Posted on November 7th, 2006%
My online baseball game, CSFBL, is a data hog to the tune of about 100GB. Yes, 100GB. That’s how much disk space it takes to store the play-by-play results of some 5 million baseball games (over 2,500 seasons) along with the related player data, historical statisics, and other fun stuff.
The server that powers this beast has three 146GB SCSI drives in a RAID5 configuration. That’s about 250GB of available disk space. Excluding data requirements for such necessities like Windows, SQL Server, tempdb files, web files, and the like, we typically have between 50GB and 100GB of free disk space.
Of course, backing up that database is another story entirely, and if I’m not diligent in keeping the disk clean (by deleting old and unneeded data files), the server can quickly run out of space. This has happened from time to time over the past few years, but a quick cleanup resolves the issue.
Over the weekend I decided to take on major . . .
→ Read More: On disk space and defragmentation
Posted on October 17th, 2005%
After years of great service, I knew it was time to replace the venerable Windows Notepad witha more robust text-editor. A little search brought me to Notepad2, which brought just the right improvements with minimal increase in overhead. (I want my text editor to load quickly and easily, which excluded many more robust tools.)
To truly replace Notepad, we don’t just install a replacement — we have to make sure that replacement takes over all tasks from Notepad. In the old days, we just replaced notepad.exe with the replacement’s executable file. In the new days, with Windows file protection, we have to do a bit more.
I read a few blurbs around the Web describing various “proper” techniques to get notepad.exe to be replaced by a new executable of choice, but only one worked correctly: rewriting all existing copies of notepad.exe very quickly. In other words, run the following code in a batch file.
copy notepad.exe c:\windows\system32\dllcache /y
copy notepad.exe c:\windows\system32 /y
copy notepad.exe . . .
→ Read More: Choosing (and installing) a better Notepad
Posted on September 29th, 2005%
Regular readers of my blog (what few there may be) will recall that some weeks ago, I had the (un)pleasant experience of a catastrophic hard drive failure. To help avert future disasters, I recently purchased an external 300GB USB/Firewire drive from Seagate. The product comes with BounceBack Express, a relatively simple backup solution that can backup files and folders to an external device. So far, the solution has worked well; I haven’t had the need to restore, and I have had peace of mind.
However, there has been one odd side effect from this new hardware/software installation: my laptop would no longer hibernate. I had the option to hibernate, but choosing it did nothing. Shutting down worked fine, as did restarting and going into standby mode.
Turns out the problem had nothing to do with BIOS settings or settings in the Power Options control panel. It had to do with BounceBack Express’s BounceBack Launcer application, which runs at login. This . . .
→ Read More: Can’t hibernate your laptop? Check running processes
Posted on September 12th, 2005%
In my pursuits to rid myself of the Microsoft beast, I’ve added a book to my collection (Setting up LAMP: Getting Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP Working Together), and decided to install Fedora Core 4 on a virtual machine, using Microsoft’s Virtual PC.
I’ve used Virtual PC in the past with no problems, but this was my first foray into using it to run a non-Microsoft operating system. It was intriguing, to say the least…
I downloaded the DVD ISO for Fedora. Virtual PC can capture ISO images — but not all ISO images — only CD-ROM ISO images. No problem, I was going to burn it to a DVD anyway.
I decided to run an integrity check on the DVD (this is a feature of the Fedora installer). It took about 16 hours. Fortunately, it passed.
The rest of the installation actually went smooth. (Note that I installed in text mode, not in graphical mode.)
The . . .
→ Read More: Installing Linux on Virtual PC
Posted on September 4th, 2005%
(This is a follow-up to my previous post, One step closer to saying “Goodbye” to Microsoft, in which I describe my experience trying to rebuild my laptop.)
Well, the bootable Windows XP Pro CD provided from my Dell computer booted up fine and installed fine. This one requires you to activate the product online (within 30 days, of course). Fantastic, I figure I’m on the home stretch, as I have a valid Windows license.
I proceed to get the laptop back up to speed by installing the necessities from my MSDN subscription, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, and Norton Anti-Virus. I’m starting to feel good again!
This morning, I decide to activate Windows (even though I have 29 days to go). I open the activation wizard and type the product key on that same sticker in the most inconvenient part of my laptop. This time I write it down on a piece of paper so as not . . .
→ Read More: One step closer to saying "Goodbye" to Microsoft (Part II)
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