Archive for June, 2008

New rules for dealing with windows

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

So,
after having learned my way over the years to ‘maintain’ a windows xp, I recently screwed up my windows install for good.
Should you care to repeat this, it’s very simple:
- put your pagefile on another partition (not c:\)
- reboot to linux
- format that partition containing the pagefile
TADAAA, you now have a non working windows system!

But you say, there’s a few more options:
I’ve gone through the trouble of finding out about the pagefileconfig command, which is a shitty vbs file and which basically doesn’t work from safemode since the reboot following the ‘successful creation of the pagefile’ ends up in windows hanging after the loadscreen.
So, I thought, I create a new user and try to keep stuff that’s loading to a minimum, but alas can’t get into safemode anymore even. Don’t ask me why. The shitty tools don’t tell you anything.
For the record, my disk/partition is 100% aok.
God how it’s a piece of shit OS :(

So from now on:
- I’ll buy no more software/games which don’t support linux (luckily there’s id Software, although I’ll miss Crysis & the Half-Life 2 bundle etc.) The games for windows bullshit was a major turnoff already so I’ll survive I suppose.
That’s a pretty short list right?
Basically the only reason I still have one is since I’m locked in with a few games I spent money on, my mistake. You only develop for windows? Thanks I’ll pass on your undoubtably great software & great UX

I just think it’s insane for the record how people say that winxp with sp3 is a decent OS, not to mention vista. Think of me when you’ll be adding something to the PATH in vista, by modifying a text line in a 200x100px window on your 1920×1200 screen. Or any of the zillion other places where the windows/frames are fixed size. Great job ms, great job! But hey, there’s the _awesome_ uac to make up for that. Hurray!

I’m so pissed, the time that’s gone into that install + the reason why I lost it, it’s so damn retarded…
To think that there wouldn’t have been the slightest issue on a *nix system.
Leaving me to wish you all good luck & enjoy the microsoft innovations!

PS: please game developers, don’t write for windows only. Everything I have that supports linux runs better than it did on windows. Don’t get stuck in the DirectX/Windows trap, please!

GPL’d Java vs. Gosling Emacs

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

A nice comment on a slashdot story reporting on made advances in opening up Java taught me a few nice trivias on the history between Richard Stallman and James Gosling in the early days:

“In the early years (1984 to 1988), the GNU Project did not have a single license to cover all its software. What led Stallman to the creation of this copyleft license was his experience with James Gosling, creator of NeWs and the Java programming language, and UniPress, over Emacs. While Stallman created the first Emacs in 1975, Gosling wrote the first C-based Emacs (Gosling Emacs) running on Unix in 1982. Gosling initally allowed free distribution of the Gosling Emacs source code, which Stallman used in early 1985 in the first version (15.34) of GNU Emacs. Gosling later sold rights to Gosling Emacs to UniPress, and Gosling Emacs became UniPress Emacs. UniPress threatened Stallman to stop distributing the Gosling source code, and Stallman was forced to comply. He later replace these parts with his own code. (Emacs version 16.56). (See the Emacs Timeline) To prevent free code from being proprietarized in this manner in the future, Stallman invented the GPL.”

Nice to see how (as the comment author puts it) ‘Richard was right.’

The rest of the comment ( & story) is equally worth a read. Long live the GPL & Java! & so many others :)

Nice overview of VMWare config settings

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

First of all, the overview

This actually helped me resolve running VMWare images on ntfs partitions mounted with ntfs-3g on linux, which generated errors with the default configuration. Once I set added

mainMem.useNamedFile = "false"

to the .vmx file, I was able to run the images just fine from my ntfs partitions.

Lotus Symphony just went final & brings Eclipse plugin extensibility to OOo

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

So Lotus Symphony has reached GA, and I have to say seems they’ve done a great job optimizing it when I compare the performance to the earlier beta releases. The product is freely available to anyone and supported for Linux (SLED/RedHat) and Windows (XP/Vista).

What makes this interesting over the standard OpenOffice distribution, is the the possibility to write Eclipse plugins to extends Symphony’s functionality. To get started doing that, just grab the SDK weighing in just over 8mb,  which contains the developer guide and sample plugins along with instructions showing you how to set up your own Eclipse development environment.

Or you could just grab a few of the contributed plugins available already.

Disclaimer: I’m an IT Specialist for Lotus at IBM Belgium, mostly focusing on WebSphere Portal & Lotus Workplace Web Content Management