I quite often use my Windows XP VM running under Vmware Server 1.0.5 (Debian Unstable) and because I still don’t have RAID I am forced to try every possible performance optimizations.

Latest and greatest was when successfully converting my 10 GB preallocated IDE disk to LSILogic SCSI following procedure close to this one. (Try it on your risk !)

1.Create LSI Logic disk:

vmware-vdiskmanager -c -s 100mb -a lsilogic -t 0 tempDisk.vmdk

2. Add SCSI definitions in your VMX file:

scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.fileName = "tempDisk.vmdk"

2. Boot the VM and install LSI Logic driver – use WHQL 1.20.18.00 (at least I could not install the latest version)

3. Make backup of the VM Disk !

4. Open the disk definition file (.vmdk). Get from there the disk size (sum of all extents)

# Extent description
RW 20971520 FLAT "WXP-flat.vmdk" 0

Then create another disk

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -c -s 20971520 -a lsilogic -t 1 anotherTemp.vmdk

This one is only needed so you can get the new geometry and replace it in the original .vmdk

5. Replace old geometry with new from anotherTemp.vmdk. In my case I replaced this

ddb.adapterType = "ide"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.heads = "16"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16383"

with this

ddb.geometry.cylinders = "1305"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"

6. Update you VMX file so scsi0:0 points to the main disk image.  Also you can remove the old IDE definitions.

7. Boot your VM and have fun.

Couple of other performance suggestions:

1. Always defrag your guest operating system disk.

2. Use

   MemTrimRate = "0"

3. Use

   scsi0:0.mode = "independent-persistent"

4. Keep your guest operating system as light as possible. Turn off themes, effects, unneeded services etc.

Resources used:

Jeremy Martin has done a great review of the upcoming Javascript 2.0. His article points out the major changes including:

• Introduction of classes, interfaces and primitives ( OOP –  yeee)
• Strict mode with compile time type checking
• Namespaces
• Many other…

The list of changes looks great to me, the only thing that still bothers me is the possibility of inconsistent implementation in the major browsers.

For more info checkout the full article.

There are already couple of discussions/reviews about the new and improved Mozilla Firefox 3 memory management but i was amazed from the amount of work they have done.

Worth reading is the original blog post from Pavlov explaining the methods he and the other developers used for optimizing Firefox 3 memory usage, caching and fighting against leaks. The post is a bit long but there is very intersting information that is quite usable for almost every application developer.

Also couple of days ago Arstechnica compared IE7, Firefox 2, Opera 9.5 Beta, Safari 3.0.4 Beta and Firefox 3 beta 4 and proved that there is obvious improvement and FF 3 uses less memory than other browsers.

With the new look and redone bookmarking system (sqllite as backend and location autocomplete from the bookmarks) I will still stick with Firefox as preferred browser.

Couple of screenshots:

And because for some IE8 vs Firefox is not interesting enough I suggest checking the newly released Safari 3.1

Couple of days ago I played a bit with the brand new and not so shiny Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. As this is the first Beta release it is mainly meant for designers and developers so they can get their clocks synchronized with Microsoft. For me as a xhtml-css-javascript abuser the most interesting thing was the new standard mode rendering engine which was already main topic in couple of discussions.

For the review I used Microsoft Server 2003 SP2 because this was what I had installed under VMware virtual machine and I wanted a quick way to revert if I don’t like it.

Downloading – only 14MBs… done

Installing – easy and relatively fast… done

Running…

On the first run you will be encouraged to choose between express settings or to manually set search engines, activities providers and other options. As IE newbie I selected express settings.

Photo 1,2

My first expressions were:

• Hey there is now a bookmark toolbar – great
• There is big blue button “Emulate IE7” – strange

Photo 3

Ok let’s check the new features:

1. Activities:

Photo 8,14,15

Activities are contextual services that provide quick access to external services from any webpage. Activities typically involve one of two types of actions

Nothing exciting about this – just sending the selected string to some “Activity provider” via the right click context menu. Still it saves the users couple of clicks and copy-paste operations. For example while I was browsing a page I highlighted the word “violin” and using the Ebay Activity provider was able to find violins on sale. Something that will be quite useful is to have activity provider which can compare prices at different online shops.

2. WebSlices:

Photo 12,13,11

Web sites can expose portions of their page as a WebSlice that users can subscribe to and bring that content with them on their links bar wherever they are on the web. Users receive update notifications when the content changes.

Generally the idea is not that revolutionary as it sounded at first. Using special markup the website developer/designer can give the end user the ability to automaticly check for updated pieces of the website. It is like rss feeds with pictures. However for both Activities and WebSlices the end user has to “install” the corresponding provider/website slice.

3. Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

Photo 4,5,6

Now IE comes with dev toolbar preinstalled (yeee) and extended. By first expressions Microsoft team have given more attention to Javascript tools. The bad news is that IE dev toolbar is still far away from Mozilla Firefox FireBug extension. From my quick walkthrough it I found out that you can enable/disable applied CSS styles but can not edit them which is something quite useful.

4. Speed

Photo 7

As usually I used my trusty companion when it comes to measuring Javascript performance – http://mootools.net/slickspeed/
For comparison I used the same testing environment just before installing IE8 where I had Internet Explorer 6 and the news are quite good. On most tests it behaves almost twice as fast as IE6. There is still room for optimizations (comparing to other browsers) but it is good to see MS are doing efforts in this direction. In the official site it is said that they have also improved rendering time – something that is pretty subjective and hard to test.

5. Rendering Engine

Photo 9,10

After visiting couple of sites (including google maps) I understood why there is such big blue button “Emulate IE7″(second screenshot was done in emulated mode). From the screenshot above you will see how “Internet Explorer 8 standards mode” mess things up (first screenshot). I will need much more investigation but I can not understand how “Cascading style sheets 2.1 compliance” can break so much things – even Yahoo’s home page has displacements. I’m sure Microsoft will fix lots of things until final version, but for sure I will have to re-evaluate my CSS/XHTML knowledge before coding IE8 friendly sites.

I wish only good to IE8 because after all there will be billions who will use it.
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Реших да си купувам менте скоростомер (велокомпютър както му викат) от ТСМ магазините. Нали ги знаете тези, който уж продават “Немски Стоки” (made in Taiwan) на луди цени. Дотук добре ама Гугъл не обажда къде да ги намериш тези магазини. Има разни дискусии, разни сайтове, но нищо смислено. Качих се на колелото и потърсих малко по-сериозно и това намерих:

1. На Графа – точно срещу пазарчето преди Славейков в посока към Алабин
2. На “Цар Шишман” – пак от същото пазарче ама перпендикулярно на Графа, малко преди отбивката за Билкова
3. Отзад зад Халите (не “Пиротска”, ами следващата пряка в посока Централна Автогара)
4. На бул. “Черни Връх” – от НДК на горе, дясната страна. Горе долу където излиза “Джеймс Баучер” – мисля, че и там имаше някакво пазарче.

Така и не си намерих скоростомер. Ако някой знае къде има да свирка.

пс1: намерих някакъв сайт, но няма адреси няма нищо (и един дизайн ще им дойде добре) – http://tcm.dir.bg/

пс2: ако някой може да каже точни адреси с удоволствие ще ги включа в списъка.

For non-bulgarian readers:

This post is about directions to stores which are hard to find.