Microsoft, striking terror in the hearts of corporate America every day with its inane monopoly. Someone please interpret this frightening insanely cryptic Sharepoint/Word warning when I try to save my document! No one else is editing it, I have the only checkout! My head is ringing, make it stop…

I love the flexibilty that git provides, and the way it fits into distributed development.  That’s the only reason I’ve been able to tolerate the hackery that is known as msysgit, the “official” Git release for Windows.

msysgit basically dumps an entire linux distribution on your Windows box when you install – ported versions of perl, vim, bash, it’s all there, just to wipe msysgit’s butt.  What a mess.  Imagine if every port was done this way.  But we’re stuck with it for now, so let’s get it working.  Which.  Isn’t.  Easy.  Especially when it comes to setting up an editor for commit messages when using a batch file script.

There are alternatives.  You can right-click on a folder and run a “Git Bash” from that location, which is hacked together to work well enough.  VIM will kick in to let you edit your commit messages.  And there are writeups on getting Windows Powershell to get along with msysgit.  But I want to use git from simple Windows batch files.

To do so, I had to do the following:

• Install notepad++, a nice reliable simple Windows editor.
• Set up a batch file to run notepad++ – make sure that the batch file does not have any spaces in the path to it – I named mine [c:\short\npp.bat]:

  #!/bin/sh
  "C:/Michae~1/System~1/npp/notepad++.exe" -multiInst "$*"

• Note that I used short names in the notepad++ path to avoid spaces.  I also found that a single quote in the path will screw up msysgit.
• Now in a batch file, you should be able to set EDITOR to use it:

  set EDITOR=C:/short/npp.bat
  git commit -a

• You can now set the editor up for use in the msysgit bash prompt as follows, it doesn’t seem to interfere with the batch setup (for SOME strange reason):

  git config --global core.editor C:/short/npp.bat

Without ALL of these steps, it just won’t work.

Ampache is basically a webservice that will remotely serve up the media on your mediacenter. This is a fundamental component of my long-term plans for world domination (or rather world subterfugation). You can play your music (yes, ALL of your music) through a browser once you have ampache set up. It’s a typical LAMP setup and takes about 10 seconds if you’re familiar with LAMP.

The “nice” linux client is supposed to be Amarok. Now, I am grateful that a nice client exists. And Ampache is the best thing since the best thing since sliced bread. But when developers don’t follow the Good Rules and intentionally create difficult installation situations for everyone, it really pisses me off. Here’s a quick cheatsheet to get you (me) through the bullshit:

• Edit [/etc/mysql/my.cnf]

# Comment out this line so that mysql allows connections other than from localhost (ie so you can connect from your LAN).
# I DO NOT appreciate having to do this and you should make sure you follow up with solid firewall rules.
# But Amarok wants direct access to your LAN's db server, so there you have it.
#bind-address				= 127.0.0.1

• Set up a mysql amarok user and database in standard mysql fashion.  Make sure the user has full remote access (not just from localhost).
• Now run ampache. This is just weird, but just do it. Ampache starts off fine for web acccess but to allow clients like Amarok to connect you have to add some ACL bullshit – it starts off totally locked down and disabled. Ampache->log in as admin->Admin tab->Show ACL’s->Add API/RPC Host->Add an entry. Use any name you want, make sure you pick RPC + ALL, and put in a start/end that matches your LAN IP range. Click Create ACL and three weird entries will be created for you. WHATEVER.
• Start amarok for the first time. It will fail because you don’t have a database set up yet. Settings->Configure Amarok->Database->Fill it out! It should work now that you opened up mysql in the first step. Then you’ll have to shut it down and restart.
• With a little luck you’ll finally be able to play some music.

I have been fighting with MythTV, trying to get it to play my videos for over a month. I have played with my MythTV compilation settings, tried turning off OpenGL, changing the video profile to “Slim”, recompiling my ATI video drivers, and messing with my X configuration. I finally solved it by deleting the installation and reinstalling:

su -
rm /usr/lib64/libmyth*
rm /usr/bin/myth*
(reinstall mythtv)

This messy post brought to you by the iPhone’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking app thank you very much…