FasterFox? Pfffftt! RAM-Fox!

ramfox You wanna speed up your browser? Get your browser into memory. I posted a couple of weeks ago about creating RAM disks on your system to offer some high-speed storage on your computer. Now the question is: what should I do with it?

RAM Fox!

RAMFox is an implementation of Firefox Portable which is based out of a RAM drive. By loading the application onto the RAM drive, all of the I/O operations that write to the disk are vastly sped up.

The implementation itself is pretty simple: copy the contents of the portable Firefox to the RAM drive and load it from there.

@cls



if "%1"=="bak" goto bak
xcopy c:systoolsramfox /e /s /d /y r:ramfox
call r:ramfoxFF.lnk %1

goto end

:bak
xcopy r:ramfox /e /s /d /y c:systoolsramfox
del c:systoolsramfoxurlclassifierkey3.txt
del c:systoolsramfoxurlclassifier3.sqlite
goto end

:end

The batch file is pretty simple. It just uses xcopy to transfer the files. The key is the second option, the “bak” option which copies the files back from the RAM disk to the permanent storage on the hard drive. What this does is copies back all of the files that were updated during the browsing sessions including passwords, cache and history.

Give this a shot if you’re wanting to find some ways to speed up your browsing experience or ways to make use of your RAM disk.

Image credit: RaeA on Flickr.

Nerd Dinners — Geekery and Good Eats

Leave it to the big brains of Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman to come up with this simple yet super cool concept. Nerd Dinners — a way (by use of web technology) for a bunch of introverts to meet up with each other and enjoy a meal, and the kind of conversation that drives our non-geek spouses crazy.

Anything that helps to foster conversation between people who are passionate about a topic is a good thing in my book. If it involves code and geekery, so much the better.

It’s a great idea, and I hope to see one (or a few) organized in and around Vancouver before too long… otherwise I’ll have to set one up. The closest one as of this posting is in Redmond. Cool, but I don’t think I can justify a two hour drive down for dinner. Not yet, anyway.

Check out NerdDinner.com and meet up with some nerds in your community!

RAM Disks – Storing Files in Memory

Back in ye olde days of DOS Microsoft included a utility with the system called RAMDRIVE.SYS. This utility allowed you to carve off a few kilobytes of your system’s precious RAM to use as a pseudo hard drive that was highly effective for reading and writing large volumes of data to and from a drive at high speeds.

The speed comes from the fact that a computer can write to memory much faster than it can write to hard disks (or god forbid, external media and network drives). RAM has always been built for performance because it needs to do so much interaction directly with the CPU therefore memory architectures have evolved to allow huge amounts of data to be pushed through ever-wider pipes between the CPU and memory.

So you want a RAM Disk do ya?

The first thing you need to do is obtain drivers to make this magic work. There are several options available for this, the one I chose to use installs itself most like an actual driver. In some other cases the setup is more like an application which must be executed to make the RAM disk work. The drivers I’ve closen for this I downloaded from ramdisk.tk. The company offers a free version (up to 64MB) and a paid version which has a maximum capacity much higher.

Once you’ve downloaded the drivers, and unzipped them follow the installation procedure for new hardware. I’ve included a slideshow of the screenshots, or you ca use the step-by-step directions below.

Slideshow

[tylr-slidr width="510" height="450" userID="36477201@N00" groupID=""]http://www.flickr.com/photos/kmsquared/sets/72157615707500410/[/tylr-slidr]

Installation

In Control Panel, open the Add New Hardware wizard
Click Next
Select Yes, I have already connected the hardware, click Next
Select Add new hardware device from the bottom of the list, click Next
Select Install the hardware that I manually select from a list, click Next
Select Show all devices, click Next
Click Have Disk, browse to the folder in which you unzipped the drivers, select RAMDisk.inf and click Open, click OK, click Next
Click Next
Click Next
Click Finish

Once installed, you can access the RAM disk properties through the device manager. This will allow you to set the size, and drive letter for your RAM disk.

Uses for your RAM disk

Storage of temporary files (photoshop, temp folders etc). Don’t put your swap file here… you’re better off just to use the physical RAM.
Storage of files which high rates of I/O – programming projects that need compilation will build faster on a RAM disk
Files which shouldn’t be stored permanently for privacy reasons – web browser files, for example.

Notes of caution

The RAM disk takes away available physical memory, so select the smallest drive you can make use of.
Anything you save to you RAM disk will be LOST once the computer is powered down. If you save data to that drive you’ll need to remember to copy it before shutdown.

So go forth and set up your super-fast disk! If you come up with a great new use for your RAM drive, or find a driver you like more, stick it in the comments!

photo credit: brutal on flickr.

Blackberry Pearl Flip Reviews

I’ve been selected for a panel of five bloggers in my office to review the Blackberry Pearl flip phone. I will be re-publishing my posts, or selected portions thereof, on my blog in addition to what I’m doing for work.

In the interests of transparency I’ll say that I’m being provided with a test unit for the three weeks that I’ll be putting up posts, but I’m not being paid for them.

So keep your eyes peeled for my adventures with a the Blackberry Pearl flip!

Tycho’s Echos

This stunning image is a composite of three separate images of Tycho’s Supernova remnant.

The image is the remnant of a supernova first discovered over four hundred years ago. The composite is made up of an x-ray image, an infrared image and a telescope photo. Check out the APOD site for more info.

Redirecting Your Website (URL Redirection)

It’s late, and I’m tired, so this is gonna be a short post. I got a question from @Mattoid12 on twitter tonight about how to redirect a website. I’m going to show three ways, and then provide a link to a site which shows every conceivable way of redirecting a website.

.htaccess File

If you have access to edit your .htaccess file (FTP or SSH access to your server) put this line at the top. It will redirect the local url “/” (root) to the new location. More on HTTP 301 here. I’ve discussed this in more detail on a previous post.

Redirect 301 / http://yournewwebsite.net/

HTML Meta Tag

The example below will redirect a page to the new location after two seconds. This code should be placed at the top of your index or default page.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://yournewwebsite.net">

PHP Redirect

This method is sort of a combination of the above two approaches. It will perform an instant redirect and return HTTP 301 to the browser. This code needs to be entered in your index.php file.

<? Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); Header( "Location: http://yournewwebsite.net" ); ?>

For examples of a large number of other possible redirects are available on webconfs.com.

Five Step Guide to Restoring Your Computer

There are lots of reasons that we fall out of love with our computers. Slow performance, viruses. spyware and just plain too-much-crap-all-over-the-place syndrome. The only way you can be sure to solve these issues is to wipe and re-load your system. If you have all the install disks for Windows (or your OS of choice) and your software, the process is fairly straightforward. Mac/Linux fanboy warning: I’m going to use Windows examples and software in most cases… deal with it.

After the tutorial, I’ve included a list of applications that you can use to make your computing life better. The list contains free and open-source software from the original developers that you can trust on your newly cleaned system. I highly recommend reading over the list, and even trying a few of them out on your current system before installing any of your old apps and tools.

Things you’ll need

Infected (or otherwise underperforming computer)
OS re-install disks (and product keys!!)
External hard drive (strongly recommended) -or-
Backup media (CDs, DVDs)

Step 1: Backup your data

You should already have a backup process in place to keep all of your data secure. If you do, good for you but that doesn’t mean you can skip this step. If you have, or have been able to purchase an external hard drive use that to backup the data. It’s much faster, and far more convenient than trying to backup to external media like CDs and DVDs. Make sure that you take everything you want to have on your new system. Often overlooked folders include your bookmarks (favourites) and desktop. These won’t be captured in your Documents folder by default.

Step 2: Reinstall your system

This is the part that makes everyone queasy. The “delete everything and re-install” part. But fear not, it isn’t as daunting as it sounds. Once all the data has been backed up, put the Windows (or other OS) disk in the drive and reboot the computer. Once the system comes back up, follow the prompts.

Select the partition to install Windows on. In most cases, if you want to restore the system the way that it was, you can select the C: drive where the old Windows install was located. If you want to get into partitioning strategies that’s for another post.

If you’re in doubt format the drive using the NTFS system. It’s the default for most contemporary Windows systems and will work for 99% of people. Yes, Mac/Linux fanboys, I realize that it’s a Windows specific file format. You guys can use HFS+ (Mac) or ext3 (Linux).

Believe it or not that’s the “tricky” part. Follow the remaining prompts through the text portion, and GUI portion of the setup to choose your username, password, time-zone settings, network settings etc. These are pretty well all common sense.

Step 3: Patching and Packing

Unless you’ve learned the secrets to Slipstreaming prior to this re-install (in which case you probably don’t need this tutorial) you’ll need to install all the latest updates, patches and service packs for your system.

The majority of these can be installed through the Microsoft Update (Windows Update) site. The updater can be run from your Start menu, or by pointing a browser at http://update.microsoft.com/.

It’s really important to get these updates in as quickly as possible because typically the CD you’re using to install the system is a couple of years old (particularly with Windows XP disks) and will be missing a ton of important security updates. You may need to run this process a number of times before it catches everything. Just continue the process until the update program tells you that there are no further updates available for your system.

Step 4: Re-install your applications

Here we go. Putting back all that was lost. The first step is to install your heavy hitters installed. Office, Visual Studio, Adobe Creative Suite — the things that take up Gigabytes of space on the disk. After that, the smaller things, utilities, tools, games. Check out the software list at the bottom of this post.

Once everything else is done, install your anti-virus or security software. This may be a controversial decision for most but I base the logic on the following: AV programs make software installation painfully slow. The chances you’ll be infected while you’re doing the updates are minimal, so save yourself a bunch of time and do this last.

Step 5: Restore your data

Copy back all of the data you backed up in step 1. This includes your bookmarks (you did back those up, right?), and anything you wanted to keep on your desktop. Putting these pieces back is the last step to making the system your own again.

Realistically you’re looking at killing a full day with the whole process, depending how much data you have the backup/restore can take a few hours, but the process is pretty straightforward if you stay organized.

Free software to help you out

Once you’re in the application re-install stage, there are lots of free tools that you can use to get your system working the same, or better than it was before. The other reason is that these applications are great alternatives to trying to find pirated applications off the Internet. Here they are, in no particular order:

7Zip – an archiving / compression utility supporting a wide range of formats
ISO Recorder – Write ISO images directly from Windows explorer
Avast – Free anti-virus application with regular updates
Paint.NET – Photoshop-like image & graphic editing program
Firefox – Alternative (?) web browser
Thuderbird – Email client
Feed Demon – Powerful full-featured RSS reader & aggregator
FileZilla – FTP/SFTP/SCP client
Open Office – Alternative word processor, spreadsheet, presentation & database
VLC – Media player that supports nearly every format known to mankind
Evernote – Note taking/keeping application that sync’s with the web
Notepad++ – Tabbed notepad application
Visual Studio Express – Free versions of the Microsoft development tools

I hope this guide has proven informative, and will help you to move forward with your computing life. Bring back that computer that has lost its lustre and make it uber-useful again.

Photo credits: wysz, S Baker on Flickr.

Goodbye Grand Central, Hello Google Voice!

google_voice Google today announced a new service to (some of) it’s customers called Google Voice. The service works very similarly to Grand Central (which the big G acquired back in 2007).

The system allows you to create a single phone number, to which you can aggregate other numbers to have a unified system for voice and messaging.

I’ve been trying to get myself a Grand Central account for several months, but I guess with the lead up to the Google Voice launch they haven’t been creating new numbers for people. It looks, from a post on the Google Voice help site, that the service will be rolling out over the next few weeks. The service will first be made available to existing Grand Central users, and rolled out to the rest of the great unwashed as it matures in the next few months.

There’s no indication at this stage if the service will be geographically limited but I suspect that, intitially at least, the service will only offer US-based phone numbers at launch.

WordPress Plugin Search Finally Works!

I did not get a chance to blog this when it first came out, but I’ve just used it again and I cannot possibly let it pass without note. WordPress has drastically improved the plugin search. They announced the upgrade a few weeks ago on the WordPress development blog.

I’ve been hard on the poor WordPress guys in the past, so I feel a special obligation to acknowledge the improvement. The search now does a great job of indexing titles, descriptions and keywords to help plugins show up quickly and easily.

Best of all for me, a search for “random image” puts the Random Image selector plugin at the top of the list (at the time of this writing at least).

Thanks WordPress guys!!

kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Monthly Archives: March 2009