A nice weekend

All I have to report is that Tamarind Tree has the best food in town, period. All things considered, I don't believe that to be a negative for the last two days :)

More time awasting

I've clearly been a time-pig today. Wholesale industrial pollution. Spent the night not installing OS/X on PearPC, and the day installing. Yup. Just installing. VSIP SDK, .Net 3.0 and the Windows SDK, Erlang, trying to get the Mac Mini hooked up to the HDTV. The Windows SDK 3.0 RC1 install was the largest time sink of them all - the default downloadables are small installers that theoretically set you up to stream down just the content you need. Practically, the installation proceeds dreadfully slowly only to hang about midways (It's trying and failing to download the SDK samples). To anyone planning on installing the SDK, I heartily suggest to download the DVD image (with the nifty mount-the-image-as-a-drive program). Download + install < 1h, no hitches. The second biggest consumer of cycles badly in need of being better invested was the attempt to hitch my mac mini to the HDTV. The DVI out would just not produce a signal that the TV could pick up on. Connecting the TV to the laptops DVI out worked (it worked. It didn't work fine - the resolutions wouldn't quite come together, but it worked). Fun fact of the day - most TVs map RGB component values from 16 to 235 to the full spectrum of brightness, leading to typical computer generated pictures (which use the full 0 to 255 range) to be much too bright.

In conclusion: my name is 'Occasionally rabid Programmer', and I am a compulsive installer.

What the world really needs...

... is a wireless keyboard that can switch between multiple receivers on the fly. I'd have receivers plugged into my xbox, mac, desktop and server pcs. And then I'd sit on the couch and just happily switch away. Brought to you by the department of wishful thinking, in cooperation with product design for niche markets.

Mac OS/X on the side

For no good reason whatsoever, I spent most of last night getting PearPC up and running on my laptop and trying to install Max OS/X. It was a lengthy process, a bit cumbersome, but ultimately I succeeded in finding my old mini system disks, making images from them and starting the install. Only to find out that the restore disks will not allow the OS to be installed on hardware that is, well, not a mac mini. Ouch. Makes perfect sense, I just wish I hadn't wasted the wee hours of the morning until 4am finding out about that restriction ;)

While wasting away that time, I used dd, nc and bzip2 quite a lot, which got me started about getting into automated system backups (the theory is simple - multiple partitions, a simple bootcd or separate partition, dd bzip2 nc, xdelta/rsync comparing to the last backup and store the result in a web storage cloud). This might be well worth looking into.

Other than that, I decided that I should start looking into using rzip as my compression program of choice, at least where file compression (as opposed to stream compression) is involved. Oh - and is there a zipping powershell class yet? [UPDATE] As it turns out, there is, and there is so much more. I thought powershell was going to be interesting, but after following the links Lee Holmes kindly provided, I am wowed and amazed. Can't wait to dig deeper.

Here be dragons

This is a timesink. Stay away. You have been warned.

Fun with Visual Studio 2005

What to do if a pre-build event fails for a Visual Studio 2005 project? Visual Studios default is to stop the build and report a failure right then and right there, without a nice, friendly checkbox to get the occasionally rabid programmer out of trouble.

Luckily, the .csproj file can be edited by hand (you will have to put up with the slight inconvenience of quitting VS, though) to override the default behavior by adding a new target definition before the closing </project> tag.

<Target
     Name="PreBuildEvent"
     Condition="'$(PreBuildEvent)'!=''"
     DependsOnTargets="$(PreBuildEventDependsOn)">
          <Exec
               WorkingDirectory="$(OutDir)"
               Command="$(PreBuildEvent)"
               ContinueOnError="true" />
</Target>

How do I know these things? Well, I am smart, handsome and blessed with impeccable manners. Other than that, I know how to use google, and google pointed me to this fine article.

Beginnings

I suspect I will look back on this evening at some unspecified point in the future with complete indifference. This is a blog about me going through my daily chores, doing some fun or frustrating programming on the side and being annoyed at my lot in the world and the unfairness of it all.

Maybe there's going to be the occasional surprising act of passion, or even an odd success or another, but, if past experience is in any shape or form suited to predict future endeavours, it's going to be a slow ride.

I have no clue why you would chose to accompany me, but, hey, you're welcome to my musings.