Larry Osterman on Concurrency

A year ago, Larry Osterman wrote a series on programming with concurrency, that I took the time to read the other day. It’s in fifteen parts, but it’s definitely worth reading! Even if you’re quite experienced with concurrency and multithreading, you’ll definitely find things you hadn’t thought about. For example this.

The links to the various parts in the series are in the "Wrapping it all up" post (the first link in this post).

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Procrastination

There are actually people doing research in psychology on the topic on procrastination! Very interesting to read. Seems that procrastinators have more health problems than other people, among other things.

Via Lifehacker.

Joel was Right about Design After All

I’ve finally read Joel’s article "What Makes It Great?", and realized that I was a little premature in my criticism of his article "What is Design?". I was after the "Great Design", and so was he, but he hadn’t got there yet. Sorry, Joel!

Going Deep

Now, there is an index of the complete Microsoft Channel 9 "Going Deep" series: look here. I don’t know if it existed when I wrote this post, but anyway, now we’ve got it.

Qtek 9100 Drawbacks Fixed

I’ve been annoyed by several things recently on my Qtek 9100 (alias HTC Wizard):

• There’s no letter recognition in the Swedish ROM.
• The device is sometimes very, very slow. It couldn’t run Skype properly, and gets very sluggish when I’ve got lots of tasks in my list (means around 500 tasks).
• I couldn’t change the text color of the "Today" page, so that I can have a bright background picture.
• I had to go to the "Settings -> System -> Memory" tab to change to another application. It wasn’t sufficient to start "Tasks" again, because my filter settings disappeared every time.

Well, I’ve fixed them all now, so I’m quite happy! 🙂
What, you want to know how? OK, then:

• The letter recognition feature can be enabled by some registry hacking. (Yes, there’s a registry on the device!) First, you need to install a .cab file, however. Look here for instructions.
• You can overclock the thing to 240 MHz! Just get the "OMAPclock" utility, add a command line "-clock 240" to it (yes, you need to rename the .lnk file to a .txt file to do that), and there you go. Skype can actually be used now, and the device isn’t at all that painful to use any more. The instructions are here. (Use it at your own risk.)
• Changing the text color of the Today page is easy, when you’ve got a registry editor. By the way, Total Commander is a good one. It’s free. Here are the instructions.
• How to change applications in a simple way was actually the easiest one, even if I chose the wrong appplication for that, initially, which made the device reboot at least once a day (it’s called vBar; no link to that one!). Now, I’ve found the "Magic Button", which works perfectly. Just install and use. And it’s free, too.

There seem to be a lot of things that you can do with this device when you look under the hood. I haven’t come as far as changing my ROM yet, but I guess I’m going to do that sooner or later. I’d prefer to have an English ROM instead of a Swedish one.

Dilbert Fixing Computers

Ha, this one is good!