Originally published at Fiberglass flowers. You can comment here or there.

Lua recently became very popular. I encountered Lua scripting in several applications including popular games, I believe it’s used in even more then Wikipedia says.

It’s extremely simple:

• 6 data types (that’s counting “nul” and “function”),
• no C++-style OOP out-of-box (but you can program one, he-he),
• 400K of pure-C code

but is loaded with in-fashion features like

• first-class functions,
• closures,
• coroutines…
• again, Wikipedia is the best.

The only metaprogramming tutorial (with a ready code to implement virtual methods) is “Programming in Lua” book. Still, I don’t see a code to implement parametric polymorphism… Maybe it’s a reason for another post

Redistributed book removed: it violated copyright.

Одно радует: если бы у Джоббса была "копейка", фирмы "Эппл" бы не существовало.

...просто он так пахнет.
Однако, у него есть development version, в которой есть групповой чат в десктопной версии, и напоминалки из календаря и почты. И что-то ещё.
Можно ли запустить групповой чат в другом клиенте - предстоит выяснить. Надо отследить, к какому каталогу юзеров лезет клиент...
А ещё от неё отвалилось голосовое общение и передача файлов. Видимо, переписывают полностью.
Версия вышла 4го апреля.

19:02:19 Saix: классика System of a doubt
19:02:37 Saix: Egc
19:02:40 Saix: Упс :)
19:02:47 Saix: ну туда :)
19:03:19 Singalen: Ммм?
19:04:11 Saix: иногда тяжело общаться сразу с несколькими людьми, особенно асинхронно...
19:04:24 Saix: всё-таки распеределённые вычисления это зло :)
19:04:37 Singalen: Аналогично. Особенно под мартини во время английского киноклуба...

Отметился в интересном посте про тупых менеджеров у mike67. Вот коммент, который стоит сделать отдельным постом :)

Originally published at Fiberglass flowers. You can comment here or there.

So here’s first beta version of our product: P-Navigator, our Yellow Submarine.

What does it do? Mostly it’s a front-end to web search service, plus some more tasties.

Why desktop client? For every search, it does several searches at once. This should save time.

Here are screenshots, here’s a 7M Flash video.

If WebFerret has 10M downloads, why can’t we have some?

Lot of things are done, even more are due to do. Like speed it up, add Wikipedia search, getting page tags from social networks, page clustering and graphical maps, etc etc etc.

Let’s see how it goes…

Originally published at Fiberglass flowers. You can comment here or there.

A couple of notes how NOT to use MSBuild.

1. Don’t generate files with AssemblyInfo task. It screws comments, screws InternalsVisibleTo attributes, and whatever else it doesn’t account for.
   ( Read more... )

cray_flatline:
— Приятно всё-таки встретить человека, который утром на вопрос "Минералку будешь?" отвечает не "КхххДАААА!..хххх...", а "Нет, спасибо".

Я:
— Мы не ждём у моря погоды, взять её у него — наша задача!

Упражнение на владение техническим английским:
Перевести на русский английский слово "Пимпочка". Сохранить технический смысл и фан.
Права на перевод чур мои.

Originally published at Fiberglass flowers. You can comment here or there.

Another problem with MSBuild bootstrappers that can screw all your installation…

If scheduling reboot after installing .NET or other prerequisites, bootstrapper copies itself to run from TEMP on boot. Why not staying where it is - who knows. And definitely, all the other MSIs are not copied, so it won’t find them. Reproduced for me.

Now give up and go write own bootstrapper. I’m setiously considering going for InnoSetup deployment.

For now, I’m trying a crazy ting, to copy MSI to TEMP for Setup.exe to find it after reincarnation… It’s the way to use given tools.

П.:
— До завтра успеем сделать?
Саша:
— А сегодня - это завтра?

(Пауза, заполненная разговорами о депривации сна, Минине с Пожарским, царе Митридоте, синхрофазотронах и ползающих холмах)

Я:
— Какой сегодня день?
(Общественность в лице Саши и Кости колеблется)
Таня:
— Второй.

Таня:
— А что с Netscape Navigator?
Саша:
— Он умер. А что?
Таня:
— Да так. Грустно...
Я (банальным голосом):
— Все мы здесь временно...
Таня (печально):
— И только Майкрософт — фарева.

Originally published at Fiberglass flowers. You can comment here or there.

Now I know it.

It’s Windows Installer error 1618 that I didn’t see somewhy when attempting to fix .NET bootstrapper. Either I was inattentive or it wasn’t there: “Another copy of msiexec is running”. You can’t have two Windows Installers running, at least if one of them installs .NET. Information is from this maillist post.

Why? Implementation limitations, I believe. No sane reasons for such a contract, no article mentioned this. Surely, who’s going to declare own “features” of that kind - just a gentle hints that “you should better use bootstrapper”. Another reason to long for a systems where setup is just a copy.

So go pack a MSI, then make a MSBuild bootstrapper.

Oh wait, do I have to have 2 files in my installation? And my customers can’t download one file?

Yes. Or go for WinZip Self-Extractor, or WinRar, or whatever else.

What about build scripts? For WinRar, here’s a nice sample. For WinZip sfx, there’s also a command-line interface. Do a

wzipse32 %ARC_NAME% -setup -auto -runasuser -le -i ../icon.ico -wait msiexec -c ".\setup.exe"

WinZip will do the thing, though displaying some dialogs we don’t need at all.

Oh, WinRar won’t work, because it erases temporary files upon setup.exe completion. And we need to wait for msiexec, because setup.exe exits earlier. What a pity.

Originally published at Fiberglass flowers. You can comment here or there.

After Microsoft didn’t include .NET 3.5 in any current release of Windows (read “Vista service pack 1″), some of us developers who believed in long-ago C# 3.0 ads, had to roll back to .NET 3.0 and C# 2.0.

Including me.

Not mentioning pain of rolling back all LINQ tasties in code and debugging our replacements (do you know why you can’t implement Where() just with yield-style function?), it means installing .NET 3.0.

It seemed to be not a problem, having a MSBuild code snippet that worked for 3.5 - just replace 3.5 with 3.0:

<ItemGroup>
<BootstrapperFile Include="Microsoft.Net.Framework.3.0">
<ProductName>.NET Framework 3.0</ProductName>
</BootstrapperFile>
<BootstrapperFile Include="Microsoft.Windows.Installer.3.1">
<ProductName>Windows Installer 3.1</ProductName>
</BootstrapperFile>

<Target Name="Bootstrapper">
<GenerateBootstrapper
ApplicationName="blah blah blah blah"
BootstrapperItems="@(BootstrapperFile)"
BootstrapperKeyFile=""
OutputPath="obj"
ComponentsLocation="HomeSite" CopyComponents="false"
SupportUrl="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=10CC340B-F857-4A14-83F5-25634C3BF043"
Culture="en" Path="$(BootstrapperPath)"/>
</Target>

Won’t work.

Hell why? Who knows. Logs in temp don’t give proper diagnostics, nor system events do. WPF fails to install at some point onto every XP installations we have, including clean special test XP SP2 VMWare images downloaded from Microsoft.

Update: Here’s the answer.

Now I rolled back to dotnetfx3setup.exe redistributable. It’s 2.8M compared to 300K bootstrapper generated by MSBuild, and it’s a pain to see installer grow…And if .NET 3.0 is already installed it starts to uninstall it… and there is no key to make it just “check or install”, need to trick it via WiX.

But we have to pay it. Oh my.

All over the Web I see no evidence that any man walked this path before. For.NET 2.0 - a lot of mentions and code samples. And completely empty for .NET 3.0.

Удивительно, как талантливо я нынче вляпываюсь в истории.
Для начала, в пятницу у меня спёрли телефон. С вай-фаем. Сам дурак, без куртки ехал в переполненном метро, у двери, из чехла на поясе только ленивый не достанет.

У нас релиз, который волшебным образом релизится уже две недели, и, чую, будет ещё минимум столько же - "такую полночь неплохо бы и продлить". И отдохнуть удастся ещё орган знает когда.
Ночевать на работе, оказывается, можно с комфортом. Если на всё наплевать.

Самые острые ощущения были вчера. ( Заинтриговал? )

Жизнь тяжела, но, к счастью, коротка.

Originally published at Fiberglass flowers. You can comment here or there.

Did you ever try parsing C++? What about parsing for every combination of possible define-s at once?

Microsoft has a static code checker tools for C++, like FxCop for .NET.

That’s awfully complex task, you now see. In .NET you can analyze bytecode, and luckily don’t really need to account for conditional compilation. In C++ where everthing is about #ifdef - it’s hell.

I never heared of anything like that. Though Insure++ or AQTime do way more things when profiling runtime, they of course find only things that were on necessary execution paths.

Тут кое-кто ищет джавистов в Днепре.
Им очень надо, так что можно поговорить за всякое.
Стучите :)
Комменты без личных сообщений расскриниваю.

Originally published at Fiberglass flowers. You can comment here or there.

Some pages that somewhy didn’t appear at top of Google searches for WiX help.

• WiXWiki.com - pretty useful and contains some snippets you won’t find in WiX manual or tutorial. Many of rare code snippets
• WiX development releases; some broken (last two broken in VS 2008), some contain the very things you’ll need;
• Justin Rockwood’s blog entry with Votive (Visual Studio addon) preprocessor variables. The blog itself is also thing to read;
• Alex Shevcuk’s blog entry on checking pre- and postconditions in WiX. His whole cycle on WiX - I also highly recommend it;
• Separately, .NET: WixWiki pages about checking for .NET runtime and deploying it with a bootstrapper generated with MSBuild;
• Another WiX wiki on mindcapers.net, I particularily needed ICE38 error explanation;
• John Robbins’ blog entry on patching patching with WiX. You don’t want number of auto-update patches to grow quadratically?
• Last but not the least, MSI properties reference on MSDN.

Originally published at Fiberglass flowers. You can comment here or there.

All the software is equally bad…

Well, I know some pieces of software that are good, but I won’t mention them today.

One of our msbuild vs nant choice criteria is  a product versioning support.

Sad or funny things are:

• both don’t include sane tool out of box;
• both need installing NAntContrib or MSBuild Community Tasks;
• even then both can’t sanely write AssemblyInfo.cs in order to leave other properties intact; if you had InternalsVisibleTo satellite unit test assembly - it won’t build then;

NAntContrib Version task is way more functional.

Additionally, MSDN page design where MSBuild reference manual lives, is awful.

I wonder if it’s the reason to choose a build tool, while they are approximately equal.

OTOH, MSBuild has a great GenerateBootstrapper task to install .NET framework from MSI (WiX sample included in the referenced wiki).

Википедия - великий источник поводов выпить.
Сегодня, к примеру - день числа п, день рождения Эйнштейна и ДР ядра Линукса 1.0.
Или вот, за дружбу народов на орбите...

В Firefox 3 авторы проделали великолепную работу - сильно оптимизировали использование памяти, отловили большую часть утечек.
В результате в пиковых точках ФФ3 ест, как ФФ2 в лучшие свои моменты.
А ИЕ7 вообще не освообждает память.
Подробности и красивый график памяти смотрите тут pavlov.net.
Поставил. Летает. Рекомендую.
Поставил последний опенсорсный FAR. Кодировки сломаны нафиг, не рекомендую.