Monthly Archives: September 2011

Pushing PlayBook to the limit

I was finishing some final touches on an application for BlackBerry PlayBook. I’ll talk about it later, when it’s released. And you know, these final touches are most time consuming (also sometimes boring). You’re quickly changing few small items and testing it again and again. I was redeploying it to my PlayBook probably every minute. The application has quite some graphics in it and suddenly the PlayBook stopped running it. The application runs in portrait mode, so I missed the message for the first time.

Although the device is very powerful you can push it to the limit (Out of graphics memory). Hope users of the application will not see this message.

Problem waking up computer from sleep

I recently upgraded VMware Workstation to version 8 (it also runs Windows 8 nicely) and experienced one problem with putting my laptop to sleep.

The problem was, whenever I closed (suspended) the VM and put laptop to sleep, later when woke it up, it started booting from scratch. It was properly in sleep as the LED was blinking as usual, even the few moments (half a second or so) after waking up it was behaving correctly, at least from what LEDs were doing.

Because I’m putting my laptop (Dell Latitude D620) to sleep all the time, it was a serious problem for me. I did some “debugging” and found conditions for this to happen as well as a solution. I was able to reproduce the problem after taking VM created in VMware Workstation 7, changing HW level to 8 and upgrading VMware tools. Don’t know whether it’s absolute root cause, but it was just enough to reproduce the problem.

The solution (except avoiding changes above, but maybe the clean VM with HW level 8 and latest VMware tools will result in same problem) is easy. Because the laptop until starting the wake up procedure was behaving as expected, my focus was to CPU. After changing the CPU Virtualization engine mode from Automatic to Intel VT-x or AMD-V (I have Intel Core 2 Duo) the problem disappeared.

Hard to say what was VMware doing with CPU that even after closing it it was in such a state, but I’m happy to have normal behavior back. If you’re experiencing same issue, hope this works for you too.

PowerThreading library on NuGet

I like NuGet because it removes the hassle of downloading and installing libraries. And sadly only small number of vendors is providing just package without installer. And I also like parallel/multithreaded programming. Crucial tool in my toolbox for parallel programming is Jeffrey Richter’s (Wintellect) PowerThreading library. The library is great and contains a lot of smart ideas [1] and some handy objects too. And it’s completely free.

Sadly it was not on NuGet. Hence I took the challenge and created the package. It’s called simply PowerThreading. Don’t take me wrong, Jeffrey is doing great job with this library and I’m and will be happy to maintain the package. He’s too smart to waste his time on this; spending rather the time on improving it, is more valuable.

[1] In fact the async/await feature in C# 5 uses similar concept as AsyncEnumerator.