Tech.It.2.Me->{By.Anton.Perez}

As a Mac user at home and a Windows user at work, I had looked for a solution to sync my iCal calendar with my Google Calendar. I did find some ways to do it, such as taking advantage of iCalshare publishing, but never found one that did a two-way sync – that is, changes I make in my iCal or Google Calendar would reflect the same data – until I heard of Spanning Sync.

Unfortunately, it’s not freeware, but for $25/year or $65/lifetime subscription, it isn’t too bad, considering the benefits it gives you.

So check it out! Peace!

I watched a segment (on the Science channel) about BigBelly, a solar-powered trash compacting garbage bin that’s currently being used in some areas of New York. Built and developed by Seahorse Power Company and priced around $4,500, it crushes garbage based on some algorithm into eighth of its size when needed; thus, reducing the frequency of garbage collection. Well worth it, I think, considering the resources needed in a city like New York.

What’s really a nice feature is it can last up to 4 weeks (on full charge) without sunlight, and still crush garbage efficiently. This is definitely one of those innovations that we humans desperately need, since garbage is a big problem these days. Nice…

Don’t you love living in the 21st century? I do.

Nice!  VMWare recently released an open source version of its very popular virtual  machine tools.  It’s currently housed on Sourceforge, known as Open Virtual Machine Tools.

The Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) are the open source implementation of VMware Tools. They are a set of guest operating system virtualization components that enhance performance and user experience of virtual machines.

Check it out here.

Here are seven “did you know” interesting computer facts (info consolidated from the CIO website):

1. What’s the closest computer to the North Pole?

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory Webcam #1, A NetCam XL, made by StarDot Technologies.

2. What’s the farthest computer from Earth?

NASA’s Voyager satellite computes at the edge of space as we know it, which, BTW, has passed by Jupiter and Saturn – and it’s almost 30 years old.

3. What is the most intriguing data center?

Google, of course.  Located in Dalles, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River, 80 miles east of Portland, they house an estimated 500,000 around the world, spread across 25 locations, that stores and estimated 200 petabytes.  Also hydroelectric dam is used to power two four-story cooling towers.   

4. What is the world’s largest scientific grid computing project?

The E-sciencE II (EGEE-II) project, launched on September 2006, for use by scientists around the world, used for large-scale scientific research projects in fields from geology to chemistry.  It processes 98,000 jobs a day, more than 1 million a month, juggling about 30,000 jobs concurrently, on average. 

5. What is the world’s fastest supercomputer?

IBM BlueGene/L (BGL).  It is powered by 65,536 dual-processor computer nodes, and is located on a 2,500-square-foot marvel at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA.  It has been rated fastest in the world after clocking a sustained performance of 280.6 trillion operations per second, or teraflops.

6. What is the smallest PC to run Windows Vista?

OQO, Model 02.  A Handheld PC that checks in at 5.6 (wide) by 3.3 (high) by 1 (deep) inches, and weighs just under 1 pound.  It consists of a 1.5GHz processor, Windows XP or Vista, 30 or 60GB hard drive, 512MB or 1GBDDR DRAM, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.  At the moment, it starts at $1,499.

7. What is the biggest paradigm change in Enterprise Software?

Linux Kernel, of course.  Created by Linus Torvalds, in 1991, helped open-source developers collectively craft a viable alternative to Microsoft operating systems.  It is said that the Linux kernel contains 8.2 million lines of code, with approximately 86 lines added every hour.  New releases occur every 2.6 months (unless otherwise marked).

I was debugging an inherited multi-project WinForms application (from my co-worker and friend, Genaro Quismorio) today and came across this error twice (below), which was frustrating, annoying and very unproductive. This error occurred while stepping through a breakpoint [Debug.Break] in my WinForms code while looking for a bug.

One fix I found on Google was to go to Debug > Exceptions > Managed Debug Assistants (MDA), and then unchecking the ContextSwitchDeadlock option; I didn’t have this option under VS.NET 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers. Unfortunately, this setting is not global across projects, which means that I have to set it every time for each project.

Managed debugging assistants (MDAs) are debugging aids that work in conjunction with the common language runtime (CLR) to provide information on runtime state. The assistants generate informational messages about runtime events that you cannot otherwise trap.

A little more research around the Internet spectrum landed me on this article (on the MSDN website), which basically shows you how to globally turn off MDA. There are apparently two-and-a-half ways to do it: registry key, an environment variable, or application configuration settings.

Registry Key

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoft.NETFramework]
"MDA"="0"

Environment Variable

1. Add COMPLUS_MDA (this overrides the registry key).

• 0 – Deactivates all MDAs.
• 1 – Reads MDA settings from ApplicationName.mda.config.
• managedDebugger – Explicitly activates all MDAs that are implicitly activated when a managed executable is started under a debugger.
• unmanagedDebugger – Explicitly activates all MDAs that are implicitly activated when an unmanaged executable is started under a debugger.

If there are conflicting settings, the most recent settings override previous settings:

• COMPLUS_MDA=0 disables all MDAs including those implicitly enabled under a debugger.
• COMPLUS_MDA=gcUnmanagedToManaged enables gcUnmanagedToManaged in addition to any implicitly enabled under a debugger.
• COMPLUS_MDA=0;gcUnmanagedToManaged enables gcUnmanagedToManaged but disables those MDAs that would otherwise be implicitly enabled under a debugger.

Application Configuration Setting

To enable the use of an application configuration file for configuring MDAs, either the MDA registry key or the COMPLUS_MDA environment variable must be set (this is why I said two-and-a-half ways). Simply create a .config file of format ApplicationName.mda.config; for example, notepad.exe.mda.config.

<mdaConfig>
  <assistants>
    <marshaling>
      <methodFilter>
        <match name="*"/>
      </methodFilter>
      <fieldFilter>
        <match name="*"/>
      </fieldFilter>
    </marshaling>
  </assistants>
</mdaConfig>

That’s it. You can read more about it here. Hope this helps you somewhat.