Microbits

UPDATE: For solutions to box drawing issues, see this post.

I just spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out why the portable Cygwin installation (I haven’t really tested the portable part yet) I was working on refused to set my custom prompt automatically.

Turns out that bash doesn’t look for .bashrc for login shells, but instead looks for .bash_profile, which is what I’m used to using. For more info, see this nice page.

As far as making Cygwin itself portable, it seems to be as simple as this article suggests, however, there are some invalid and possibly unneeded (still worked when I removed them) commands in the batch files.

Here’s the batch file I use to start rxvt (I fixed some invalid options and removed some stuff):

@echo off

for /F %%A in ('cd') do set WD=%%A
set path=%WD%bin;%WD%usr\X11R6\bin;%path%
set SHELL=/bin/bash
set CYGWIN=codepage:437
set HOME=/home/user

:: Custom font for box drawing issues (not used atm)
:: bin\run rxvt -sl 1500 -bg black -fg gray -sr -fn 'Lucida ConsoleP-13' -tn rxvt-cygwin-native -e /bin/bash --login -i

:: Normal font
bin\run rxvt -sl 1500 -bg black -fg gray -sr -tn rxvt-cygwin-native -e /bin/bash --login -i

If you have several old PCs lying around, you could turn them into a grid, a single computer that uses all their resources together.

I haven’t found a good use for a grid personally, but I found a nice piece software to setup a SSI (Single System Image, basically means one OS running on multiple machines) grid, and a nice tutorial.

If I had a grid running MySQL, the 35 million row DB table I use would probably search pretty fast.

In other news, Panda3D (a game engine, usable from C++ or Python) looks like it has excellent documentation, something that a lot of engines are lacking. I’m also wondering if I should buy a Mac now that Snow Leopard is out (that’s when I said I’d buy one)… I wonder if I’d really use the Mac applications…