Software and Computing

So here's the scenario: you've built a DLL that gets dynamically-loaded at run-time by another application (possibly not yours) and now you want to debug it under Eclipse, but execution blows right past your breakpoints! What to do?

In my case, I'm debugging a Python extension, but this scenario applies to other situations as well - Apache modules, PHP extensions and plug-ins to other applications. In all of these cases the application loads you DLL at some point after it has launched - usually in response to a script or user action. Debugging the DLL in these situations can be challenging because it is not loaded in memory along with the application.

After being bugged for what has to be the 1000th time by Apple Update to install software I neither need or want, I'd had enough. I realized that on most of my machines, I don't need QuickTime any more and it's not worth the annoying extra nagware that Apple feels is necessary to install on my system along with it.

Most websites no longer use QuickTime video and I use my Mac for synching my Ipod with ITunes, so bye bye Apple software on my Windows machines and good riddance.

I don't think I'm alone here and I think this is a good lesson for any software make - if you make your products singularly obnoxious, people will stop using them.

The MinGW and MSYS environment has a couple of problems under Windows Vista:

First, the install, install-info and patch commands are flagged automatically by Vista as requiring Administrator privileges based simply on their names. Nice. This will cause mysterious permission denied errors during builds. The UAC dialog won't pop up in this case either.

The fix is to add ".manifest" files for each of these commands in the same directory as the command. The manifest file looks something like this:

install.exe.manifest:

Create and edit one of these for each of the commands above. If you have Cygwin, you can copy them from /cygwin/bin.

The second problem I ran into under Vista is that tar operations on gzipped or bzip2 files will frequently fail with a "child died with signal 13" error. It appears that the MSYS versions of gzip and bzip2 have issues under Vista. I can use the Cygwin versions in their place with no problems. If you're using MSYS to build packages, be careful with having cygwin in your PATH however.

I recently had the need for a virtualization solution for Windows to host some Linux-based embedded development tools. Not wanting to shell out big bucks for one of the commercial solutions, I decided to check out some of the free options.

I just donated to the Eclipse Foundation and became a "Friend of Eclipse". I've been using the Eclipse platform for years for a variety of applications both professional and personal. It has certainly paid me, so I thought it was time to give a little back.

ATF, we miss you

One of the reasons I donated was to help support the PDT (PHP Development Tools) and ATF (AJAX Tools Framework) Eclipse projects (although I also use the Java and C/C++ tools pretty heavily too). PDT is rapidly become the standard platform for PHP development and ongoing work on the project has been robust.

The ATF is a great project, but has been a bit resource starved for the past year or so. ATF allows you to integrate with your favorite AJAX toolkit (like Dojo, jQuery or whatever) and then develop and debug Javascript code using the embedded Mozilla XULRunner. It's a very slick way to develop Javascript code without shelling out big bucks for a commercial package. Unfortunately, the last stable build was released nearly a year ago and doesn't run on Ganymede (the current version of Eclipse).

Hopefully, we'll see a new release from the ATF project soon.

I happened to need to compile some D-Bus code and ran into a compile error:

I checked to make the D-Bus development headers were installed and they were. A little Googling shows that others commonly run into this as well - the problem is that the D-Bus headers aren't included in the default compiler include path. You you need to explicitly specify them with:

TacoQuest has a cool Twitter badge hack to turn URLs in tweets into links. I modified his hack slightly to just show the URL instead of "link". Logic being that the URL had to fit in the tweet in the first place, so they usually look OK on my badge.

Here is my modified hack (read the TacoQuest post first):

If you use the HTML/Javascript Twitter badge, you've probably noticed that it has issues under Internet Explorer. It will generally work the first time a user hits the page, but if the next time, the badge will not show a tweet list. Here is a work-around you can use if you have access to your blog's code.