Whittlings » tech

What annoys me…

Nathan — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:59:59 +0000

That game developers insist on filling my Documents folder up with hundreds of folders bearing their company name, with the sole reason of storing their save files in those respective folders. There’s a reason that there’s a “Saved Games” folder, guys. The ability to use this folder seems to be a skill learnt only by Darwinia, Red Alert 3 and C&C3 (even then, the latter two create a folder in /Documents to store Replays – DO NOT WANT).

Fun with compiling

Nathan — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:14:01 +0000

In a desperate effort to procrastinate today, I’ve been tinkering on the Linux ITS machines seeing if I can supplement their provided software. To this end I’ve attempted to build some decent multimedia apps (vlc and mplayer), update Firefox from 2.0 which was being used, and install Chrome; all in a non-root environment.
Firefox was at least successful (eventually), after sorting out a mountain of dependencies and ensuring that they were all compiled against updated libraries (in particular, various libraries were compiling against old versions of fontconfig which later threw undefined symbol errors for FT_SYMBOL_SIZE). Unfortunately, until/unless I compile KDE for these computers (it’s presently on 3.5), it isn’t possible to compile gtk-qt, so Firefox looks somewhat horrendous on the default theme. KDE4 though… there’s an idea. Instead, I’m using the rather lovely Chromify theme, which hides most of the defects for now.

It’s taken years to get Chrome to start compiling, not least because of the dependency tree that needed sorting. A more trying problem was that Chrome uses SCONS via gyp to set up the development environment. Cruelly, scons uses its own $PATH variable which it determines of its own accord. This meant that all of the dependencies that I’d built into /local/usr weren’t being referenced in the SCONS path. Additionally, editing the scons files themselves with the PATH setting didn’t work because they were regenerated by gyp at each reinitialising of the environment. Eventually after much trial and error I found a workaround in editing the src/build/common.gypi file to include the line:
'ENV': {'PATH': '/custom/path/variable/here'},
Within the scons_variable_settings block for linux.

Warwick Word 2007 fix

Nathan — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:57:15 +0000

There seems to be a problem on ITS windows machines at the moment where trying to do nearly anything in Word (even pasting content into the page, or attempting to print it), results in Word complaining that “The Macros in this project are disabled”. Until ITS presumably release a fix soon, you can fix this now by:

Enabling the “Developer” tab in the ribbon – Open Word Options from the menu which is opened by clicking on the circular thing in the top left. Under “Popular” options should be “Show developer tab on the ribbon”. Enable it.
Open the Document Tempalates dialogue – it’s under the developer tab.
Disable the addins – On the templates tab, uncheck both the “MathType Commands 6 for Word” and “MathPage” Global Templates and Add-ins.

And you should be done! Yay!