ChinnoDog’s blog

I am totally slacking on blog postings.  I recently started using Ubuntu on my laptop as my main operating system and have a ton of things to figure out yet.  Here is an important one.  I figured out printing to PDFs though.  To print to PDFs:

apt-get install cups-pdf
mkdir ~/PDF
sudo chmod u+x,a+x,+s /usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf

You might have to

sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart

after that.

Bitlbee is a IRC proxy that allows you to connect to instant messenger services using an IRC client.  It emulates an IRC server so you can connect to it from your favorite IRC client and then plug in your account information.  You can install it on a server for shared use or install it on a workstation to connect to locally.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out of the box in Ubuntu.  Here is what I did to install it.

1. Install bitlbee (duh).
   sudo apt-get install bitlbee
2. Install xinetd if you don’t already have it.
   sudo apt-get install xinetd
3. Now we need to copy bitlbee.xinetd into /etc/xinetd.d per the instructions.  Oops, we don’t seem to have that.  Make a temporary directory and download the source to get it.
   cd ~
   mkdir bitlbeesrc
   cd bitlbeesrc
   sudo apt-get source bitlbee
   cd bitlbee-1.2.3/doc
   sudo cp bitlbee.xinetd /etc/xinetd.d
   
   (you are done with the source)
   cd ~
   rm -rf bitlbeesrc
4. The /etc/xinetd.d/bitlbee.xinetd we just copied still has its default settings.   Open it up in nano or your favorite editor and set “user = bitlbee” and “server = /usr/sbin/bitlbee”
5. Restart xinetd.
   sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart
6. Almost done.  If you connected to bitlbee now you would get permissions errors though.
   sudo chmod 777 /etc/bitlbee/bitlbee.conf
   sudo chmod 777 /var/lib/bitlbee
   (I would like to point out here that I KNOW that you don’t want to be setting 777 permissions everywhere.  I don’t think its particularly dangerous here.  I’m a noob. gimme a break. :-p )
7. Everything is ready.  Connect to localhost on the default IRC port (6667).  Proceed with the quickstart guide written by pleia2 to add accounts.

Once upon a time whenever I would move or rearrange I would get out my graph paper and draw each room to scale with doors and windows and outlets and the whole nine yards.  Then, I would measure all my furniture and I would draw that to scale on another sheet and cut out all the pieces.  I could then move them around the drawing of my room until everything fit nicely and I could see that yes, there was actually walking space in the room!  (Ok, maybe that says more about my shortcomings in interior design than anything else.)  Anyway, I didn’t do it this time when I moved into the house and I regret it.  I always wanted a faster way to do it but there wasn’t one.  Drawing it in a full fledged CAD package would take too long and it was difficult to get measurements right using drawing programs like Visio.

Awhile back I found Google Sketchup online.  Its a free 3D design package that is kind of a hybrid of the above mentioned application types.  Once you get used to the controls its pretty easy to build 3D objects.  It uses a very intuitive interface that allows you to draw things on the screen and then extrude them.  Its almost magic!  I have only recreated my office thus far, using crude blocks to represent most things that take up space.  This is sufficient for my purposes, though SketchUp is certainly capable of more.  Next: draw doors and build furniture!

This is a major improvement over my graph paper cutouts!  Though, there is some additional design time required for planning out the additional dimension.  This technique should be particularly useful in my office since it is so small.  I will be building up as well as out in order to be sure I have enough space.  I have included the actual SketchUp drawing below for anyone that would like to have a peek.  My sister used to put things in my cutouts that didn’t belong there.  I anxiously await the edited copy with a toilet where my desk is supposed to go. Sketchup Drawing Office.zip

I’m testing remote control solutions at work for the next couple weeks.  For the moment I’m testing the small business solution from Bomgar.  It seems to be fully featured.  It supports everything!  Win / Mac / Linux / Win Mobile and soon Blackberry!  Anyway, anyone that has wanted my help in the past, now is your chance.  I will probably be testing a competitor product soon as well but it probably won’t have anything but Windows support.

I have not updated my blog in forever.  This is so bad.  This is almost two months old.  Well, here goes anyway.

I went to Michigan at the end of August to see my friends.  I try to go to the CRIM when I can.  I think this is my 5th time but I’m not sure.  I would have to count my CRIM t-shirts.  It’s really just an excuse to hang out with my friends.  Its a charity walk / race that happens in Flint every year.  We always do the 5k walk.  Once we did the 8k but we were younger / skinnier then.  Then again, weren’t we all?  I took my camera and then forgot it in my car.  I know, good one.  I have a few pictures though.

This is near the end of the CRIM in flint.  Its not the most vibrant of colors.  I think the camera in my phone has had some sun exposure.  There is no one there because most of the other people have already rounded the corner up ahead.  The second one is an official photo from the photographers.  They take them every year and then sell them to the participants.  I’m walking with Diane and pushing Ripley in the stroller.  She is playing in the puddle she made in her cup holder from cups of water we picked up along the way.

On the way back to the car we some some college age kids fishing rubber duckies out of the river from a race that had apparently taken place earlier.  The river isn’t particularly clean.  There was a general expectation they would get sick afterwards.  At least one had a raft.  The picture next to it is the disposable RFID tags they use now.  Everyone ties them to their shoes.  There are gigantic RFID readers at the start and finish lines.  The finishing order appears in the newspaper the following day.  (We were not very close to the beginning.)

We went to see Kristin afterwards, but I have no pictures of that.  I got to see Kristin’s apartment and then she made scalloped potatoes for dinner.  The Saturday of the CRIM was Diane’s birthday and we got drunk at her request.  For someone that doesn’t drink it seems to me that it takes me an unusually large amount of alcohol to get anywhere.  Peach schnapps + orange juice + bowls of scalloped potatoes = good times.

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? 

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.

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.

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.