Have you heard? You can crash Vista and Windows 7 really easily with the following super basic code! (Tested 3x on roomies computer)

See details Here!

At $work I manage the subversion repositories for all of the software that we develop. It’s certainly not something that I’m great at, but I’ve used it longer than most so I am the most qualified to deal with it.

Furthermore, at work we use this tool (Freescale?) which, when it creates a project, creates a Boot directory and a Con directory. Ok, so I had helped our head honcho EE create a repository to store his project data and versions. He’s puttering along and he thinks, “Hey, I want to ‘save’ this version so I can go back to it later!” So I explain to him tags and how to set it up and all this jazz. Well, it turns out that when we made the repo initially we did not make tags, trunk, and branches, like we should have. We just put everything in the root of the repo. Foolish! So anyway, I tell him that we can reorganize it fairly easy and we do that. So we make the changes, delete the old directory, and recheckout from trunk…

It failed. It could not check out the directory! Some of you may be able to guess why: in Windows you cannot (easily) create a directory named “con” (or com, or a few others.) So we are having the hardest time getting it to check out. Meanwhile he has to make a release for the customer and I am under the gun. So he pulls up a copy he made (how?) and gets back to work and I try to figure out how to deal with this in my office. At this point he has asked me to just revert the changes.

So I go back to my office, try checking it out a few different ways and have no luck. So finally I get an idea, I figure I’ll check it out in a virtual machine with Linux installed! So I do that, I run the reverse merge to undo all of our changes, and I check everything back in. It worked!

So the moral of the story? Don’t name folders “con.”

I work at a Microsoft Company more or less. We use SQL Server, IIS (moving to Apache…), and various flavors of Windows for all of our machines. I haven’t had the cojones to install Ubunutu on my desktop yet, so I am stuck with cygwin and friends. But the perl that runs my server is not in cygwin. That means that if I want to do valid testing I have to do it with the regular perl. I’ve tried running prove from the cygwin commandline, (ie, /cygdrive/c/usr/bin/perl/prove,) but it just hangs. So I just have to suck it up and run prove from cmd.

The color highlighting doesn’t work (or at least I couldn’t get it to) so with code that sometimes throws a lot of warnings (that’s intentional, I am testing croaks often) I see way too much noise to follow what’s going on. Redirection to the rescue! Instead of just running prove, I can run

instead and it redirects all of the warnings to the file foo. Although it’s obvious, it makes running tests that much easier, and I think running tests should really be the path of least resistance. So thank you DOS makers, for implementing STDERR redirection, I didn’t think you’d have done that, but you did.