02.19.09

Makefile tips

Posted in Colen Stuff, Software at 2:48 pm by Colen

A cunning trick I discovered today. To suppress error reporting for a command in a makefile, prepend it with a dash character. For example, this command will fail and stop the build if the directory already exists:

mkdir c:\somefolder

However, this command will ignore the error and press on – perfect if you don’t care if the directory is there or not, you just want to make sure it gets created:

-mkdir c:\somefolder

The only change is the addition of a dash at the start of the line.

(This doesn’t change the fact that makefiles are horrible and that I hate them.)

09.13.07

Windows Vista

Posted in Colen Stuff, Software at 11:32 am by Colen

So I’ve been using Vista on my new development machine for a couple of days, after spending the entire weekend getting it set up (ugh). Here are the good things about it so far:

  • Breadcrumbs – In explorer, it shows that you’re in “c:\Xxx\Yyy\Zzz” as before, but if you click on “Xxx” it switches to that directory. You can also switch between directories by clicking between them. Overall: Excellent.
  • Search ‘as you type’ – just like find in firefox, where there’s a little bar at the top of the explorer window and it filters the list of files as you type into it. Wonderful.
  • Start menu keyboard support – hit the windows key and type the first few letters of a program name, and that program runs. It’s like Windows+R on steroids.
  • When you hit F2 to rename a file, it selects the filename but NOT the file extension. Oh, this is so nice.
  • Windows Aero is very pretty, and the start menu looks nicer.
  • The new volume control (with a separate control for each application!) is awesome, and the new clock is very pretty. You can also set up multiple clocks to appear, for different time zones etc.

Bad things so far:

  • iTunes bluescreens my machine when I try to import my song library. Waah!
  • Apparently I can’t use my geforce 5500 as a secondary graphics card now? It also bluescreened my machine when I tried it.
  • Visual studio 2005 doesn’t install properly and needs a patch to work, and complains when you run it. Get with the program, microsoft – can’t you get your flagship IDE working properly on your new OS?
  • User Access Control (or whatever it’s called) is annoying sometimes – why should I have to press “continue” 4 times when creating a folder and renaming it? Stupid.

So some good, some bad. However, almost all the good things… those aren’t really “woah we need a new operating system for this!” features. They could easily have been added to windows XP.

The jury’s still out… hopefully service pack 1 will improve things.

10.09.06

Hero Lab

Posted in Software at 7:41 pm by Colen

So we finally released some screenshots of the program I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. Yay me!

clicky

^__________^

03.09.06

Office 2007

Posted in Software at 12:25 pm by Colen

Purty screenshot!

see http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/ for more purty screenshots of office 2007. I think it looks nice.

08.15.05

Travelling!

Posted in Software at 5:23 pm by Colen

Off to Indianapolis tomorrow, for Gen Con. Management and Marketting both have lots of meetings to do, but I don’t, so hooray. I do have a seminar to do about using our wacky products, though, so I need to work on that. Instead of posting here, I guess.

After I get back, I’m moving! Hooray! \o/

08.03.05

That’s dumb, you’re dumb

Posted in Software at 12:17 pm by Colen

Quote from the Old New Thing (see link on the right):

——
Recall that when blitting from a monochrome bitmap to a color bitmap, the color black in the source bitmap becomes the destination DC's text color, and the color white in the source bitmap becomes the destination DC's background color.
——

RECALL THAT? No, I don’t recall that, and here’s why – because it’s STUPID. Nobody in THE ENTIRE WORLD knows that. Neither would anyone expect it to happen – because it’s a really stupid thing to do that would not be expected in any situation.

This is why programming for windows is so hard – because you have to learn about all these stupid, stupid things that were clearly implemented because it seemed like a good idea for whatever thing the programmers were working on at the time, rather than doing it properly.