Smart Power Control

I setup an SSH server at home running on my Media Center box. ALL of the shows that I am recording runs at night, so during the day, other than the time it has to download updates or running some batch process, it usually goes to suspend/sleep mode - which of course makes my SSH to become unavailable.

Why not just turn on "Wake up on LAN"? Well, I tried that and it worked, but it also somehow wake up the PC when I don't want it - like in the middle of the night or on a Saturday morning, or several seconds after it goes to sleep. In the end, I basically turn-off "Wake up on LAN" and trying to find a different solution.

Basically, what I want is this:

1. The PC needs to be on between 8am to 5:30pm - this the window where I usually need my SSH
2. It also needs to be recording my scheduled recording in Media Center
3. Other than those, it should be in suspend/sleep mode

A friend of mine suggest moving the SSH into a router running DD-WRT. This is probably the best solution, so I can operate my PC on "Power Saving" mode and just leave the router on. Since I am using a Linksys router that is compatible with DD-WRT, I tried it. The problem is that my router does not have much memory, so not only I have to put the micro_plus_ssh version, but also when SSH is running the router would lock up and I have to reboot it. So after playing with this option for about 2 days, I went back to running my SSH on my Media Center box. Maybe one day when I am buying a new router - I will get one that is much more capable to run SSH on. But now back to original plan.

So for a while I just put my PC to "Never" sleep and just turn it off at night and turn it back on in the morning. I moved all my scheduled maintenance stuff (virus scan, windows update, etc) to morning/afternoon. Obviously this gets to be a pain after a while - especially when I keep forgetting to turn it on or off.

So for now, I use a software called "SmartPower" - where I schedule my PC to be "ON" between certain times and/or when certain parameters are set. Here is an article in LifeHacker about it. The way to use it is basically setting your computer to "Never" sleeps, and let SmartPower take over the sleep management (instead of letting Windows doing it). So, to meet my needs, I set:

1. In "Schedules" tab to awake / stay on during the weekdays between 8:15am to 11:55pm
2. Under "CPU" tab, set to 27% - this is for watching recordings past midnight or on weekends
3. I set my PC to awake when Media Center remote is used

That's it - works flawlessly. Oh - and I replaced the power supply unit into the one that is 80 Plus certified to conserve more power during idle or low processing time while it's on.

Additional readings:

• Browsing through SSH tunnel

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Conditional Reference in VS 2010

In one of our projects, we are using some third party components that have separate dlls for 32 bit and 64 bit. Since our old development box and production server were 32 bit, so we used the 32 bit version. No problem whatsoever.

In a different project for different client, our development box is a 64 bit machine. But, since we are running VS 2010 and using Cassini for our debugging, we use the 32 bit reference. But since our production box is running 64 bit, last minute before build for release in our build server, we swap the reference to 64 bit, re-check-in and build. So we just keep doing it that way - until one day, we forgot to do that and a production build got pushed to production environment and (of course) it breaks. So we fix it and then we vowed to find a solution to the last minute reference swap thing.

So here is how we fix it:
In VS, right click on the project that has the reference to the 32/64bit ref, do an unload project and open using XML editor and in it, you will see something like this:

...
    <PropertyGroup>
        <Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">Debug</Configuration>
        <Platform Condition=" '$(Platform)' == '' ">AnyCPU</Platform>
    </PropertyGroup>
...

    <ItemGroup>
        <Reference Include="Project.Reference.MyProject">
            <HintPath>..\References"Project.Reference.MyProject.40.x86.dll</HintPath>
        </Reference>
    </ItemGroup>
...

What you need to do is add a condition in your project file, so on certain environment it will use the x86 and x64 for other. The easiest way to do this (which is what we did) is adding a conditional statement itself on the reference element - when compiled as "debug", use the x86 dll and to use the x64 when compiled as "release". So we changed it to be like this:

 
...
    <ItemGroup>
        <Reference Include="Project.Reference.MyProject" Condition="'$(Configuration)' == 'Debug'">
            <HintPath>..\References\"Project.Reference.MyProject.40.x86.dll</HintPath>
        </Reference>
    </ItemGroup>
    <ItemGroup>
        <Reference Include="Project.Reference.MyProject" Condition="'$(Configuration)' == 'Release'">
            <HintPath>..\References\"Project.Reference.MyProject.40.x64.dll</HintPath>
        </Reference>
    </ItemGroup>
...

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