Solved HP Elite Book slow start on windows 7 64.

I've been battling with a long delay after booting my new laptop, I was waiting for a minute from when windows is loaded until the user profile icons appear.
After much rebooting and usage of various tools I finally found the culprit by using msconfig, to systematically eliminate the possibilities.

I found that by disabling the following 2 services I could knock off 40 seconds of wait time so that I could log in faster:

Drive Encryption Service / McAfee Inc.
DEBridge / McAfee Inc.
I believe that these are both installed as part of the HP Protect Tools, with these 2 services disabled, I can authenticate using my fingerprint reader.

Hope this helps some other frustrated soul.

Windows XP fast user switch disconnects wireless connection

I got a new wireless router last month, a linksys WAG120N and after setting it up I discovered that I couldn't establish wireless connectivity from another user profile on Windows XP when doing a fast user switch.

The first profile that was logged on and connected worked fine, but if that user remained logged on and I switched to another user then the second user could not connect.

So after battling with this for a month I finally managed to find a work-around, which I will share here in the hope that it reduces frustration amongst other long suffering souls.

1) Log into your routers configuration page something like http://192.168.1.1/

2) Navigate to the wireless security settings

3) Set the security mode to WEP

3.1) Be aware or the security risks : http://www.home-wlan.com/WEP-vs-WPA.html

4) Generate or enter keys, and remember which key is set as the active key.

5) Save settings.

6) Remove your old wireless connection profile.

7) Add a new wireless connection profile using the WEP key from above.

8) Check connectivity

9) Fast user switch to another profile

10) Repeat steps 6), 7), 8) & 9) until all profiles are working.

I saw this question asked on google answers without an answer:

Wireless network disconnects on fast user switch in XP

Subversive vs Subclipse

OK, so I've been playing around with subversive a bit more and I've changed my preference from subclipse to subversive.

However I the last time that I did a clean installation from scratch on Galileo it was still a bit of a mission, I had to install components from both the Eclipse update site and from the Polarion update site.

Some of my new favourite tools

This is a short list of some of the most useful tools that I have used this year.

• Notepad++
  The best plain text editor around
• Process Explorer
  Windows Task Manager on steroids
• Junction
  Symlinks for windows
• XMLTask
  A neat plugin for manipulating XML in ant.
  

subclipse vs subversive

Well I've just tried subversive-0.7.8 for the first time, and I'm not exactly bowled over.

• The install process was a nightmare
• The UI seems a bit richer than subclipse
• But the overall performance appears to be slower

I think I'll be staying with subclipse-1.6.2 for now.

Excellent post on securing subversion via LDAP

Excellent post on securing subversion via LDAP - http://pteropus.blogspot.com/2008/04/securing-subversion-via-ldap.html

JMS API Lacks Depth.

The JMS API still does not cater for a simple method to obtain the number of messages on a queue. Currently you have to jump through the following hoops to get the queue depth:
1) Create Connection
2) Create Session
3) Create QueueBrowser
4) getEnumeration
5) iterate through the enumeration while incrementing a count.

On some JMS implementations for large queue depths this approach has rapidly resulted in OutOfMemoryException, as the entire enumeration is loaded into memory.
So inevitably, the developer ends up dropping into proprietary code thereby losing portability and increasing vendor lock-in. OK this could be tempered by creating a factory pattern implementation ... but why, multiple times across many development organisations.

Many JMS implementations have a native way of simply obtaining the queue depth along the lines of the following:
1) Create Connection
2) Create Session
3) getQueueDepth(Queue queue)

This doesn't involve loading all the messages into memory, and it is s common that it ought to be added to the standard JMS implementation.
I believe that this should return -1 if it is not supported else return the actual queue depth.
There could be another variation,
int javax.jms.Session.getQueueDepth(Queue queue, String messageSelector)

I'm not sure whether this should be applicable to topics, as depth is relative to the consumer, perhaps the subscriber name could be passed in to a similar method.

Its coming up to 7 years since the release of JMS-1.1, surely this feature alone is worth releasing JMS-1.2.