Reset WINS cache on a QNAP device

Disable WINS server from web administration page

SSH into it

cd /var/log/samba/locks

delete wins.dat

Enable WINS server from web administration page

Done.

I just purchased Trillian Pro for life...

Unfortunately, I'm probably never ever going to use it. Do I regret it? A little, but I wanted to give it a fair shot.

Introduction

I really wanted an IM app that would do all the services I use. Pidgin and Miranda both support Skype through the SkypeAPI, but that integration is iffy at best.

I admit that my needs are very different from most people but here is why Trillian is basically unusable to me :

UI and customization

This is my miranda setup. Here are the highlights of this UI setup.

• Lack of whitespace and window dressing and borders. Keyboard navigation lets me do everything.
• Names are indented in groups. 
• No status messages. I show only the data I need and I want to know.
• The smaller bottom chat window is set to always on top
• The larger chat window houses my IRC channels, and that is set to NOT always on top
• Every window remembers what tab container it belongs to.

In contrast with Trillian.

• Lots of wasted space
• No indents on names under groups
• In tiny vs simple UI, names are indented but status messages show up. There needs to be an in between setting.
• Tabbed Chat Windows are always on top or not, I cannot specify per window.
• Tabs do not remember which group they are in. Once I close the application, IRC boots up and opens the large chat window first, every chat window I open from then on goes to the big chat window, and not a smaller one below.

Insufficient keyboard navigation

In Miranda, keyboard navigation alone is enough for me to do everything. I almost never have to touch a mouse

CTRL+SHIFT+R = go to next waiting message ( event:next event does not seem to work the way it used  to in trillian Pro 1.0, if it does, then I have no clue how to get it working correctly )
CTRL+SHIFT+A = pull up the contact list ( this still works )
CTRL+W = close a window ( this works )
CTRL+PGUP/PGDOWN =  go to the next tab (also still works )

Incomplete Skype group chat support

The main reason I wanted to use Trillian was because of its SkypeKit support, and not have to have Skype running in the background. Unfortunately, this feature is not 100% complete. It lets you receive messages from a group conversation, but there is no way to send to that group if you don't already have it open. The poor UI I could kind of deal with, but this feature is the most important of all.

Slow

Everything in Skype animates in and out with a fade. Give an option to turn this off. I don't need fades, I want quick response time. Opening a chat window to a contact takes half a second, and closing it takes half a second as well.

Why does it take such a long time for it to shut down? I can see it sit in task manager for a good 15 seconds before the process finally goes away.

Conclusion

I really wanted to switch back to Trillian since I have fond memories of my Trillian Pro 1.0 days. You guys were the best around back then. Unfortunately, with the way Trillian works right now, the user experience does not fit my needs.

VSPTree is alive!

I've been using Windows 8 for the last couple of months and have been having a great time with it. It's Windows 7 with a nice flat UI, much faster I/O. Stability is the same, and pretty much have never opened a metro app. I'm not even sure how to use those correctly. The new Start Menu is just a very big start menu to me.

Anyway I digress, I needed to profile something and went with the usual suspects. CodeAnalyst, Got no data. AQTime, failed to launch the exe. Very Sleepy, worked but no hierarchical call graph. Tried to resurrect VSPTree with the VS2010 profiler and I got a driver not allowed error.

Oh well. Some digging around and I found Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2012.

So I took a little time and updated VSPTree to work with it, and added some minor usability updates. It's not the best application in the world, but sometimes it's handy just to have it.

VSPTree 0.5 : Now with Windows 8 64 bit support. Here.

Conditionals in Property Sheets

I've since moved to using property sheets exclusively instead of wfMake and it's been going well. A bit more more typing but I like the fact that I can edit a bunch of includes and not have to regenerate the vcproj/vcxproj. The most time consuming part was going through all the projects and setting the right macros everywhere. But you only have to do it once.

It's one place to update everything and can be syntax highlighted and formatted quite neatly.

You end up with something like this. This is only an excerpt, the whole thing is quite huge. You can then string your macros any way you like. The fanciest bit of this is the conditionals at the top that I use because some sln's that include these projects are sometimes in different places, and there was no other way I could think of to correctly set the path.

  
  
    
      
        $(ProjectDir)..\..\..\
      
    
    
      
        $(ProjectDir)..\..\..\
      
    
    
      
        $(SolutionDir)
      
    
  
  
    
    
      WF_DEBUG;
      _DEBUG
    

    
      WF_RELEASE;
      NDEBUG
    

    
      WF_FINAL;
      NDEBUG
    

    
    
      WF_PC32;
      WIN32;
      _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS;
      $(FORCED_ENVARS)
    

    
      $(WF_DEBUG);
      $(PC32_PREPROCESSOR);
      __PLACEMENT_NEW_INLINE
    


  

Pre-commit goodness

This solution was used to solve programmers frequently accidentally committing debug executables into SVN. On developer machines you rarely see this issue because all the debug libs exist, but a level designer or artist will frequently run into the problem and will have no idea what the problem is, and someone will have to take a look at it and figure out what in the world is going on. Then the doh! moment happens and someone has to recompile and commit that.

The precommit hook also show an example of how to deny committing certain files like .argb and thumb.db

The solution is simple enough. Add a precommit hook that scans all the exe's for debug libs. This method uses Dependency Walker by Steve Miller.

So far I've tested it on rather large commits with 20 exe's and it doesn't take more than 20 - 30 seconds to complete. Server is running a i7-960 for reference.

cd /d %~dp0
SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
SET REPOS=%1
SET TXN=%2

SET PATH=E:\svn;E:\bin;E:\depends

svnlook changed %REPOS% -t %TXN% > E:\temp\svnlook%TXN%

grep -E "A.+(.argb)" E:\temp\svnlook%TXN%

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" (
 echo Do not commit ARGB files! >&2
 goto :error
) 

grep -E "A.+(thumbs.db)" E:\temp\svnlook%TXN%

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" (
 echo Do not commit thumbs.db! >&2
 goto :error
)

grep -P -o "(?<=\w\s\s\s).+\.exe" E:\temp\svnlook%TXN% > E:\temp\svnlook%TXN%_exegrep

for /f "tokens=1 delims=¶" %%f IN (E:\temp\svnlook%TXN%_exegrep) DO (
 svnlook cat %REPOS% -t %TXN% "%%f" > E:\temp\temp
 depends.exe /c /of:E:\temp\dep.txt E:\temp\temp
 grep -E "QT.+D4.DLL" E:\temp\dep.txt
 if "!ERRORLEVEL!"=="0" (
  echo Do not commit Debug executables! %%f is in debug>&2
  goto :error
 )
)

del E:\temp\svnlook%TXN%
del E:\temp\svnlook%TXN%_exegrep
exit 0

:error
del E:\temp\svnlook%TXN%
del E:\temp\svnlook%TXN%_exegrep
exit 1

Saving tortoiseGit password

Took me a little while to find this, so I thought I would immortalize it here.

Apparently you need to save a file called _netrc in %USERPROFILE%

So a quick little batch file :

@echo off
SET /P HOST=What is the hostname i.e github.com?
SET /P USERNAME=What is your username?
SET /P PASSWORD=What is your password?

echo machine %HOST% login %USERNAME% password %PASSWORD% > "%USERPROFILE%\_netrc"

Crappy documentation? Internet to the rescue

So through some amazing series of events, I broke the TeamCity installation.

Things weren't building. I thought it might be a bug, so maybe I'll try a newer version. The newer version needed an upgrade to the database so I said OK, but I made sure to back up first of course.

Lo and behold the new version did solve the old problem, but it presented a host of new ones! Basically made it unusable. Of course this was a beta build, but hey beta is the new GMC nowadays right? WRONG!

Oh well, time to uninstall and go back to the backup. Cue the 30 minutes I spend trying to figure out how in the world do I restore this backup!

The manual says :

Just do this!

maintainDB[cmd|sh] restore -F <TeamCity backup file name>

Error : config is not empty. Ok I'll delete that then.

run again

Error : system is not empty. Ok I'll empty that too!

run again.

Needs a target!

Wuh? That's the "Restoring Data from Backup to Another Database" instruction not the standard restore.

But no. It doesn't work. Ok, scrounge around a bit more....

Hallelujah.

Turns out you need to copy the database.hsqldb.properties.dist out of the config directory in your backup zip first. Give that as the -T database.hsqldb.properties.dist

And then everything gets restored. Then it gives you some instruction that says, you have to copy that file into system\buildserver.properties.

Did I? Nope. Did the restore work? Yes.

Bad documentation is bad.

The difficulty of buy in

I've managed the company software infrastructure for many years. Along the way I've implemented every single idea or request that people have thrown at me.

Bug Trackers
Mantis
Redmine
Fogbugz

Company intranets
Google sites
Mediawiki
PhpBB
Wordpress

Email
Exchange
Gmail

Version Control
Visualsourcesafe
Sourceoffsite
Perforce
Subversion

Chat
IRC
XMPP server

The problem is once there is a preexisting system, and you have 80 - 120  people using it, and staggered projects there's almost no way to get everyone to switch at once! So you try and switch one project at a time, especially the ones that are eager to try a new system because of their complaints with the old one. Then the teams on new systems are faced with a learning curve, eventually fall back to the old system and you're back at square one.

So how do you get buy in? The simplest way is to use what most people already use at home. Which is why IRC, Gmail, AIM have continued staying on and all efforts to move everybody to gTalk will probably fail, and I can't believe gTalk doesn't have chat rooms! Which is what prompted the internal XMPP server. Campfire is definitely an option, but with > 100 users, you quickly reach your cap and can't scale.

Along the way we're picked up small pockets of other services like dropbox that are mainly used by people who cannot live without MS Word to share documents, while others like me just use Google Docs for sharing and collaboration.

I guess at the end of the day, there is no fit all solution, and that is really unfortunate.

On a side note, the wordpress with a custom plugin system works great as a wiki/intranet/annoucement system. The gist of it is this. Use wordpress, and a catchall address on googleapps that automatically adds every new user in your google apps account.

Then just add this plugin to wordpress :

post_content);
 $theauthor = get_the_author_meta( 'user_nicename', $thepost->post_author );

 // Get a comma separated string of categories
 $category_list = '';
 foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) { $category_list .= $category->cat_name . ' | '; }

 $subject = $category_list . $thepost->post_title;
 $body = "\n".
  "\n".
  "
$thecontent
".
  "
by $theauthor
".
  "
guid\">$thepost->guid
".
  "\n".
  "\n";

 $headers = "From: " . get_bloginfo('name') .'' . "\r\n";
 $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
 $headers .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1\r\n";

 mail('all@wayforward.com', $subject, $body, $headers);
}
add_action('new_to_publish', 'domainemail');
add_action('draft_to_publish', 'domainemail');
add_action('private_to_publish', 'domainemail');
add_action('future_to_publish', 'domainemail');
add_action('pending_to_publish', 'domainemail');
?>

Replace everyone@yourdomain.com with your catchall.

This way you get emails sent for every announcement with a permalink sent to everyone, including any new person you ever add to your domain, till the end of time. Oh, and you have the full history too when you go visit the site.

Compact & Clean for Google Reader

Like what you see? Then get it here.

Miranda and AIM

If you have a lot of trouble logging in sometimes. It's probably because the SSL login servers are down.

So connect to

login.oscar.aol.com port 5190

instead of

slogin.oscar.aol.com port 443