Monday, August 29, 2022

Many forks on github projects

When a project is not updated very often or goes by for years with no official updates, forks can proliferate. Then people who arrive at the site may want to know which forks are active. Luckily, there is a github project for solving this problem! It is called ActiveForks. If you go to https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.html you can enter the name of the github project and you will get a table of results, with the ability to sort on any of the presented columns.

Monday, August 01, 2022

Windows and directories that cannot be (easily) deleted

If a directory contains nodes whose full pathname is greater than around 255 characters then Windows has tremendous difficulty deleting such a directory. But luckily, there is an easy way out. The 7-Zip command comes with an additional executable, 7zFM.exe which is the 7-ZIP File Manager. I recommend you put an icon for this on your desktop. It works a bit like a file explorer with one significant difference. If you click on a directory and enter shift-delete then it will delete that directory even if other commands fail due to the 255 problem.

Sunday, March 27, 2022

Function parameters that are fundamental types passed by value and const

The rule is to not do this in the header file. Some people say don't do it in the cpp file either (I am in that camp) but this does seem to be a matter of opinion. See the abseil article https://abseil.io/tips/109 for a discussion.

Windows, X11, cygwin, fonts and Xming

For years I used the X11 server that is part of cygwin. It seemed to be a bit flakey but there didn't seem to be anything better. Every now and then I would run into a problem where it would seem to work but xterm would complain about missing fonts. So, I downloaded and installed xming-fonts (from https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/files/Xming-fonts/7.7.0.10/Xming-fonts-7-7-0-10-setup.exe/download) on my local node (not the node that was running xterm) and that fixed the error. These days I no longer use the cygwin X11. I use XMing: see http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes.