Author: grant

Three Nice Looking Diff Tools and My Pick

1 Desire

Diff’s are hard. 80% of the time they are simple and fast. 20% of the time they are, well, complicated! My days of text-only diffs are coming to an end. They remain a part of my toolbox but I want a grown-up GUI diff tool. Fortunately there are plenty of options. But how to choose?

  • My decision making process was pretty simple: write down questions about them and answer them in a big spreadsheet
  • See where that takes me
  • Make a decision

Here is how it went.

Continue reading “Three Nice Looking Diff Tools and My Pick”

Speed Up FileVault2 Decryption

FileVault2 (FV2) provides disk encryption for OSX. I am unfamiliar with it.
I read about it at the Apple website. It doesn’t explain much. I wanted to know
how OSX handles it. To learn I tried it out.
After installing OSX I turned on FV2. The encryption was seamless. 8GB in 15m.
I installed 58GiB more of applications and copied files. Then I wanted to
re-provision the machine.
I booted into an external drive with OSX 10.9 (10.9) on it. I erased the disk on
the box. When I erased it I was asked for a new password. I provided it. I am
guessing that FV2 wanted a new password. I booted back into 10.9 and OSX
reported that FV2 is turned on. Seems like you can’t just wipe a FV2
encrypted partition. I asked OSX to decrypt the partition. It did and I tried
erasing the partition again and it worked fine. Going through the provisioning
process again I found that decrypting 58GiB takes about 2 hours.
Some experimentation left with the plan that when I want to re-provision a OSX
box I will erase the partition and re-image it and boot into it to decrypt the
partition. Surely there are command line tools to do so. I did investigate
that people I want directions that anyone may follow in the UI.

How to Type the OSX "Pretzel" Key in Unicode

Emacs tells you everything that you need to know about it using describe-char:

             position: 927 of 1056 (88%), column: 33

            character: ⌘ (displayed as ⌘) (codepoint 8984, #o21430, #x2318)

    preferred charset: unicode (Unicode (ISO10646))

code point in charset: 0x2318

               script: symbol

               syntax: . 	which means: punctuation

             category: .:Base, j:Japanese

             to input: type "C-x 8 RET HEX-CODEPOINT" or "C-x 8 RET NAME"

          buffer code: #xE2 #x8C #x98

            file code: #xE2 #x8C #x98 (encoded by coding system utf-8-unix)

              display: by this font (glyph code)

    mac-ct:-*-Lucida Grande-normal-normal-normal-*-17-*-*-*-p-0-iso10646-1 (#x3B4)

Character code properties: customize what to show

  name: PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN

  old-name: COMMAND KEY

  general-category: So (Symbol, Other)

  decomposition: (8984) ('⌘')

There are text properties here:

  fontified            t

EWS support for Emacs

I use Exchange at work for calendaring. I also use terminal-mode emacsclient when I’m logged in from another machine. In that scenario I can’t easily open a web browser to use Outlook Web Access. It annoyed me that I couldn’t check my schedule from within a terminal Emacs session. Thus, I did the only sensible thing and implemented full Exchange Web Services API support for Emacs.

Of course you did.

Some Nice .NET RSS Feeds

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReflectivePerspective
https://dotnetkicks.com/feeds/rss
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AyendeRahien
http://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet.rss
http://www.reddit.com/r/csharp.rss
http://www.reddit.com/r/powershell.rss
http://www.reddit.com/r/sqlserver.rss
http://www.reddit.com/r/azure.rss
http://www.reddit.com/r/windowsazure.rss