Progression

Some of Windows Vista’s “Enhancements” have made the operating system rely heavily on valuable hard disk space.  Recently I’ve been trying to comprehend how I could have possibly filled up a 750 gb hard drive with 680 gb of information after only owning the computer for 6 months.  The fact of the matter is that a few of these “enhancements” use way more than they need in order to “enhance” your user experience.

There are two Windows Vista Specific features that hinder disk space:

1. Windows “Temp” folder (Used for IE7 and applications that use the Windows Installer API for installation)
2. Windows “Shadow Copy” service (Used to create periodic system restore points to prevent data loss due to malicious software or hardware failure)

You can save yourself upwards of 5 GB of space if you periodically empty your “TEMP” folder, however the real disk space hog lies in the latter “enhancement.”

The Windows Shadow Copy service can use up to 15% of your hard disk space just by keeping ancient versions of your files.  The problem lies in that the Windows Shadow Copy service creates copies of your files DAILY by default.  From what i’ve seen this “vault” of backups purges backups that are a month old or older.

By deleting the Windows Shadow Copy backups (not including the most recent one) I was able to free up 120 gb of space on my 750 GB hard drive (16%). Read more…

This is really just something for all you new jQuery learners, if you want to keep the cursor inside of a text box, even if you click elsewhere on the page, you can do this:

//Initial focus on #inputfieldid
$(”#inputfieldid”).focus();

//When you click anywhere it focuses back on #inputfieldid
$(this).click(function(){
$(”#inputfieldid”).focus();
});

So the summer is in full swing and I’m cranking out 45 hour work weeks. 9 - 7 with an hour lunch break has been the general theme. I’m now working the afternoons with a new company called JAT Digital Solutions which I have been doing extensive PHP/MySQL + HTML/CSS/jQuery for. I’m learning quite a lot in the development world and this in particular has further accelerated my quest for javascript mastery.

Some development stuff i’d like to post soon:

- How to fix bootcamp 2.0 in leopard
- Barcode generator with caching support
- FWDK updates
- FileCal updates
- G2P Lite updates
- How to clean up a windows xp/vista computer so it actually runs faster
- How to build a web based security system for under $100
- jQuery tutorials
- Debt management system
- IMS dev

I just added plenty of information to my portfolio, and it has been reorganized to be more coherent.  There are now links to some of the pages i’ve done coding for, as well as descriptions of the Webkits + Webapps i’ve been developing myself and along with Eric Wimberley (http://www.blank89.net).

He needs to fix his site!

In other news, I took down my old server and set up a new one.  This one is built tougher and has been locked down for security.  I’ve got the thing running all my development script as well as my nightly builds.  Hopefully I will be able to fix my music server, but Windows to Linux networking is pretty miserable sometimes.

FWDK (Foski Web Development Kit) has been an ongoing project for the last couple months and I hope to release a demo online as soon as possible.  I’m not really sure if I will release the source code of this project yet.. But only time will tell.

PS. I love jQuery..

I got my home server up and running! I’m going to start posting nightly builds in the nightly folder on it, hopefully this will make collaboration with my graphic designer + administrator easier.

But basically every site i’ve ever programmed will be on this server sooner or later…

Seriously loving my LAMP setup right now, and i’m getting to learn a lot about apache and server administration in general.

More to come!

No UI updates here.. Just everything under the hood. PDF’s are now much more supported as events, they will pop into a new window when you open them as well.

Head over to the FileCal page to download.

Just finished work on a script that uses google to find audio and video files.   I saw what http://www.g2p.org had done and I decided to write my own version with video support as well.

More Info >
G2P Lite > 

This is a step-by-step how-to of how exactly I set up my triple booting system on a PC. I used two hard drives for this configuration, one 400GB for my Vista + Ubuntu, and another 120GB for my OSX86 partition. This cleans up a lot of problems with getting the EFI bios to work.

My hardware configuration:
-Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 (2.0 GHz)
-2GB DDR2 533MHz
-500GB + 120 GB SATA HD’s
-Board: Intel D945GCF
-Chipset: 82945G
-Intel GMA 950 Graphics
-10/100 Mbps Lan (Works on Vista + Ubuntu, not osx86)
-Integrated 8-Channel Sigmatel Audio (Works on Vista + Ubuntu, not on osx86)
-USB 2.0 Bluetooth Adapter (Works on Ubuntu + osx86, not on Vista)
-USB 2.0 Ethernet Adapter (Works on osx86, not on Vista + Ubuntu)
-USB 2.0 Audio Adapter (Works on osx86 + Vista, not on Ubuntu)

1. You will need:

• A PC with the same board/chipset/graphics for this install to work. A lot of computers come standard with this configuration.
• A copy of the Kalyway patched 10.5.1 OSX86 Install DVD.
• A copy of Ubuntu 7.10 (http://www.ubuntu.com)
• Any copy of Windows Vista (or xp really)
• Two (2) Hard drives! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, makes life much easier and you don’t risk destroying your other partitions when installing OSX86.

Read more…

This is basically my experience and setup of a functional triple boot.I used two hard drives:
- 1 with Ubuntu Linux 7.10 + Vista [Prim]
- 1 with Osx86 (kalyway) [Sec]

Grub bootloader modified to boot into the EFI setup on the OSX partition by default.

I’ll post stats later

So I essentially finished up a nice little beta for public release. More Info >

FileCal is a simple implementation of an ftp based calendar/event system. This is great for developers without easy access to MySQL or for quick and painless event creation. FileCal is designed for posting banners or fliers directly onto a calender without having to do more than a drag and drop.