Evan Brassart

I hate it when the last place I look, after saying “if I can’t fix this now, I’m giving up forever,” solves my problem.  I hate it even more when its a known bug!  http://www.magentocommerce.com/bug-tracking/issue?issue=5944

One SQL statement, and an hour of head scratching later, all is well!

I decided to test the new Windows 7 release candidate on my Dell D610 laptop and other than a few driver issues I am really happy with it. It looks like windows 7 + server 08 R2 will be a dream for IT professionals.

Initially I had problems with the Intel integrated graphics on the D610, it is a 915GM chipset and isn’t supported by Windows 7. However I pulled down the windows XP driver install and it will actually work. There are 2 conflicts with the driver and windows 7.

1. External Monitor Support
2. Battery Savings Mode

To fix the external monitor support: Install the graphics driver. Use Device Manager to disable the external monitor driver. Then reinstall the graphics driver. And again, use device manager to disable the external monitor driver (or verify that it is still disabled). This tricks windows 7 to not uninstall the driver on restart.

The first time you unplug your D610 you will notice some terrible color changes on your monitor. That is because the driver tries to go into battery save mode and windows 7 has a conflict. Run the Intel Graphics software and disable the battery save mode.

So I ran in to an issue this weekend,  I needed to print a whole bunch of RTF files in a directory as quickly as possible.  I came accross multiple solutions online of pre-written perl code to do just that.  The problem I ran in to was that using Win32::OLE in perl to control Microsoft Word wasn’t working because the RTF documents were sometimes reporting errors (whatever created them wasn’t doing a very good job).  Another example I found used open office.  This solved the errors that word was reporting, but was terribly slow, opening another instance of open office for each print.  I finally gave up and started hacking away at some perl and came up with this solution!

If you have all of the files in 1 directory try the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
 
my @rtf_files;
my $rtf_file;
 
@rtf_files=glob "*.rtf";
 
foreach my $rtf_file (@rtf_files) {
#wordpadpath should be the path to the wordpad executable.
system(1,'$wordpadpath','-p',$rtf_file);
sleep(3);
 
}

If you need to recurse through multiple directories try the following:

#!perl #windows
 
use warnings;
 
sub recurse($) {
  my($path) = @_;
 
  for my $eachFile (glob($path.'*')) {
 
    if( -d $eachFile) {
      recurse($eachFile."/");
    } else {
	my $value=$eachFile;
	my $mypath="blah"; #blah should be your working directory for the print
	my $newfilename="";
 
	#print "\t",$eachFile,"\n";
	if ($value =~ /\.rtf$/){
		system(1,'$wordpad.exe','-p',$value); #$wordpad.exe should be the path to wordpad.exe
				sleep(3);
			}
    }
  }
}
 
## initial call ... $ARGV[0] is the first command line argument
recurse($ARGV[0]);

Retrospect 7.6 on a Windows 2003 server backing up 680GB on a Mac OS X server over a gigabit ethernet LAN to a dell powervault LTO2 autoloader.

Total time went from 12 hours to 9 hours.  Speeds increased from 1000MB/min to 1257 MB/min a 25% gain.

On the Mac OS X server go to System Pref -> Network -> Select your adapter -> Ethernet and set MTU to Jumbo (9000).

On the Win 03 server Go to Control Panel -> Network Connections -> Select your adapter -> Properties -> Configure -> Advanced -> Select the Jumbo Frames Property and make Value=9014 Bytes.