art's abode

Got my paws on the RTM of Vista SP1 yesterday night, and upgraded earlier today off a mostly-clean 6000 build, without a hitch. Apart from rebooting a handful of times and taking about 2 hours on a new notebook, I haven’t run across any problems yet.

SUA SP1 also works (and is more or less just as slow and shitty).

Anyhow, it’s somewhat exciting to have a moreso Server 2008-like kernel.

In Vista, if you have a capable screen, you can input not only with Wacom (“Penabled”) pens, but also with your finger. If you find that the calibration settings are completely off (which they seem to be by default), run in console as administrator:

tabcal novalidate

Today I ran the Windows binary package of MAngband 0.7.2a. Apart from missing walls and other things, it would consistently crash when I typed ‘:’ to chat. Pretty annoying.

As a result, I’ve compiled a Vista-compatible version of MAngband. You will need at least the Cygwin base set installed, as MAngband requires terminfo definitions. You can check out the project page with all the relevant downloads and information at MAngband-Vista. I hope to release updated versions of MAngband-Vista as new versions of MAngband are made available, and until these issues with Vista are resolved in the official distribution.

Aye, that’s right open source fans, your favorite blogging tool is no longer beta testing! Live Writer 2008 was released earlier this month and is finally out of beta testing (I’m using it as of this post!) at version 12.0.1366.1026. I’ve been posting here almost exclusively using WLW, and contrary to the regular ultra-hilarious jokes about Microsoft Beta softwarez, it’s been a pleasant and stable experience for me in Vista.

Apart from supporting Live Spaces (which I haven’t tried as of yet), it supports publishing to WordPress and Blogger.com, among others. It has a nice and non-intrusive WYSIWYG editor with toolbars, supports easy inserting of pictures, tables, and videos. WLW lets you set up multiple accounts, which is handy if you are a real lifeless dork and find yourself tending multiple blogs.

Recently I set up a SharePoint MySite blog server at work, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it integrated as seamlessly as they boast. It’s a matter of putting in the URL to your own blog as a SharePoint blog account in WLW, and after you authenticate, it’s more or less ready to go. Uploading content attached to your entry is also handled well, allowing you to link or upload content to the web host.

WLW 2008 supports different views, so you can more or less edit your entry as it would appear formatted using your blog’s CSS styles. Then again, you could not, and turn it off too–pick your poison. And when you feel like wearing a black trench coat and putting on your Matrix-style sunglasses, you can switch into HTML editing mode too. Nifty.

It also allows you to create categories inside the editor, as well as select existing categories, and set the publishing date.

It’s worth a try if you’re using Windows, it’s still free.

Aye, it was a pain to get this one going properly with the line drawing:

Set the font to Lucida Console, which should have been installed with Vista. If you’re using a linux terminal you might as well make sure the linux keyboard layout is selected as well.

For lines and other special characters, set the line drawing to Unicode. Lucida Console has Unicode lines. This is also why it doesn’t work with Terminal or Fixedsys fonts in Vista, woe is me, I spent ages trying to figure that one out.

Unless you know you’re using another translation page, set the translation to UTF8.

Things should look a lot better now!

AUTH is needed for many IRC networks, most notably on EFnet. If you’re running a single instance of mIRC for example, it’s not so difficult to port forward TCP 113 to your windows machine and allow mIRC to run its built-in identd.

It gets trickier when you want to dish out varied AUTH responses depending on the client on your NAT. You can use rndware’s Windows Ident Server (1.0.3 is the latest as of this post) with Vista. I use it on Vista and can confirm that it runs both as an application in your systray (handy!), or as a system service (doubly handy!).

You can also use it in conjunction with reply-from-file mode, where it reads identity information from a flatfile rather than responding with the same AUTH each time. This is handy if you setup psyBNC on the same machine as your identd.

SftpDrive is a commercial program for Windows (apparantly it works in Vista: I’m using on multiple Vista machines here without a hitch).

It allows you to map directories on your SSH server as a network drive in Windows. This gives you seamless functionality between your SSHD and your local filesystem. I’ve found it extremely handy for editing remote source code and HTML, file management and storage/retrieval.

I’m going to press our company to purchase corporate licenses for SftpDrive, it’s really worth the price if you work via SSH on a regular basis on a Windows machine.

Anyone know of a free alternative that does the same?