F1 help in Windows [XP] Explorer

Have you ever accidentally hit the F1 key in Explorer when you meant F2 (or 1, or Esc)? Normally missing a key isn’t a big deal, but in this case F1 triggers the Windows help center. Help may be valuable sometimes (I wouldn’t know, I’ve never used it), but for me, the accidental keypress costs me 20-30 seconds of productivity while I wait for the thing to load and close it.

The slow demise of Cable TV

I’m officially calling out the end of cable television in ten years. It will be replaced by Hulu, or something like it.

On the Economy of Light Bulbs

On May 17th, 2003, I bought this compact fluorescent light bulb for $5.99. A couple days ago it finally stopped working, ending it’s 76 month career of generating photons.

Get your motherboard model in Linux

If you ever need to remotely determine the motherboard model of your linux server, try using dmidecode. This dumps the BIOS information, and that will usually yield the motherboard model.

Even Faster Django Unit Tests

Last year, I wrote about speeding up django unit tests. With this method, I’ve been able to significantly reduce the time it takes to run my unit tests.

But I still have a real short attention span. If anything, it’s shorter than it was last year. I also have an additional problem: I tend to create databases that have lots of preloaded data. This means that when I run tests or when I’m doing model development, I have to wait for all that data to load. Waiting sucks.

Workaround for Subclipse crash

A couple weeks ago I tried to setup Aptana on my Mac, but was quite disappointed to find out that whenever I used Subversion, the JVM would crash. It took a while, but this morning I narrowed down the problem.

The JavaHL native client for Subclipse adapter was blowing up the JVM. In retrospect, I should have figured this out earlier, since the JVM doesn’t really crash that often. Because the JavaHL is calling into the svn shared lib’s on my machine, it has the possibility to crash.

The workaround is pretty simple: uninstall the JavaHL client adapter and install the SVNKit client adapter. The SVNKit adapter is pure java code, so it doesn’t call into the libraries directly. Any bugs that may exist in SVNKit will just throw java exceptions instead of killing the JVM.

Grooglin

grooglin (n): A google gremlin. Often blamed for odd behavior with Google services, such as receiving a reply to an email before you sent the original.

Linking Javascript

This is an idea that I’ve been kicking around for a while.

Back in the C days, when most everything was determined at compile time, life was simple. You wrote your program, you preprocessed it, you compiled it, then you linked it. Linking is the cool part. The linker would determine exactly which bits of code you were using, and selectively remove everything else. This dramatically decreased final executable size and improved efficiency. As a side effect, if you called a function that wasn’t defined in your code, the linker produce an error about “unresolved symbols,” which would remind you to link to your favorite library.

Air conditioners, water.

It is surely HOT where I live. Actually, today is on track to be hotter than it’s ever been in Portland. Right now (11:00 AM) it’s 91° F, and it’s forecast to hit 107° F this afternoon.

Needless to say I’ve been running my air conditioner non stop for the last few days. This brings the temperature in my house to a comfortable 90 or so during the day and nearly 82 at night. I have a central AC system, that has an external compressor (a little box that sits outside, makes a loud noise and blows lots of hot air).

Attached to the system is a little tube which drains all of the condensed water that the device collects when it cools the air. The other day while looking at the tube, I was wondering how much water comes out of it. So, I put the tube in a bucket (normally it just drains on the driveway). I was quite surprised to find that I was able to fill 2 of my buckets. These buckets are about 3.5 gallons, so that means I’m collecting at around 7 gallons in 16 hours (almost a half a gallon per hour).

That’s a lot of water.

The McDLT Time-Dilation Effect

McDLT time-dilation effect:

A neurological effect that occurs when your hot side gets hot, and simultaneously your cold side gets cold.