Computers

Pondering: should I ever go back (regularly)?

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I used to spend a lot of time at the PC-BSD tech support forums (forums.pcbsd.org). As some should know, it is not one of my ‘favorite’ projects for numerous reasons.

I haven’t been active there in I guess, nearly a year now. Should we say, shuffling though like 50 threads a day and being one of the few paying attention got quiet old, when I’ve so much else to worry about after work. Ending up as little more then a spam-patrol man wasn’t very interesting either. Although things have been realitively docile since FreeBSD opened their own forum, I hang my hat over at DaemonForums.org – a place that’s worth visiting.

One of the alarming things about forums.pcbsd.org even while I am inactive, I still have several orders of magnitude more posts then everyone else… Man I used to check that forum several times a day. At one point, I may have been the last skilled snook left, I hope that has changed….

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Haha, believe it or not but I just upgraded my file server from OpenBSD 4.4 Release to OpenBSD 4.5 Release, lol. Usually I’m pretty good about keeping my systems up to date, but lately life has just been to troublesome to care about it :-/.

In a change, I’ve also elected this time to install the various X related dist sets in the upgrade; I have no need to run GUI tools to manage my file server, but I have been thinking of using the machine to supplement my laptop, by way of running an X-Server on the desktop machine, and employing SSH for an extra layer of encryption.

Although I have never had need of (nor desire to try) the OpenBSD ports system, it does require X if memory serves, so probably good to have it available. Since the box isn’t setup for running an X server it is only filling free diskspace, and that box is well partitioned hehe.

Building vim with support for Python and Perl on Windows

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Previously:

install a suitable version of Visual Studio / Visual C++
install a suitable version of Python
install a suitable version of Perl
open a Visual Studio Command Prompt

I have VC Express 9.0, ActivePerl 5.10.0, and Python 2.6.2 installed from Python.org’s installer.

Check out the VIM source code, you can find directions here. I suggest using CVS or SVN to make the patching life easier. Precompiled binaries of CVS and SVN are available for Windows, and it is possible to build them yourself of course ;).

I use CVS and wish to keep the tree along side my regular vim:

> cd /d P:editorsvim
> cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@vim.cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/vim checkout -Nd vim7-cvs-src vim7
> cd vim7-cvs-srcsrc

You should know read the Make_mvc.mak makefile to find the options you are interested in using. I’ll leave the viewing the file from the command line to a Windows users intelligence (hints: more, edit, notepad, wordpad, or gvim would be useful). We have to tell nmake.exe to use this file and our options, for asses who use Visual Studio all day but don’t remember nmake: we pass it VAR=value pairs.

> nmake /F Make_mvc.mak CPUNR=i686 FEATURES=HUGE GUI=yes OLE=yes CSCOPE=yes CTAGS=ctags POSTSCRIPT=yes PYTHON=P:DevelLanguagesPython2.6 PYTHON_VER=26 PERL=P:DevelLanguagesPerl PERL_VER=510

Obviously if you want same options, adjust the paths like a good little geek.

At least on my system, MSVCs compiler refuses to build the vimrun.exe, install.exe, uninstal.exe, and xxd/xxd.exe targets (and programs). As such, I build gvim and the gvimext.dll – the targets are in the makefile. if one wants to build a vim execuitable under a diffirent name, I suggest ‘nmake /e VIM=foo /f … OPTS=… foo.exe’ to create foo.exe (default is gvim).

As such we need a place to put vim so we can actually use it.


> MKDIR ....vim-personal
> FOR %F IN (*.dll *.exe) DO XCOPY /Y %F ....vim-personal
> XCOPY /Y P:DevelLanguagesPerlbinperl510.dll ....vim-personal
> XCOPY /I /E /Y ..runtime* ....vim-personal

and one can borrow the lost vimrun and diff files from a working install. If one also juggled the names so that vim-personal became vim72, one could also borrow the install.exe file most likely…

In doing all of this, I’ve written a batch script to use in automating the thing, which is not as good as my vimbuild shell script but still works lol. When I get some time I’ll make my script also update the spell files and what nots (hint: see spellreadme.txt)

This is rich

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As a side note, you may be wondering if it is a security risk that applications can add and remove applications from the exceptions list any user intervention, or perhaps you think that the bigger risk is that applications can disable the firewall altogether. To perform these feats, the application must have administrator privledges. If you have malicious code running in administrator mode on your system, the game is already over and the hacker has already won. The hacker’s ability to disable the firewall would merit little more than a footnote.

What it fails to mention is many millions of Windows XP installations are run with administrator privileges on the users regular account, I practically ROFL’d lol.

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So far experiments continue with SWAT 4 performance issues. Deeper testing has shown that it is no longer connected to graphical issues, not when running on my current hardware/driver config; nice to be able to max out the graphics online *and* in single player.

What happens is periodically when moving through an area, I get a stutter-lag-warp like motion: as if the whole game stopped spinning and then suddenly unlocked. The only consistency I’ve noticed is it happens when entering a region of the map that I have not been in previously—or have not been in for a while. One thought is that perhaps it occurs when the cache must be updated with stuff that has already been moved out of the games memory cache. My machine has RAM to burn so I have been testing the game with various cache sizes, but don’t honestly expect any positive result. On modern machines, cache size shouldn’t matter to much with the Unreal Engine 2.x lol.

Atm I’m defragging a few disks, maybe that might help a little. I don’t know if it is just the much greater frequency of crashes with Windows XP, or that NTFS really sucks that much worse then FreeBSDs UFS2 system. But for one reason or another, my windows file systems always end up very highly fragmented. Although on the upside, unlike Win32: FreeBSD does kind of encourage you to fsck afterwards hehe.

Hopefully my experiments will yield some fruit, and I can stop warping all over the place lol.

bored…

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src: http://www.heuse.com/cphumor.htm

Interviewer: “Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?”

Bill Gates: “No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great
programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to
the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished
out listings of their operating system.”

There are 10 types of people in this world.
Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

DEBUGGING : Removing the needles from the haystack.

Endless Loop: n., see Loop, Endless.
Loop, Endless: n., see Endless Loop.
– Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure
to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
-Dijkstra

“The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a
soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.”
– _The Wizardry Compiled_ by Rick Cook

“The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of
referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given
that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant.
This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.”
– FORTRAN manual for Xerox computers

“C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it
harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.”
– Bjarne Stroustrup

“Programming graphics in X is like finding sqrt(pi) using Roman numerals.”
– Henry Spencer

“Never put off until run time what you can do at compile time.”
– David Gries, in “Compiler Construction for Digital Computers”, circa 1969.

BASIC programmers never die, they GOSUB and don’t RETURN.

Real programmers are surprised when the odometers in their cars don’t turn from 99,999 to 99,99A.

FORTRAN is not a language. It’s a way of turning a multi-million
dollar mainframe into a $50 programmable scientific calculator.

C is almost a real language. Even the name sounds like it’s gone through
an optimizing compiler. Get rid of all of those stupid brackets and we’ll talk.

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

Programming is 10% science, 25% ingenuity and 65% getting the ingenuity to work with the science.

Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.

We don’t really understand it, so we’ll give it to the programmers.

COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods.

Computer interfaces and user interfaces are as different as night and 1.

The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten 10% of its
capacity, the rest is overhead for the operating system.

A computer scientist is someone who fixes things that aren’t broken.

The computer is mightier than the pen, the sword, and usually the programmer.

Programming is an art form that fights back.

After a number of decimal places, who cares?

“Virtual” means never knowing where your next byte is coming from.

If at first you don’t succeed, you must be a programmer.

“It’s 5:50 a.m., Do you know where your stack pointer is?”

If God had intended humans to program, we would be born with serial I/O ports.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

You never finish a program, you just stop working on it.

Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.

PL/1, “the fatal disease”, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of APL, I shall fear
no evil, for I can string six primitive monadic and dyadic operators together.

Programming is a lot like sex. One mistake and you could have to support it the rest of your life.

Another Glitch in the Call
(Sung to the tune of a Pink Floyd song)
–
We don’t need no indirection
We don’t need no flow control
No data typing or declarations
Did you leave the lists alone?
–
Hey! Hacker! Leave those lists alone!
–
Chorus:
All in all, it was, just a pure-LISP function call.
All in all, it was, just a pure-LISP function call.

You can’t make a program without broken egos.

What I have leanred today

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Some programs really have no bloody idea what the hell they are doing when it comes to paths.

Applying the oft’ used idea that once a disk is mounted, you can NOT unmount it without explicitly saying so, would actually be a nice option in Windows.

That The “Internet Options” in control centre (I got bored, so I took a look in CP lol), actually has *nothing* to do with the Internet what so ever, unless you believe that the entire Internet is Microsoft Internet Explorer ^_^.

Really, I don’t know what annoys me more, how often Microsoft’s attempts to “Integrate” shit seems to demonstrate pure stupidity, or just all the comedic prerequisite for a god complex!

Some times, I really wonder who thinks of all this crap: and what they were smoking at the time.

My first date with KDE 4.2.2

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Being someone who knows a few things, I decided that in order to be fair: I would generally hold off deciding whether KDE 4 is an improvement over KDE 3, until after KDE 4.2 was released. Well, as life has it, I’ve spent most of two days compiling KDE 4.2.2, and things went very smoothly (not that I liked compiling ocaml among the dependencies :-/). This is on my core workstation, running FreeBSD RELENG_7 (i.e. 7-STABLE).

My very first impression was… is this thing working??? All that first time setup takes a while to do, and without much sign of anything happening in the background. On the second boot up, after logging in through the X Display Manager (XDM), I counted 17 seconds until there was a usable desktop; but user interaction was clean all the way, no doubt about that this system was coming online. If you count the time it takes for korganizer and the other system tray icons to load, about ~45 seconds to get a full desktop — but it’s not far to count background programs like systray icons lol (especially the kind you’ll likely remove later).

Although I think the startup time shouldn’t be to bad for most people, I’ve forgotten how long it took to get a full KDE session going up, but I would say 17 sec is pretty good on my hardware hehe. With just a Sempron 3300+, even Blackbox and FVWM2 could start faster for my tastes, so no problem.

I find the new style K-Menu quite useful, takes a little getting used to – learning what adapts a focus follows mouse approach (the nav-icons on the bottom) and what requires a clickly click to work (most everything else). It is beyond me why it defaults to that behaviour (developer preference maybe?), but easy enough to make it a bit more consistent: right clicking the big K and going into the application launcher settings put the desired option right under my noise :-).

Obviously, the first thing I looked for was Konsole, the theme stuff on it is just awesome. Second thing was to dig up the run command dialog to get my urxvt+screen going. Further attempts to use the run dialog, proved that it was mostly a piece of krap. (Eye candy, but shitty to use; guess that is why there are terminal emulators.)

Closing the desktop folder viewer widget-thing was the third major action. Because I’m a person that hates having a desktop cluttered with icons (I prefer terminals :-), I like the idea very much, but since I have no immediate use for it, no need to have it taking screen realestate.

One thing that irked me, bringing up the help and control center entries on the applicaiton launcher (K-Menu?) loaded the ones from KDE 3.5.10, joy 8=). Oh wellk, it’s quite easy to remove or change them via the menu editor. In the case of khelpcenter, it seems it just finds the wrong documentation ^_^. Killing off the old thing and setting /usr/local/kde4/bin in PATH at the top of my ~/.xsession file, fixed access to the Control Panel. I must admit, I rather dislike KDE3 cruft in the menu – however you slice it

For years, I have wondered why some systems never turned on the NUMPAD by default, considering that I now do so much off a laptop; I can understand why, it’s a pain in the ass if when its unexpectedly on xD.

I generally feel that the whole Plasma and widget crazed stuff is a good element of KDE 4, but in all honestly, FVWM and Blackbox have just spoiled me something terrible.

It would appear, that KDE 4.2.2 is more or less ready for general usage, and unlike 4.0RC*, can actually be customized quite a lot to taste :-). For a little while, I was worried that Gnome might take the lead, and keep it… but I think by the time Gnome 3 hits, KDE 4 will be queen and king of the desktop environments, hehe. For those who desire eye candy, and have a machine capable of it; if you liked AERO, you ain’t seen nothing yet laddy. I think anyone who is still holding onto KDE 3 at home, should start migrating while the getting is good; and employ programming talent for bringing along any missing “Must haves” to the new desktop. I am not sure if it is really an improvement beyond the concepts, but hey, at least there is Okular!

The technologies that interest me most, are only Phonon and Kross — although I’m not likely to use either programming wise, beyond their stake in Qt (Qt has some form of Phonon, and has had a JavaScript’ish thing avail for awhile; and I wonder if kross will make it’s way in before Qt5, hehe)

As for me personally, well I’ve gone back to the Famous Virtual Window Manager version 2.5.27, old habits die hard 😉

Further testing of KDE 4.2.2 and later, will probably be through the Windows builds, rather then assaulting my poor stable laptop hehe.

The reasons I hate Firefox

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All OSes

Control over JavaScript is pitiful — NoScript should be stripped down and built into Firefox.

Controls over tabbed browsing is minimalist, in so far as notepad and ed are minimalist text editors; Last year I tried TabMixPlus on one machine and was annoyed that such a thing could be necessary, just for basic tabbing features. (Konqueror and Opera are much better then extensionless Firefox)

The default theme sucks, and good custom themes that have kept up with releases can be hard to find. On my last hunt, I laughingly ended up with a variant of the ‘first’ theme I ever setup, all the way back in Firefox 1.0.x !!!

Until recently the interface for managing ‘Applications’ to open stuff with, was usually useless; by until recently, I mean for a user who has been here sine 2004~2005; and old enough to know that the name and ‘logo’ has changed somewhat ^_^.

For years plugins have been a major pain; a plugin should never be able to crash the ENTIRE web browser, or worse! Render the entire web browser unresponsive — the ability to restore the users session is an excellent feature, not a band aid for the problem.

The ability to customize things is ridiculessly low, unless you want to get into themeing or add-ons; take a look at Konqueror, for a starting point on keybinding lol. I’m not even going to speak of Firefoxes interactive-scriptability…

On my Windows NT 5.1 machine, tested under Firefox v3.0.3, v3.0.6, and 3.0.9 tested; have never experienced this under BSD or GNU/Linux systems; but under Win32 the following also….

Images are about 3 times the size; if you go by dimensions in terms of window.resizeTo()’ing the browser window to match the on-screen size of the image.

Text is huge; I had to turn fonts down to size 10; SeaMonkey runs at 16 on the same machine, and the FreeBSD box uses the defaults.

Firefox initially refused to remember my home page in the preferences

Firefox blatantly refuses to accept ‘Show my home page’ on startup, and always ‘starts up’ with the ‘Show my windows and tabs from last time’ option. EDIT: seems to be doing it on unix as well; piece of shit web browser!!!

Firefox refuses to remember what size a window was when it closed; unlike previous versions have always done (in so far, as I have ever had to resize anything). In fact, I like Vimperator because *now* I can easily have Firefox resize itself on startup via JavaScript through .vimperatorrc.local, since the Windows version on my machine lacks the abilities of past Win, and all unix versions i’ve used :-/.

Except for the last three, I’d reckon the problems are because my Windows machine does not use the default DPI setting in Windows — if that causes a problem, I would consider that to be Mozilla’s problem and not Microshaft’s ;-).

Note: Over the past 10 years, it has not been uncommon for me to spend that many hours a day, surfing the World Wide Web; so I am not a total moron.

Imperialist or Vimperialist?

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I’ve begun testing the firefox extension “Vimperator”. I have become, should we say increasingly disatified with Firefox since the 2.0.0 release; so it has basically been pissing my off for the last 2 or 3 years ^_^.

All web browsers just suck, most are totally lame… Firefox, the 1.x releases were a great step up over IE5/IE6, but by modern standards Firefox 3.0.x is still lacking – it has not really evolved *all that much* past what it was so many years ago. The finaly piss in the bucket, was when Windows Firefox 3 proved to run more effectively on FreeBSD under WINE, then FreeBSD Firefox 3 on FreeBSD or Windows Firefox 3 on Windows NT 5.1. That, just popped the cork… lol. It’s my firm believe that a web browser, especially something as big, fat, and ugly as Firefox, Opera, or Internet Explorer — are seriously fucked in the head, if they require non-standard issue add-ons to make them useful.

Personally at the minimum, I think any browser that supports tabs and javascript; but lacks a _real_ way of managing tabs and security (think NoScript), is just !@%!%^^! retarded. Ok, that kills off the majority of web browsers ever created, doesn’t it?

Tonight, I installed Epiphany; and despite the unappealing appearance of the program, I actually found it superior to Firefox 3 after a few minutes of testing. The extensions package offering an interactive Python console, especially so. The standard JavaScript interface was fine I guess, but I would much prefer Python to JavaScript; because I know the language much better.

To give Firefox one last, and final chance… before I take a HEX EDITOR to the SON OF A ****, I’ve installed the Vimperator extension; in the hopes that the massive changes it makes, might redeem Firefoxes lameness. So far, it seems to be quite an improvement. The ability to navigate documents is much improved; most notably it now has *S* *A* *N* *E* tabbed browsing support, heck I’ve seen modeless editors with better tab support then standard Firefox, and that’s kinda sad. Access to JavaScript is much more readildy available (in a less ubtuse way), and bringing most of the Vi IMproved style stuff along, builds up issues solved by some add-ons, and not dreamed of yet by most “regular users”.

What can I say, I am no normal user — I spend inordinate amounts of time on and around computers. During that time, the programs I use most often include a terminal and command line intreptor (Windows is just moronic here, period), a text editor, various chat programs, and a web browser. Although there are countless people in this world, who use more of the web then I bother to explore: few people use their web browser more then I do, lol.

I chose Vi IMproved as my text editor, because it is quick, effieciant, and rewards the user with a tool that respects the most simple fact of any program solving a common problem: The user has more things in life to do then use this shitty program, so let’s make their life easier.

Why can’t a web browser do that also?