free the bird - Part 47

Watch out world here we come…

My bro’s HighTechGeek PC consulting business is off and running! I am trying to help him get set up with all things linux, and we’ve got his site hosted on his wee little linux box now. What’s next? ONLY TIME WILL TELL! The sky’s the limit! 😛

How do you get a better google rank? Link to each other!

Comments | Sunday, June 1, 2003

Visual Studio 2003 Launch Event

I attended the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 / Visual Studio .net 2003 Launch event (hey it was right next door, and it was free!). Mostly marketing hype, but the last session covered some great features in VC++ 2003:

“98%” C++ ISO compliant (now supports template partial specialization, compiles boost, loki and blitz++ out of the box…)

whole-program optimization, can inline across modules

better intellisense, faster dynamic help, faster startup, generate html from comments

support for Windows Forms via Forms Designer – includes docking and auto-resizing layout capabilities – but generated code is “managed” (allocations are done on the .net garbage collected heap hrmmm…) – you can derive forms!

/G7 optimization switch for P4/Athlon, “5-15% improvement”

/GS security switch to check for buffer overflows and exception table hacking

/arch:SSE/SSE2 for improved (“2-3%”) floating-point performance

Time to break it out…

Comments | Monday, April 28, 2003

Whiteboards for all!

OK, have fun drawing here (you need a Java-enabled browser, tis all)… For the really cool part, open up side-by-side copies of this page in two browser windows before you start drawing… then get your Australian penpal to do the same… then yer old girlfriend in England… then…

Update: drawboard uses a custom port for communication, so there’s a good chance that any firewall will block it…

Unfortunatelly, your browser doesn’t support Java applets. You have to use another one.

Looked at a couple Java open-source whiteboard apps, this one is drawboard, there’s also babylon but it seems to be in unstable shape (or I did something wrong, but I TRIED, believe me…). BTW, if you want to do anything in Java under Redhat, I recommend this page to get set up…

Comments | Monday, April 28, 2003 [ whiteboard ]

CVS through Plink through Proxy patch

UPDATE: This is no longer an issue in more recent Putty releases.

Putty’s plink.exe is an ssh Windows command-line tool that’s great for scripted access to CVS. It is used behind the scenes by TortoiseCVS. There are lots of options available to establish the SSH connection, including going through a proxy, and these are stored in a “session”. However, if you try to load a session from the command line, so you can get proxied CVS access, plink.exe ignores the rest of the command line.

I got the source for plink.exe and patched it to work for me. I am fairly sure this version will work for everyone, but not positive – I have submitted it to the Putty team for review. Here’s the patched version for now, based on the development snapshot dated 3/17/03.

PLINK session settings you should change from default:

host
auto-login
send timeout (typically needed to keep the proxy from dropping the connection
proxy
preferred SSH = 1
force local echo off
force line edit off
ssh: dont allocate pseudo-terminal

TortoiseCVS SSH command:

plink.exe -load session -batch

(continued…)

Comments | Friday, March 21, 2003

diff-on-Windows Roundup

Recently, I installed TCL/TK and grabbed TKDiff, to see if that was an improvement over WinDiff, which is a visually crude but fairly reliable workhorse. To get TortoiseCVS to use it, I set up a batch file as the TortoiseCVS diff app (CVS->Preferences->Main->External diff app). For some reason, you can’t directly specify the .tcl file in TortoiseCVS. The batch file contains this line:

c:TKDiff kdiff %1 %2

I was interested in a smarter diff because of cr-lf problems I recently introduced while sailing back and forth across the windows/linux time-space continuum. Well, TKDiff barfed on all that. Can’t hold it against it, tho…

TKDiff – barfed – totally confused

WinMerge – barfed – totally confused

CSDiff – seemed to do OK, but MAN it’s tough reading one listing

WinDiff – did OK

So I guess I am back where I started for now… I manually patched up the CR-LF problems, and I am back to liking TKDiff the best at this point… what a roller coaster ride, man I got a headache… to be continued…