Installing FreeBSD’s boot manager on a dual boot system

The FreeBSD boot manager is quite good, for me it’s worked in all my setups except for a Vista setup I once had but quickly got rid of (for obvious reasons). I’m pretty sure GRUB will work with Vista however.

Sometimes in a dual-boot environment you have to reinstall one of the Operating Systems. Usually it will be Windows as it is usually the case in my setup. When Windows is reinstalled, I will lose the FreeBSD boot manager and only be able to boot into Windows. To get the FreeBSD boot manager back, just put the FreeBSD boot-only disc (it’s only about 30MB) in the drive, boot into it, then follow these instructions:

1. In the menu, go to Partitions
2. Select the FreeBSD partition and hit the ‘S’ key which will set it to bootable (can also do this sort of thing in fdisk for dos and other partition management apps)
3. Then hit the ‘W’ key to write it out
4. Choose to install the FreeBSD boot mananger from the popup menu
5. Reboot

You will now have your FreeBSD boot manager back!

Torrents are inefficient

Torrents are now quite popular, many companies and open source projects are now using it for distribution.  Torrents are very easy to use which is important as a lot of people don’t know how to deal with multi-part files like split-rar’s or binary-split files that have to be concatenated together.

However in terms of bandwidth efficiency, torrents are horrible.  The bandwidth at my house is approximately 1MB/sec (8mbps).  I know this because I can download a FreeBSD ISO file from a very fast connection geographically near my network connection – only 3 hops away.  When I download 2-3 torrents at the same time, I am downloading at 230KBps in total and uploading at 100KBps in total.  And if I simultaneously download the same FreeBSD ISO I get 100KBps on that.  That means that my download is effectively capped at 330KBps.  Granted, there is a 100KBps uploading but where is the rest of my bandwidth???

I have noticed in the past when someone on a shared Internet connection would be downloading torrents, basically the Internet connection becomes UNUSABLE.  Latency, bandwidth are affected greatly.  If someone is leeching from an FTP site, this doesn’t really happen.  I suppose a lot of small packets are sent in both directions with torrents and that is the cause.  Anyone have any experience with this and want to share their opinion?

My ideal Windows XP setup

This is mainly a guide for me to remember all the little tweaks and apps I use while building my ideal Windows XP setup. This is a Work In Progress and probably remain that way.

General Desktop Tweaks

I like my taskbar to be on the top of my screen

This is because I find it more natural to go for the taskbar and the start menu at the top. I liken this to a physical desk or workspace: I general keep things I will need like a stapler, hole-punch, pens, etc.. at the top of my desk away from me – not towards me near my chest. It’s too bad Microsoft and other graphical desktops default to the bottom, because once you try using it at the top for a while you will never go back. I suggest you give it at least a good 4 weeks before discounting it. Another thing I forgot to mention, I always auto-hide the taskbar and disable it from being on top of other windows.

No junk on the desktop

Having a programming background with some experience with graphics programming, having a lot of artifacts to draw on the desktop is a lot of overhead. I prefer my background to be solid and black. I still keep the recycling bin on there until I find out a better way to deal with it (suggestions anyone?) What this does is reduce any drawing overhead associated with moving windows, minimizing, maximizing, etc.. Call it a complex, I don’t care. When I see people with 5000 icons on their desktop and some ridiculous wallpaper that is 2048×1536 pixels in PNG or JPG scaled down to XGA (automatically and very inefficiently by Windows) it seriously makes sick to the stomach. I’m not talking about the casual computer user either, some of these people should really know better!

With the above two done, the desktop is actually usable and fun to work with. There’s a sense of peace I feel when working that way. When I use other people’s computers with taskbars on the left side of the desktop opened up 1/4 of the way into the desktop with a hundred icons sitting there – some of them important documents even, I feel more dirty than being in a hostess bar full of Thai hookers with nothing but a bathing suit on.

Start menu heirarchy

I delete everything that is in the programs folder of the start menu – EVERTHING! I create top-level folders called: dev, net, apps, sys, games, Startup. in dev goes my development related shortcuts, net goes any network related apps, sys goes any system related apps like alcohol 52%, VMWare, TweakUI, etc.. In apps goes things like Office, Photoshop, etc.. Usually there are no sub-folders beyond these 5 as I don’t keep shortcuts to uninstallers, help, etc..

System Tray

I like having as much horizontal space in my taskbar as possible for running apps, so I hide all systray icons! Exceptions are things like Winamp and pidgin and anything that basically minimizes to it.

Installed Software

• Pidgin w/ Pidgin Encryption
• Eclipse
• JDK 1.6
• VMWare Server 1.x – so I can boot into FreeBSD on my other partition
• TrueCrypt
• MS Office 2003 (I don’t like OpenOffice – it is not very compatible with MS Office, and Office 2007 is ugly as all hell)
• Picassa 2 – for photo-editing and managing pr0n

Customizing the file open/save dialog in Windows XP

Windows by default will create icons “My Recent Documents” “Desktop” “My Documents” “My Computer” and “My Network Places” in the dialog. I rarely use any of them and I usually need to quickly browse to C:\, and C:\Documents and Settings\<username> as most of the apps I use put files there like uTorrent, Newsleecher, etc..

What I prefer to do to make navigation faster is to remove the unneeded icons and add my own. The utility I use is: TweakUI as part of the PowerToys suite of apps. It’s quick to use and easy to do. Here’s a screenshot of the dialog and what I did:

Here’s a screenshot of the File dialog:

Obviously you will want to add your own links as appropriate.