random neuron misfires

If you’re like me, you use a lot of tabs at once in Firefox… a LOT (50+). Even with a few tabs, the new Firefox with the Plugin Container tends to sit there chewing up CPU, grinding core temperature higher and higher. In my case, it ran my CPU up to over 200F, before I had to kill it off from the shell.

The idea is sound, but the implementation is absolutely horrible. If a webpage has flash components (and really, what webpage doesn’t these days), but isn’t actually playing Flash content, the plugin should be idle. With plugin-container, it sits there spinning, eating valuable CPU cycles and generating a LOT more heat than necessary.

So here’s how to stop it:

Under ‘about:config‘, do a search for ‘dom.ipc‘, and you’ll see something like this:

The values you want to change, are the ones related to the plugin(s) you do not want to run in a separate namespace. In my case, that was the two plugins listed.

Just double-click the key, and change the values from ‘true’ to ‘false’, as shown here:

That’s it… just restart Firefox, and now your plugins will run in “legacy” mode, the same way they did before plugin-container came alone. The only problem is that you’ll be much more prone to Flash crashes taking out the browser itself, so save often, or use a Session Manager to help restore the tabs you had loaded if/when Firefox crashes.

I’ve been a long-time user of TweetDeck, and have posted here before describing how to get it cleanly installed on Linux, but one thing that always irked me was the hard-coded, horizontal nature of the UI.

I run a large resolution on my laptop (1920×1200), but even with 8 searches, I’m running off the right of the screen. Horizontally scrolling to the right and left gets tiring fast. Very fast..

So I came up with a mock-up of a slightly new UI idea, which solves this problem in a somewhat elegant way. The configuration for this would be something along the line of thresholds of columns (a “table” in other vernacular), where you specify the maximum number of horizontal columns, and anything more than that flows to vertical rows.

See the below mock-up for what I’m talking about (click the image to enlarge):

So TweetDeck team, are you listening?

I installed the “Calendar Printing Assistant” for Office 2007 in a VM, and was very impressed with the output. Slick and lots of choices.

I recently upgraded to Office 2010, and have been tinkering with the conversion of my Office 2007 daily usage in a VM to the Office 2010 usage in a VM, but missed the power and flexibility of the Calendar Printing Assistant.

If you Google the tool, you come to this page on Microsoft’s site, which refers to ‘version 4’ of the CPA. Unfortunately, this only works with Office 2007, not Office 2010.

In fact, if you search around some more, you even find posts from Microsoft themselves, saying that it isn’t updated to handle Office 2010 yet.

Being one to never give up, I kept digging, and digging, and digging… and after many searches through Microsoft’s site directly, I found it! The Calendar Printing Assistant for Office 2010 (and Office 2007), “updated” to version 2.0.

Microsoft Calendar Printing Assistant for Microsoft Office 2007 (12.0.6520.3001) MSO (12.0.6520.5000)

I just verified that it does indeed install and work on Office 2010, without any issues at all… other than some GUI artifacts (probably due to some funky VMware video drivers for Windows 7, more than CPA itself).

Enjoy!

I ordered a Novatel MiFi 2372 from Amazon this week, hoping to decouple my primary laptop from holding the 3G SIM card under the battery while I’m on the train back and forth to the office. I spend 5+ hours a day on the train, and having 100% solid connectivity is a must.

I did a lot of research before deciding on this particular device. The closest competitor was the PHS300 from Cradlepoint, but it had one flaw that the MiFi overcame: I can directly plug my AT&T SIM card into the MiFi, but the PHS300 requires an actual USB dongle + SIM card. AT&T wanted $249 for the empty dongle itself, so that was a no-go.

Some of the sites I found on the web indicate that you can hack the configuration of the MiFi using some undocumented options, found only in the config/backup file. This can turn on or disable some features of the device, not visible or exposed in the MiFi web interface.

This is 100% untrue (at least with the 2372 made for North American carriers/networks).

Two of the features I was most-interested in was the ability to charge it over USB while using the device over wifi. This is not directly possible without modification of the USB cable hardware itself. Luckily I have a USB “Y” cable that has data on one male end and power on the other. If I just use the power end, I gain the same feature, but the configuration option is completely ignored.

The option that some sites suggest is:

<routeroverusb>1</routeroverusb>

The other option I wanted to change was the number of maximum connected devices. Having a hardware-locked limit of 5 devices seems highly restrictive, so I checked into that.. and that too, is not modifiable on the 2372. If I’m on the train and have 2 laptops + my BlackBerry with me, that’s already 3 devices. That means I can’t further share my connection with any more than 2 other devices on the train in the car with me. Bad design.

This option looks like:

<allowedclients>5</allowedclients>

If you look at the MiFi itself, it’s really just a cellphone with built-in WAN routing and NAT. The Android phones can do this out of the box already, but those are larger/more-complex/requires contract. The more I play with the MiFi, the more I realize, I’m just holding a phone in my hand, minus a keypad and screen and speakers.

So here’s my synopsis after less than 12 hours of really beating up the device, with the cons first:

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Recently, my Windows 7 laptop started showing the “Search programs and files” Start Menu option was showing bogus search result that looked like this:

I searched around for awhile, and finally stumbled on a site describing the exact fix I was looking for.

In short, you need to perform the following steps to fix this:

1. Open the Registry Editor, but since may not be able to search for it, you’ll have to surf over to C:\Windows\System32\regedt32.exe and run that, or C:\Windows\regedit.exe.
2. Navigate to the key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderTypes\{EF87B4CB-F2CE-4785-8658-4CA6C63E38C6}\TopViews\{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}
3. Locate the value: GroupBy in the right-hand pane.
4. Change the value to System.StartMenu.Group
5. Launch Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and kill the explorer.exe process you’ll see running.
6. Inside of Task Manager, go to File | New Task (Run…)
7. Type “explorer.exe” and click Ok.

Nobody seems to know why this happens, and it happens randomly. It was discussed in the Microsoft forums, but there was no fix therein.

This is yet another reason why I hate Microsoft Windows. Random behavior in a computer is never acceptable.

I’ve been getting an annoying error message lately on my BlackBerry Bold 9700 every time I go to BlackBerry App World and try to read the Reviews for an application I’m interested in. The error message is:

"There was a problem reading data from the server and BlackBerry App World must exit. Error type: 100002"

According to BlackBerry Technical Solutions Center Knowledgebase article KB21648, the fix is non-obvious, but with version 1.XXXXXXX.0.33, AppWorld “Reviews” do not work at all when reading them over Wi-Fi. The problem is with XML parsing over Wi-Fi connections. Why the same parsing over 3G works, I don’t personally know.

Yes it’s a completely weird problem and a bug, but the “solution” is to disable Wi-Fi if you want to read Reviews of applications in BlackBerry App World. The rest of the app functions fine using Wi-Fi, just not Reviews.

UPDATED: 2010-4-8 to include rotating video.

I’ve recently started creating some screencasting tutorials with my Linux laptop using recordMyDesktop and find myself having to convert the video to various other formats before I can share it with my Windows colleagues, or upload it to YouTube.

I’ve done some of this before for converting video for use on my BlackBerry over here and converting video for my iPod over here.

Here’s are the snippets all in one place (using mencoder, but you could also use ffmpeg). Hopefully these will be useful to others as well.

Some of the lines below are quite long; make sure you unwrap them all on one line when you run the one you need.

Enjoy!

This past weekend, I “upgraded” my Lenovo Thinkpad x61s laptop from XP Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate, in preparation for some new gadgets I’m planning on testing with it.

Anyone who knows me well enough, knows I’m definitely NOT a Windows fan, but I do have to use it for some of my proprietary peripherals, my hybrid GTD system, and for my day job. Everywhere else, I use Linux. This is the reason I carry two laptops with me when I travel: One running my favorite flavor of Linux + VMware Workstation for “regular” Windows work, and the ultra-portable for running “real” Windows for cases where a virtualized Windows instance just won’t work.

A lot has changed in Windows 7 from what I’m used to with Windows XP, and there are a lot of annoying quirks, but I’m trying to stick with it, and keep it installed, so I can use the 12″ notebook as my “primary” on-the-go machine for the short term, until my second Lenovo T61p shows up to replace my current one.

Because there are a lot of changed settings, and everything is buried everywhere on Windows 7, in a seemingly illogical fashion, I had to find a way to get to it all.

Windows lacks a lot of power, customization and flexibility that Linux has had for a decade, so I continue to use and support Linux. But there are ways to eek out some power in Windows, and in Windows 7 I found such an option, and it’s called “God Mode”. Here’s how you activate it:

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I’ve been seeing all of this chatter on the web, YouTube and everywhere else about unlocking phone handsets, so they can work on any provider’s network. There are dozens of companies out there who offer unlock codes for any phone, any provider, for a fee of course. You can get them on eBay, you can get them on various online sites, you can get instructions through torrent sites and so on.

The one thing you can’t get, no matter how hard you look, is the actual algorithm they use to generate these codes.

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I’ve been using VMware Workstation for many, many years and I run a few hundred gigabytes of virtual machines for development and testing on various platforms. Some of these include physical machines that have been converted to virtual machines (using VMware Converter, which used to be called P2V [Physical 2 Virtual]) and some include purely virtual machines I’ve built from scratch using the default ISO file or installation media.

Almost all of my Windows virtual machines are physical machines converted to virtual machines, due to the cost and licensing of that platform.

I have a Windows 7 virtual machine that I’ve built up and have been testing with some new Office products and other snap-ins to help me test Funambol and productivity tools, but I noticed that the 64-bit Windows 7 version I have lacked any networking. It flat-out did not have a valid network driver.

I looked around on the CD, installed the VMware Tools from the menu, and made sure the current patches and service packs were applied (I keep a local repository of these to avoid re-fetching them over the WAN every time I have to rebuild my virtual machines). The 32-bit Windows 7 had working networking, but the 64-bit did not… and I couldn’t figure it out. I installed a 64-bit Windows XP VM, and it had the same exact problem… no networking.

Being the reverse-engineer that I am, I started looking into the VMware configuration and the files themselves, and grep’ing the source and strings(1) on the binaries, and then I stumbled upon the solution…

Shut down your Windows VM (do not suspend it, you have to shut it down completely) and open the main .vmx file in an editor and add the following line:

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

If your VM has more than one network device, make sure you set the right one in your .vmx file for your networking. I have several in my session: one for bridged, one for host-only and one for NAT. The NAT one happens to be ethernet0, so that’s the one I wanted the “public” networking functional on.

That’s it… when you reboot the VM, Windows will detect the “new” Ethernet interface, configure it for you, and then networking will work perfectly. Another VMware problem solved!