I was recently tasked with fixing a Windows XP Post-SP2 laptop that was
operating very sluggishly for no obvious reason. It also wouldn't allow you
to press F2 or F12 during boot to change any options. It turns out the problem
was due to an ancient bios (an Inspiron 5100, revision A06 when the current
is A32).
It wasn't a simple upgrade because these things aren't well documented
on Dell's site, but you need to upgrade to A22 before going all the way to
the current, it's called a "gateway" bios because it opens up new upgrade
avenues.
The relevant post, just in case Dell allows deep linking for others with
the same problem to save a little time: F2 does not access cmos which suggested
removing the hard drive to force it to boot from cd and to do revision A22 first.
Incidentally once it booted from CD again with the new bios into BartPE, it
was fast... and back to Windows on the hard drive it was fast too. Roughly
7x as fast for Windows to become usable, so I'm guessing it was a Post-SP2
driver mismatch with the old bios, as it did redetect a couple of things.
This describes how to fix an svn repository after accidentally committing a
file with a password in it:
Yes, this happened to me. Today. I didn’t look at the files before committing
to my public repository, and had to fix it quickly. These are the steps to undo
the last revision. First, the easy way (if using fsfs backend):
The first thing you need to do is stop the server. Anyone who checks out the
repository while it contains the soon-to-be-deleted rev will be hosed and have
to check it out again from scratch. This includes the WC you committed from,
so go ahead and move that out of the way.
- Go into the svn repository using
cd
- Edit
db/current and decrement the first number. That's the tip revision.
- Move
db/revs/$BADREV and db/revprops/$BADREV out of the way, so when someone does commit that rev it won't have issues
- Run
trac-admin resync and/or restart Apache, as necessary
And now the hard way, if you're using the bdb backend (because this way makes more sense than hacking it directly):
The first thing you need to do is stop the server. Anyone who checks out the
repository while it contains the soon-to-be-deleted rev will be hosed and have
to check it out again from scratch. This includes the WC you committed from,
so go ahead and move that out of the way.
tim@client# mv workingcopy workingcopy_bad
root@server# /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
* Stopping web server: Apache2
root@server# cd /var/svn
root@server# svnadmin dump reponame > svn.dump
root@server# vim svn.dump (delete the offending revision in its entirety)
root@server# mv reponame reponame_bad
root@server# svnadmin create reponame
root@server# svnadmin load --force-uuid reponame < svn.dump
root@server# chown -R www-data:www-data reponame
root@server# /etc/init.d/apache2 start
root@server# trac-admin /path/to/repo resync
tim@client# svn co http://example.com/path/to/repo
That’s it... once you’ve got your WC clean, make the changes but this time
watch out for passwords and recommit the changes you made the last time.
Updated 2007-07-27 for better fsfs instructions, suggested by Eric below (and finally verified as working by me).
This may be public knowledge to everyone else in the universe, but I just
found out where VLC hides a setting that makes files play without hitches even
over slow-ish wireless networks. On OSX, first open VLC Preferences, then
enable Advanced options, and go to “Input / Codecs,” “Access
modules,” “File” and up the caching value from the default
300ms to something a bit more, like 2000ms. The
higher this value, the laggier pausing and playing is, but it’s a tradeoff
I’m willing to make for playback without copying the file first.
I’m easily or something. First for your perusal, the
Belle and Sebastian Song Generator.
I won't give away the easter-egg, but I assure you there is one, and it's just like the band
would do.
Secondly, reading the misheard lyrics page from Sinister,
and subsequently listening to the songs, I agree with two of them being better lyrics than are actually in the songs.
...“me and the midget don't see eye to eye on it”
I always thought in “Seeing Other People” the words “Your[sic] kissing your
double, your[sic] kissing your reflection” were sang instead of “Your[sic] kissing
your elbow etc.”
I thought it was about these skinny long hair boys who go to discos and
get stuck into skinny long hair girls who look the same as them. And It
got me thinking is it incredibly vain to be attracted to someone who
looks like you, or is it worse to think you can do better.
I just read that. I know what I mean.
I neglected to mention it here, but I have several new panoramas online
— Youth Fair 2006 and
Fry Street - University Border
for the Worldwide Panorama, Spring Equinox.
Last Friday we scheduled a trip to go out and take a look at how Dr. Garlick
is using his Windows Media Center PC at his home. It was about an hour drive
there, to almost-downtown Dallas, although parking was a lot better than we
expected. All Photos.
We got things partially working, including divx playback using Tversity,
better HDTV reception by using a larger antenna,
and ended up convincing him that splitters weren’t the answer in this case,
since we were working with low signal on several channels over the air.
Then we were offered the chance to go rewire a condo, which of course we
nerds jumped on, but it was a bit of a zoo given four people that all had
opinions on how to set it up. In the end, we came up with a scheme to save
300 feet of coax and use two splitters so all the satellite jacks will be
live at once. The answer is more splitters, when you’re working with a good
enough signal source.
Then we were trying to watch a scratched DVD and the Sony drive in the PC
failed to make sense of it, but my Mac could. Macs rule. Dr. Splitter says
so.
I'm working on a new design with larger fonts and none of the weird
“the window is too small” or “page takes 45 seconds to load”
issues. Film at eleven.
before and after.
I’ve been working on a few projects recently, and they’ve finally gotten to
the point where I can talk about them a bit. I’m interested in making better
representations of interesting data, which is how pretty much all my projects
got started this month. Why did I do them? Because I can.
- Denton Restaurant Health Department Ratings
as gleaned from PDFs on the City of Denton site,
and melded with Google Maps. The PDF parsing was pretty easy, and will
be added to my standard library pretty soon.
- Oracle of UNT,
styled after the Oracle of Bacon, but for UNT students linked by classes
instead of movies. Can be slow at times, I haven't put much into optimizing
it yet. See how you’re linked with me (I’m the tsh0019 in the second
box).
- Some updates to my standard Python library
to include an ordered list that uses
binary search to test for inclusion which is orders of magnitude faster than
the linear search that Python’s builtin list uses. This speed boost has
come in handy a number of times for solving Project Euler challenges.
Halo night was last night (Monday), and we spent the majority of the time
discussing whether the events in Alanis Morissette’s song were indeed
ironic or rather just unfortunate. Join us next week, and maybe Jeremy
will pick some less lame gametypes!
I've packaged up the tools I use for modifying s3d data files for the game programming class. This is of somewhat limited use to the average person, but I know of at least two it might help. project page.
I originally took thse long exposures back in April of 2003, but forgot to
copy them back up when I redid my website a while back. Easter Egg Hunt.
