Software

Hilarious session error with rsync/ssh

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For the sake of experimenting, I installed Debian Lenny into VirtualBox on the Winsucks machine, being lazy I used the network installation ISO hehe.

One of the things I dislike about Linux distros, is they don’t seem to take kindly to a leading capitol letter in usernames for some reason. Debian’s installer also (logically) set my uid/gid to 1000. Rather then map between uid/gid, I merely use the same values for my account on all machines. Since BSD could care less, I also use ‘Terry’ instead of ‘terry’ when possible ^_^.

While setting up for the test, I also changed my accounts uid/gid; oh boy is the vipw program talkative. In doing that, and then running the test from a shell w/o logging out and back in again first, resulting in this funny error message:

terry@virtuous:~$ rsync -arz --links --safe-links --no-D -tx -e 'ssh -l Terry' --rsync-path='cd /srv/rsync/conf && /usr/local/bin/rsync' -n  --stats Terry@vectra::home /home/Terry
You don't exist, go away!
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(635) [receiver=3.0.3]
terry@virtuous:~$

Making sure my sessions uid/gid are correct with the system databases however, fixes that lol.

Currently, I’ve setup VirtualBox to boot Debian into console mode and run it ‘headless’ with ssh+x11 forwarding. Should we say, I’m more then comfortable using a unix shell, ;-).

Mating Vi IMproved with Visual C++, part I

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Maybe it’s because it is an Integrated Development Environment, but Visual C++ seems to be a little lacking in its handling of external editors (at least in the express edition I have avail). It seems the best way to get MSVC to work with Vi IMproved for editing files, is to right click on a file in the solution explorer docklet, and click “Open with”. From there one can specify a program to open the file with and force it as the default editor; the down side is the bloody thing seems to reject the concept of command line arguments.

As such, I created a new win32 application in the IDE, and stripped the fundamental code down to the following

#define GVIM_EXE    _T("P:/Editors/Vim/vim-personal/gvim.exe")
#define GVIM_ARGS   _T("--servername"), _T("MSVC"), _T("--remote-tab-silent")

int APIENTRY
_tWinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
          LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
        UNREFERENCED_PARAMETER(hPrevInstance);
        UNREFERENCED_PARAMETER(hInstance);
        UNREFERENCED_PARAMETER(nCmdShow);

    _texecl(GVIM_EXE, _T("gvim"), GVIM_ARGS, lpCmdLine, NULL);

    return 0;
}

Which means I get one instance of Vim running and double clicking files in the solution explorer, will open a new tab in the GVim window; gotta love an editor with a client-server feature hehe.

I have Michael Graz’s visual_studio.vim installed along with the required python for windows extensions. The plugin loads and appears to be exactly the *first* vim plugin that I can actually find a purpose for using! Except for one small problem…. the plugin can’t seem to chatter with the running instance of Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition!

Of course, I could likely jerry rig vim’s :make command to invoke vcbuild for me without much trouble.

Heh, and just for the heck of it, I wonder if a similar plugin could be written for other IDEs, like Code::Blocks, XCode, and KDevelop?

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?

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Awhile back I stumbled over a macro program for Win32, but lost track of it; found it again today: http://www.autohotkey.com/

I’ve been missing such abilities under Win32, and ain’t about to swap my old PS/2 keyboard for one of them fancy G15s lol.

Flitations with /bin/ed

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lately, I’ve been developing a strange affection for the old ed(1) text editor. Because tpsh defaults the value of EDITOR to ed on unix, and edit on windows; I’ve had to deal with ed quite a lot whilst working on my shells ‘fc’ built-in (fc is the command for listing and editing/re-executing commands through the shells history).

Of course once support for ENV was worked out, I changed it to ex >_>

atm I’m reading the ed tutorial in ed, via ssh to my OpenBSD machine; it actually makes a nice pager :-/. All in all, I don’t think I would take ed over vi for coding but it’s a rather interesting program; after starting vim it’s also possible to drop into extended ex mode with gQ, effectively giving a modernized line editor.

My interest in ed atm is for short editing tasks, the kind where vi and other screen editors are not often necessary for the task. Some times, I can’t help but wonder if I’m secretly older then my birth date suggests lol.

mmm.

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Using git for all my scm/vcs needs, I’m starting to wonder how the hell I ever lived with CVS lol. (The documentation for git isn’t to bad these days either)

Yet Another Way To Hang Your Web Browser

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Try copy/pasting ~4.5MB of data into a text area, then watch your CPU catch fire and the laptop overheat. If you have a decent browser or a cooling system, you might get as far as the form submission timing out ^_^,

Honestly, I could swear there is almost no complex software on this damn planet that does not f***ing suck!

Complex software that doesn’t suck: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, nvi, vim, GNU Screen, rxvt-unicode, GNU grep, nawk, ed, the better forms of emacs, gcc/g++, perl, fvwm2, but what else….. lol. There is more software that sucks then that doesn’t.

git rules, cvs drools

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Hmm, after a using git for all of my stuffs these past few days…..

CVS can go rot in hell, someone actually wrote a real system 😉

As much as I try to keep my OpenBSD box lean & mean, git is fairly light on runtime dependencies: 

Terry@vectra$ cat /var/db/pkg/git-1.5.6.4/+REQUIRING                            
libiconv-1.12
p5-Error-0.17009
curl-7.18.2
rsync-3.0.3

libiconv is required by other things I use, and I believe gettext depends on it, and a lot of stuff uses gettext lol (uh, almost everything). curl and rsync are also useful to have around, and rsync I actually would want installed anyway (just in case I need it someday). So really, there is no serious dependency issue from it, since OpenBSDs standard git package doesn’t include the TK gui tools like FreeBSDs does. TBH, although I usually keep tcl/tk on my development systems, I never use tcl or tk-bindings. And I really have no desire to use any git front ends, nor gitk/git-gui for that matter.

Using git after getting used to living with CVS for so long, I can’t help but wonder….. why the **** anyone uses CVS anymore. Even Subversion is easier to live with then CVS, but not always a fun thing to install/manage at times, ‘least it is well documented (and tirival for cvs users to pick up hehe).

git… simple, effective, fast, and not brain damaged.