Rainers Blog

If you are developing Java on a Mac, chances are pretty high that you are using Eclipse for development. In addition you probably (or at least you better) have lots of RAM too, however, Eclipse is a bit conservative when allocating RAM. If you have tons of plugins installed, or the plugins are quite heavy (Android SDK, I am looking at you), then you can easily get in low memory situations.

The way to change the max amount of memory reserved for eclipse is somewhat buried and not trivial to find (unless you ask Google). The way to do it is to go into the eclipse folder, right click on Eclipse.app and then select “Show Package Contents”. Inside look for the eclipse.ini file (if you are running windows you can skip this step).

Here is my version of the eclipse.ini

-startup
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.200.v20090520.jar
–launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_1.0.0.v20090519
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
–launcher.XXMaxPermSize
512m
-vmargs
-Xms40m
-Xmx812m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
-Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts

The sections in bold are the ones that I have changed. Then just save the file and relaunch Eclipse. That should give you a bit more RAM and you should hopefully get better performance.

I have been asked to create an internet kiosk and since I am an avid SecurityNow listener, I knew that  a good tool for that would be Windows SteadyState (http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-129.htm).

I had used a stripped down version of DamnSmallLinux (BoothCD) before but that didn’t work anymore due to incompatible hardware and I couldn’t be bothered to configure a new version.

The new computer already came with Windows Vista so I thought lets give it a spin. I was afraid that it would take a long time to setup SteadyState properly but the GUI is really quick and intuitive. So from download to finished setup it takes about 15 minutes (plus one reboot). You can configure the machine to not store any changes made by the kiosk user (which is what I used). The only thing that I had to do in addition was to hide my administrator user from the welcome screen.

Associated links

• IntelliAdmin.com: Free Kiosk Utility for Windows
• Windows SteadyState for Internet Cafe
• Download Windows SteadyState

If you have ever wondered which fr…ing process is locking a file you are trying to delete on windows, take a look at the tool below.

WhoLockMe Explorer Extension v1.04 beta (NT-Win2K-XP) download page

Ever wondered why your games just sucked under Vista? One of the problems is that there are more than 100! services running by default. If you can survive without the maximum number of bells and whistles you can speed it up quite a bit. Check out http://www.speedyvista.com/services.html

If you are like me and looking for a way to get a Quicksilver like experience on your windows machine. Give Launchy a try.

I prefer is over Colibri as it is way more limited than Launchy.

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