Windows

When (re)installing httpd today, I ran into the following error message:
(OS 10048)Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.
: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80

When I attempted to make a commit using TortoiseSVN today, I was told that there was a problem and that I would have to run the cleanup command to sort things out. Running the command, however, resulted in the following further error message:
Cleanup failed to process the following paths:

Here I was, earlier today, simply trying to swap the default gateway of the Ethernet card of my Windows 7 box, and ran into the following peculiarity. First off, as soon as I swapped the gateway, my Ethernet connection went down. To investigate this, I popped into the command-line and tried pinging the new gateway only to run into the error message below:
General failure.

Last week, I noticed that my computer was becoming really sluggish and the fans, extremely noisy. Seeing as to how I had an inkling that this was due to my CPU heating up or rather, not being cooled enough, and the fact that Windows wasn't telling me what the temperature was, I was in the hunt for a utility to report CPU temperatures in real time. I could, of course, check it via my BIOS. But I wanted a utility to be able to run under load.

Windows 7, much as I enjoy using it (although the shine has worn off a li'l bit), has a few niggles. One of these, which really annoyed me was the sudden seemingly random spike in CPU usage that, once it occurred, never went away until I rebooted the system. The task manager did not list any application as consuming any significant attention from the CPU. However, the resource monitor (which can be reached from the performance tab in the task manager) provided the answer as I found the innocuous sounding "system interrupts" process consuming a steady 40-45% CPU.

I had no idea how long the windows box I'm using has been up for... While on Linux, I could've just typed uptime to find out, it appears that m$ never expected their systems to be up long enough to bother with such a utility.

A little digging around and some experimentation unearthed the following methods for finding this out on XP:

1. Open a command prompt and type "systeminfo" and look for "system up time". This might require an updated system.

While doing some routine cleaning up of installed programs on my Windows box, I ran into an entry that simply said "vjOcx1.9"... I had no idea what this was, nor was any related information terribly helpful. Some googling later, I found that that this is very like connected to TV4Africa, a p2p TV player that IIRC, I installed to watch snooker via the net (It didn't work).

Hope this helps somebody out there :)

During a fresh install of Windows XP SP3, upon reboot after the initial copying of files, I ran into an error message stating that there were CRC checksum issues with a file on my CD-ROM, namely D:\i386\asms.(sys?). Google divined that I very likely had a problem with the disc media... but considering the fact that I've installed XP using the same media very recently, I doubted this to be the case.

Today, I purchased and installed the Edimax EW-7316Ug wireless 802.11b/g USB Adapter. While I usually approach the purchase of hardware for Linux - especially for non-mainstream products - with a certain degree of trepidation, I was heartened to note during my pre-purchase exercise that the Edimax page specifically mentioned Linux compatibility and even provided a source code download. How rare is that?!

For those of you out there who have been hankering for a decent free, open-source file renaming utility, I highly recommend that you give Métamorphose a shot. I've been using the v2 beta in XP and it's been excellent. It's written in Python and is also available for Linux, BSD and Macs.

There are a few minor UI bugs though, but I'm sure that they'll be sorted out in due course.

Hooray for FOSS!