Archive
My Must-Have JailBroken iPhone Apps
I’ve got a tonne of apps that are installed in my iPhone. But there are a few that I use regularly, and deserve special attention. I have downloaded all of these apps from the un-official Cydia store, where you can find a lot of free, and payed apps that will only work on JailBroken iPhones. For those who don’t know, out of the box, your iPhone is restricted by Apple so that your apps cannot do things like run in the back ground.
On with the list.
10 Ways To Suck At Programming
I found this article written by Donnie Garvich at http://www.finalint.com/2010/05/04/10-ways-to-suck-at-programming. But his server seems to be over loaded as it is throwing 505 Service Temporarily Unavailable message from time to time. So I have re-posted a copy of that article below:
I recently inherited a web app from a dirty, nasty, stinking contractor that claimed to be a competent enough programmer to be left alone to get things done. Unfortunately, we took him at his word. Functionally, most of the web app seemed to work at first glance. However, once the client took over the reigns and actually started using it things went downhill fast. The contractor disappeared after payment (die reputation DIE!) and I was left to try and get things working properly and performing up to snuff while the client limped along with what they had been given.
I decided to document a few of the things that I found wrong along the way. These are really just things that every good programmer should already know to avoid… but obviously some people need to be reminded (or taught).
VMware-authd.exe
I got home today and woke up my pc from hibernate. I always have Process Explorer running in my task bar, so as I was waiting for Firefox to start up, I noticed that my CPU was pinned at about 70% usage, it wasn’t Firefox. It was VMware-authd.exe. I do have VMWare installed but I have not touched it on this machine for years.
Being concerned I turned to the all-knowing Google. The answer came in the form of a blog post by Christopher Miller, who suffered the exact same issue.
Here is his post, hope this helps other VMWare users out there:
I was doing some work on one of my PC’s and I had the processes list open in Task Manager. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that one process, VMware-authd.exe, was going from 0 to 10% of the CPU. I didn’t know what that process did, I went out on a limb and assumed that it was somehow related to VMWare. VMware is one of my favorite tools, but I wasn’t running any VMWare sessions. Time to go Googling. Apparently it’s a service that provides administrator priviledges to to a running VMWare session if the host use isn’t logged in with administrator access rights
If you are logged in with admin rights, you don’t need to have this service running. VMware-authd.exe is the name of the executable for the “VMware Authorization Service” service. You can go into Services and shut that service down and then set it’s startup type to “manual”. There are no other services that depend on that service to be running. You can also stop the service from the Windows command line with the following:
net stop VMAuthdService
Life as a programmer
"You know, when you have a program that does something really cool, and you wrote it from scratch, and it took a significant part of your life, you grow fond of it. When it’s finished, it feels like some kind of amorphous sculpture that you’ve created. It has an abstract shape in your head that’s completely independent of its actual purpose. Elegant, simple, beautiful. Then, only a year later, after making dozens of pragmatic alterations to suit the people who use it, not only has your Venus- de-Milo lost both arms, she also has a giraffe’s head sticking out of her chest and a cherubic penis that squirts colored water into a plastic bucket. The romance has become so painful that each day you struggle with an overwhelming urge to smash the fucking thing to pieces with a hammer." – Nick Foster ("Life as a programmer")
Bike Picture
Hi everyone,
A friend of I sent this picture to me today morning, and I didn’t resist to publish it.
It’s awesome!!!!!
Enjoy the view
20 Windows Registry Improvements
The following was taken from Tech Radar. Since I found this useful I am mirroring the post here for my own reference (and others).


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