Roy's musings

CircuitCity online is open for business again. They filed for bankruptcy in Nov 2008 and closed both online and stores.

I am in the process of assembling a PC for my friend. So I was gathering information on various components. I thought I must share what I learned about hard disks. The latest breed of hard disks in the PC segment are called Solid State Disks (SSD). Though the technology is not new, the price has become affordable in the recent few years. Due to their formidable high prices earlier, computers were usually shipped with the drum-based hard disks (I will refer to them as simply HDD). You can read about SSDs from wikipedia . These are the points I wanted to share: 1) The transfer speed of SSD is faster compared to HDD. A good 7200 RPM hard disk usually has a transfer rate around 70 MBytes/sec. Where as SSD has a transfer speed around 200 MBytes/sec. Remember I am giving an approximate figure and speeds vary for read and write. One of the recent additions to the hard disks is 10000 RPM hard disks. I found them to be faster than SSD. For e.g. Western Digital's Velociraptor has a peak tr...

I wanted to try out running Ubuntu from my USB drive (2GB). While I was searching for the right software, I came across UNetbootin utility. This utility is a lot simpler to use than the method provided in the Ubuntu site , a method that makes use of Win32 disk imager. The best part is, UNetbootin provides you options to create bootables from other operating systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD and other notable flavors of Linux. UNetbootin is not an installable, its just one .exe file. You download the exe file and start it. It will prompt you for the version of OS you would like to burn in your USB. Once you select, it will automatically download the ISO image file and burn it for you. In case you happen to have the ISO image file available on your local hard drive, you can provide that path too.

Here is a complete list of icons that are used in Eclipse. It is very useful to understand all these icons as most of the time in the outline views only the icons are used to crisply denote what each member/method stands for.

This page provides you a list of top 5 JavaScript frameworks. Though I am not sure if they are the top 5, which is always arguable, I am very sure that those frameworks are good and useful.

If you had been following my blog, I posted an issue earlier with VirtualBox 3.0 that under network load it freezes. That bug has been fixed in release 3.0.2. Please refer to the release notes of 3.0.2 for an update. I verified the fix by reinstalling the 3.0.2 version.

VirtualBox comes with built-in facility to trace the network packets. To enable tracing, you must first shutdown your VM. Then find out the VM's name or uuid. Please refer to my earlier post to find how to find uuid. Once you have the uuid of the VM, give the following command: vboxmanage modifyvm a27473c0-d690-4c95-a48a-1c49d69a20e6 --nictrace1 on --nictracefile1 c:\temp\nictrace1.pcap Replace my uuid with yours. I am enabling tracing on the NIC1. You will have to change the parameters appropriately if you would like to trace some other NIC. To make sure that your VM's tracing is enabled on the specified interface, give the following command: vboxmanage showvminfo a27473c0-d690-4c95-a48a-1c49d69a20e6 VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 2.2.4 (C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Name: Ubuntu8.10 Guest OS: Ubuntu UUID: a27473c0-d690-4c95-a48a-1c49d69a20e6 Config file: C:\Documents and Settings\xxxx\.VirtualB...