Category: Computers & Software

During our current work on upgrading EP Office, I ran smack into the wackiness that is Vista UAC (User Access Control). If you use Vista at all, you know what that is. You start a program, everything seems to freeze for an inordinate period of time, then, the screen goes gray, and the dreaded UAC… Continue reading Wacky UAC – Part I

I installed Emacs version 23 the other day on my machines. Nice anti-aliased fonts and quicker startup times — plus a lot of things that should be defaults (like transient-mark-mode) but weren’t and which you were forced to put into your .emacs file under earlier versions are now defaults. Meanwhile, not quite related, but not… Continue reading Emacs 23 and Fun with Org Mode

I have been using Emacs for editing source code, and have found that I can do things faster and faster the more I use the program. If I then go and use an IDE such as the new Qt Creator (which has vi but not emacs key bindings as an option) I am incredibly frustrated… Continue reading Some Useful Emacs Commands

I’ve been maintaining EP Office on my Panasonic Toughbook laptop Krell, which dual boots Windows XP and OpenSuse 11.0. SuperSluggo, my main desktop dual boots OpenSuse 10.3 and Windows Vista. Unfortunately all my development tools for EP Office are older versions, such as InstallShield Express 4.0, and won’t run on Vista. So it was time… Continue reading Triple Booting on SuperSluggo

Setting up a Linux system always involves some customization, and so to avoid reinventing the wheel each time you do it, I urge you to keep an installation diary that records exactly the steps you took to achieve your perfect system.  The previous 2 parts of this series of posts described setting up dual booting… Continue reading Configuring OpenSuse 10.3 Part 3

More on configuring a clean install of OpenSuse 10.3 on SuperSluggo. INSTALLING NVIDIA GRAPHICS DRIVER I found the “one-click” installation from the OpenSuse website didn’t work. By the way, to put this all into context, the version of OpenSuse I had installed was 64 bit. 64 bit processors have been around for a while, 64… Continue reading Configuring OpenSuse 10.3 Part 2

SuperSluggo, is a quadcore DIY computer based on last year’s Linux Journal‘s Ultimate Linux Box. By waiting almost a year, the price came down to about $1500, even with souping up the system beyond what was described in the original article (1.5 terabytes of hard drive, anyone?). I set up a dual boot system with… Continue reading Configuring OpenSuse 10.3 Part I

As I write this I am anxiously awaiting the rest of a shipment from newegg.com; for, after much anticipation, SuperSluggo is on the verge of instantiation.  As all Sluggo fans know, Sluggo is possibly the slowest, most primitive computer still running on the planet, but nevertheless the guardian and protector of this very website.  Residing… Continue reading Sluggo Going Into Semiretirement

One last subtlety I discovered while adding namespaces to EP Simulator has to do with forward declarations of classes. Most C++ programmers know you don’t have to include a header file with the class definition if you are using pointers or references to that class. For example: class A; class B { A* a; };… Continue reading Namespaces and Forward Class Declarations