I would like to let everybody know that today is System Administrator Appreciation Day, so go out and get him a beer or her a bundle of flowers for putting up with the crap of us Developers of the past year.

http://www.sysadminday.com/

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I found this great article about Con Kolivas on Slashdot today:

Linux is burdened with ‘enterprise crap’ that makes it run poorly on desktop PCs, says kernel developer Con Kolivas. Kolivas recently walked away from years of work on the kernel in despair. APCmag.com has a lengthy interview with Kolivas, who explains what he sees is wrong with Linux from a performance perspective and how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers.

This article is personally the first time I have heard of Con Kolivas, but in the article he makes many great points about performance and usability that every software developer should be concerned with. He also talks about the disconnect that the Linux Kernel Developers have with the common user and the weight corporations hold over the changes that go in to the Linux Kernel.

Tags: Linux, Performance, User Experience

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One of the new features of Windows Vista was the Driver integrity Checks. In the x64 version of the product it is turned on by default, and is a great idea to prevent kernel level access to only drivers that have passed the Microsoft Testing for security and performance. However this feature can be rather annoying since Microsoft hasn’t even released signed drivers for all their products. (i.e. Streets & Trips GPS Device) So I have included the following steps in order to disable the driver signing integrity checks, so that you can install unsigned drivers.

Note: You should only do this if you are experiencing driver installs getting blocked and you use this driver on a daily basis. Because there is an F8 boot option that will temporarily disable driver signing for other needs and also this is a very good feature that helps prevent spyware and other nastys from gaining access to your OS.

1. Log in to Windows with a user name that has administrative access.
2. Right click on Start > Accessories > Command Prompt
3. Select Run as administrator
4. In the command prompt type bcdedit /set nointegritychecks on
5. Reboot.

To turn driver signing back on do the following:

1. Follow steps 1-4 from above.
2. In the command prompt type bcdedit /set nointegritychecks off
3. Reboot.

So it is that easy.

Tags: Microsoft, Windows Vista

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