Up until recently I often found myself switching back and forth between using tail to monitor a file and less or vim to page through it. I cannot understand how I missed the option, but when viewing a file with less, simply press F and it will go into monitoring mode. And by interrupting you go back to paging mode. So very convenient and it involves less context switching.

For my own development I use Mercurial and TortoiseHG for my version control system. I also use, at the moment, a CAcert certificate to use HTTPS with my repositories. I am not sure what changed when, but apparently the certificates now get verified. So this causes obvious problems trying to push or pull due to "SSL: Server certificate verify failed" errors.

To make this work on a Windows 7 machine with TortoiseHG in stalled, first download the CAcert root PEM certificate and place it some permanent directory. Next open the TortoiseHG global settings (right click somewhere in Explorer and select TortoiseHG » Global Settings). In the window that opens click the Edit File button. If it does not exist yet create a section similar to this:

[web]
cacerts = C:\path\to\cacert-root.pem

Press Save and OK and any push and pull action with HTTPS URLs should work as they ought to.

After upgrading various ports on my FreeBSD system and days later a full world and kernel, a reboot showed me that unbound didn't start. The system reported that:

error: reading root hints
/usr/local/etc/unbound/named.cache 88: Empty line was returned

It turns out that from ldns 1.6.13 to 1.6.14 there is an API change that caused problems for unbound. After upgrading ldns you also need to recompile unbound to pick up on these changes. If you do not, you will run into the problem above.

I am really impressed with pkgng. On the mebsd website there's a handy explanation and tutorial that's really worth reading to get up to speed.

If, like me, you had a working FreeBSD system with amavisd-new and p0f set up, you might find that p0f suddenly stopped working at some point. The cause for this is that it tries to use pcap on the USB bus, which it cannot do. The solution is to put hw.usb.no_pf=1 in your /boot/loader.conf.

int localeId = GetKeyboardLayout(0);

// The low word contains a Language Identifier for the input language
// and the high word contains a device handle to the physical layout
// of the keyboard.
localeId &= 0xffff;    // mask off high word to get the locale
                       // identifier

switch (localeId) {
    0x040c:
    0x080c:
    0x1009:
        useAzertyMapping();
    default:
        useQwertyMapping();
}

Relevant links:

• GetKeyboardLayout()
• Default Input Locales
• Locale IDs assigned by Microsoft

I pin programs that I use frequently to the taskbar of Windows. So I was a bit surprised to see that the newer version of Eclipse, Juno, doesn't seem to support this by default. After some searching I find out that you can force this by adjusting the eclipse.ini by starting the file with something akin to:

-vm C:Program FilesJavajdk1.7.0_05bin

Then after starting Eclipse with this in place, you can, once fully loaded and past the splash screen, pin Eclipse to the taskbar.

So recently I had an issue with Steam where the Witcher 2 update got stuck at 99% and the status "Update Paused". No matter what I tried with the pause/resume button, I couldn't get it to budge from this status and actually update.

After a while I grabbed Process Explorer from the Microsoft website and checked the files that were being opened when I toggled this state. I noticed a reference to Steamsteamappsdownloading20920CookedPCpack0.dzip. Then I also noticed a file reference to Steamsteamapplogscontent.log. Upon checking that file I found a notice that it was trying to preallocate about 11 GB for this pack0.dzip. Checking my drive status, I saw that this particular drive letter only had about 9 GB left. Freeing up some space allowed the update process to actually start and finish, after which I got even more space back, since it seems Steam downloads these files and then replaces them, deleting the temporary one. So I guess the lesson learnt is that you should always have enough disk space free as the single largest file in any of your games.

You can enable support for certain forward version features via the android.support namespace. In order to accomplish this you need to start the Android SDK Manager and make sure that under the Extras heading you select and install the Android Support package.

Once done you go into the directory extras/android/support/v4 and copy the android-support-v4.jar to your own project's libs directory. Next go within IntelliJ IDEA to File » Project Structure and under Project Settings go to Modules, make sure your application is selected in the middle pane, then on the right side select the Dependencies tab. In the window below click the plus-icon and select Jars or directories. From the resulting window browse to your libs directory and select the android-support-v4.jar and press OK to close the window and add the jar-file to the dependencies of the project. Since you are now using certain constants from a newer version of Android the Module SDK needs to be changed to Android 4.0.3 Platform as well. Press Apply and close the Project Settings by pressing the OK button.

So with recent Mercurial 1.7 releases HTTPS support was tightened, so you are bound to encounter a warning in the form of: warning: bitbucket.org certificate not verified (check web.cacerts config setting).

Now, http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CACertificates there are details on what to configure for certain operating systems. Given I use FreeBSD, I altered my $HOME/.hgrc as follows:

[web]
cacerts = /etc/ssl/cert.pem

For OpenBSD this should be in the same place since release 3.8. But apparently NetBSD does not have such a file in base.