Desktop Heap limitation

When running lots of applications, one may notice a moment where no more windows can be opened. This is the Desktop Heap limit; you will see this logged in the Event log as “A desktop heap allocation failed”

Back when I was running Windows Xp I hit this limit quite often (because of my working habits). The solution was to increase the limit; for this one needs to edit a specific registry key (always backup first!):

View sorted list of connected IPs

At points one may need to quickly check and see who is connected to a server – and in case of servers running services such as http, ftp (so on) the number of their connections.
The netstat program does indeed display the list of connections, but browsing through it when there is a large number of connections is rather difficult.

Disable yum fastestmirror plugin on CentOS

The fastestmirror plugin may be useful at some points, but it can be a pain in the ass at others.
For example, I tried updating my CentOS installation today and because of the mirror caching it was downloading the updates at 30K/s. After disabling the plugin the speed from picking a different mirror jumped to 3MB/s.

To disable the plugin…

RaspberryPI – first impression

I couldn’t resist not trying out my RaspberryPI which I received yesterday 🙂

I quickly recycled one of my SD cards, installed the recommended SD image and booted it up.

After the initial boot setup screen (and partition resize), you can see it running connected to a monitor via HDMI, with a keyboard, mouse and wireless adapter (Asus WL-167g) all plugged in a 4-port USB hub…

My RaspberryPI has arrived

Yay! After around 4 months of waiting, it is finally here. My very own Raspberry PI 🙂

It appears I received a rev2 board which, among other small improvements, should feature 512MB of RAM instead of 256.

The board comes packed in a nice neat pink(?!) case, together with a quick start guide giving you the essential information on how to get the thing started…

“Now playing” Windows 7 gadget mod

One of the gadgets I started using recently is the “Now Playing” gadget.

One issue I noticed though is its inability to display the trackname for tracks which lack the ID3 tag. The widget would just switch to its “Play a file in Winamp” message. So after a bit of tinkering, I managed to get it to use the track filename and display that instead…