//g9e.net

I just came across a new open source news site: opensource-news.com. Don’t know yet wether it’s worth to subscribe to their feed, I’ll watch it for some time and decide again.

This is more a hint for Windows developers coming originally from UNIX systems. If you’re missing tools like ps, top, pstree or strace you should have a look at the website www.sysinternals.com which offers a suite of advanced system utilities.

A very handy tool in the UNIX world is tail. In particular the option -F proves useful if you want to view log files. But what do you do if you’re working with Windows? Of course, you have to search the Internet for a Windows port and go through the compile-hell. I have to admit, compiling tail wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass as compiler bigger programs. Nonetheless, I wasn’t willing to spend time searching and installing a Windows port of tail and thus I coded it within a couple of minutes. The following Python script only implements tail -F filename, but that was sufficient for my purposes.

import sys, time

lastLine = 0
f = 0

def dumpFile(f, start):
  f.seek(start)
  cur = start

  for line in f:
    print line,
    cur = f.tell()

  return cur

while True:
  try:
    f = open(sys.argv[1], 'rU')
    lastLine = dumpFile(f, lastLine)
    time.sleep(1.5)
  except IOError:
    print 'no such file' + sys.argv[1]
  finally:
    if f:
      f.close

I didn’t know that Dell is selling smartphones. Dell Lightning is a Windows Phone 7 powered device, Dell Thunder runs Android. Both phones look awesome.

I’ve advertised Paul Harrington’s blog post on WPF in Visual Studio 2010. Here’s a list of all parts:

1. Introduction
2. Performance tuning
3. Focus and Activation
4. Direct Hosting of WPF content
5. Window management
6. Automated UI Testing
7. Wrap up

I’ve just came across the article Microsoft Aims to Bring apt/rpm-like Tools to Windows. It describes how difficult it is to compile and install open source software on Windows. Microsoft developer Garrett Serack hast started the community-driven project Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform (CoApp for short) which

aims to create a vibrant Open Source ecosystem on Windows by providing the technologies needed to build a complete community-driven Package Management System, along with tools to enable developers to take advantage of features of the Windows platform.

.

Are you interested in GUI programming on the Windows platform? Then you should know about WPF: Windows Presentation Forms, the next generation of GUI toolkits on Windows. Paul Harrington discusses WPF in Visual Studio 2010.

I’ve just switched my blog to WordPress. Don’t know yet whether I like it or not.