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Time for another software related post. People familiar with the GNU/Unix system would know that the standard way to install about any GNU software from code is to run the following commands configure make sudo make install These commands are from the GNU autotools environment. Knowing the GNU environment, these tools are what I used to compile most of the (relatively small) pieces of code I wrote. Until I discovered CMake. CMake, or Cross-platform Make is a tool that serves the same functionality as the GNU autotools (hereafter referred to as autohell). As the name suggests, CMake can be used to compile software across multiple platforms. Why am I encouraging CMake over autohell? Well, firstly, it’s not autohell! The GNU autotools are extremely useful when compiling on Linux. That’s what they are designed for. Cross compilation is extremely easy with the --host= flag. Unfortunately, when it comes to using them on Windows, the system just becomes a pain in the neck. P...

This post is born out of frustration and panic and sheer anger at what happened to me last night. I decided to reformat my hard-disk because I had a lot of clutter on the drive and my computer was running slow. So, there was the issue of taking backups. This time, I decided to ditch the flash drive and take a backup on a DVD, so that there would be a permanent backup of my files. And because I was too lazy to download a proper DVD burning software, I used the Windows DVD writing software. Well, so here goes. The files were written, and could be read on my desktop which runs Windows XP. Since the files were on DVD, I hardly bothered about multiple backups. Heck, you really cannot delete from a recordable DVD, can you? And therein lay my fallacy. After having reformatted my hard-disk, I tried restoring from the DVD. I found that the DVD was extremely fragmented (yeah, you got that right, the DVD was fragmented), as a result of which my DVD drive went crazy trying to read the disk. I mana...

ERROR_SUCCESS. This macro would be familiar to all those who have done some programming in WIN32. It is the output of the GetLastError() function to check the thread's last error state when no error has occurred. Weird, isn't it? I mean, if it is a success, then why is it marked as an error in the macro? This is one example of a badly made API. APIs are considered bad when programming in them becomes non-intuitive. Software is said to be bad (or said to suck) when it seems counter-intuitive to the user. There is one very simple example of this. Start notepad. Type in any text. Click on close. The message that you see is: This makes no sense to me as a user. Of course, the programmer follows the approach that he creates a temporary file called Untitled , and in that file he allows the user to make all his changes. But how am I, as a user to understand that? A similar disconnect occurs even between two different programmers. That is why it takes a whole lot of effort to make ...

If there is anything that annoys a geek like me, it is being forced to use/do/say/think something. More so if it is useless and annoying. I have a Compaq laptop. It came pre-installed with Windows Vista. Along with the OS came a bunch of goodies utterly useless software by HP. They were HP Health Check, HP Battery Check, HP Wireless Assistant and HP Update. I shall now proceed to attack these software one-by-one. I start with HP Health Check. Perhaps the most annoying software of them all. It checks your PC periodically for issues(?) and then gives the most annoying pop-up of them all. It reads HP Health Check has finished checking your PC. Click this balloon to view results. And when you click the balloon to view the issues, most of the time, you are greeted with this message: HP Health Check did not find any issues with your computer Sometimes, it finds a whole bunch of drivers which are outdated. But it does not update them, nor does it give an option to select the drivers to b...

You hear this everytime. Everyone who is uses the internet often has his own favourite browser. And geeks have all kinds of favourites, text editors, OS, desktop environment, et cetera . But more about that later. I am narrating a story of arch-enemies that started around 1998. Microsoft bundled its crappy web browser with its relatively good OS. That meant that everyone who used the OS because it was good now used the crappy browser as well. This skewed all stats about browser usage. Suddenly, IE was the most used browser of them all. One of the prerequisites of being a geek is that you need to be prepared to kill the person who criticizes your favourite (that you are not able to do the same is another story!). So, naturally, the enmity began. Well, was IE all that bad? I don't think so. It was good to have a browser built into the OS. Moreover, IE innovated and is responsible for so many of the things that make up today's web, and which we take for granted. It was the first b...