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October 30, 2006
[Tech Support] Making a Windows Machine (More) Useful
I just got my Core 2 Duo windows desktop. When apple makes a core 2 duo 12 inch power book that can drive a 30 inch cinema flat panel, I'll buy one of those--and run windows on it. Until, then, I got me a dell.
Making a windows machine useful consists of the following:
- Install TortoiseSVN (reboot)
- Install WinSCP3
- Install Picassa2
- Install iTunes
- Install MikTex (complete package of course)
- Install gsView (don't forget to do GhostScript first!)
- Install TeXnicCenter
- Install VS .net
- Install office 2007
Posted by jones at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
October 06, 2006
[Misc.] Laptops, laziness, open source and windows
I've decided to use two desktop machines (one at school and one at home) until someone makes a laptop that I actually want to buy (that would be a 12 inch laptop with a core 2 duo in it and dvi out). So I set up subversion on both desktop machines and use subversion to keep my working set of files up to date on both machines. It's working pretty well, except sometimes I forget to click "SVN commit" when I leave my office. That's a problem.
I could either walk back upstairs and click "commit" before I get in my car. But that would require work.
I could put my windows boxen on public IPs but that would require extra work to keep them ultra-up-to-date and require installing some kind of access client.
So instead I wrote a little C# app that uses Tigris' command line SVN client to do an update, automatically. The problem has now been reduced to the problem of triggering the update. I could just schedule it as the windows' equivalent of a cron job, but that might cause a box to commit when I don't want it to.
So instead, I created a mail rule in Outlook 2007 that runs my command line commit program when it recieves mail with subject "cvn commit at [home|office]"
I was on a roll at that point, so I also wrote some code to send me the output of the commit operation using the Outlook interface in C#.
As a devout operating system agnostic, the appealing part of this project was that it combined the best of two worlds: I wrote my code in C# with a superb IDE (VS.net) and used a great open source tool (the svn client).
Posted by jones at 07:28 AM | Comments (1)