Diagnosing BSODs

I had to investigate a series of Bluescreens and tried a lot of the usual stuff, i would do with common sense and my unixy background. In the end the best tool i found was the NirSoft Bluescreen Analyzer. It helped me understand the frequency of my problem and gave me rudimentary stack traces. So it seems my Page Fault in Non Paged Area BSOD was caused by some interaction of my AVG Virus scanner and the ntfs driver. Good riddance piece of crap.

Why a lot of modern languages are doing it wrong.

While I am still uncertain about the role of go - half a year after release 1.0 and a bit longer since its introduction, i have not seen any major app in Go that sounded really interesting, just a load of proposals of what could be cool in Go - Rob Pike said quite a lot of true words about the old school dinosaur languages back in '10 that i just heard again.

Epic new bicycle helmet

This new design  is awsome, although i fear, it will be to expensive to really push the classical one out of the market. Poor, I'd love one of those.

En-/Disabling the Windows+L-Locking shortcut

Upon pressing Windows + L Windows will lock your session. I for one am trained to switch terminal emulator tabs with that key combination and am greatly hindered by this.
So i created
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\DisableLockWorkstation
as a DWord (i had to create the System key as well) and set it to 1 for Disabling (0 would be for Enabling it again). Works instantly.

Changing the Windows keyboard layout *permanently*

I involuntarily spend a lot of time in windows at the moment and one of the things that drives me nuts, is the inability to use different keyboard layouts permanently, globally without uninstalling the alternatives. Having to change it for every window, and redoing it after closing one just doesn't cut it. So i now use autohotkey  as an xmodmap and xbindkeys replacement and combine it with kbswitch. In order to get us altgr-intl (the parts that interest me) and make capslock another escape i switch the language to english and use the following autohotkey script:
CapsLock::Escape
>!y::SendInput ü
>!p::SendInput ö
>!q::SendInput ä
>!s::SendInput ß
+>!y::SendInput Ü
+>!p::SendInput Ö
+>!q::SendInput Ä
This appears to satisify my most basic needs for now. Now if there was something that would make this insanity of a vfs less messy i'd be almost content.

Why something hailing itself an international, multiuser OS doesn't have that is beyond me. I would love to force the responsible people to use amharric, japanese and russian in random succession and see if they volunteer to implement it afterwards.

<edit>I forgot to mention, that you should realy turn off the global hotkeys for switching the ime, or you'll likely hit alt shift sometimes and be confused why your layout changes by itself.</edit>

Removing the searchya pest completely

My mother, despite being competent enough to reinstall her operating system, is quite prone to catch these nasty firefox toolbars. I am unsure if they are malware of some kind, though it's not unlikely given how much they resist being deactivated.

I found several hints on the internet regarding how to get rid of that crap:

• Uninstall via Control Panel>Software
• Deactivate the firefox addon
• Edit the registry (don't you love administering windows?)

This still didn't get rid of the searchya completely because it had registered its useless url with the default for a new tab.
So i ended up solving it

• Opening about:config and setting browser.newtab.url to something sensible.

Good Riddance Pest.

Writing advice

I am not a very practiced writer and i found the following information quite helpful again http://web.science.mq.edu.au/~rdale/resources/writingnotes/