If you also want to speed up your Windows XP box, the following link serves as a good article.

Windows XP Definitive Performance Tweaking guide


Real life incident:
Shuva: (@ office, losing patience waiting for his laptop to shut down). I will take this question to my grave.
Anadi : What question?
Shuva : Why does Windows take a lifetime to shutdown?
Anadi : (brief pause, shakes his legs as usual, thinks)
...
...
Anadi : Everybody takes a lifetime to shutdown.


Happy Tweaking.//

It can be quite frustrating at time when you cannot get a simple thing as doing a arithmetic expression where the number has a leading zero. I am talking of Bash arithmetic.

Example:
let x=7*5 is OK.


let x=07*5 is also OK

But
let x=08*5 gives the following error:
bash: let: x=081: value too great for base (error token is "081")

The reason is that numbers with leading 0 is treated as octal in Bash. So 01, 02, 03 ...07 would not have any problem. 08, 09 are not valid octal numbers and hence treated so.

OK, OK. How to get rid of a leading zero. Unfortunately in Bash its not so straight forward. Here are some useful hints:

1. Use a loop like this to get rid of leading zeros from the variable x

while [[ $a = 0* ]]
do 
a=${a#0} 
done

2. The second solution is to explicity mention that it is a base 10 number, which can be quite cumbersome.

y=081
let x=10#$y*7; #Treat 08 as a base 10 digit.

Happy Bashing.//

I have been using Cygwin with Windowmaker for connecting to Unix machines from my Windows desktop. Many people in my team still use PuTTY. Most of my colleagues have given up PuTTY when I introduced them to the beauty of Cygwin+WindowMaker. Here is an article of how to set this up.

But I still come across many developers and sys admins who still use PuTTY. PuTTY provides a window with a single connection to one Unix machines. If you need another connection you need to open another Putty window. How about having a PuTTY window with Tabs? If you care you should get the PuTTY Connection Manager from
PuTTY Connection Manager

Happy PuTTYing.//

A must use tool for every high-productivity desktop users and a great relief for people coming from Linux or Hummingbird interface which always supported multiple desktop sessions.

Download the recently published, small (62KB) tool called Desktop v1.0 from Microsoft Sysinternals and try it out. You have multiple options to toggle between desktops including the linux conventional Alt-F1,F2,F3,F4 keystrokes. I just installed a few minutes back and I am loving it.

As a side note, it allows you to create up to 4 desktops but I get an error saying that enough space is available to create the 4th desktop.

Happy Desktopping.//

HowtoForge is a great site containing tutorials on how to perform setups of various tasks on Linux systems. From stuff as basic as a simple C++ tutorial to How to setup Load Balanced Cluster on MySQL, they have a very good collection of community contributed articles. Next time if you are looking for a how to its worth seraching here than simply replying on Google results and hunting down the correct one. Go to http://www.howtoforge.com/.

Happy following.//