New Home Page

From my very first home page somewhere in 1994 to my current one (that is, until yesterday) I always did every aspect of design myself. My home was always handcrafted.

Last big update I did in year 2006. Then I made .NET based solution that enabled me to ease my way into updating content. Every year from then I started new design and then abandoned it because lack of time.

In meantime I started writing blog on blogger.com and using it’s infrastructure and I was annoyed. Part was because blogger.com lacks some basic functionality and part was because I could not change anything in it’s code.

Next year will be different. I finally got off my ass and did some WordPress investigations. Before I knew it, WordPress was already running on my test domain and it took only one day for it to move to my main domain. In next few days I will also migrate my blog.

It was an impulse decision to do this so do expect some down time while I get to know the platform.

QText 2.32

New version is here.

This is just maintenance release with some bug-fixing. Major fix is speeding up of QText closing on some systems.

This will be last version for at least few months. Enjoy it. :)

Download:

• Installation
• Zipped executable

Too Aggressive for My Taste

Last night I had some videos to encode. I prepared everything upfront and I left my computer to do work overnight. At morning I was greeted with logon screen. My Windows decided to install updates. It didn’t matter to them that some other program was running. Kill and burn was their motto.

Yes, I know that I can turn on “Download updates but let me choose whether to install them”. However, when I do that, Action center starts complaining about non-optimal settings. If I turn this warning off, I just turned off all messages regarding Windows Update. If I leave it on, it leaves tray icon and I may miss other important messages.

There is just no right solution for this and it annoys me quite a bit…

P.S. I know that tray area is called notification area these days. I just prefer old naming.

Extracting Sparse Tar

I had to move some files from Unix. File was big, I had small USB drive - one thing led to another…

GZipped tar was obvious solution. In addition to that a friend of mine recommended to also use --sparse argument with it. Theory behind sparse files tells that block of 0 should be saved extremely efficiently thus making my file smaller even before zipping part gets involved. This made my command look like “tar cfzS somefile.tar.gz somefile”. It all worked as advertised.

Next day I got to extract this on Windows. My trusty WinRAR had no idea how to proceed. I just got “The archive is corrupt” message. My next efforts went into searching for Win32 version of tar. Since GNU tools like to be small and concentrated, of course this was not sufficient - I needed Win32 GZip also. Notice that I might be wrong here and there might be Win32 tar somewhere with everything integrated - I just haven’t found it.

Since (on Win32) extracting this tar.gz needed temporary files, I did it in two steps: first with gzip (gzip -d < somefile.tar.gz > somefile.tar) and then with tar (tar xSf somefile.tar). Even with all this, file was just too small.

After testing few more programs I gave up and recreated this archive without --sparse option. It ends up that size difference (with compression on) is not that high after all but final result is much more portable.

Here are tools I used:

• tar (site)
• gzip (site)

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta

Visual Studio 2010 has SP1 lurking around. It just arrived in form of beta accessible only to MSDN subscribers but I am sure that general public will get it at Thursday.

Total download size is 593 MB in single ISO. Exact content of package was not published (as time of writing this post) so I risked my main development machine and I installed this service pack beta based on faith alone. Installation took around an hour with need for single restart and with annoying flashing of taskbar button every few minutes (probably as each independent package was queuing-up).

I must confess that I see no big difference. Everything is where it should be. There might be some new templates and there is probably a lot of bug-fixing around. However, everything appears to be stable and this is best thing I can say about any beta.

As expected, it also contains new offline Help Viewer. Cries for normal offline viewer started with Visual Studio 2010 beta and only grew stronger with final release. This service pack finally brought something that works as good as offline viewer in times of Visual Studio 6.

I am eagerly waiting to see which features I missed and what exactly is in this service pack. In meantime I hope that my machine will not crash… :)

[2010-12-08: Official announcement is available now.]