Those of you who wish to download authenticated RSS feeds may find that your client doesn’t support them.  Or in the case of Outlook 2007, it supports them intermittently!  (Try adding a few LiveJournal authenticated feeds and then change your LJ password and see how many of them you can get to work again.)  I found this blog post that echoes the problems of authenticated feeds.

Here are two possible solutions to the problem:

  1. Use a news reader that is supports authenticated feeds.  I have installed RSS Bandit (per the suggestion in the above link) and I think its great.  I don’t know what other readers support authenticated feeds.
  2. Use FreeMyFeed to authenticate for you.  This is only slightly less convenient, but allows you to read authenticated reads in any reader.  Personally I may take advantage of this to read authenticated feeds on my Moto Q.

One of the features that I really wish WordPress contained was friend levels and filters.  LiveJournal happens to have a usable implementation of this though.  I am now cross posting to LiveJournal so that I can create posts that are neither public nor completely private.  In order to see these you need a livejournal account.  In order to access the RSS feed that contains the private posts you need an news reader that is able to download authenticated feeds.  Here is a link to the authenticated feed.  The user name and password are those used for your own LiveJournal account.

ChinnoDog’s authenticated news feed

Note: This link is now added at the bottom of the main page.

My mom has been carving fruit for some time now.  It is amazing the details that she can put into them.  The picture at left is a watermellon she cut for a birthday party.  I was going to show a photo of the watermellon laid horizontally but someone (kids) took a chunk out of the other side.  I guess they were hungry.  Production of a carving like this takes approximately 3 hours.  It is a full sized watermellon, purchased at the peak of summer.  She cuts a variety of other fruit into patterns as well, but watermellon is the most spectacular.  Anyone near Lancaster, PA need one of these?  :)

Niagara Falls night scene header

I went to Niagara Falls for 4th of July weekend with pleia2. I know, who goes to Canada for the 4th of July? Canada Day is July 1st they don’t even celebrate the 4th.  There were fireworks on the American side but we didn’t even bother going to see them.  By 3pm there were already throngs of people gathered down by the water on the Canadian side.

We stayed at a cute little bed and breakfast called Ambiance By The Falls just across the Canadian border.  It was only a three room B&B; small, the way I like them.  It has a great location on the edge of town in the adjoining development.  From there you can walk to all the attractions.  Breakfast was good and our hostess was kind.  Overall, a very nice trip.

Here are some highlights.  (Picture spam to follow!)

Read the rest of this entry »

It is a sad truth that running Outlook 2007 on Vista can cause even the fastest computer to slow down to a painful crawl.  When using Outlook with an exchange server the bottleneck is the OST file.  The amount of disk activity generated by outlook is significant.  The problem is, Outlook itself is not the only offender!  In Vista the indexing service also molests your OST file repeatedly while it sorts and indexes all the email, spam, contacts, calender items, and everything else that Outlook uses.  Add to that that Microsoft Communicator’s Outlook integration causes constant accesses to your OST file and you have an absurdly large amount of disk activity that never stops, even when you aren’t doing anything!

My solution: Put the OST file on a RAM drive!  Since the OST is causing a disk bottleneck, we will just get it off the disk.

Step 1: I am using 1.2GB of space on the exchange server.  In addition to consuming large amounts of disk space, it is causing the indexes mantained by Vista to grow ever larger and generate more disk activity.  So task #1 is to configure autoarchiving and then run it to reduce the size of your mailbox until it will fit comfortably into memory.  My target was 128-256MB.  That doesn’t sound like much relative to my 1.2GB, but it represents nearly all of the mail I access on a regular basis.  Compact your OST file when you are done to verify its size.

Step 2: I need a RAM drive.  At work I run Vista x64, which adds a further level of difficulty since I need a 64-bit RAM drive.  I found one that works nicely in this thread at PlanetAMD64.  There are others, but this one is free and it works.  In Vista x64 it creates an error on boot because the driver is unsigned but you can boot up anyway by pressing F8.  In Vista x86 you can disable driver integrity checks through the boot loader, but not in Vista x64 RTM.  There is a way to sign your own driver so this doesn’t happen; anyone have fast and painless instructions for this?

After you install it and reboot you will need to format it and save blank volume image.  The readme describes how to do this.  You can format it with the file system of choice.  I wanted something that would not waste too much space and be fairly fast so I used exFAT with a 1MB cluster size.  If that is what you want, use this to format your drive:

format r: /fs:exFAT /V:RamDrive /A:1M

If you are using Vista x86, exFAT support seems to be absent.  So if that is the case or you are just afraid of exFAT, use your file system of choice.  The bigger your cluster size, the better, but be sure you can utilize most of your drive.  Your usable disk space will be in multiples of your cluster size and you need room for your FAT.  (So on a 256MB RAMdisk if you have a cluster size of 16MB that is 256/16=16 clusters.  Except that a little bit is used for the FAT so that is only 15 clusters resulting in a usable disk space of only 16*15=240MB!)

When you are done, save the image to the registry using the command line in the readme file.

Step 3: Move your OST file to your RAM drive.  Right click on the Outlook icon and open properties, click on E-mail Accounts, double click on Microsoft Exchange on the email tab.  Click on More Settings on the wizard, go to the Advanced tab.  Uncheck “Used Cached Exchange Mode” and click Apply.  Click Offline Folder File Settings.  If the file name is greyed out you either have Outlook open or another application open that uses the OST file open.  Put in r:\outlook.ost as your file and click OK.  Re-enable Cached Exchange Mode and click OK and then get out of your dialogs.  Start up Outlook.  It will download a fresh copy of your mailbox and Vista will immediately begin indexing the new OST file.

OST In Memory

Step 4: If you made it this far, Outlook is running fast and the rest if your computer is running almost as fast as if you didn’t have Outlook open at all.  The only thing left to do is to make sure the OST file gets saved when you shut down and copied back to the RAMdisk when you start up.  If you used a RAMdisk other than the one I linked to, this might be done for you.  However, it is an easy enough task to do this yourself.  Create two .cmd files in the folder you are running the ramdisk4g out of called startup.cmd and shutdown.cmd.  Create the two files with the following text:

startup.cmd: copy /y “C:\Users\stephenn\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.ost” r:\outlook.ost

shutdown.cmd: if exist r:\outlook.ost copy /y r:\outlook.ost “%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.ost”
Then, open up the group policy editor (run “gpedit.msc” to get there quickly) and navigate to “Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Scripts(Startup/Shutdown)”.  I trust you can figure out how to add the two scripts to your startup/shutdown sequence.

Vista Startup Script in Group Policy Editor

The End! If you loose or corrupt your OST file it won’t matter.  Just recreate it.  It is just a copy of the stuff on the server.  If you attempted to follow my instructions using a PST file, try not to wipe out your inbox forever. :-)

Note: “Disk activity” to r:\outlook.ost doesn’t show in performance monitor anymore.  Reads and writes to your RAM disk are completely absent.  Now you can search and destroy new bottlenecks.

Ok, I might be neglecting my blog.  Thats pretty sad since I always think of things I want to put here.  So, I’ll catch myself up now.  Part of the intent of having a blog at all was to collect a list of things to do and places to go.  I’ve been to some places lately.

Last weekend I went to DC on a business trip and took Lyz with me.  After a long full day meeting and a company dinner on Friday we went to the Natural History Museum and caught a 3D IMAX movie at the Air & Space museum on Saturday and then went to the zoo on Sunday.  The company put us up in the Renaissance Mayflower on Thursday and Friday and I picked up Saturday night at the Reniassance M Street from Priceline.  Lyz posted pictures, and.. well, I’m too lazy to post pictures right now, so see them here and here.

Closer to home I went to Union Barrel Works in Reamstown on Friday for a rather tasty meal.  Of the beer I only found the Kolsch to be drinkable, but thats pretty good considering I didn’t know I liked any beer until a month or so ago.


View Larger Map

Ok, enough for now.

Went to the Allen Theater in Anneville yesterday to see Indiana Jones with Lyz. Its a relatively small theater with one screen. It looks very small-town. However, you can get coffee drinks and a number of other delicious items from the coffee shop to take into the theater. Cute place. And oh yea, Indiana Jones was good, but not Raiders of the Lost Ark good. Before the show they played the national anthem and everyone stood up; I’m still a little confused about that. Local tradition?

Allen Theatre

So I claim not to be able to cook, but there are a few kitchen appliances I am picky about.  Not having a microwave, I set out to buy a new one.  I didn’t walk into a store and buy one though.  I did the whole nine yards; I looked it up in consumer reports, called for the best price, and the ordered it.  Its now unboxed and on my kitchen counter.  It is simply gigantic.  It is a GE PEB2060.  I picked it up at E.A. Pyle in Palmyra, a cute little place.  $190 when it was all said and done.

Monster Microwave (Nalgene bottle added for scale)

This is the beginning of the life of my blog.  I will not pretend this is the first time I have tried to start a blog;  This one just seems to make the most sense so far.  I’m starting this blog in part for me but also so I can share things that I know and things that I do.  It doesn’t have a grand purpose or design.  Its just a place to put stuff.  The life of my blog starts with me moving to Lebanon, PA to a house I am renting.  It is just over 4 miles from where I work.  Being separated has been good for me.  Getting settled in my house is taking a lot of energy, but it is exciting.  More on all that later.