While writing a post for my blog I noticed that on Windows some of the filenames on-disk showed encoding problems. I have this stored in Mercurial, so somewhere from Mercurial to the checkout on Windows something goes wrong where it concerns character encoding.

After some research and conversations with people on the #mercurial IRC channel, I understand that Mercurial stores everything internally in Python's byte encoding. On Windows it will then convert this to its native ANSI codepage, in my case codepage 1252.

Thankfully Windows 10 has a wonderful option nowadays to fix this issue. If you go to Control Panel, click Clock and Region, click Region, click Administrative, and under Language for non-Unicode programs click Change system locale. In the window that pops up tick the checkbox in front of Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support. Maybe by the time you are reading this the beta label has already been removed. Click OK and the system needs to restart.

You will need to clone the repository again since Mercurial (TortoiseHg) will need to properly generate the filenames.

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.

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.

Now that Microsoft allows you to download the Consolas font the question becomes how to add it to the list of choices for the command prompt properties.

In the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 247815 you can find instructions on how to add a font.

Basically on most default Windows XP installations it boils down to adding a String name '00' to the HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionConsoleTrueTypeFont with a value of 'Consolas' (the corresponding name from HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionFonts).