Category: Computers

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Hulu Desktop Window Size Creep

This work-around has been sitting in my ~/bin for quite a while now, but I thought I should share it with the world…

If you’re using Hulu Desktop on Linux and you find that the window expands every time you go through a maximize/minimize cycle, the following script should help. It deletes the saved size each time you launch Hulu Desktop. Assuming you have ~/bin at the beginning of your PATH, save it as ~/bin/huludesktop. and mark it executable.

#!/bin/sh

# Work around the ever-expanding window bug.
sed -i "/^\(height\|width\|pos_\)/d" .huludesktop

exec /usr/bin/huludesktop "$@"
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Server Core NTP

This appears to be the way to configure Windows 2008 R2 Server Core as an NTP client (replace the all caps bits with the appropriate values):
w32tm /config /computer:COMPUTER_NAME /manualpeerlist:NTP_SERVER_FQDN /syncfromflags:manual /update

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Ubuntu Maverick Release Party

What: Ubuntu Maverick Release Party
Where: rlaager’s House
When: Sunday, October 10, 2010 @ 2:00-5:00

Please respond to rlaager@wiktel.com by 1:00 Sunday if you’re coming. I don’t want to sit around waiting if nobody is coming. 🙂

Of course, bring your computer (if portable) for the install/upgrade to Maverick.

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iphlpsvc CPU Usage

On my test Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core install, I’ve been seeing period CPU usage spikes on what’s basically an idle guest. Task Manager showed an instance of svchost was the offender. I used Process Explorer to narrow down which services it was running. From there, I had to use the process of elimination to find the CPU hog.

I started by disabling the Windows Update service. Even though that turned out not to be the problem, I stand by that. There’s no reason to have a service running when we’re going to run the updates manually.

It seems the IP Helper (iphlpsvc) service was the culprit. Some web searching suggests it’s used for 6to4 (or Teredo) tunneling. We’re not interested in host-tunneled IPv6 connectivity; eventually I want native IPv6. So, I just disabled the service. The guest’s idle CPU usage seems to hover around 1% now.