The default setup for the Mercurial DVCS on Windows with tortoisehg uses plink and Pageant to manage SSH keys when you are using ssh as the transport protocol for mercurial. That’s most likely the right choice for a normal Windows setup, but if you already have openssh installed and configured to talk to various servers, it’s easy to switch mercurial and tortoisehg to use openssh. It’s also very helpful if you’re forgetful like me and forget to start pageant, add new keys to it etc.

Another slightly edited post from my old C++ blog. Again, you may have seen this one before.

This post is a quasi follow-up to the  “little exception shop of horrors”_. As I mentioned in that post, I believe the reason for dumping all the exception handling code into a single header file was a misguided attempt at avoiding code duplication. No, I didn’t write that code, so I can only speculate as to why it was done. I inherited the project that contained this code and the reasons were lost in the mists of time. I did file it under “sound idea but bad execution”. It doesn’t fix the problem and you still have code duplication as the preprocessor will do the duplication work for you. Ah well, at least to don’t have to type the code in yourself multiple times. I couldn’t help but think that there must be a better way.

… I’ll just point them to this article and explain that I’m just sweating the details. If you’re a programmer, that is a lot more important than most people and most programmers would believe.

This post first appeared on my old C++ blog. You might have seen it before.

I think by now we can all agree that exceptions are generally a good thing in C++. They allow us to separate the error handling from the general flow of control inside a program and also enable us to handle errors at the most appropriate point. More often than not, the best point to handle errors is quite far removed from the source of the exception.

I’ve been using the official GNU distribution of Emacs for Windows for the last few years and am very happy with it. Well, usually I am very happy with it until someone sends me a 25GB log file I need to analyse and the 32 bit Emacs refuses to play when faced with the enormity of the file in question.

This happened again recently so I finally decided to go look for a 64 bit Emacs for Windows, which led me to emacs-w64:

MELPA has recently got its own domain (melpa.org) so it’s time to update your list of package repositories with the new URL.

Speaking of MELPA, I recently switched to their stable repository instead of their “regular” nightly build/snapshot repository after I accidentally ended up with a cider build that didn’t want to playing ball. This is not a complaint - if you use nightly builds etc you know what you’re getting yourself into - but it prompted me to switch over to using the stable package repository instead on those machines that I consider production machines. This of course require me to uninstall and reinstall a bunch of packages but that only took a few minutes.

For those who aren’t aware of this yet, there is an Emacs Stackexchange site that’s currently in beta. I’d like to encourage everybody to take part in it so it can become a viable site on the Stack Exchange network.

Announcement on the emacs-devel list. Fingers crossed that 24.4. will be out in a few days as mentioned.

Update - 24.4 has been released.

We have an early 2008 MacBook “Blackbook” that is still working perfectly well and does everything we ask from it. It’s one of the reasons I love Apple hardware - it’s well engineered and works without a major fuss. Obviously we’re not playing games on it but it’s perfect for us to use for tasks that need a bit more power or typing than you’d want to do on a tablet. It’s also perfect for doing tasks that I want to use a separate computer for, like online banking.

If you haven’t heard about the bash “shellshock” bug yet, it may be time to peek out from underneath the rock you’ve been under ;). While bash isn’t installed as standard on FreeBSD, there’s a very good chance that someone either installed it because it’s their preferred shell or because one of the ports lists it as a dependency. Either way, now would be a really good time to check if your machine has bash installed if you haven’t done so already. Go on, I’ll wait.