People bleat on and on about how much better Linux is than Windows. Here’s some news: I’m fairly bright, and I like challenges, but even I am getting frustrated at Linux. I’m using RedHat 9, which might make some of you mutter “Why isn’t he using Ubuntu?”. Well I’ve joined a group of like minded individuals, and we’ve inherited a server and it happens to be RedHat 9. So it stays.
So I get VirtualBox, download the 3 CD’s that RedHat is provided on and start installing. The installation was painless. However getting the needed stuff installed is where things collapsed. Every website and forum that goes into installing redhat files has a slightly different way of doing things. But they don’t tell you where to get the files from: “Type the following to extract the apr-1.2.5-41b+8.tar.gz”. That’s fine, but please tell me where to get that file first. Also installing from source isn’t the greatest it’s cracked up to be. Various software components organically evolve – functions come, go and get renamed or deprecated and dropped. So trying to compile several things from releases that you try and glean from the net isn’t the productive, especially when you have to wait 10 minutes to find they aren’t compatible. So there goes rpmfind.net.
And that brings me to my next point: The point of the tools is to make me more productive, not the tools themselves. Spending an afternoon trying to install software (Subversion of all things) isn’t productive. Windows takes about 30 seconds: Download the msi, double click the msi, accept the default config, done. I can now start using Subversion. Can I use it on RedHat? No. Because I still haven’t got it installed.
So why don’t I use the install I have on my Windows box? Because I am trying to get the steps figured out so we can use it on the server without me borking the entire server.
This is the reason why Linux will never break the strangle hold of Windows. You may say that if I used Ubuntu then I wouldn’t have this problem, but RedHat was released in 2003. I can still double click MSI installers created in 2003 and be confident that they will work as advertised.
Stack Overflow, the website that bears the same name as the podcast, has opened for private beta testing. I am honoured to be one of those beta testers. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to ask or answer a question as I don’t currently have any to ask, and everyone has already replied what I would replied to the topics that caught my eye.
[yes - this counts as a post just to let people know that I haven't forgotten about you all]
A while ago I purchased a 320gb hdd for my media center. When it arrived Windows recognised it as being 298gb in size. I didn’t quibble – I wish I did now.
Recently I replaced it with a 500gb drive by the same company – Western Digital – but Windows recognises it as being only 465.76gb in size. Where’s my other 35gb?
I’ve been caught by one of those 500gb = 500,000,000,000 bytes (500x1000x1000x1000). If you do the maths properly, you get 500,000,000,000/1024/1024/1024 = 465.66gb.
In other words, if you are in the market for a new drive, steer clear of Western Digital. I used to like Maxtor drives, but I switched because Maxtor were more expensive than the competition, but now I wish I’d stuck with them. It seems Maxtor were charging more because they were giving you the actual drive size – not an imaginary number.
Update: Even my Maxtor drives are doing it now: I have 2 40gb maxtors in this machine of varying ages and they both report differing amount of available space. One is 39.6gb in size and the other is 38.1gb. Neither quite 40gb but both above the 40,000,000,000 mark:-(
IBM have started making their developerWorks section available only if you sign up. This is fair enough, they have a good resource and they have the right to track the comings and goings of their readers.
However the thing that riles me every time I have to log in is their practice of taking me to a page where I can “review my contact information” – like it changes regularly – but there are two tick boxes at the bottom of the page, both unchecked:
- Please use e-mail to send me information about other offerings
- Please do not use this data to send me information about other offerings
It is sooo infuriating having to tick the bottom box on each log in because I know that if I forget, even just once, I will be buried under an avalanche of spam. While it may not be illegal it certainly isn’t friendly.
Okay this is a rant. Feel free to come back when I have written something slightly more constructive.
One of my many projects I have on the go needs a C++ SVG library. So I do a search for C++ SVG libraries, of which there are several. However most of them either require GTK+ or Qt. Not useful to me as I have an perfectly usable windows tool-kit called MFC. You’ve might of heard of it?!
So finally it comes down to three: AGG, Cairo, and Keystone.
AGG isn’t really a complete SVG library, but more of a basis that can be used to implement one. In fact they give a basic library to demonstrate the promise that AGG gives. However it may be useful depending on how much of the SVG spec I need, but for now it’s out.
Keystone is an SVG library with some good examples, but it hasn’t been updated in a couple of years, and there wasn’t a quick overview of what parts of the spec it does and doesn’t support. Also the author never replied to my email. So that is out.
Leaving Cairo. Now I had high hopes for Cairo as it is used by Mozilla for the rendering in Firefox, et al. It is being worked on and it gives accelerated graphics via Glitz. Since Moz uses it then it should support Windows straight out the box, right?
Wrong. First you have to create a file that the Windows version will need. They have an html page that shows what the content of the file should be…Why not just include it in the distribution in the first place? You then need to download the MSVC 7.1 project from a third party website. This has what is needed to compile it. Except it doesn’t. It needs libpng. So I go looking for the DLL, but it’s not that easy – they don’t have a simple “Get Binaries here”. You are led around in circles. The version says 1.2.8 but the program looks for v1.3. So I get the source, but I can’t compile that because it thinks there is an error in the zlib source (except there isn’t as even my little knowledge of assembler can tell that there isn’t a problem with the source, and you’d think by version 1.2 they’d have fixed a major flaw like that). Maybe it is the source that comes with libpng, so I download the actual zlib, but that has the same problem. None of these programs have a project for MSVC 8, but relies on the project converter to actually transfer all the information correctly.
So after 3 hours I have several directories of uncompilable code. You’d think that the Windows version would compile straight out the box because, well, there are more people using Windows so most effort would go into that version. I’d lay money on the fact that the downloads for the Windows version of Firefox is double what any of the others are put together. But no, the Windows version is treated like the red headed step-son and ignored because it’s not cool to work “for the man”.
Tonight I am trying another 3rd party binary distribution. I’ll see what comes of it, though I would rather be able to compile my own so when the software gets updated I can update as well instead of relying on someone else…
Been merging code bases at work, from several forks to one. I was hoping to get this done after we install TFS but my boss wants it done before we do our final check in to PVCS 5.3, which is his prerogative. It falls to me, however, to perform the merge, and I am doing the merge blind – that is I don’t know what the code does, and there is no one to ask.
So what tools can I use? Well PVCS has a code compare tool, which I guess can be used, but given that even the most basic check in is fraught with dangers I am loathe to use it. Any source control that requires you to manually hack a file isn’t to be trusted.
So I did what I normally do in situations like this where the tools I have around me aren’t up to the task, or are found lacking. I hit SourceForge.
There I found WinMerge, which is simplicity in itself. A very nice interface, and wonderfully intuitive, unfortunately it get’s confused easily, especially if the two files being compared are disjointed (bits swapped or moved). This was my primary tool in performing the changes. Also there doesn’t appear to be anyway of taking both section changes into a single file.
So the next tool I found was KDiff3 which is a lot more robust, but with an awkward cluttered interface. In WinMerge you select the two file you wish to merge and then use Alt-Up/Down to cycle between differences. Then you use Alt-Left/Right to decide which side to keep. Very easy and very quick.
KDiff3 uses Ctrl-Up/Down and puts the merge changes into a third file. The GUI isn’t as nice or as clean as the WinMerge one it is a more powerful tool. However to select the changes you have to use Ctrl-1/2/3 (KDiff3 supports 3-way merges) which while doable with one hand means twisting, and with a lot of changes in a file makes it a good candidate for inducing RSI.
Now my advice would be for WinMerge to use the KDiff3 engine (from browsing the mailing list that would require a rewrite of most of WinMerge) or have KDiff3 use the keyboard layout of WinMerge and steal some of the visual designs from it. Both a good tools in their own right but what is stopping them from becoming great tools they both have.
March 16th, 2007 :: graham.reeds
Categories:
MiscWhere I work likes to keep the machines up to date with the latest patches on all their systems. There is nothing wrong with that, but the way automatic updates goes about it is.
About an hour ago I go the message that as part of the automatic update my machine needs to be rebooted, and gave me a choice of now or later. Due to me debugging some treacherous code I selected later but Automatic Updates doesn’t believe that I will update my system, and keeps reminding me that I need to reboot like I have the attention span of a goldfish. I DON’T WANT TO REBOOT – I’D RATHER KEEP WORKING ON WHAT I AM DOING!
In fact I have had to dismiss it while writing the post.
March 12th, 2007 :: graham.reeds
Categories:
MiscOne of Google‘s plethora of useful tools that are making it as extensions to Firefox is Google Notebook. It’s exceptionally useful though it does come with a pointless “Open Notebook” text next to the icon in the status bar. It’s not needed so it has to go. Also if your status bar was a mess like mine you will need the Organise Status Bar extension.
This is written from a Windows perspective so you might need to change some points in your religion of choice:
- Close Firefox.
- In your Profile, go into extensions\notebook@google.com\chrome\chromeFiles\locale\<your locale> back up the two files that are there (google-gnotes.dtd and the google-gnotes.properties).
- Open them in the editor of your choice (notepad works fine).
- On the lines that say openNotebook make sure that there are nothing in the quotes or after the equals sign.
- Then remove the key in the gnotes.accessKey. If you leave it in you get a solitary letter next to the icon.
It’s not quite perfect as you have a small space to the right of the icon, but at least there is no ugly text. Hopefully for future versions this hack will not be needed. I might look into this at a later date, but for now it suits me fine.
Also, as an aside, it is interesting to note that the extension works on any page. It would be nice if the GoogleTalk functionality of the GoogleMail page was extended to do the same.
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