A Single Point Of FAILure

Apparently, frighteningly many of all important Domains out there (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Hotmail, the list goes on) are registered through the same company, Markmonitor. Who are they? Why do so many big companies suddenly seem to trust them? Why do I smell stale cheese? Here is some text somebody wrote about this: click. The text is very sensationalist and thus should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Still, it's just one more company that we should keep an eye on, as quite a bit of our infrastructure depends on their integrity. Came across this on a certain German blog.

virtualenv management

I use virtualenvs for just about any Python work I do. To make working with them in my shell, zsh, a bit easier, I added the following to my .zshrc:

export PYENV_ROOT=$HOME/devel/py-envs

venv-new() {
    local ledir=$PYENV_ROOT/$1
    if [[ -e $ledir ]]; then
        echo "a python environment by that name already exists :("
        return 1
    fi
    virtualenv --no-site-packages --distribute $ledir
}

venv-activate() {
    source $PYENV_ROOT/$1/bin/activate
}

_venvs() {
    _files -W $PYENV_ROOT -/
}

compdef _venvs venv-activate

What this does is it gives me two new functions (think "commands") in my shell. To create a new virtualenv, I do "venv-new NAME" and to activate an existing one, I do "venv-activate NAME". And because of the compdef, I get proper tab completion on venv-activate.

Setting up a new Windows machine

The single thing that annoyed me the most when setting up a new Windows machine when compared to Linux was how I had to collect different installers for dozens of different tools from all over the net. But when setting up my new desktop machine a few days ago, a friend pointed me to ninite. It's a simple installer-builder. Just select the tools you want and it generates an installer that downloads and installs all those tools unattended. Awesome.

Fuck you, last.fm

I've been a last.fm subscriber for about two years now and I really enjoyed it. Mostly because I could listen to my loved tracks and playlists I created as custom radio stations.

Awesome feature.

Which they are about to discontinue come November 17th. (link to the announcement)

With that, they are, at least in my totally not humble opinion, killing every feature which made being a subscriber worthwhile. Obviously, they won't see any more of my money.

Bastards.

Surprising Differences

As of course everyone knows, I recently became a Windows user after years of only using Linux on the Desktop. While on the whole I am surprisingly happy, there are of course a few things that annoy me. Some where to be expected, like the lack of package management. But some are quite surprising to me. One example.

I own a USB soundcard which I use at home with my 5.1 system. Under Linux, it was no problem to plug in or remove this device while sound was playing. It would just switch over to the new primary device instantly. Under Windows however, every application producing sound while plugging in/out either crashes or throws error messages.

I really wasn't expecting Windows to be worse in even small ways in such Desktop/Sound related matters.

Windows Taskbar Thumbnails

Normally, when hovering the Taskbar entries on the Windows 7 Taskbar, you get a thumbnail of the window. I don't particularly care for this feature so I wanted to disable it. Turns out you can't. What you can do though is increase the timeout for this thumbnail to be shown, which is good enough for me.

Open regedit, go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

and add a new DWORD called ExtendedUIHoverTime and set it to a (DEC) value of 20000 for example (that's 20 seconds).

DLL Problems with cygwin

When trying to use bzr in cygwin, I got a funny little error:

E:\cygwin\bin\python.exe: *** fatal error - unable to remap \\?\E:\cygwin\lib\python2.6\lib-dynload\time.dll

 Turns out this happens when you don't install cygwin in C:\cygwin. Fixing it was relatively simple:

1. Close all cygwin appliations
2. start a ash or dash shell in a cmd shell
3. run rebaseall
4. (If you don't have it, install the rebase package using cygwin's setup.exe)
5. ???
6. Profit!