I have been working on a ruby on rails app where I needed to use the ruby-shout gem. Since I am trying to do my development on a Windows 7 computer, I found the easiest way to get everything working correctly was to install ruby and rubygems in cygwin 1.7. When I tried to install the ruby-shout gem I ran into a issue where it would not compile because libshout and shout.h were not found.

To get the gem installed I did the following:

$ cd /
$ curl -O http://www.artfiles.org/cygwin.org/pub/cygwinports/release-2/libshout/libshout-devel/libshout-devel-2.2.2-10.tar.bz2
$ bzip2 -cd libshout-devel-2.2.2-10.tar.bz2 | tar tvf -

This will extract the necessary files for you, and that is it. Now you can do a “gem install ruby-shout” and it will build and install correctly.

I love using Cygwin on my Windows machine. I have it setup to run the FVWM X-Windows interface. My terminal of choice for this system is mrxvt . Mrxvt does not come as a cygwin install but you can build it for the cygwin.

I found the installation instructions for doing this here .

Basically you need to make sure that you have the following packages installed on your system (There could be more, but I don’t know what they are since I install everything cygwin has to offer):

1) Cygwin base install
2) gcc
3) make
4) autoconf
5) automake
6) libiconv
7) the entire X11 category of packages
8) all of the cygwin rxvt packages
9) font-misc-misc

Next you will need to compile the code with the following commands:

$ ./configure --enable-everything --disable-debug
$ make
$ make install

Now you are ready to use it. I startup fvwm using the xinit command. You must make usre that you include the -silent-dup-error flag or mrxvt will have weird behavior. Here is how my xinit initialization script looks.

xinit -- -emulate3buttons -clipboard -silent-dup-error

Since I did not want to do that command every time I started fvwm I just created a alias to that command in the .bashrc file.

Well I had decided to try and to a post a week on the Blog for my New Years Resolution. Well that sure did not last long. I seemed to only be able to do it for one month before I failed on getting a new post out there. I expect that is not too bad of a thing, since I have been busy at work, and have not found enough free time to get back to this. Oh well..... I am going to reset the clock, and see how many weeks in a row I can go now, without missing a post.

Recently I did a uninstall of Nero 7 from my Windows 7 computer and installed Nero 9. After I had completed this I found that there were many orphaned Nero 7 AutoPlay handlers left in the options list. I had to manually remove the options from the list using the Windows Registry Editor (regedit.exe).

To do this, execute regedit.exe, then navigate to the following location in the registry editor.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ AutoplayHandlers

At this location of the registry you are concerned with two different folders, the Handlers and EventHandlers folders. The Handler folders holds the reference to the software that is executed. The EventHandlers folder contains the different AutoPlay option lists.

First you will need to go through the Handlers folder and delete all folders associated with the software that is showing up. After you have done that then go through the EventHandlers folders and remove all of the references to the Handlers in each event. I had to go through each individual EventHandlers subfolder.

I have my Windows 7 computer setup with a account profile where I have to provide a password to log into the computer, or resume the session after the computer goes to sleep. Since I am the only user on the computer, I hate having to do the “CTRL-ALT-DEL” keystroke to get to the login prompt.

This is a easy fix though. You just have to press the windows key and type in “Local Security Policy”. Then expand “Local Policies” and click on the “Security Options”. You will now see a list of local security options. Go to “Interactive logon: Do not require CTRL+ALT+DEL” and set it to enabled. After you have done this, you will need to restart your computer so the setting will be in effect.

I have found that after some windows updates, or for a reason I still can’t figure out, the setting gets reverted. You might have repeat these steps again and again, as mine keep on getting reset.