February 22, 2009

Speeding up the Logitech Harmony Software

As I've just recognized I've forgotten to write a notice here that we've bought a Logitech Harmony 785 programmable remote control.
This thing is quite interesting and fun to play around with, but it's also not so easy to configure as the standard off-the-shelf remote. The only thing is, that the configuration software on the PC is on the one hand not very intuitive and on the other hand... slow... as... hell...

Well at least I can offer a solution against the slowness.

The problem with the Logitech Harmony software seems to be, that Logitech bundles it with an older version of the Java Runtime environment. Something like Java 1.5 or so.
To speed up the software yourself you need a recent Java JRE installed on your computer somewhere, with at least a version equal or greater than JRE 6.
The following procedure is:

  1. Navigate to the installation directory of Logitech Harmony (something like "C:\Program Files\Logitech\Logitech Harmony Remote Software 7")
  2. go into the "jre" subdirectory and delete everything there (or back it up somewhere)
  3. next locate the JRE directory of Java (something like "C:\Program Files\Java\jre6")
  4. copy the "bin" and "lib" subdirectories of the Java JRE 6 directory to the Logitech "jre" directory
  5. finished

When you start up your Logitech Harmony software now, it should feel smother and react faster. I don't know exactly why this works but I suspect that the JRE of Java 6 is more advanced and faster in the areas which are used by the Harmony software than the JRE 5 which comes bundled with the software itself.

This is a relatively easy modification to do but if you're changing the configuration of your remote often, this can be something which helps you to make your changes faster.

February 20, 2009

University term (almost) over now

Just wrote the last written exam for the past term at the university. Now the most of the stress for that term is over.
There are just one or two exercises left to hand in and then we can relax for one or two days until the next term starts.

The beginning of the upcoming term should be not so stressful at the beginning, so we can use this period to breathe a bit more.

One of the subjects I'm curious most in the next term will be "Computer Graphics", which seems to be the largest one. I think this one will be very interesting.

On another note, I've just noticed that my StackOverflow.com reputation score has just exceeded 1.000 points :) Yay.

February 9, 2009

Internal review results

Last week another round of the internal reviews started.
The purpose of those reviews is to perform a two-way-feedback on the work performance of the employee. What went right, where are the strengths of the person, what went wrong, where are the weaknesses and what are the possible ways in the future to improve the personal performance.

I've had mine mid last week and there haven't been much surprises. One thing I've already recognized personally is, that I'm not as active in my main project because I'm constantly disturbed by other stuff which arises from old projects where I'm the only one left to do the work.
Also, the project management got the impression, that I'm more "connected" with the older projects than with my main one which is partly true partly false.
True in the case that I'm more confident in the older projects as I'm the impersonated knowledge of almost everything which is necessary for those projects. False in the case because that doesn't mean that I'm not trying to increase my knowledge in the current project. But I could have done better.

Of course there were an equally number of good points but I don't want to elaborate on that because I cannot improve there. My improvement chances lie in the points where I got feedback that it could be better and I'm definitely working on it!