Windows

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Neowin: User concept re-imagines File Explorer with Fluent Design.

https://www.neowin.net/news/user-concept-re-imagines-file-explorer-with-fluent-design/

I’d actually like to see something like that. Generally I’ve come to appreciate the new age UIs that pop up in W10, mostly because I’ve already suffered their design evolution from mobile platforms. Much as I did various desktop horrors from Unix and Microsoft systems.

Windows 10’s file explorer largely keeping the status quo left me with mixed feelings. But the fact remains of you end up suffering a GUI file manager: Microsoft’s is the gold standard to curse at.

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Right, premake4 is one of my favourite ways to build C/C++ stuff but tonight I’m thinking it has a moron involved. You can specify a project as being one of four kinds: ConsoleApp, WindowedApp, SharedLib, StaticLib. The documentation here states that this likely means /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS will be passed to link.exe, and indeed it is. That is how you say call WinMain and do any other I’m a GUI app magic for Windows; other wise you get a main and a command  prompt; simply put.

This FAQ entry on the other hand, is just retarded.

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Interesting findings. At work, my work station has always had problems using SMB/CIFS, in fact  it is almost useless but fortunately being Linux-oriented over here in Engineering, more traditional unix methods are favoured, so it is of little loss. Now the sad fact that most people use Windows, means that SMB/CIFS is easier to work with under Android than stuff like NFS or any of the multitude of similar techniques. As I rarely need to share stuff with multiple people, for my own stuff, I typically use SSHFS.

In fact, SSH is both such a part of my work flow between machines (here and espiecally at home), I wrote a handy script that lets me quickly mount my $HOME on a remote as ~/hosts/{hostname} locally. It’s useful. My workstation is setup both as a SSH client, server, and sshfs-mounter. But how to get stuff via Android, since I can’t just use CifsManager?

My ASUS Transformer obviously has support for FUSE, just looking at what `mount` says is enough to guess that. But there is no real support for SSHFS, all the goodies are missing. Since I have a very simple chroot of Debian stable, a quick `apt-get install sshfs` and bingo, all done :-). Since the stuff I’m interested in mounting at home (where SMB/CIFS works like a charm), I can just use SSHFS mounts and a shared socket. I.e. I can have things like my Dropbox mounted, get live sync, and even access locally!

Muahauhauauhuahuaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

VNC over SSH, the idiots guide.

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Since I rather like to have options, I’ve decided to augment my usual SSH /w option of X forwarding to the option of VNC as well.

Objective: connect to my netbooks X session using VNC, tunnelled over SSH.

Implementation:

Since my netbook runs a GNOME centric distribution, I’m using the “Remote Desktop” preferences program on “System -> Preferences”. If you’re like me and to damn lazy to hunt and peck, this just runs the program ‘vino-preferences’. On here it’s possible to setup VNC access to your desktop. In essence, it just runs vino when you login. There are loads of good and bad write ups on VNC server setup and 3 or 4 click setup is good enough for me.

My iptables rules pretty much block such things as incoming VNC requests, which is good because I don’t want the session exposed across the network interface. Pretty much all there is for accessing my netbook is the SSH port.

Now on another system, it’s possible to connect using SSH forwarding. This gains us both encryption for the VNC session and less port exposure; that is good for security.

PuTTY client setup:

  1. Load/create your session in PuTTY
  2. Go to SSH -> Tunnels
  3. Add a port forwards
    1. source port: 5900
    2. destination: localhost:5900
  4. Login to the system using PuTTY.
OpenSSH client setup:
  1. ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 username@host
There are options for both if disabling the shell session and only running the forwarding is preferred (PuTTY: SSH->Don’t start a command at all; OpenSSH -> RTFM for -n, -N, and -f). 5900 is the default VNC port running off the server end (my netbook).
Now on the client machine, connecting any VNC client (e.g. TightVNC) to localhost should give the desktop session over at user@host; in this case, my X session on alice!
This is the shortest, sweetest, non-non-sense, you’re assumed to know how to RTFM if you want to know the facts, kind of write up that I’ve seen on doing this. Hmm, maybe it helps that I already know how to use SSH port forwarding with OpenSSH, hehehe.

Strawberry Perl + CPAN

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Well, I’ve figured out one of the problems getting anything to work off CPAN. The installer didn’t have the brains to detect that CPAN configuration should work with $prefix where $prefix != C:strawberryperl. As in my case, the distribution is in C:DevFilesLanguagesPerl. Hehe.

It would be nice to be able to install modules and not have so many WTFs/Minute.

Visual C++ 2010 Express, new levels of weirdness…

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As usual there is a redist.txt file in the Visual Studio root, that explains about what Microsoft supplied files you’re allowed to redistribute with your applications. In MSVC9.0, the express edition only came with release and (non re-distributable) debug assemblies of the C, C++, and  managed code runtime libraries.

In looking at the files installed by the latest and strangest version yet, I see that there is no vcredist folder… instead there is a vccrt folder, that contains a mungle of C and C++ that appears to be source code for some type of MS C/C++ runtime libraries :-/.

Tweaking my noise at the old API

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In fooling around with the Windows API, I’ve just had an enjoyable moment of guffawing. As a quick test of the JS stuff in winmm, I hooked up MM_JOY1MOVE to MessageBox() and ran the program under the debugger. It resulted in an endless stream of MessageBox(), resulting in the Windows task bar hanging, and taking at least 25-30 seconds to recover, after the program had finally overflowed the stack, been examined, and finally terminated manually.

I almost died laughing lol.

Yipee-Kai-Yay Terminus font now avail. on Windows !

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As some no, after spending a night of debugging only to learn that I had typed structobj,member instead of structojb.member, after a 6-8 hour coding run, I went in search of a new font. The font I found, was Terminus, and ever since I have _absolutely fucking loved it_ in fact, I can’t even look at my terminal in another font without missing it.

When filing a bug report to the libmng folks, I left a comment in the bug entry about using a font where O != 0; then went in search of my dear terminus, and then found this and just had to install them :-D.

Terminus is my favourite font, but my only compliant has been needing X to actually enjoy it…. now that’s solved!

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Wow, either Internet Malware is getting worse then ever or Firefox 3 just sucks worse then ever >_>. Javascript just took over Firefox, tried to convince me to install an Antivirus program — loaded “Explorer”‘s my computer page (in Firefox), obviouly faked scanning files and finding a few thousand bits of malware, before trying to redirect me back to their “Antivirus program” — and setting a Windows XP like pop up right in the middle of the Explorer-replicating page, that’s so obviously not a pop up window but a web hack. The irony of this? I’m running FreeBSD, and the most damage the account being used can do is write data to /dev/null (a black hole file). Are Windows lusers really stupid enough to fall for that trick? Wait, don’t answer that question.