Autopragmatic

When running some Perl batch programs on Microsoft Windows XP, I got frustrated that some sub-programs would crash and pop up a dialog box with a message “perl.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close”.

Since the dialog is modal, everything stops until I press a button, which is incredibly annoying! If it needs to close, then just close and get on with it!

After some digging around on the web, I found a way to suppress those dialogs:

KB#124873: Disabling System Hard Error Message Dialog Boxes

In short, set the
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows\ErrorMode
registry key to the value “2″.

[This entry updated April 14, 2008 based on comments and this blog. Updated again August 26, 2008.]

I use dreamhost.com as my hosting provider and wanted to use it to host git repositories as well. git supports publishing via HTTP so that part is pretty easy, but I also wanted to make it easy to push my local work to the repository on dreamhost.

Unfortunately, git documentation was a little impenetrable the first few times I read it and dreamhost doesn’t offer git automatically, so here is a summary of what I did in case it helps
someone else figure it out.

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently tried to use Microsoft’s free Visual C++ Express 2005 with ActiveState Perl to compile XS modules from CPAN and found that it wouldn’t work. The fix appears to be adding a file to the C:\perl\bin directory: perl.exe.manifest

This fix taken from Perl Monks: Problems with FREE MS VC++ tools.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon with the built-in Nvidia drivers and discovered that my dual monitor desktop reverted to the annoying behavior of placing windows and dialogs dead center in the expanded desktop, right at the split between the two monitors. It would also maximize windows across both monitors rather than just one.

After trying various configuration options in xorg.conf, I found that a simple change to the Compiz Advanced Desktop Effects Settings fixed this problem, at least for most windows. (Some dialogs still split the screens.)

First, install the compizconfig-settings-manager package, which adds the Advanced Desktop Effects Settings application to the System->Preferences menu.

Next, launch that preference app and select the “Display Settings” tab. Manually set the display output configuration in the “Outputs” section, then uncheck “Detect Outputs”. For example, for my side-by-side 1280×1024 screens:

Logout and restart X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace). That should fix the problem.

Some of the Compiz effects may wind up restricted to a single monitor. To fix this, many of them have options to span the effect across all monitors. For example, the “Scale” effect has the following option:

Sometimes, I spend a lot of time searching and experimenting for the solution to some annoying technology problem that seems like it should be simple and already written up somewhere online.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking that I should post my own solutions (when I find them) so that the next person like me stands a better chance of finding a shortcut to the answer. So that’s what this blog is for.