Why do alt,ctrl and space get stuck in Windows?

This has been buggin me since I ran WinXP (Or was it 2000?).

I discovered yesterday it's because of the Sticky keys Lock-modifier-keys-when-pressed-twice-in -a-row misfeature (under control panel - easy access centre).

Disabling that lowers your daily stresslevel. Enjoy. :)

The singularity is coming...

I've begun re-reading the book Accelerando by Charles Stross. The first half is pretty mind-boggling and fascinating and definitely worth a read if you're into software development, sci-fi and wonder where humanity is going. The latter half falters a bit as the story is trying to wrap itself up, but if you only manage the first part I hope you'll still found it worthwhile.

It resonates well with Ray Kurzweil's talk on TED.com, which I've just watched. Even though the video is old news (being from 2005 and released in 2006) I feel it needs to be spread a bit more. I guess we're not at the point where everyone knows everything new within a few weeks, but I wager that the time for spreading news is shrinking in the same way as everything else. :)

If you haven't heard about universal exponential growth or the singularity: watch the talk and, if you fell intrigued, read the book. Period.

Mercurial and python 2.6! :)

This is a follow up on my previous post 'Distributed Version Control Systems on Windows' where I just want to note that I've made some progress with Mercurial by using Python 2.6 instead of 2.5.2.

The good thing is that Python 2.6 uses MSVS 2008, which I do have available. So with that, I can use setuptools to compile python libs. Including Mercurial!

Compiling and install Mercurial into my Python 2.6 64-bit installation was dead easy, by the books all the way! Yay!

That will probably help with running buildbot/mercurial/trac on a pure windows-based server (as in no cygwin). But I'm considering using a linux box for this anyway, since it's smoother and more easy to add misc minor stuff to. (Not disregarding setting up ssh-accounts for mercurial users, which is what I've done currently.)

I'm currently using it to try to assist the Mercurial situation on BuildBot, which is lacking a bit, especially when it comes to in-repo branches. There are patches on the buildbot trac, but they haven't been applied and the crucial one won't be added until it gets a proper test-case.

So, I'm working on that. There's some issue with line-endings preventing try-patches to apply cleanly in the tests. (It works in real life, as I did use the try-functionality at my last job. Never got it ready for every developer though...)

patch.exe on vista - part 2

I've updated my previous post on getting patch.exe to work on Vista with UAC.

Short version: msysgit has a patch.exe that convinces Vista it doens't need to be omnipotent.

Updated 2010-11-26: There is also a comment on my SourceForge bug regarding unxutils's patch.exe.  The suggested fix works well.