepublic.com], now you can. Copied here for convenience:

Takeaway: Did you know that unless you uninstall a device driver on a Windows XP machine that it still may be sucking up valuable system resources? Here are step-by-step instructions on how you can view and remove these unnecessary devices.

When you install a device driver on a Windows XP machine, the operating system loads that driver each time the computer boots regardless of whether the device is present—unless you specifically uninstall the driver. This means that drivers from devices that you have long since removed from your system may be wasting valuable system resources.

Follow these steps to view and remove these unnecessary device drivers:

1. Press [Windows]+[Break] to bring up the System Properties dialog box.
2. Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.
3. Click the New button below the System Variables panel.
4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices in the Variable Name text box and 1 in the Variable Value text box.
5. Click OK to return to the System Properties dialog box and then click OK again.
6. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button.
7. In Device Manager, go to View | Show Hidden Devices.
8. Expand the various branches in the device tree and look for the washed out icons, which indicate unused device drivers.
9. To remove an unused device driver, right-click the icon and select Uninstall.

Win32Driver…
javax.comm…

This is ridiculous!

It shouldn’t be this hard, Sun.

One of my implementations:

Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft as we know it is on the way out. Sure, you’ve probably heard about the lack of compelling features in Vista. Maybe you’ve even heard about the scary “trusted computing” “features” of Microsoft’s newest operating system. I know that I’m not going to be buying it anytime soon. It took me quite a long time (2004) to convert to Windows XP, and I believe it will take me even longer to, if ever, take the “next step.” I don’t want my OS to report anything to Microsoft. I don’t want to have to have genuine advantages on my software. I want to own my software, and do what I please with it at that point. You’ve probably heard these arguments before. But that’s not what this is about. This is about the Open Document Format. Specifically, it is about a spreadsheet I received tonight, a file ending in .ods, that threw me for a little loop.

The document’s author offered the following:

I assume most of you are using/have on your system OpenOffice, so this is an OpenDocument spreadsheet of my proposed database structure.

Well, he was wrong, at least about me. I don’t have OpenOffice installed. I’ve tried it; I didn’t like it; I went back to Office 2000 (the best it ever has been) and I didn’t look back. Until today. Until that .ods file showed up. I knew that Excel wouldn’t open it, but I tried anyway. I was right. So I looked for a viewer. None seemed preeminent or worth downloading. Then I thought about something — Google Spreadsheets. I tried it out, and sure enough it understood the format.

Sure, I was disappointed with the integration — I couldn’t open it right out of gmail (I had to save it and then upload it). And Google Spreadsheets seems to be rather slow. But its not installed on my computer. I only use it when I have to. Its free. Its easy. And it worked.

Most likely, Google Spreadsheets will only get better. Office? I’ve only seen it get worse for years. Microsoft has done many great, and perhaps many terrible, things. I personally think personal computing is much more advanced overall because of Microsoft. But I don’t recall seeing Microsoft innovate in a very long time. It seems poetic that this side of their demise will so closely foil their rise. This time, a document format forces me not to upgrade to a new version of Office, but to start using a different program.

Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Rng As Range)
Dim R As Integer
Dim G As Integer
    For Each Target In Rng.Cells
        If Not Intersect(Target, Range("AL5:DX177")) Is Nothing Then
            If Target < 1 Then
                G = 255
                R = Target * 255
            Else
                R = 255
                G = 475 - (Target * 255)
            End If   
            Target.Interior.Color = RGB(R, G, 0)
        End If
    Next Target
End Sub

How to move Vim’s swapfile and backup to another directory.

How to disable the honking huge toolbar.

I finaly (after-several-years-finally) imorted my Greymatter Blog archives into WordPress. It probably would have been a lot easier had I done it at the beginning, but I wasn’t very advanced then. This time, it took a little bit of php hacking, but the import itself was relatively painless and quite quick. I’ve just spent the last few hours cleaning up and categorizing the November and December entries (including the entire Roadtrip series!).

I have a few more months to go (I think I had Greymatter for 8 months), but I’ll get around to fixing up the rest of the months as well. Its just tedious, and I feel the need for a shower.

Last list night, I noticed that my random photos were having issues. Delving deeper, I discovered that my entire photo gallery system was relatively broken. I changed a few obviosuly broken directory pointers, and things started working better. Unfortunately, the main Checksum Arcanius Photo Gallery page was stopping after only a few galleries, instead of displaying all 35 albums, as I had instructed it to. It wasn’t clean either — it appeared that the script had simply stopped running. Furthermore, I noticed that the random pictures script was dying saying that it was running out of memory.

This surprised me, since I wasn’t doing any actual image manipulation, only display of already exisiting images, and the php.ini limit of 8M should have been plenty, I thought, for this. Nevertheless, I tried increasing it, first to 16M. I reloaded apache and then my site. More of the gallery page loaded, but the random block script was still dying, this time using up all of the 16 Megs it was allocated. Never one to give up that easily, I bumped the number up two more times, until it stood at a ridiculous 128 megs. The main page started to work, but the random blocks were still dying from lack of memory.

I decided it was time to try Gallery2 again, even though my last experience was less than stellar.

Bad Idea.

Everything is still wrong with Gallery2 that was wrong with it before. And its a bigger memory hog than its younger sibling (Gallery 1.5) that I am currently using. When trying to import single albums, php died citing too many open files, and the memory usage soared into the hundreds of megabytes. Ridiculous.

So after giving the problem some time off, I came back to it tonight. I bumped the memory allotment up to 320 Megs, updated to the latest Gallery 1.5, and updated my custom random block script. The result was — finally — the random block cache was properly regenerated. I have since dropped the memeory limit back to a more “reasonable” 128 Megs; we shall see if this causes the site to break tomorrow when the cache expires. I tried 32 Megs earlier, but this amount still caused the main gallery page to fail to load completely. This is strange, because when this all was running on oasis (it has since been moved to frankenputen) the 32 Meg limit there worked fine, and I never had any issues. Could it be Ubuntu’s Apache or PHP is less efficient?

At any rate, I have decided that not only is Gallery2 still terrible, but Gallery 1.5 is not all that either. My plan is to develop my own photo gallery solution this summer,