Root Access

William Hilsum

00:22

If I had downvoted the two above me, I could have got second place on the competition :( I'm a good sport :(

... actually, I would of needed +1 as well... I wonder who I have annoyed to get so many downvotes :/

nhinkle

@Wil thanks for your good sportsmanship. And hey, you still get an SU t-shirt!

William Hilsum

2nd prize, not second place*

Tyler Gillies

@WilliamHilsum isn't that the same?

William Hilsum

lol! Thanks - I already have two (I think it is)... but... I like it, I wear those all the time!

nhinkle

2nd and 3rd place are the same level of prize

so the winner gets the grand prize, the 2nd and 3rd get a "level 3" prize, and the next 7 get t-shirts

however we appear to have a tie for 3rd. so i'm not sure yet how we'll handle that.

we also need to verify that all candidates meet the requirements

William Hilsum

00:29

Again, like I wrote in the comments... I am happy to get so many upvotes, but, it is going to drive me crazy - I wonder who I have annoyed :(

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William Hilsum

@nhinkle ... I think there is enough to go around, but, I am happy to give up my Tshirt if it helps someone else! - (I wouldn't mind it though - I do like it though!)

nhinkle

@WilliamHilsum nah we've got plenty of t-shirts

William Hilsum

cool!

nhinkle

i need to talk with rebecca and the other judges about what the exact swag will be for level 2 and 3 prizes

and of course half the contest stuff needs to be judged by people, so that'll take a while. expect a blog post midweek or so

William Hilsum

00:34

So shattered... I started a little job/quick favour for someone and almost 5 days later, I realise I am about half way through... thought it wouldn't take more than a couple of hours :(

nhinkle

Oh! Sorry @SimonSheehan and @JourneymanGeek... I had gone to bed by the time you responded. I made a thing! Rather, I'm working on a thing.

files.nathanhinkle.com/monitor_cpu_mem_test.exe

it's somewhat inspired by the stat monitors my friend who uses OS X has

basically it puts an icon in the notification area, and when you click on it, it shows a flyout window with graphs of the CPU and Memory usage. Eventually (I just started on it) it'll show a list of the top processes by CPU and mem usage, and hopefully other stats.

You can download the current build at the link above... it's very alpha.

Journeyman Geek

@WilliamHilsum: i thought about strategic downvoting/non voting for about... half a second too, but eh, i'd rather lose, than win cheating.

@nhinkle: potentially shiny!

nhinkle

@JourneymanGeek if you have any suggestions for what shiny stuff would be helpful to include, let me know

Journeyman Geek

hm.. dosen't seem to start for me >_>

nhinkle

@JourneymanGeek look for an icon in the notification area. It looks kind of like a laptop. You have to click on the icon for it to open. Or right-click. The display logic is slightly... alpha :P

Journeyman Geek

00:42

oh crap ;p

William Hilsum

@JourneymanGeek Ditto! :) I'm just most annoyed by the downvotes - I think I would of been second... I just don't know what I have done wrong/who I have annoyed :(

nhinkle

also the exit button may or may not work in the build i uploaded. so you might have to kill it with the (real) task manager. i don't remember when i last uploaded a copy to the website

William Hilsum

You can't change if you don't know what you have done! I would of loved an anonymous comment or email! ... I wonder if Molly created a few accounts just to down vote me!!! (joke!)

Journeyman Geek

@nhinkle: an always on top option would be nice ;p

@WilliamHilsum: Almost tempted to suggest using comments rather than votes to votes.. but that's too much work for most

nhinkle

I'm planning to have a config option for how it displays, so it could either be on top all the time/docked, or act like a normal fly-out window (like it does now where it disappears when you move away from it), or to open on click and close on another click, but not automatically disappear, or to appear on hover and go away on un-hover

Journeyman Geek

00:46

also, what will be the config options?

nhinkle

idk yet, since i'm not sure yet what all i'll be able to put in it

probably an option to change the graph colors. and to determine how many processes to show in the list (one there is a list). and maybe other stuff, idk

what else would you like to be configurable?

Journeyman Geek

hmm, if its possible, maybe in addition to memory and CPU, hard disk read/write per programme?

nhinkle

yeah i'm hoping to include some HDD stats. not sure how doable that is in .NET

Journeyman Geek

blah, darn my odd spelling of program. can't shake off the additional 'me'

nhinkle

it's possible to get almost anything using WMI calls, but that's very resource intensive. right now this little app takes hardly any CPU and mem; if i started using WMI a lot, it would become impractical to keep running all the time

though i could have it only make the calls when open

Journeyman Geek

00:52

(since if i'm trying to track down what's misbehaving, its usually CPU, Ram Usage then HDD use

Gareth

@WilliamHilsum It is simply ridiculous you got that many downvotes @Wil - and very much undeserved

nhinkle

congrats @Gareth ;)

Gareth

thanks @nhinkle

nhinkle

@JourneymanGeek it looks like there is a PerformanceCounter for disk use :D

William Hilsum

@Gareth Thanks for that, and congratulations yourself!

nhinkle

00:56

ooh and for network usage

anyhow i've got to get going. thanks for the feedback @JourneymanGeek

Gareth

haha, I think I actually have an edit stalker

i.e. when I edit some posts, a few hours later someone will come and make edits on the same question (to some answers I missed or whatever)

without fail

Tom Wijsman

@nhinkle Good thing that you avoid WMI, there are indeed the performance counters and if that doesn't provide enough you could look into ETW. Worst case you need to do a P/Invoke to access stuff from .NET, but it's not impossible... :)

Journeyman Geek

@Gareth: or they use the front page

cause there's times when its nothing but edits ;p

Gareth

I thought that, but some of them aren't on the front page any more

the VTC room has been quiet for a few days...

Tom Wijsman

@nhinkle: I somehow still dislike any monitoring graph software running, would be interesting if your program had some option to only log when you open it.

@Gareth Exams over here, slhck could be near Belgium I think, and I guess others are busy too...

Gareth

01:11

yeah true :) just an observation I guess

Tom Wijsman

Might be related to start of new school year (well, not worldwide on September 1).

Simon Sheehan

01:26

@nhinkle looks cool and lightweight.. I'll test it tomorrow! Saved to my dropbox

Journeyman Geek

02:52

gah. Packrattiness strikes again

I found something i MIGHT need, in a mirror of the sysinternals tools...

downloaded it 'in case' before realising i haven't used to OS it runs on in years

Sathya

04:07

@lovesh they're for you only if you're looking at building your own webapp.

nhinkle

04:27

@TomWijsman I'm looking into that. Problem is, once it's done, the notification icon will show a mini graph or something like that, and i don't want the graph to lose all data or have chunks of missing data when you hide then reopen it. i did design it so that points are removed from the graph as soon as they're out of the displayed area. that prevents the memory from going through the roof as points get added.

Sathya

@nhinkle requires .netv4, can't test on work system

nhinkle

when it's visible, it takes 2% CPU on my laptop, and 0% when it's not visible - most of the CPU use is from drawing the graphs. i guess i could add an option to pause data collection when not visible, but it would make the graphs look funny

(it takes 0% on my desktop, but that's because 100% is a lot more power, so it just doesn't register as much)

@Sathya yeah, sorry. i would've used 3.5 but charting controls weren't built in until 4.0

Sathya

@nhinkle cool... I hope you aren't using WMI to fetch the data :p

nhinkle

4 hours ago, by nhinkle

it's possible to get almost anything using WMI calls, but that's very resource intensive. right now this little app takes hardly any CPU and mem; if i started using WMI a lot, it would become impractical to keep running all the time

it's using PerformanceCounters

much more efficient. i don't want my own CPU Assassin :P

Sathya

@nhinkle ah cool :)

nhinkle

04:35

@SimonSheehan want to play some co-op portal?

ping me if/when you do

Simon Sheehan

05:02

@nhinkle I'll drop you a message on steam when I can!

@nhinkle not tonight though, a bit late :p

nhinkle

@SimonSheehan no problems

Tom Wijsman

05:27

@nhinkle: And the amount of cycles? (You can add a column for that in Process Explorer, or I'll look later this day)

nhinkle

@TomWijsman wdym "cycles"?

Tom Wijsman

But 0% on not showing is a good start... :)

CPU cycles

nhinkle

"Your computer has: 200 bicycles in it! YAY!"

@TomWijsman what do you mean by "and the amount of CPU cycles"? The amount what? I should show them?

Tom Wijsman

@nhinkle No, see the amount of CPU cycles your program takes. :)

nhinkle

OH. Good question. let me know if you figure out how I can measure that

Tom Wijsman

05:29

1 min ago, by Tom Wijsman

@nhinkle: And the amount of cycles? (You can add a column for that in Process Explorer, or I'll look later this day)

Set it's refresh time to 1 or something and then you can see the amount of cycles per 1 second.

Column is called Cycles Delta.

nhinkle

mk. i'll look in a bit

Tom Wijsman

Anyhow, gotta go continue and catch a bus...

nhinkle

good luck @tom. thanks for your input

DMA57361

07:30

morning all

Sathya

morning @DMA

Journeyman Geek

10:34

erf.

I know there's a perfectly good reason... but, one thing i wonder about business majors is... do they actually believe all this BS?

is looking at his notes before class

DMA57361

lol

Journeyman Geek

(just to note, i am a major mongrel. double majors in management and computer forensics, if things go to plan).

on the bright side, my IT security management text looks like light reading

and.. gonna log off. I take notes on paper and the desks on this floor are too darned small

Tom Wijsman

12:19

@nhinkle Your luck seems to have helped, thanks! :)

@nhinkle: Good thing that you use Obfuscation, there are companies that forget such things.

hidden 5M cycles, 80 context switches
shown 70M cycles, 100 context switches

Behaves very well, when it's hidden it's less of an impact than csrss.exe and when it's shown it does do some significant CPU (but well, you are using it so nothing to care about) but still less than programs like Firefox.

@nhinkle: I think it might be more interesting to be able to change the polling interval; might also make it interesting to run that idle on servers.

Very nice that it's based on pure Performance Counters and non-bloated .NET stuff, to keep it light weight...

Simon Sheehan

14:10

Last day of holidays today, wooo

Journeyman Geek

14:24

lol

just started school today

hm, blah, another spidey sense user superuser.com/users/96702/kathleen-c-hudson

Tom Wijsman

15:31

My sister needs to buy a Mac and Adobe software for it for school, while she already has a costly Windows laptop with Adobe software...

First reason they gave is because apple.com/remotedesktop/remoteassistance.html is Mac-only, funnily enough it supports VNC. :)

And well, she could go for the illegal option; but in a public setting that's kind of risky...

It's like crazy to pay 2k or so just because something unimportant doesn't run on what she already has.

The illegal option is probably still more cheap if they catch you...

But well, I guess that's not really going to work due to compatibility problems.

George Edison

Any SU Blog people around?

Sathya

15:46

sorta @GeorgeEdison

George Edison

Is this link accessible to you?

I was wondering if anyone has some feedback.

Sathya

not when logged out, but logged in yes

George Edison

Oh, good.

Sathya

looks good @GeorgeEdison

George Edison

Thanks.

...and submitted.

William Hilsum

15:56

@TomWijsman ouch... what course is it? :/

Simon Sheehan

16:27

@TomWijsman Can't they just let her use it? It's all the same software

Adobe products do not change much between operating systems

Mokubai

17:01

The only way I can see to answer this question (superuser.com/questions/332161/operating-system-solaris-10) is to point them to Wikipedia....

tombull89

you know it's going to be an interesting day when a visiting technician took down a secondary edge (i.e. highest level in the school) network switch for updates...then the primary one failed, leaving us with no internet, no email, no network connectivity, no wireless, and no phones.

Mokubai

Ah, slhck commented on that question in almost exactly the same way as I was about to

@tombull89 That does not sound good...

Though, you can always guaruntee that a primary will fail the moment you try and replace/update the backup...

Sathya

@Mokubai Dr. Murphy agrees with you.

Mokubai

17:18

Yeah, there's a whole set of variations on the theme. "Anything that can go wrong, will" and "if there's a worse time for something to go wrong then that's when it'll happen" and so on.

Though my favourite of those laws is Coles Law which is "Thinly sliced cabbage"

Sathya

@Mokubai ?

Mokubai

Coleslaw.. Thinly sliced cabbage and carrots mainly :)

I know, it's a bad joke....

Simon Sheehan

Linker3000

18:38

@tombull89 My sympathies - I came in to find the Linux-based VPN server had died over the weekend. Up again in 10 mins, but not a nice start to Monday.

Tom Wijsman

@WilliamHilsum Not course, school.

Hmm, I think there is a bug in my Gentoo (back on Windows now)

played some YouTube videos, suddenly I had like those colored pixels in random spots on the screen

no overheat or something

just buggy, first thought my card started to give up (although I feel no heat)

reboot fixed it, just weird...

@SimonSheehan Looks delicious.

William Hilsum

WOOT! Finished a project that was dragging on far too long... a little favour that took over 5 days! Happy now and can't believe it is done... I made an amazing discovery, when I try to ignore Super User for a while... I actually get work done!

@TomWijsman How can they make you choose a platform? I can understand if it was a course especially on it or something, but, that is just weird

Tom Wijsman

:1846392 You might want to add rate limiting to that, especially for long lists.

@WilliamHilsum She's studying Design stuff. And well, Mac's the platform for that...

William Hilsum

19:02

@TomWijsman That's just silly - I can understand if and only if the course is full of teaching shortcuts and stuff that they don't want to redesign... but still... if it is just about Adobe, it's silly!

paradroid

@TomWijsman When I was studying architecture a lot of people used Macs (and this was before they became very popular), but there were serious disadvantages as they could not run 3ds max and a lot of Autodesk stuff, like AutoCAD (yuck), while you could run everything on Windows, including Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign.

William Hilsum

21:11

paradroid

21:52

@WilliamHilsum There are quite a lot of youtube clips about that.

eg. youtube.com/watch?v=_n7ZyS_g0DQ

William Hilsum

Trust me to be late :(

@paradroid Brilliant, thanks!

paradroid

@WilliamHilsum All these things tend to be on reddit pretty early.

William Hilsum

I just check once every few days :( there isn't enough hours in the day to keep on top of everything... Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News and more :( ... I haven't checked Engadget in over a year!

paradroid

Reddit has replaced pretty much all those other sites for me, as it of course links to everything else. "The front page of the internet" ^TM

After you unwatch the crappy subreddits full of noise, there are some good ones to discover.

It's actually quite annoying in places, which could put you off.

It's good for tech news in particular.

Science too

I'm an op on the ##/r/sysadmin freenode IRC channel for that subreddit

Although that does not exactly mean much. as anything goes in that channel

@WilliamHilsum And as for Twitter, I have never been a fan, although I do follow quite a few people, but I have it mashed into Google Plus, along with Facebook and LinkedIn.

So I only have to go to Google Plus for all those sites

William Hilsum

@paradroid I am going to try to get more in to Reddit.... I do like it

paradroid

22:06

@WilliamHilsum I recommend changing the default subreddit subscriptions

Stuff like /r/lolcats would drive you insane (not sure of that is a default, but I would not be surprised)

nhinkle

@paradroid how do you set that up? The mashing together?

paradroid

@nhinkle It's a Chrome extension: sgplus.me

It works well, but can be a little bit slow. You can pay for faster access.

And in case you were wondering, it has been checked out for security implications, after a similar addon was found to be pretty dodgy. That one is fine though, from what people have said.

paradroid

22:52

Oh, he's gone

nhinkle

23:13

@paradroid yeah, I do. and I am actually here :P

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