Colour Your folders with iColorFolder

IColorFolder gives folders a context menu which lets you change the colour.  Unfortunately this doesn’t work fully in Vista yet, and you’ll need to manually change the icon, navigate to Program Files\iColorFolder\iColorFolder.dll to get access to the folder icons.

Incidentally if you want have a shortcut to a folder, you can use the same workaround to use a coloured icon.

Colourise your commandline

Colour ls

It’s equally useful to have colour folders when using the commandline, to achieve this you can use msls from utools.

Download it and place it somewhere within the path (I use \usr\bin, which I added to the path earlier).

Now, to get colour directories you can type “ls –color”.  However it would be better to have that happen all the time.

To set color as the default, set the environment variable LS_OPTIONS to –color:

1. Press Windows+Pause,
2. Click through these buttons: Advanced, Environment Variables, New
3. Set the name as LS_OPTIONS and the variable to –color

Next time you launch the commandline and type ls, it will be in colour.  You can also combine options here, for instance if you want -l to be default as well.

Using 4NT/TCC-LE

Another way of getting colour directories is to use 4/NT or TakeCommand-LE (The free cut down version) from JPSoft.  This replaces the whole command shell and has many enhancements that help day-to-day.

Once you’ve downloaded the shell, if you want to change colours for particular kinds of files, then type option, go to the windows tab, and you can set directory colours.

To set EXE CMD and BAT files to be bright white enter:

EXE,CMD,BAT:15

If you want bright white on blue enter

EXE,CMD,BAT:15,1

Semicolons seperate file types - here I’ve set executables yellow and documents white:

EXE,CMD,BAT:14;TXT,DOC,PDF:15

The colours are arranged foreground, background and can be any of the ones used below (note background only has 8 colours to choose from, while foreground has 16, the last being the brighter versions).

Note:  These are the default textmode colours, if you change the command prompt colours yours may be different.

Tango in putty

The tango project is a usability project for free software, the colours are very pleasing and have been ported to putty, alternatively the Igvita theme is nice.

The tango port comes with the bitstream vera mono fonts too, so everything should look pretty good once installed.

Colourise your browser

If you use firefox you can install ColourfulTabs which makes it easier to find that tab among the crowd (especially useful if like me, you have lots open).

Colourise gmail (sometimes)

This one is a little annoying as it seems to be broken, but I’ll include it anyway in case it gets fixed.

If you install greasemonkey and the gmail colouriser, then all your gmail will be coloured by label (for instance I have a label for mailing lists I subscribe to).      When the gmail colouriser is working this works great for finding certain kinds of mail in the long list.

Unfortunately this isn’t working for me at the moment, so no screenshot… if I knew how to debug greasemonkey scripts I might have a look at fixing this as it’s so useful - it seems to choke on certain mail names but I’m not sure what they are.

Go forth and download…

Via  http://deadcabbit.blogspot.com/2008/05/jedit-pre14-tango-has-arrived.html

Tango is a project to bring tasty icons to open source projects, those on windows can also see tango icons in the current version of the gimp, in linux you can see them in gnome and kde.

Update:  Link to PsionSoftwareLTD promotional information on worldofspectrum.org

http://www.hackosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/nc111nt.zip

[update]

Jon Craton has mirrored this file in case the other link goes down

http://joncraton.org/files/nc111nt.zip

(Cheers

[update 2]

It seems that antivirus programs mark netcat as a threat when actually it is just a useful tool - see conversation and links in comments for details.

While I’m greatful for examples like this J2Me GameCanvas example I’m not so happy about this bit of it:

/** Starts the canvas by firing up a thread
*/
public void start() {
Thread myThread = new Thread(this);

// Make sure we know we are running
running = true;
done = false;

// Start
myThread.start();
}

What’s wrong ? Quite simply ‘myThread’.  You see the ‘my’ prefix used in code all over the web - it’s extraneous… extra noise, you may as well add ‘the’ to the beginning of every variable.

Variable naming is to a certain extent a matter of taste; a lot of people would say that it is worrying about nothing. The problem is, that most of the time spent with code is reading it, not writing it; as such we should try and be as succinct as possible ‘my’ adds absolutely nothing here.

In the example above it would be better to either leave out the ‘my’ or call the thread canvasThread.

 Fuzzy

Where possible variable names should reflect what you want to use them for, if your naming is fuzzy then others will use them for things you did not intend and then your on the downward spiral…

This is the other crime in variable naming, over generalising… quite often you see variables called ‘data’ when the name of the type would do fine… usually it is only in IO based applications dealing with arbitrary data that the name is appropriate.

Of course, if you can’t think what to name them, then don’t pad them out as well, it’s pointless.

My my my

A quick search on coders (excluding mysql) finds 301,040 hits for ‘my*’.

That’s a lot of noise… stop the madness: ban ‘my’ now… if microsoft can remove it from Vista, how difficult can it be?

A perennial question is when 1.0 will be released, excitingly it looks like this will be sooner than we thought - as seen from their mailing list today:

Paul Vriens <paul.vriens.wine at ??????> writes:

> Just noticed that the dates attached to the versions on
> http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleasePlan are not correct.
>
> 0.9.58 came out on March 21st.
>
> Does this mean we still stick to May 9th or do we stick to 0.9.61 as being
> 1.0.0.rc1?

We should stick to May 9th, we'll just have to wait for this date to
coincide with a release. If my calculations are right this should be
release 0.9.218 on May 9th, 2014. Hopefully we can clear the 1.0 bug
list by then.

--
Alexandre Julliard

Without furtherado, heres my 5-minute-python.

import sys, pygame
from pygame.locals import *

import pygame.mixer

if __name__=="__main__":
    pygame.display.set_mode((120, 120), DOUBLEBUF | HWSURFACE)

    pygame.init()

    try:
        filename = sys.argv[1]
        pygame.mixer.init()
        sound = pygame.mixer.Sound(filename)
        print 'Press ESC to quit, any other key retriggers sound'
        sound.play()

        running = True
        while running:
            for event in pygame.event.get():
                if event.type == KEYDOWN:
                    if event.key == K_ESCAPE:
                        running = False
                    else:
                        sound.play()

    except IndexError:
        print 'Usage tplay.py filename'

The file is attached here: Tiny pygame audio player.

The bad news is I found out that is the Vista taskbar that more than halves it.  I run without Aero, as Aero completely borks OpenGL (quite apart from the fact that Vista limits you to OpenGL 1.5).   It’s bothered me for a while that in Blender I could never get over about 30FPS - on the weekend I found out that I can have the window as large as I like and get much better framerates as long as the window doesn’t touch the taskbar.

This is the kind of thing I hope SP1 will fix, but I severely doubt it

[EDIT - Add Flickr link]

Flickr

retrocomputing