in a fog

I expect OS’s and applications to keep running for days on end. I don’t like to close and relaunch apps as I expect them to be available. Unfortunately that comes at a price of ‘lost’ RAM. Recently, I’d been getting a lot of spinning pizzas (delays) when switching between programs and when using a program. So I checked into memory usage.

The following examples have the same page or files open and ‘rendered’ before and after relaunch.

Firefox: 750MB before 140MB after relaunch
MoneyDance: 140MB before 70MB after relaunch

Pretty dramatic differences.

I’ve been using wordpress’ automatic update plugin on several sites and it works very nicely. A little tedious in places since it pauses to let you download backup files, tell you what’s next, etc. But, overall it is an excellent feature since installing upgrades is not an everyday thing and I forget the process between upgrades.

Update: The plugin has an automate upgrade option that avoids most of the pauses mentioned above. Very efficient.

As a change from the slick designs portrayed in the prior two posts, here’s a glimpse of something nearer to reality.

We’ll be building a Home Theater PC (HTPC) which will likely lead to a few future entries in this blog.

Choosing a mainboard for the HTPC was a laborious task. I was amazed at all the options out there. CPU’s, support chips, graphics chips/cards, etc. After reading for a couple of days, I made some arbitrary choices to narrow the field and then ended up choosing a ‘low end’ board with integrated graphics. It may not be sufficient in the end but will provide an initial platform on which to learn a few things. At a relatively low cost.

The board is a Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H. Intel CPU with NVidia support chips and graphics.

Useful forum threads:

• “Input on HW choice for linux HTPC“
• “Newbie HTPC Build setup“
• “new budget build for mythbuntu” {until it devolves}

J likes this. Maybe find something cheaper / similar? Ikea? 
 

Slick, could use in ArborHT in conjunction with the iScan if we don’t find a more integrated way to switch/convert.

Noticed this switch in Best Buy or maybe Office Depot recently.

Just to document a simple change to turn off the 3D dock, here is a repeat of the CLI command to set the default dock style to 2D. This has appeared in several places including OSXHints.com

$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

Macworld has an interesting short article on screen sharing between macs on a local net which includes some options that need to be enabled via terminal.

Recent Debian installations of openSSH default to a hashed host name in the known_hosts file used by openSSH. This makes it more difficult to manual maintain and edit this file. A good start on the commands that can (should?) be used to manage know_hosts can be found on this blog entry.

Two useful commands:

search for an entry: $ ssh-keygen -H -F hostname
delete an entry: $ ssh-keygen -R hostname


An online version of the ssh-keygen man page provides more detail on the options it provides.

Since a one way hash is used, there isn’t any way to list all the entries in known_hosts with machine names “de-hashed”.

Several problems have come up as a result of database table changes made in wordpress 2.3. Most if not all involve the categories table that was eliminated in favor of a new table. Some themes, including k2, and some plugins are no longer consistent with the database. It seems that the changes are mainly:

• categories –> terms (a table)
• cat_ID –> term_ID
• cat_name –> name

I suppose this is documented better on a wordpress page somewhere, but I never found the description. Googling did turn up other leads.

On one of the sites that use k2, I found the problem in this file: …/wp-content/themes//page-archives.php

Commenting out the following two lines eliminated the error. A crude fix, but I haven’t noticed any bad effects yet.

// $numcats = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(1) FROM $wpdb->categories");
// if (0 < $numcats) $numcats = number_format($numcats);

Another site that uses k2 has a different set of symptoms, but that was probably due to some files left over from a prior version of k2. Once I thorough clean out and upgrade with plugins off it was ok. The main trick for me was to switch to the default theme while doing the upgrade. When k2 was the active theme, the database upgrade step failed.