The Hanover Collaboration

So I got my new computer and spent yesterday configuring it. Smart/lazy versus tough/stupid has long been my Yin and Yang. This time around, I’m not even dual booting it. I’m going Pure Windows at least for now. If I need linux, I think I’ll boot it off a CD. Here’s how it’s configured.

“Virtual Desktop Manager”: Microsoft actually provides some basic functionality here but I think they miss the boat. I tried some other desktop managers on my old computer and was dissapointed. One was buggy and the other lacked some deal-breaker feature. I’m trying this one out. I’ll let you know.

Cygwin I went with the full install. It took about 3hrs to download and install. Now I’ve got pretty much every linux program I can think of. Including Octave.

I redirected the “my documents” referrence to /cywgin/home/tom/.

Emacs: On my last computer, I had both a Cygwin and native Win32 emacs. If I double-clicked something readable, it opened in Win32 emacs. This one couldn’t run scripts (e.g. preview-latex). The Cygwin one could but it had to be started from a Cygwin shell manually and it only like files in subfolders of c:\cygwin (which it called ”/”). This time I’m going to try to get by with only the Cygwin version¹.

XKeymacs This converts all the shortcut keybindings in all of my programs to be emacs keybindings. It still sucks when I screw things up, but I am also starting to get some mileage out of it too. For instance, I can M-del right here in TXP! But I don’t seem to have M-a and I’m not sure whether the kill-ring works properly.

Open Office Saved like $200 here.

Graphing Calculator It graphs but more useful is that it lets you define functions. It is great for those medium-hard single-variable problems for which Matlab is overkill.

Security: McAfee Baleeted The thing came with 6mo free but it was a piece of shit. It acted like it owned the place. Up to date Windows, Firefox and Thunderbird have sufficed for me in the past². Anyway, I keep backups so that the worst thing to happen would be an afternoon of reinstalling. In fact, I find it bizarre that so many people have virus problems. I go on IRC and download executables with nary an issue. Some people can’t seem to open an email without getting a virus.

MIT will give me VirusScan Enterprise but I don’t think I should bother. Any thoughts?

Privacy: tor, off the record
Data Backup: TortoiseSVN
Other stuff: Bittorent, itunes, gnupg, Ethereal
MIT is hooking me up with SSH, SFTP, FTP and VPN (not to mention the Win XP pro). I know there exist free versions of these, in fact I already have them in my Cygwin install. But life is all about ballance.

¹ Since I had trouble finding it, what follows I would have liked to have found. Here’s how I made cygwin emacs start from windows.

runemacs.bat

C:\cygwin\bin\bash --login -c "/usr/local/bin/runemacs-helper \"%~f1\""

runemacs-helper

export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0
emacs "`cygpath -u \"$1\"`"


You need to have X running to make this work. You can add “startx” or “XWin” or “XFree” to one of those files but then you will get a new X session every time you open a document. I added X to the Windows startup.

Now I can click on the “open with” context menu and select “runemacs” to set up the file association (the first time you have to browse for it).

I’m a real scripting n00b so figuring that out was a real pain. There are some issues with the way the Windows deals with spaces and quotes in commands. Consider the following,


cmd:>command "argument one" arg2 arg3 "argument four"


cmd:>command "nestedcommand "nested arguments""


See the ambiguity with the associaton of quotations? """" could mean ()() or it could mean (()). Since windows filenames have spaces, you have to put them in quotes. I think windows parses it is the first case and then strips the quotes off. The trick is to put them back on again. %~f1 takes argument 1 strips the quotes and converts into a windows path. So then I put the quotes back on again with \”. So this means /usr/local/bin/runemacs-helper "file name" is what gets sent to bash. Finally the left-apostrophe quote trick I got from here

² Other precautions: I use a limited privilege account. I also check msconfig and deny startup to everything non-essential.