KBac's Alter Ego

Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Windows 7 service has eaten half of my SSD drive

After a year with my lovely and powerful Windows 7 install, my 55G SSD drive started running out of disk space...

Browsing a little for solutions helped reclaiming some space:

from shadow storage
then restore points

But only after I have tried WinDirStat, I have managed to nail it.
The tool has highlighted that 50%! of the disk space has been allocated to: C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache\LocalMLS
which is managed by Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service.

Cleaning that directory helped and I enjoy my reclaimed disk capacity again. I have also followed suite and disabled the service as others, from MS forum, have done.

Enjoy!

Wednesday, 31 August 2011

More Goodies from the Microsoft

It has been long since last time anything has been posted onto this site. Remaining very busy, I could not resist to share about lectures dealing with the functional programming available on Channel 9.

The lectures are given by Dr. Erik Meijer and are entitled:Functional Programming Fundamentals.

There are 13 instalments and all are worth watching:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13

Enjoy!

Saturday, 28 November 2009

More goodies from MS

My interest in software scalability and performance often leads me to Microsoft's Parallel Framework Extensions team BLOG, which recently published this great presentation from their parallelism tour...

These slides is a must see item, really. They describe most of the goodies discussed on Channel 9 for a long time like:

Application of PLINQ (more functional expressions!)
Task definition, scheduling, stealing and exception handling
Tool support

All this to be able to increase your CPU core utilisation, contributing to the increase of your application performance. Wonder, what is Java alternative here?

This lead me back to a bit neglected site of MS Labs and their new baby Reactive extensions for .NET. What a treat that is! If you thought, you knew about the possible applications of the Observer design pattern, you need to check it out.
Erik Meijer shows how observable collections can help to unify handling of the event driven UI with async calls to services. And how this uniformity can help with the cloud based application architecture. Duality and monads as base for RX can be found discussed in video by Erik and Brian Beckman. More functional world implementation in the imperative space :-)

Completely on the side, this time tool from Microsoft Live Labs. It is an intelligent Coolris on steroids. With my business intelligence background I can say it is another must see analytic app (called Pivot), which helps to explore data visually with a true WOW factor.

Tuesday, 16 December 2008

Improving coding practices

I am in process of taking a deep breath after releasing quite a complex piece of software. And while recovering from overdue missed and unread news I came across this article entitled "Comments == Code smell", which struck accord with me...

I like the author to challenge readers' view on the subject. Indeed when we DRY the code well enough, we have a chance that it becomes fluent and tells us all about itself. There are many reasons mentioned to why define fine names for your methods. Another one is to make methods meaningful, in the context of the domain we deal with (BTW: I hope DSLs can help here...).

Lets take a look at this from the point of view of people who support the system making sure all questions are answered; all issues are understood. For them failure, with exposed call stack containing properly named methods, will ensure that the data flows according to the business process definition or not, cutting this way support time to bare minimum (easy to guess: no comments, especially those in line, will guide them).

Here is the space for the BDD tools to show their beautiful face. As generated code can and should remain meaningful. Helping us humans making sense out of the mess when need be.

Saturday, 25 October 2008

How Does Functional Programming Affect Your Code?

F# has done a lot of good propagating functional programming style into the .NET world. From my experience, once you have used functional language your OO techniques are bound to change. This article by Matthew Podwysocki expresses exactly that. Enjoy!

Sunday, 5 October 2008

Is Fring a new Skype?

It will be a couple of months since I became the proud owner of an iPhone. I am really happy to be able to check my email on the move, read news and navigate around town using features of my new gadget. One of the things missing would be IM support...

Therefore I was very happy to see that Fring has released its iPhone client that does not require jail braking. It is really great to be able to be in touch with my MSN Messanger and Skype contacts.

There is plenty of space for improvements, as the iPhone application is in its early days. But it can not only serve as IM (apart from aforementioned including Twitter, GoogleTalk, ICQ and Yahoo Messanger). It will also allow you to talk using VoIP with third party services and own clients on platforms like Symbian etc. It is quite impressive.

My main concerns are related to security and privacy. I am always uneasy when I am asked to share my user credentials across services. Would not it be great to use common well established and secure third party proxy for authentication? Thinking how many user accounts I have opened with various service providers, is it not time to unify all this? Are Microsoft Live ID or OpenID valid alternatives?