Knicks making moves

Even though the Knicks didn't land Lebron, (which was a longshot anyway,) I really really like what Donnie Walsh has done. He's added significant depth in the frontcourt and at point guard, something they desperateky needed. Probably more importantly, all the new pieces have reasonable contracts that can be used in trades, well all except Stoudemaire. But even though I feel they significantly overpaid Stoudemire, given that no team was going to give him that much, I understand Walsh's thinking. He needed to get Amare locked up as soon as possible in order to entice Lebron and that's how much it cost. And hey if Amare can play at an All-Star level and entice impending FA like Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony, then it certainly would have been worth it. Yeah I know the Knicks have had terrible luck gving contracts to people with bad knees but you'd think the Knick's legendary bad mojo must end at some point. We've suffered enough...

Besides Amare, we got Felton, Anthony Randolph, Ronnie Turiaf, and the Russian guy Timofy Mozgov. Toney Douglas is a decent PG but he's still learning and from what I've read Felton can really thrive in D'Antoni's system. Randolph if healthy could be the next NBA big man to break out, just like Amare did. The offense of Stoudemire and defense of Randolph could make a very imposing front court. And with the length of Gallirani and Chandler on the court the Knicks could finally be able to compete with the bigger teams, Plus it will be really interesting to see what the young guys - Bill Walker, Azubuike, and Landry Fields - can do. And of course everybody's waiting for Gallo to breakout, which he could do this year.

With all this the picture is even better. Curry's salary comes off the books this year, meaning in 2011 the Knicks will have a good chunk of change to sign a top-tier FA outright, or they could use Curry in a trade. Plus Felton's contract is only 2 years meaning they will have room to sign Chris Paul or Deron Williams. They might even be able to sign one of these elite PGs through a trade using Felton and Randolph and Gallirani and Curry's contract

As far as Mike D'Antoni goes, well I give him one year to prove himself. He finally has the roster he wants including one of his favorite players so now he has to deliver. I really don't think much of him as a coach at this point, he mad seome terrible decisions personnel wise starting with the Knicks' best player and coming down to the tail-end of the season he was starting to look desperate. So we'll see.

So for once I'm optimistic about the Knicks this season. The bad luck has to end at some point.

Steam 'Perils of summer' sale ends...finally

Before I was forced into selling my blood or some even more degrading action to get money, the Steam sale finally came to an end. Although it would probably be shorter to list what I did not  get, here's a list of the games my grandkids will have to finish before they can buy any more games:
 

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising

Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey and Abe's Exodus

Order of War

Dogfighter

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Ultimate Sith Edition

Hearts of Iron III

Supreme Commander 2

Overlord

Left for Dead 2

Introversion Complete Pack (Defcon, Uplink, Multiwinia, etc.)

Left 4 Dead

Killing Floor

Half Life Source

Blazing Angels 2

Grid

Just Cause 2

Civilization IV

Trine

Beat Hazard

Borderlands

whew...well I spent less than $150 in total and it was definitely worth it.

Windows 7 page file size

Even though I know 4Gb isn't really a lot for a developer PC, especially one that runs several VMs, one thing that I didn't understand is why under heavy usage my desktop would just suddenlly fly off  to la la land - thrashing and thrashing and thrashing for literally hours. It seems that I've found the cause - the size of the swap file. It seems that Windows started off with a relative small page file size (probably because it detected 4 GB of physical memory,) and was attempting to dynamically allocate the swap file and shed physical memory load at the same time - this lead to the machine being rendered unusable until cold restart.

Bottom line is that with only 4 GB RAM and impending heavy application usage, the Windows page file must be set to a minumum size of at least 4GB to avoid excessive paging. If your system pages incessantly and becomes unresponsive under heavy memory load, setting a large enough minimum pagefile can work wonders. It won't be a s nice as upgrading to 8GB or more, but if you blew all your  money on the Steam summer sale, it's a good temporary fix.