Cain Manor

I just got Office 2007 installed.  On the very top is a yellow bar asking me to “Click here to enable Instant Search.”  This is Microsoft’s attempt to get me to install their intrusive Desktop Search, and clicking the bar takes you to the download page for that product.    It’s ugly and unwanted and it took some time to figure out how to disable it.  To disable…

Tools -> Options -> Other -> Advanced Options -> remove the check box for “Show prompts to enable Instant Search”.

An option to either install or remove would have been a lot easier.

Converter application to remote physical machine 445 and 139
Converter application to VirtualCenter Server 443
Converter application to ESX Server 3.x 443
Physical machine to VirtualCenter Server 443
Physical machine to ESX Server 3.x 443

Ice worms fascinate me.  They are, as you guessed, worms that live in ice.  They burrow through ice, and, if warmed up, dissolve into a goo.   They are up to an inch long and inhabit glaciers and snowfields in the coastal ranges of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon.  There isn’t much known about them, and they’ve never been found anywhere else.

Seattle Times Article

Wikipedia 

To use this, just copy it to you computer, and rename it something.vbs. (Thanks to Darin for pointing that out.)

Const MY_COMPUTER = &H11&
Set objNetwork = CreateObject("Wscript.Network")
objComputerName = objNetwork.ComputerName
Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace(MY_COMPUTER)
Set objFolderItem = objFolder.Self
objFolderItem.Name = objComputerName

I had an SE contact me about services.exe using excessive memory on some of his boxes (~130MB.) As he was worried about this (and he had a ticket), so was I. I started with the semi-handy Process Explorer from Microsoft. I’ve been spoiled by the nifty things you can do with UNIX (lsof for instance), but I couldn’t get to the bottom of what was taking up so much memory. After 90 minutes on the phone with Microsoft Platinum support, it appears that (drum roll please) the event logs were taking up the memory. We backed up and then cleared the event logs, and the memory went down to a more manageable, and expected, size (~8MB.) Apparently, the event logs are cached on startup (and kept in memory as they grow?). However, this isn’t that big of a deal as services.exe is one of the first processes that gives back memory to a memory constrained system

The support guy from Microsoft went away for a few minutes and found this out from talking to one of his peers. I’m no closer to figuring out how to troubleshoot memory processes on a deeper level. His only suggestion was to get a crash dump from the server and run windbg against it. On a Linux box, you can just run lsof, or dtrace or… well, you get the idea.

The Antikythera Mechanism is a 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck. Detailed imaging of the mechanism suggests it dates back to 150-100 BC and had 37 gear wheels enabling it to follow the movements of the moon and the sun through the zodiac, predict eclipses and even recreate the irregular orbit of the moon. No other civilization is believed to have created anything as complex for another 1,000 years

Continue reading ‘The Antikythera Mechanism’ »

Justine & I made this recipe a couple of weeks ago. Very tasty, and makes a good amount of food for not much money…

This simple, rich soup is adapted from a dish popular in Cameroon.

Continue reading ‘West African Peanut Soup’ »