Reasonably Logical

As part of getting a new system configured today, I had to remind myself how to get commands such as “ls” or “g++” working on a Windows machine. It had been years since I did this the last time, so it took some research. I’m just making a note of it here, so that next time I know where to look.

Download MinGW and the “basic minsys system” (using their mingw-get installer). Once this runs, you’ll have the mysys command line and can run what you need. Next, you can (but don’t have to) modify your PATH variable to add the paths to the MinGW/bin and MySys/bin directories to the _very end of the string_. (You definitely want these being searched last. Otherwise, windows command scripts may start doing really weird things. There are several commands - find, sort, etc.. - which exist in each toolset.) This allows you to use Linux style command verbs in the command prompt (cmd.exe) on Windows.

To my knowledge, this works on Windows XP, and Windows 7. It probably works elsewhere.

Note: The porting work done in MinGW is pretty good, but not perfect. Don’t expect to be able to compile large open source projects without changes on your Windows box. If you want that, Cygwin is the closest you’ll get. That’s better, but far from perfect. Your best bet is probably a VirtualBox VM.

In the last 24 hours or so, I’ve discovered two new Thunderbird extensions that I absolutely love. The first is the new Release Candidate for Lightning 0.8 (the calendar extension). (Warning: This is NOT a final release. I would not recommend using it with real data yet.) For years, I’ve been using Sunbird - the standalone calendar from Mozilla. (Lighting & Calendar are developed in parallel by the same team.) However, the integration features this time around might just be enough to get me to switch over. The task integration was a particular improvement over previous versions.

The other extension is Seek. It adds faceted search to Thunderbird. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about how nice it would be to have something like this. (I actually had an extension I’d started myself to do this, but never got very far.) This will completely change how I sort, save, and search my archived mail. Beautiful. (This one is a full release, but is more features are forthcoming.)

Lightning 0.8 RC1: ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/0.8rc1/

Seek: http://simile.mit.edu/seek/

A friend sent me this link to a utility which allows you to sort the buttons on your Windows taskbar. Very useful. On negative point is that the webpage is in “Engrish”. Its written by a Japanese programmer whose English is not great. However the utility itself is just fine.

I can make no guarantees about the long term quality of the software. I’ve only been using it for about a day.

TaskBar++