Saturday was the day of the wedding, a fantastic day, it was a great service and reception, H’s dad’s speech was great, as were the best men’s (there were 2 of em!), and as was Kris’s, including an emotional and respectful toast to Stuart. Oh, and the weather was good too (if a little windy at times).

We were suited and booted, and I know that doesn’t happen often for me, but I suspect even less so for Dave Dev, in fact, I can’t recall ever seeing him in a suit… so here’s evidence:

Here’s H&K cutting their cake:

Here’s a vid of H&K arriving at the reception:

After a quiet sunday recovering from my hangover, watching the grand prix (well the end of it anyway) and having a chat with James P who was camping with the family up near Ripley (in Codnor I believe, and if that’s the case I’m surprised he didn’t come back to find his car and his tent on bricks :) we headed back down to Christy & Dave’s place ready for my flight back on Monday morning. We squeezed in a little curry at a local curry house, which was great!

Then it was the start of the long flight back (well shorter than when I came, as I messed up and ended up with a 6hr wait in Singapore on the outward journey), and I arrived back home at 9pm-ish on Tuesday, just managed to start the washing machine going before I nodded off.

It was well worth the trip back, and great to catch up with people who I hadn’t seen for a long time. Although the travelling was pretty gruelling and I don’t plan to do it again any time soon!

Thanks must go to my Sis and her hubby for spending the bank holiday weekend ferrying me up to Belper and back, I’ll return the favour when you come over to Sydney, Christy :)

First thing is to follow this great post by Matt Hawley, it has the links and instructions to set up all the required packages, python, pywin32, mercurial, and isapi-wsgi. Follow that post up to the config part.

Now my setup differs from Matts, he creates a new website to host mercurial and starts it on port 81, I wanted to use port 80/443 and have it play nicely with the rest of the WHS standard web sites, but I didn’t want to have to configure host headers, and wildcard certs, etc. I discovered that using host headers were a problem too, apparently they mess up the existing software in my HP WHS, so I decided to go with a virtual directory under the main web page.

When modifying the ‘hgwebdir_wsgi.py’ file to set your hgweb_config path, I also set the path_strip and path_prefix to 1 rather than 0. It doesn’t seem to work if you only set path_prefix to 1.

Follow Matt’s instructions for generating the DLL shim called _hgwebdir_wsgi.dll.

I created a shared folder in WHS to contain the repos (because you can’t access the drives directly that are used in the drive set), so set that path in hgweb.config file:

[paths]
/ = \\server\repos\*

In IIS Manager create a new app pool called Mercurial, then create a new virtual directory pointing to the folder you created in Matt’s post step 1. (mine was c:\inetpub\hg, but it could be anywhere you like)

If you do use a network share for your repos, you will need to change the identity that the app pool uses to a user that has permissions to access that folder, or give access permissions to Network Service. If you change the identity to a local user, follow the instructions in this post for assigning the correct groups and rights to the user, otherwise you might just get a ‘Service Unavailable’ message when you browse to the page.

Click the configuration button to configure the application.

Click Insert in the Wildcard Application Maps and select the _hgwebdir_wsgi.dll file. Important! Ensure you uncheck the ‘Verify that file exists’ checkbox, otherwise you will get 404 errors when you try to browse the site.

In the directory security tab click the Edit button on the Authentication and Access Control and disable anonymous access, also enable basic authentication and disable integrated windows authentication. This is needed for mercurial authentication, but credentials are transmitted in plain text so shouldn’t be used on the public internet without ssl.

To enable ssl, assuming your site already has a certificate etc, just click edit on the secure communications, and check the require secure channel checkbox.

Now you should be able to browse to https://yoursite/hg and see the repository summary page.

The commands I gave previously for adding p4merge as the merge tool didn’t do quite what I was expecting, and didn’t actually work :)

After expecting git to use this merge tool whenever merges were needed it doesn’t, you have to run it when auto merge fails using this command (discovered from this SO question):

git mergetool

This will then go through each file with conflicts and run p4merge on them. Except that each time it tried to run p4merge it failed, so I guess the command was setup incorrectly.

I took a look at the .gitconfig file in my user folder and noticed that each of the file parameters to the p4merge.exe had got lots of slashes:

[user]
	name = Mike Hunt
	email = someone@somewhere.com
[core]
	editor = notepad.exe
[merge]
	tool = p4merge
[mergetool "p4merge"]
	cmd = p4merge.exe \\\"$BASE\\\" \\\"$LOCAL\\\" \\\"$REMOTE\\\" \\\"$MERGED\\\"

So I changed it to this:

[user]
	name = Mike Hunt
	email = someone@somewhere.com
[core]
	editor = notepad.exe
[merge]
	tool = p4merge
[mergetool "p4merge"]
	cmd = p4merge.exe "$BASE" "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE" "$MERGED"
[diff]
	tool = p4merge
[difftool "p4merge"]
	cmd = p4merge.exe "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"

And now it runs p4merge for the merges and shows the files properly, and also note the entry for the diff tool, so it uses that for diffs as well, using the command:

git difftool

Other things that had me scratching my head for a while were:

1) If I delete a folder from the working set I couldn’t stage the delete (or commit it), which I discovered was due to me not using:

git add -u .

or

git add -A .

-u (or –update) stages files based on what is in the index rather than the working set, so it won’t add new files, but will update newly updated files that are already staged, and it will also remove files that were staged but have been removed from the working set.

-A (or –all) will do as -u but will also stage new files as well (lesson learned, “use git add -A .” from now on!) More details here

2) “git pull” performs a “git fetch” then a “git merge”. The fetch fetches the remote branch to a local tracking branch based on the remote and branch you fetched, e.g. “git fetch unfuddle master” fetches the master branch from the unfuddle remote to a tracking branch locally called ‘unfuddle/master’. The merge then merges that tracking branch to the local branch. e.g. if you are in the local branch “git merge unfuddle/master” will merge the changes.

3) If you mess up and want to reset your working files to the last commit:

git reset --hard HEAD

4) If you only want to reset individual files:

git checkout -- hello.cs

will reset the local working file hello.cs to the staged version

or

git checkout HEAD hello.cs

will reset the local working file to the HEAD version (last local commit)

Here are some handy links that I have come across for finding this info:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/255202/how-do-i-view-git-diff-output-with-visual-diff-program

http://gitguru.com/2009/02/22/integrating-git-with-a-visual-merge-tool/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/866262/p4merge-error

http://www.andymcintosh.com/?p=33

http://www.gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/11/pull-with-rebase.html

After some investigation I found msysgit which is basically git on windows. It effectively installs a bash shell on your windows box with all the git commands. I also decided to use Unfuddle as an online store of my source code. Here are the steps I took to get setup, mainly so that I can find them again if I need to do this later…

Installing msysgit was pretty straight forward, I accepted the defaults and it installed just fine. (This was after discovering the right package to download, as that is not immediately obvious, but it’s here, the git package, rather than the msysgit package)

Setting up git to work with unfuddle and setting up ssh keys etc was the next step, and also setting up the repo to work with Visual Studio, which is basically setting up a .gitignore file to tell git not to include certain files and filetypes in the source code control

Once git is up and running you should then set up some global config, an ssh-key can be created using the following:

ssh-keygen –C “your@email.com” –t rsa

This will create the key in a folder called .ssh in your user folder. You then use this key to add to unfuddle (or github or wherever) so that you can be authorised against the remote repo.

Then set your username and email:

git config -–global user.name “Your Name”
git config –-global user.email "Your@Email.com”

In your user folder there should be a .profile file, if there isn’t then you can use

touch .profile 

which will create a file without a filename and only an extension (you can’t do this in explorer) Then add this to it, which starts up the SSH Agent when bash is run, so that you only have to enter the ssh key password once.

SSH_ENV=$HOME/.ssh/environment

function start_agent {
     echo "Initialising new SSH agent...";
     /usr/bin/ssh-agent | sed 's/^echo/#echo/' > "${SSH_ENV}"
     echo succeeded
     chmod 600 "${SSH_ENV}"
     . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
     /usr/bin/ssh-add;
}

# Source SSH settings, if applicable

if [ -f "${SSH_ENV}" ]; then
     . ${SSH_ENV} > /dev/null
     #ps ${SSH_AGENT_PID} doesn't work under cywgin
     ps -ef | grep ${SSH_AGENT_PID} | grep ssh-agent$ > /dev/null || {
         start_agent;
     }
else
     start_agent;
fi

This question on SO tells you how to change git’s default editor, I changed it from vi to notepad. (I use notepad2, but it’s installed to take over from notepad, so opening notepad.exe opens notepad2)

git config –-global core.editor “notepad.exe”

This question on SO tells you how to change the default merge tool to p4merge, which is my merge tool of choice:

git config --global merge.tool p4merge
git config --global mergetool.p4merge.cmd ‘p4merge.exe \”$BASE\” \”$LOCAL\” \”$REMOTE\” \”$MERGED\”’

Then that should be the environment set up, after that its just a case of either creating a new repo or cloning one from unfuddle.

This page has the basic info on how to do it:

1) If you are starting a new repo, create it in unfuddle, then create a folder locally for it then:

git init

1b) you might also want to create a .gitignore file in the repo folder, so that you can tell git to only commit your source code, mine looks like this (you can tell where I ‘borrowed’ it from):

# .gitignore for .NET projects
# Thanks to Derick Bailey
# http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/derickbailey/archive/2009/05/18/a-net-c-developer-s-gitignore-file.aspx
# Additional Thanks to
# - Alexey Abramov

# Standard VS.NET and ReSharper Foo
obj
bin
*.csproj.user
*ReSharper*
*resharper*
*.suo
*.cache
*Thumbs.db
*.scc

# Other useful stuff
*.bak
*.cache
*.log
*.swp
*.user
_compareTemp
_notes
aspnet_client
httpd.parse.errors

# Office Temp Files
~$*

# If you have a deploy folder
deploy
deploy/*

# Exclude ALL DLLs?
#*.dll

2) Associate the repo with the unfuddle remote repo:

git remote add unfuddle git@subdomain.unfuddle.com:subdomain/abbreviation.git

git config remote.unfuddle.push refs/heads/master:refs/heads/master

2a) If you already have code in the repo you can clone it

3) Finally, write some code, and when you are happy and want to commit the changes to your local repo:

git add *
git commit

4) Then push the changes to the remote unfuddle repo:

git push unfuddle master

Dave pursuaded me to go with him to sit in the sun on the grass at the botanical gardens and I’m sat here on the grass typing this. Not a bad idea Dave! I’ve attached some pictures of Dave enjoying himself, mind you it’s only about the 3rd day or so of sun that we have had since he got here, so he’s been enjoying the decidedly English-like weather up until yesterday!

Oh and happy Halloween too!

I’ve managed to steer clear of eBooks for a long time, being a firm believer of having a nice chunk of mashed up tree in my hand is part of getting into a good book. However, I have recently installed iPhone app Stanza and downloaded a couple of eBooks. Partly because books are really expensive over here, and partly because I didn’t want to lug a book around with me on my way to work.

I have to say that I have got into reading on my iPhone, I’ve bought a copy of the book I am reading at the moment, Day Watch by Sergey Lukyanenko and just carried on reading from where I had already got to in the paper book. I had thought before I gave it a try that the iPhone would be too small to read on, but using it I don’t think that’s the case. The app remembers where you got to in each book, it has online catalogues that you can browse to either purchase books and download them there and then in the app or safari, or just download from the many free catalogues too, like project gutenberg.

Since I was on a roll with eBooks, I thought I’d give video a go, to make the journey to and from work pass quickly. After some research (well, googling, still not that impressed with bing) I discovered an opensource project called Handbrake which is a video transcoding app. It has a default setting for iPhone, and I just ran some tv shows through it and hey presto, 200mb m4v files of each episode, no matter what format I threw at it, xvid in avi, or h264 in mkv, it sorted them all out.

Most impressed, a quick iTunes sync with the iPhone and the next morning I was watching TV on the way to work, great quality, really watchable even on the screen size that it is (I think handbrake crops the video as well as shrinking it so you may lose some of the edges of the frames, but it doesn’t make everything really tiny).

The only thing I have to be careful of now is missing my stop on the train cos I am too busy watching tv :)

Took a couple of shots with my iPhone camera:

Dusty Sydney

Dusty Sydney in my apartment

It had mostly gone by lunch time and things were back to normal

Control.Invalidate()
Adds a region or a control to the update region of a window

Control.Update()
Sends WM_PAINT to the window if the windows update region is not empty (sends directly to wndproc bypassing the apps message queue)

Control.Refresh()
Calls invalidate and then update

String format alignment enums
The names of LineAlignment and Alignment (plus the descriptions in their tooltips) are confusing and I keep forgetting which one is which.

StringFormat.LineAlignment
Text alignment vertically

StringFormat.Alignment
Text alignment horizontally

Scrollbars
The scroll value automatically takes into account not scrolling the amount at the end of the range given by LargeChange. According to reflector:

case ScrollEventType.SmallDecrement:
	newValue = Math.Max(this.value - this.SmallChange, this.minimum);
	break;

case ScrollEventType.SmallIncrement:
	newValue = Math.Min((int) (this.value + this.SmallChange),
		(int) ((this.maximum - this.LargeChange) + 1));
	break;

case ScrollEventType.LargeDecrement:
	newValue = Math.Max(this.value - this.LargeChange,
		this.minimum);
	break;

case ScrollEventType.LargeIncrement:
	newValue = Math.Min((int) (this.value + this.LargeChange),
	(int) ((this.maximum - this.LargeChange) + 1));
	break;