Drealmer's Tumblr

TortoiseBlame as Visual Studio external tool

Add an External Tool pointing to TortoiseProc.exe with the following parameters:

/command:blame /path:"$(ItemPath)"
/line:$(CurLine)
/startrev:1
/endrev:-1

Video Game Developers in Belgium - update

LuGus Studios has been added to the list here: (link)

kkrunchy and false positives

I have been using the kkrunchy EXE packer (link) for a while, but I only noticed now that the resulting EXE were way too often reported as malicious by antivirus software. VirusTotal (link) reports a 35% detection rate, which is way too high to ignore. Googling around I found the following quote (link) from ryg (of Farbrausch fame), the guy behind the amazing kkrunchy:

long story short: i’m done with exe packers. the overall win32 environment is just too hostile towards packed EXEs for me to bother with it

That really saddens me, that was the best tool around. But being the best means a lot of malicious software used it to hide themselves, and the baby got thrown with the bathwater.

Looks like I’ll have to turn to UPX (link) which is a bit less efficient, but is only reported as suspicious by 5% of the antivirus on VirusTotal (namely by TrendMicro).

Escaping wildcards in Perforce filenames

To refer to files containing the Perforce revision specifier wildcards (@ and #), file matching wildcard (*), or positional substitution wildcard (%%) in either the file name or any directory component, use the ASCII expression of the character’s hexadecimal value. ASCII expansion applies only to the following four characters:

• @ becomes %40
• # becomes %23
• * becomes %2A
• % becomes %25

Extract from Perforce documentation on File Specifications (link).

Lua quiz

Explain how this:

...
t = { [123] = 'hello' }
print(string.format('t[%d] = %s', key, tostring(t[key])))

Can output this:

t[123] = nil

svn move, file gone

This one puzzled me quite a bit, that was a strong case of PEBKAC but still…

I have a file in directory A, I do an svn move from A to B, so now the file is in B. I commit the whole thing, do an update on another computer and A turns into B, but the file is not there anymore… What happened?

svn log tells me the file should be there, svn list confirms… yet there is no file on the computer.

$ svn info | grep '^Depth:'
Depth: empty

Damnit, sparse directories!

svn co --set-depth infinite

Restoring the executable bit

I got a bunch of files on Mac OS X who lost their executable bit (because they got copied to and from a Windows host), I wanted to automatically restore them all. Being such a newbie with bash it took me some time but I managed to get this one running, and I am so proud I feel like sharing it with the world. That’s supposed to be just one line.

for f in *; do if [[ `file $f` == *executable* ]];
then chmod a+x $f; fi done;

Am I doing this right?

Goodbye Jean Bartik

The news didn’t make the headlines, and I only discovered right now that Jean Bartik died this year on March 23. She was one of the ENIAC programmers, and worked on the BINAC and UNIVAC at EMCC. She was an invaluable source of information and first-hand anecdotes on all these early pieces of wizardry. Her autobiography should be published soon, I can’t wait to read it.

Sources:

• The ENIAC blog (link)
• The New York Times (link)
• Computerworld (link)

disable Google country redirection

I live in Belgium, a country that has three national languages: French, Dutch and German. I speak French, I barely understand Dutch, and I can’t speak any German.

But I know enough English to run all my software in English, always.

Now every once in a while, Google realizes that I am in Belgium and switches to Dutch. And in the case of Google Groups, there doesn’t even seem to be a setting to go back to English (or I could not find it).

So this link is invaluable to me : http://www.google.com/ncr

NCR stands for No Country Redirection, accessing Google through this link will prevent Google from ever trying to guess your language based on your location.

Water Finds a Crack

Some time ago I read a very interesting article in Game Developer Magazine, and the full text of this article has just been posted on the author’s web site.

Water Finds a Crack - Soren Johnson: (link)

Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. What gives the most reward for the least risk? What strategy provides the highest chance – or even a guaranteed chance – of success? Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.

That really strikes a chord for me, it might explain why I found playing some economic simulation games tedious, and to some extent why I liked Transport Tycoon that much: micro-optimization there was insanely expensive (literally moving mountains) and provided a nice end-game gold sink.