Multiple desktops in Windows 7

This small tool from Microsoft allows you to have 4 virtual desktops. There are also several alternatives out there in the open source world for more (and more flexible) virtual desktops.

Updating grub in Ubuntu

The best link I found:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/156700/how-to-set-default-boot-kernel-in-ubuntu-grub

Eclipse startup error with TFS plugin

Sometimes Eclipse will produce the dull error message "An error has occurred. See the log file...". On my system this is caused by the TFS plugin misbehaving. 

An easy way to recover this is to navigate to the directory ${workspace}\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources and delete the file .snap.

Windows - find processes that have a file locked

The tool Process Explorer can help ("Find/Handle or DLL substring")
http://www.heise.de/download/process-explorer.html

HDD backup with rsync

Just switched from Windows 7 built-in backup to rsync (using cwrsync).

Initially, backing up 88k files, 212 GB, to an external HDD (connected via USB2), took 9h 26 mins (383 MB/min).

Running rsync again (only a few browser-related files had changed), took 2h or so.

Making PDFs compatible with IEEE style guides

I had a lot of trouble embedding the Helvetica font into my PDF. Here's how I solved it (from here); instead of WinEdt, I changed the ps2pdf settings in GhostView.

At this moment (April 2006) it is not possible to make PDFLaTeX embed these fonts (aka the Base-14 fonts) if they are used in external images. PDFLaTeX will embed these fonts only if they are used in the document itself.

It is possible however to tell PS2PDF to embed the fonts:

• Open WinEdt
• Select: Options, Execution Modes
• Select ps2pdf
• The Command Line Switches for gswin32c.exe are

  -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -r600 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 

  Add the following switches to this line:

  -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true  -dEmbedAllFonts=true 

From now on PS2PDF will embed all fonts.

Error 0x8004a029 when installing Shrewsoft VPN client on Windows 7

During install, I receive "Error 0x8004a029: Couldn't install
the network component".

Error 0x8004a029 means that the maximum number of filter devices for the system has been reached. Other similar software ( VPN clients, 3rd party firewalls, etc ) install filters. You can either attempt to remove other software that has installed a filter, or attempt to increase the following registry entry value to allow more filters to be installed.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\MaxNumFilters