Archive for the ‘Off the record’ Category
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Boosting Windows 7 File Move Performance by Up to 10,000%
I’m currently moving about a whole bunch of smaller files in Windows 7 (about 400,000 files). I was getting frustrated with the abysmal rate at which Windows is able to move files around. Even moving just one folder into another one causes Explorer to start “discovering” the entire source dir, which is utterly pointless in the first place as there’s just one node to consider and to relink in the MFT. One wonders why it always does that. It didn’t do so before Vista.
Anyway – adding injury to insult, these files need to be imported in and processed by an application which is rather poorly written, making it run out of memory when it is fed much more than 4,000 files at a time. So, I have to move batches of about 4,000 files into separate folders before importing them, and to do this I have to use Explorer. The move operations, as mentioned, are incredibly slow, maxing out at 25 items per second, sometimes dropping to 5 items/sec, generally hovering at about 15 items/sec. I was wondering if the problem was the files lists in the source and target Explorer windows being continually refreshed as items were moved in and out of them, and so tried to navigate away from them, even closing the windows entire, without effect.
Then, by accident, I discovered that if I selected a batch of files from the bottom of the list in the source window, the move operation was massively faster, running at 350-500 items/sec! That’s a performance factor of ~ 14 to 100, in other performing, compared to the previous runs, at between 1,400% and 10,000% effectiveness. Go figure!
Not having access to the Windows source code, one can only guess at what kind of code disaster lies behind this behavior. But regardless, remembering this trick can prove very helpful when you don’t feel like spending an entire day looking a green bars very slowly moving east.
These issues, and the effect of this trick, seem to happen according to Windows’ current mood, though. Sometimes you get to drag-and-drop a folder with 200,000 files into another folder instantly, at other times it’ll spend 30 seconds examing a 100-file folder. Similarly, sometimes (about 1 in 4 so far) the forementioned trick has no effect, and you’re looking at green bars again. Your mileage may vary
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Leaked Screenshot of Windows Server 9 Login Screen, In-UI Annotations new Design Strategy
Whoah…! Today is a great one for me as an individual, and for the Windows community as a whole.
It’s been an amazing couple of months! Windows 7, as it seems, will soon – or sometime, anyway – be surpassed by its successor, Windows 8. This has been disclosed officially by Microsoft, discussed all over the net, and various leaks of functionality and design have been discovered and forwarded to the interwebs, mostly about the Windows 8 Login Screen.
As anyone with half a brain knows, the most important part – feature-wise – of an operating system, and also the hardest to fake if you were to do that, is the login screen! Especially with regards to Windows, as on an average day, this is the place you’ll be spending most of your time.
Well. Santa’s got something in his stocking for you!!! Working closely together with a close friend of mine “behind the fence” so to speak (who shall remain unnamed), I’ve acquired a great deal of info on something very astounding. Even now, months before the release of Windows 8, and years before the release of the next iteration of the Redmond series, I am in the fortunate position to be able to reveal a couple of goodies to you. For one, the successor to Windows 8 will be named “Windows 9″!!!
Secondly, in what seems as a big-brotherly shoulderpat and comradery “get-well” gesture from Microsoft to the daredevils of Europe, the codename has an Icelandic ring to it, specifically “Eönghörn”.
And as if that isn’t enough to get your panties shaking, I’ve even managed to acquire a leaked and very very hush-hush screenshot of the login screen of Windows 9. This is even from Windows Server 9, and shows an entirely new strategy in interface design – helping the user by using in-screen annotations, explaining all those things that are usually really hard to fathom to the average Windows Server administrator.
These are great times, indeed, and if I were Canonical or Apple, I’d be shitting my pants! Wouldn’t you?
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Linux Users More Generous than their Paying Mac and Windows Counterparts?
So, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wants me to buy the “Humble Bundle” – a pay-what-you-think-is-fair financed bundle of computer games. Not only that, but you get a choice of who to pay, too.
I went to the site and started reading – primary concern being, of course, “will it run on Linux?” I scrolled down and a pie chart caught my eye. The statistics for the previous Humble Bundle installment. An event that apparently resulted in the raising of $500,000 to EFF:
Now, while Windows as a platform is the largest contributor, per user paying it’s also the smallest one, as you can see by the average purchase price by platform to the left. Actually, on average, a Linux user has coughed up about three times the amount a Windows user has. And about twice as much as the average Mac user.
Now, why is that? Well, I’d like to think that we’re just better people, but that would be stretching it a bit
Either way, with more than 132,000 purchases it’s damn hard to dismiss as statistical error. Given that any PC these days is hard to get without Windows pre-installed, it’s not like we have the extra money left to spend that we didn’t use on the OS. What do you think? -
Is this 2000 Once Again?
Sitting here reading feeds. Two consecutive posts from TechCrunch:
One is about real value, real innovation where investments will generate real return, where the other is pop piggy-backing on services piggy-backing on trends with a monolithic trend beacon still not generating revenue. Yet the pig is snubbing out $6 billion?
Are we already knee-deep in the next IT bubble waiting to burst as a horrid aftershock to the economic crisis a few years back? There’s so much money being funneled into non-revenue generating business these days… These months… These years…
Just me?
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Fixing the Broken and Mangled Search in Firefox (4) on Linux Mint
So, while being busy doing other stuff and therefore postponing actually getting rid of this buggy Mint version of Linux Mint 10 KDE (which is basically 100% Kubuntu minus Canonical goodness and instead tons of additional bugs and Mint branding everywhere), I was getting pretty bitchy about the totally fucked up search in my Firefox 4 installation.
This Mint-branded partner search crap is everywhere and not so easy to get rid of. The actual search bar was easy enough – manage the search providers, delete Google from the list, then search for new providers with “google search english” as keywords. Reinstall, and that part’s taken care of.
Then there’s the deal with the “Mint Enhancement” add-on crap that can be deleted for everyone by just doing a,
$ sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/firefox-4.0/extensions/mint-search-enhancer@linuxmint.com
Easy peasy, but might need to be done again after an update. At least until replacing the OS itself with Kubuntu.
The more tricky part is fixing the address bar type-to-search feature which on Mint 10 KDE results in awful Mint-branded results in what appears to be Thai. Leaves me hungry for veggies, rice, nuts and coconut milk, but not satisfied with my results. The language part is the easy one. It seems the Mint branding fucks up the preferences’ lang setting, which is specified as [chrome://global/locale/intl.properties] – clearly supposed to be an instruction to fetch the system’s locale and use that, except it obviously doesn’t work. Go to Preferences > Content > Languages and fix it manually.
Left is the annoying Mint branding itself which apart from being ugly removes all the usual Google search options, modifiers, and Google account links at the top. The problem can’t be fixed by visiting about:config or anything like that. The problem lies deeper, as a mangled system-wide Firefox search engine XML configuration file. Go to a console and type:
$ sudo nano /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml
Remove everything in it (ctrl+K deletes an entire line) and paste this text in it:
<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/"> <ShortName>Google</ShortName> <Description>Google Search</Description> <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding> <Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,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</Image> <Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET" template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&qu={searchTerms}"/> <Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search"> <Param name="hl" value="en"/> <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/> </Url> </SearchPlugin>
If you prefer search results in your native language, you would want to not include the <Param name=”hl” value=”en”/> line which tells Google that, “Yes, I know I’m currently in Denmark, but I still want to see search results in English, please!”
Once again, an update might want to mess with this file. Keep a link to this post just in case
Restart Firefox and enjoy not being kicked in the teeth by Mint any longer.
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RVM Gets Head…
Heh. This seriously speaks to the kid in me. Just set up a new RVM installation on a desktop box, and got a laugh from Wayne’s greeting,
Be sure to get head often as rvm development happens fast, you can do this by running 'rvm get head' followed by 'rvm reload' or opening a new shell w⦿‿⦿t ~ Wayne
‘rvm get head’ followed by ‘rvm reload’? Really? Hmmm… So is there an implicit ‘rvm release’ going on in-between there? w00t indeed!
Yeah, sorry, I know – very corny. But it is Friday!
Recent Posts
- Creating Missing Keyboard Shortcuts in Applications on Mac OS X
- Get Back /var/log/messages in (K)ubuntu 11.04
- Boosting Windows 7 File Move Performance by Up to 10,000%
- Leaked Screenshot of Windows Server 9 Login Screen, In-UI Annotations new Design Strategy
- Linux Users More Generous than their Paying Mac and Windows Counterparts?
