Install VirtualBox Guest Additions in Windows’ safe-mode so system file protection doesn’t interfere with the installation, it’s that simple and fixed all my VirtualBox performance problems.
IE can’t do anything right. If you save some graphical elements to PNG, and try to put them on an area with CSS-defined color, there will be a difference even if you used the same color in the PNG — IE renders PNGs darker than it should. The reason for this is misinterpretation of gAMA frame saved in PNGs that makes it possible to better color-match pictures. The fix is to remove this frame, and doing it on Ubuntu is as easy as:
aptitude install pngcrush
cd your-graphics-directory
mkdir fixed
find . -type f -exec pngcrush -d fixed -rem cHRM -rem gAMA -rem iCCP -rem sRGB {} \;
Now you have a „fixed” directory where you have PNGs that will work properly in IE (and are a bit smaller which is a nice side effect). If you’re sure they’re ok, just do
mv fixed/* ./
rmdir fixed
That’s all.
Using Java Timer class one can schedule a task for recurring execution. Even though ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor makes it possible to create timers with nanosecond resolution (but beware of underlying operating system clock precision!), regularity of task execution is by default awful.
I have run into this once and had to explain the customer that it’s not fixable. When I measured the delay between timer executions, etc. it turned out that doing as much as new Thread(runnable).start() usually takes 1-5 milliseconds, but at times it takes two orders of magnitude longer: even half a second!
Same customer, other project and this time I thought of a reason for this behaviour: garbage collection. I started with calling System.gc() explicitly inside measured code and it takes 200-500 milliseconds! So it must be it.
Is there a solution? Of course there is. It’s called The Concurrent Low Pause Collector and has been in Java since version 5. Read the linked article for many, many details, but shortly just add:
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
to the usual java -jar command and the garbage collection will be done in parallel with your code execution. Of course it’s no golden bullet, it makes overall performance worse (now instead of 1-5 milliseconds, a single loop pass takes 4-10 milliseconds), but for this particular use, it makes Timer regularity better by two orders of magnitude.
SIL3124 is a PCI (as in old PCI, not PCI express) SATA-II controller which I had to buy because my NAS’ old Gigabyte motherboard supports (downspeeded) SATA-II drives only to 750GB size. Of course I got to know this AFTER buying 1,5TB drive 😉
Anyway, it’s always uphill and even though SIL3124 card sees the drive and I’ve installed Ubuntu Server with no problems to it, I couldn’t boot the card. It kept saying „no valid device”. Turns out it has a RAID-only BIOS by default so if someone – like me – wants to use it as an JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) controller, BIOS upgrade is needed. How user friendly not to mention it in a – Czech-language – manual.
Of course, being mainly a Linux user with no CD- or DVD-drive, I have it even more uphill. BIOS flashing tools are available for Windows and DOS. Soooo the solution is:
Note: Drive’s UUIDs change because of that so it’s best to do it BEFORE installing Ubuntu, otherwise You get a maintanance console.
Update 2009-11-18, using Ubuntu 9.10 now
============
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002
"FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578
"FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:00000001
============
Mainly notes to myself, but maybe some random Googlers will find some of them useful. I may add more in time.
aptitude install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev # download from # http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Aurora+Gtk+Engine?content=56438 # unpack and cd to source directory ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-animation make sudo make install
and then chmod +x it and use it with Gnome’s Open With function on .doc, .xls and .ppt files. That way I’m able to open those files in Word, Excel and PowerPoint just by double clicking them.#!/bin/bash wine start "z:$1"
tar xzvf eclipse-jee-ganymede-SR1-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz sudo mv eclipse /opt # you probably should think twice about chown and chmod, # but I myself make my PC physically secure so don't care sudo chown -R user.group /opt/eclipse sudo chmod -R 770 /opt/eclipse sudo nano /etc/environment # put path to JDK by adding a # line something like JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun" /opt/eclipse/eclipse # choose your workspace location and start EclipseWhen in Eclipse, just use their instructions on installing PDT:Help > Software Updates... > Available Software > Manage Sites... Add... > add the DLTK 1.0 interim site: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/dltk/updates-dev/1.0/ Add... > add the PDT 2.0 interim site: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/updates/2.0/ Enable the Ganymede Update site (if not already enabled): http://download.eclipse.org/releases/ganymede/ Expand the DLTK site and select the Dynamic Languages Toolkit - Core Frameworks or Dynamic Languages Toolkit - Core Frameworks SDK Feature Select the PDT or PDT SDK Feature Install...