Technology Kills Deconstructing technology, one piece at a time…

11Jun/100

CakePHP Project: WebManager

I have started work on a solution to a problem I have been searching for for quite a while. Finding nothing that satisfied me, a while back I started on a new project titled (DE to be precise).

The functionality will include the ability to manage the entirety of a business or individual's web presense, from names and websites to providers, datacenters, , and more. Manage them all in one place and interact with them in intelligent ways--get renewal reminders, login links to all services, relevant contact information displayed on related pages, and much more.

This project came about because I was tired of having to manage my various web assets in all different disconnected places--my registrar for domain names, my various hosting providers and control panels, all of my websites, pages, and projects around the web, and more. It was all just getting to be too much, and while there are a lot of organizational tools, none of them seemed to be designed for this specific type of management. In this, I saw a way to make something that works better for me.

The project is built with CakePHP 1.3, the Javascript framework, and the interface to give users a full desktop-like experience on the web.

I am not sure yet what different versions I will offer, and whether this will be a locally-hosted product or SaaS ( as a Service) hosted and provided by the Digital Empire. Only time will tell, and I should hopefully have some screenshots and more information posted soon.

21Mar/104

SugarSync Memory Leak

First, a quick update about my other major SugarSync issues-- assisted me in resolving the issue on my laptop in which I had to re-import the previous configuration and re-scan everything each time started. That was resolved by uninstalling, reinstalling, then not choosing to import my existing configuration, but instead starting a new one.

I still have major issues with the way it's handling syncing my files, however--every day there are tens or hundreds of files supposedly in which are renamed inexplicably whenever I try to save them. Deleted folders still reappear if I do not permanently delete them manually from SugarSync. Some files still never , even though SugarSync indicates all files are "backed up and in ." Hopefully they are still looking into these other issues as well.

Now, a new issue. For the past several weeks, I have been dealing with my Windows 7 Professional x64 machine's 4 GB of RAM filling up within a day or two of leaving it running. No listed application was actually using that --adding up the reported commits of all running processes did not equal the amount of which was used up. So I knew I was dealing with some sort of memory leak.

I tried disabling things I didn't necessarily need, but nothing helped until I finally decided to disable SugarSync from starting. Even though it would report very small memory usage, my memory leaks stopped completely when I stopped running SugarSync all the time. Looking at the process's history it would regularly use ~500 MB or more, but nowhere near what was actually being used on my system.

I do not have this issue on my Windows XP laptop, so it seems to be related to SugarSync and 7 (not sure about Vista).

Anyone else noticed such behavior? I will report it to SharpCast so they can investigate further--maybe it's not SugarSync specifically but some interaction between SugarSync and another process running. But it makes my system crawl when the memory usage reaches 90 or 95% and the only resolution is a restart, so for the time being I am no longer running SS.

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15Sep/090

Windows 7 Missing Start Menu Items Fixed!

After installing a small utility which added a icon to my 7 RC machine, suddenly my All Programs collection in the went blank.

At first i thought the utility had somehow deleted all of my Start Menu items, but that was not the case. Items could still be searched for and launched that way in the start menu, but not browsed for by clicking All Programs.

I found this post over at Greg's Cool Thing of the Day blog which describes a "fix" (moving some of the items into one or more ) which worked perfectly, and all of my Start Menu items have returned.

Thanks, Greg!