Use Notepad to open any text file in Windows 7 right click

Notepad is a lightweight and handy text editor that comes with Windows operating system.

There is a trick in Windows that can let you right click on any text document and instantly open it with Notepad for reading or editing.

What you need to do is just to include a shortcut of Notepad into your "Send to" menu.

Below is the steps to do it for Windows 7:

Step 1: Open Windows > Run... or alternatively press the Windows + R keys on your keyboard.

Step 2: Key in "shell:sendto" and press the OK button. This will open Explorer and bring you right into your SendTo folder. The content in this folder are the items that will appear in your "Send to" menu whenever you right click on any file or folder. (If you are using Windows XP, then key in "sendto" only and press the OK button.)

Step 3: In this SendTo folder, create a new shortcut to "%windir%\system32\notepad.exe". That's all you need to do.

Now, right click on any text file, go inside the "Send to" menu and open the file with Notepad. Pretty handy isn't it?

You can use this trick to easily open files such as README, *.log, *.ini, *.nfo, ...

Note that you can actually use Notepad to open any file, but if the file is not in text format, you probably just able to see chunk of codes only.

Also note that this trick is applicable for the user currently using the Windows 7 only. If you have multiple users in the system, then the other users need to repeat the same steps above for their own Windows account.

World IPv6 launched today (6 June 2012)

Today (6 June 2012) is the world launching day for IPv6.

To recap, I wrote about the exhaustion of IPv4 last year. The address space used by the current version of the Internet protocol, IPv4, has already run out. Without action, we risk increased costs and limited functionality online for Internet users everywhere, in addition to curtailing the Internet’s growth of a platform for innovation and economic development. The only long-term solution to this problem is adoption of IPv6, which provides a practically unlimited number of addresses.

Now, major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are finally coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by today (6 June 2012).

This marks the largest industry commitment to and deployment of IPv6 in the history of the Internet, with the ultimate aim to eventually replace the current IPv4.

Well, due to its vast usage and long time existance, IPv4 won't be replaced within a few years, and will co-exist with the new IPv6 for a lengthy transition period.

Meanwhile, for end users like you and me, whether it is IPv4 or IPv6 should be pretty transparent to us, as we are more adopted to the more human-readable domain names translated from the IP addresses.

In virtualization, use as few vCPU as possible for optimal CPU performance

Nowadays, virtualizing a physical server into several virtual servers is a common practice. In fact, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model of Cloud Computing is based on virtualization too.

Unlike physical server running on physical CPU, whereby the common sense is more CPU (or CPU core) is better, in a virtualized environment, it is often a best practice to configure as few virtual CPU (vCPU) as possible to the virtual server.

In most cases, if 1 vCPU is sufficient, it is advisible to configure the virtual server to use 1 vCPU instead of more.

This is because:

• Each vCPU will consume some physical CPU resource even if it is in idle state.
• Unused vCPUs still consume timer interrupts unless the guest OS kernel is configured with the NO_HZ "tickless timer" option (a feature available in the latest Linux 2.6 kernel).
• The more vCPUs a virtual machine has, the more interrupts it requires.
• Maintaining a consistent memory view among multiple vCPUs can also consume additional resources, both in the guest OS and the host.
• Some older guest OS execute idle loops on unused vCPUs, thereby consuming
  resources that might otherwise be available for other uses.
• The guest scheduler might migrate a single-threaded workload amongst multiple vCPUs, thereby
  losing cache locality.
• In SMP guests the guest OS can migrate processes from one vCPU to another. This migration can incur a small CPU overhead.

In addition, it is a good practice to disable screen savers and Window animations in virtual machines. On Linux, if using an X server is not required, disable it. This is because screen savers, animations, and X servers all consume extra physical CPU resources, potentially affecting consolidation ratios and the performance of other virtual machines.

Reference: Performance Best Prictice for VMWare vSphere 5.0