I’ve often wished I could use Unix style symlinks on Windows for easing path problems while developing software. I wasn’t aware that in fact NTFS does support symlinks but only for directories. Confusingly though, Windows doesn’t ship with ANY tool to actually create them!
Apparently Microsoft intended that you could only use this feature by purchasing an extra set of utilities. However, there is a freeware tool on sysinternals.com called Junction which can be used to create them.
The advantage of symlinks over Windows’ Shortcuts is that they can be navigated transparently from within other software e.g. the command shell or scripts. Whereas Shortcuts are really just files with link data which is interpreted by Explorer (as far as I can tell).
Just spotted a very interesting looking Windows GUI MySQL administration tool: MySQL-Front.
I’ve been using the excellent Java based SQuirreL for a while now because it provided me a database-independant interface for administering databases . Plus it has a good selection of useful plugins. However, I think I’ll try out MySQL-Front and see if it offers any advantages for working with MySQL on Windows.
Here’s a link to a David Heinemeier Hansson’s (creator of Rails) list of resources for getting started with the Ruby programming language:
Getting started with Ruby (Loud Thinking)
I agree with him that it’s not spectacularly easy right now how to get started learning the language although I’m sure it’ll improve quickly. There is an excellent online book but the API docs seem to lack a lot of examples which makes learning more about it a bit dry.
Found a great site today: Sysinternals Freeware. It hosts various interesting and useful freeware Windows system monitoring utilities such as:
- Filemon
- For monitoring filesystem activety. Watch open files and see the processes which are accessing them. A lot like
lsof on Linux.
- Autorun
- Generates a comprehensive listing of all applications configured to run during system bootup and login. I always knew a lot of stuff ran (cause of the huge time it takes to boot my laptop) so I was impressed to see the entire list finally. Maybe I can now start to work out how to cut the boot time down a bit.
- Regmon
- A lot like Filemon but monitors real-time access to the registry instead.
This is just a taster of what’s there. There are loads of other valuable looking tools there for exploring Windows’ internals.
One of the site’s owners, Mark Russinovich, has an interesting weblog on the site as well: Mark’s Sysinternals Blog. Seems he’s been digging into the internals of Sony’s DRM root kits recently: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far.
Spent a while today trying to remember this command. I needed it to persist a one-off backup process which I needed to leave running. I knew I seen this done before but couldn’t remember the command. My initial searches kept turning up the wrong info. Now I’ve found it I don’t want to forget it again.
Basically you use the ‘nohup’ command which runs another command and immunizes it against hangup signals. You also have to use the ‘&’ shell operator to run this process in the background. Then you can log out of your terminal and leave the process to run. E.g.
$ nohup myprocess &
Ooops! Saw this when I was on holiday, and just had to capture it.
I imagine a lot of people will have seen this sort of thing on cash machines before, but this is truly spectacular.
Update: another sighting: Parking Meter + Windows == No Access - iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky
Photo taken a couple of weeks back when we had the first snow in Edinburgh.
Time for comic relief
Found this page while looking around for a decent tagline for my site. You’ll see my favourite one up above underneath the site title.
Here’s some other gems:
Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
Q: How many people work around here? ‘About half’.
I’ve downloaded OpenOffice 2.0 to try it out. So far I’m very happy with it. My only gripe is that the default bullets in Writer still look big and blobby, I need to look for a way to set the default to be something more sensible (not sure if that’s possible).
Bruce Eckel has already been putting it through it’s paces by testing it with his famous Java books: OpenOffice 2.0 passes the first trial-by-fire. He seems very impressed. His original Word doc was 10MB, when saved in Open Doc Format it came out as 1.6 MB!
It certainly is interesting news about the Govt. of Massachusetts choosing to standardise around the Open Document Format specification which is now the default format in OpenOffice 2.0 rather than go with Microsoft’s supposed “open” XML format.
Here’s an interesting article I found which explores the reasons why the Massachusetts government may have made their decision: Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn’t).
