Doing taxes on a virtual machine

A few years back I started using a virtual machine (VM) to run my tax software. I hope by sharing my motivation and method, those new to virtual machines will gain some exposure and find them useful in other endeavors. Since this tackles some advanced configuration, it may also be helpful to those trying to use VirtualBox outside its default configuration. Virtual machines are essentially a completely different computer running as software on a physical computer. They allow you to run a different operating system, test software without affecting your regular machine, and easily snapshot your machine state and restore it at a later time. One limitation is that running a VM will use about twice as much memory, since you're running another instance of an operating system and whatever applications. Another limitation is that performance can be reduced for certain things, for example graphics intensives tasks like games or 3D visualization.

Two different VM's running on my machine

My main motivation for using a virtual machine to do my taxes was that I wanted to be able to use the software from either my laptop or my desktop interchangeably. Normally, one might choose to install on the desktop then simply remote desktop into the desktop. However, I also wanted to be able to access the software while other people were using desktop. Allowing multiple users at the same time on a single machine with Windows normally requires a server edition or modifying Windows in a way that is not consistent with your license agreement (e.g. https://www.serverwatch.com/server-tutorials/remote-desktop-connections-for-multiple-users-on-windows-10-and-windows-server-2012.html).

Another perceived benefit was not having to untidy my desktop with new installations every year. Instead these are all within the virtual machine. Even better, if installing one version uninstalls the previous years software, I would only have to restore a snapshot to retrieve a state that had the correct software installed to amend a return.

Snapshots of a VM, showing multiple states that were "saved", that can be restored or branched from

One key feature I need to enable for my use case of using the virtual machine from any machine inside my house is Remote Display. This is a setting directly on the VM (not the guest OS) that allows me to directly Remote Desktop into the VM, even when somebody is using the host machine.

Another huge reason I chose to use a VM is because it is fun experimenting and playing with new and different things.

Next year, I might play with using a EC2 instance for this so that I don't need to dual purpose my gaming machines for this and worry about memory management.

Prologue

Another drawback of VMs, having to keep additional machines up-to-date:

Give to those less fortunate, today!

Walking from the parking garage to my office in the wee hours of the morning, I usually pass a couple homeless people, still asleep, on the sidewalk. I've felt a desire to make a positive impact in their lives, something big and personal, but haven't really known what I can do that is within my means and would make a lasting positive impact. When I brought the whole family to see downtown and my office on a bitter cold night, over dinner I explained that the people they saw were homeless and had to sleep outside. My five and seven year old kids, too young to be touched with any jade, immediately wanted to step in and do something. They suggested we bring them home, or let them sleep in our car. I wish I could.

With the impending tax changes, I will be most likely going from a situation where I can claim itemized deductions to one where I will claim a standard deduction. Since for every dollar I donate, I will have to pay about 30 cents less in tax, its effectively a 30% discount on any charitable contributions I make in 2017 that I won't get in 2018. You may be in a similar situation if you plan to itemize your deductions (which usually only makes sense if your state/local taxes, mortgage interest, and charitable donations exceed $6,350 if filing single or $12,700 if filing jointly).

Combining my desire to help with my strong compulsion to optimize, I just gave to a couple charities that I hope will make a difference in the lives of those I pass nearly every day downtown. I don't say this to brag, but because I think that giving is contagious. I hope that my giving encourages others to do the same. I'm also hoping the knowledge that this might be the last opportunity to take advantage of the current tax law will encourage others to give too, especially those that have been meaning to, but haven't gotten around to it. Hurry up and get that donation in before the year is over!

Writing Culture, Listening Commute

The other day at work, there was a meeting for all the hires in the past year. It included a panel of some experienced employees and the opportunity for us new hires to ask questions about the organization and company culture. The topic of our writing culture came up. The narrative documents we create were described as not only being key to informing the reader, but it was stressed that the process of creating the document ensures that the writer is fully thinking through and understanding the problem space. This really resonated with me, as I think it says something pretty similar to what I stated in my previous post:

"There is something about writing that ... makes reflection more deliberate and effectual."

To me, this validated my position. Its nice to know you're not crazy, and better yet, get a little confidence to help boost your motivation. Writing prompts and forces you to answer questions that are too easy to miss or ignore otherwise. That said, I haven't done any more reflective writing, but I will.

Since I have a rather long commute, I've been taking advantage of podcasts to educate and entertain myself. I though I'd share my list of favorites:

• Revisionist History by Malcom Gladwell
• Revisiting and understanding historical incidents
• Just listen, its great. if you don't like the first one you listen to, try another. Its a really amazing podcast.
• S-Town
• Amazing true story about a brilliant guy in a backwoods town. He contacts a reporter to investigate a murder that the town in covering up.
• Java Pub House by Freddy Guime
• The production quality isn't amazing, but I really appreciate the content and am using it to help kickstart my journey towards Java mastery.
• Mission to Zyxx
• Think improvised Star Wars parody. I've laughed out loud... alone in my car. I think people saw me.

A couple of these were recommended by a great guy I used to work with. He's a smart guy, you should check out his blog.

I'm planning a post that will refer to one of the episodes of Revision History, Miss Buchanan's Period Of Adjustment. Have a listen, and you'll have better context when I get around to posting about it.

I've also spent a bit of time lately playing PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG) in addition to my old standby, Rocket League. For those not in the know, PUBG is a multiplayer online game that starts with about 99 players dropping out of an airplane onto a multi-kilometer island, scavenging for weapons and equipment, and fighting for their life as the playing area gets increasingly smaller. The goal: Be the last man standing. I've played games where I've gone 20 minutes without seeing anybody only to be picked off by a sniper rifle when I'm one of 14 people left. Other games involve running into somebody right at the beginning while you're both still weaponless. It's intense and fun. I've felt enough adrenaline from it that I don't play when I know I want to be asleep within an hour.

Cheers

And.... we're back!

I decided to try to resurrect this blog again. The biggest hurdle isn’t getting started, it's finishing a post; finally having it good enough. I’ve started several posts over the past few years, but never finished. Realizing this though, the knowledge I may never publish starts to becomes an impedance to starting. I’ll try to overcome that through high-level outlining and shorter posts, breaking things up if necessary.

On the way home from work yesterday, I decided I wanted to do more reflective writing. To me this means: Looking at my life, deciding what I want to do or change, coming up with a plan if possible, and documenting it. There is something about writing that I think makes reflection more deliberate and effectual. Without it, I think a train of thought can become interrupted and trail off without any resolution. I used to do this often in college but haven’t done much of in the past 15 years. This post serves as a public version of it.

I also decided I wanted to focus on trying to do three things on a regular basis: Learn, Do, and Write

I feel like I’ve done well with learning. I’ve completed a lot of MOOC courses (I recommend starting with Learning How To Learn on Coursera) and reading (currently reading Thinking, Fast and Slow) but I’d like to continue and increase this.

“Do” more or less means projects, mostly software, but it could be some sort of hobby building or community service. I’ve started but abandoned a few things. I will probably pick a couple of them back up, specifically an engine for the board game Sorry that I can develop AI / Machine Learning players to simulate against each other as well as a machine learning approach to playing Ultimate Tic Tac Toe. Ultimately, I’d like to do something that is more widely beneficial but this will be a start.

Lastly writing is a way to share what I learn and do, as well as accomplish my goal of more reflective writing. Again, this blog provides an avenue to do such.

Some things I might post about soon include:

• Things I like about my new house
• My new job and commute
• Plan and progress on my personal software projects

Thanks for reading

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Maintain System Responsiveness when Running a Parallel Visual Studio Build

The recent addition of encryption to laptops with spinning platter drives has proven painful for many developers on my project. A big complaint has been the lack of responsiveness of the system while doing a parallel build. Tasks that should be nearly instantaneous take several second to nearly a minute. Since some of these tasks such as switching between files or applications might need to occur many times in a minute to complete a larger activity; these delays stack and take away the opportunity to be productive doing other things like preparing slides or creating documentation. This article provides a work around to solve this problem until SSDs are available to all developers who need them. Note that improving your system's responsiveness while building will increase the time that it takes to build.

This method works by lowering the I/O priority of the processes doing the build. This is not possible using the built in Windows Task Manager. Instead use either Process Explorer, which is available for free from Microsoft, or Process Lasso, which has a free evaluation but requires a paid license for commercial use. Process Lasso also has a neat feature that I'll go into more detail about later that automatically changes the priority of the processes any time a build start.

Using Process Explorer you can change the priority of all MSBuild.exe¹ processes to Background (Low I/O).

Using Process Lasso you can change the I/O priority of all MSBuild.exe¹ processes to Very Low. You can do this "Current" which will only affect the currently running processes, or do it always which will modify any MSBuild.exe process currently running or created in the future while Process Lasso is running. It took some work to get this to work, I had make sure I had it configured to control all users processes, then make sure I closed and reopened Process Lasso after installing. If you want this feature to work, play with it and make sure it is.

A few things to note: If you work on some unrelated code and want to build a small project while a big parallel build is running, it will take a really, really long time for that small project to build. Get around this by cancelling your large build and letting your small project build then resuming your large build. Remember, the solution described here is just a work around, if you want to do things in a reasonable way, you're going to need an SSD. Also, if your system is unresponsive while building, you'll probably notice other times that it is unresponsive during heavy I/O as well. If you your system to always be snappy, you're going to need an SSD. And, once again, if you are using this method to do other things it will make your build take longer. If you want to be able to work while building and still have reasonable build times, you're probably going to need an SSD.

One other thing I noticed is that Intellisense can take a long time to run and its heavy I/O exacerbates the problem. I disabled Intellisense until I get an SSD which will make Intellisense usable again.


^{1. Its necessary to do this to the MSBuild.exe processes because they are always started at normal priority, despite their priority of their parent process}

Git 2.5 handles multiple working copies, and its available now for Windows

Yesterday, I posted about tricks and scripts to support multiple working copies all using the same repository. Later in the day I realized Git for Windows 2.5 had been released. Now you can uninstall any previous distribution of Git, and install this. Any thing like GitExtensions or SourceTree will use it if you add Git to your path during installation. Then you can use the nifty worktree command to create new working copies that all point back to a single repository on your machine. This means native support for multiple working copies; no symbolic links necesssary.

A single git repository with multiple working copies on Windows

A project at my company recently transitioned from ClearCase to Git. The codebase is large and monolithic and as such a bare clone of the repository with relatively few commits is over 20 GB not counting any working copy files. Many developers have several clones of the repo to allow working on different releases without having to switch branches and rebuild all the code which is time expensive on this large codebase. This means having 3 or more copies of a growing 20 GB git repo.

Why is it necessary to have duplicates of the data in a repository on a given machine? Its not. Git has a user contributed script to create symbolic links to an existing git repository for a new working copy called "git-new-workdir". (Git 2.5.0 will have this feature baked in, with the worktree command EDIT: Apparently it has now been released for Windows.) When I attempted to use this script from git bash on Windows, however, it created a copy of the working copy instead of referencing it with symbolic links as intended.

Eventually, I found a branch of it for Windows that uses mklink to create the symbolic links. I put the script in the same directory as my working copies so that I can navigate in git bash to that directory and run it with "bash git-new-workdir-win". It expects the path to the original repository (on your machine), the path to the desired new working directory, and optionally the branch to checkout.

Before I found this script, I was able to get the same functionality by manually creating the links following a guide I found for getting this functionality on Windows XP. Note that the script yields slightly different results that are probably slightly better than this manual process, although either solution works. Specifically, the script does not symbolically link the logs directory but does symbolically link a few of the files such as "config" found in the root .git directory.

If you have existing working copies you want to convert to using symbolic links without having to recheck out code, you should be able to retain them and use the manual method to overwrite the directories within the .git directory, or run the script to create a new working copy, then overwrite the directories and files in your existing .git with just the ones that are symbolic links in the new working copy. I'll take this opportunity to give a shout out to Link Shell Extension, which is a great shell extension for creating symbolic links, hard links, etc within Windows Explorer without having to use mklink through the command line. This extension will make it obvious which directory elements are symbolic links in Windows Explorer. Also make sure you've pushed any commits/branches you want to keep before overwriting things inside your .git.

Since symbolic links will fail if the source they are pointing at are removed, I first moved an existing repository to a safe place on my machine, then replaced all my existing repositories/working copies with links to this repository using the mechanisms mentioned. This mitigates the risk of accidentally deleting the source of your symbolic links if you were to use an existing working copy's repository then some time later remove it when it is no longer needed. If you want to start with a brand new repository instead, you can pull down just the .git directory without creating a working copy using git clone --bare.



tl;dr: Get this script and run it