Skip to main content

How DOS 1.0 cost me an hour of scratching my head

A couple months ago, I migrated my text rpg Carnage Blender to a new server, with Ubuntu 6.06 on the new box.

For an unknown reason, ftstrpnm on the new box wouldn't generate the pngs I used in my captchas. It was easier to just check in the images from the old machine into the my svn repository than debug this, so I did.

The downside was that my working copy on my Windows laptop stopped being able to update from the repository. It would get to "words/con.png," and error out. Google, for once, didn't turn up anything useful.

Today I got motivated. I tried all kinds of ways to get this to work. A new checkout had the same problem on Windows, but on Linux worked fine. The svn command line client for windows didn't work any better than Tortoise -- instead of "Error: Can't open file '...words\.svn\text-base\con.png.svn-base': Access is denied", it barfed con.png to stdout, and died. This was a clue, but I didn't realize that until later.

Puzzled, I tried scp-ing con.png directly. No dice. Maybe it was a problem with my ssh server or client instead of subversion. So I tarred up my Linux working copy and untarred on Windows. Still it crapped out on con.png. I gzipped just con.png and tried to scp that over. That didn't work either.

I started experimenting with the filename itself. I could scp the .gz just fine if I renamed it to c.png.gz first. But "touch con.png" on windows failed, as did "touch con.txt." Finally I googled [windows filenames con] and found the answer at the top of the results, unfortunately from before I started reading oldnewthing or it might have jogged my memory.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Missing Piece in AI Coding: Automated Context Discovery

I recently switched tasks from writing the ColBERT Live! library and related benchmarking tools to authoring BM25 search for Cassandra . I was able to implement the former almost entirely with "coding in English" via Aider . That is: I gave the LLM tasks, in English, and it generated diffs for me that Aider applied to my source files. This made me easily 5x more productive vs writing code by hand, even with AI autocomplete like Copilot. It felt amazing! (Take a minute to check out this short thread on a real-life session with Aider , if you've never tried it.) Coming back to Cassandra, by contrast, felt like swimming through molasses. Doing everything by hand is tedious when you know that an LLM could do it faster if you could just structure the problem correctly for it. It felt like writing assembly without a compiler -- a useful skill in narrow situations, but mostly not a good use of human intelligence today. The key difference in these two sce...

Why PHP sucks

(July 8 2005) Apparently I got linked by some PHP sites, and while there were a few well-reasoned comments here I mostly just got people who only knew PHP reacting like I told them their firstborn was ugly. These people tended to give variants on one or more themes: All environments have warts, so PHP is no worse than anything else in this respect I can work around PHP's problems, ergo they are not really problems You aren't experienced enough in PHP to judge it yet As to the first, it is true that PHP is not alone in having warts. However, the lack of qualitative difference does not mean that the quantitative difference is insignificant. Similarly, problems can be worked around, but languages/environments designed by people with more foresight and, to put it bluntly, clue, simply don't make the kind of really boneheaded architecture mistakes that you can't help but run into on a daily baisis in PHP. Finally, as I noted in my original introduction, with PHP, ...

A week of Windows Subsystem for Linux

I first experimented with WSL2 as a daily development environment two years ago. Things were still pretty rough around the edges, especially with JetBrains' IDEs, and I ended up buying a dedicated Linux workstation so I wouldn't have to deal with the pain.  Unfortunately, the Linux box developed a heat management problem, and simultaneously I found myself needing a beefier GPU than it had for working on multi-vector encoding , so I decided to give WSL2 another try. Here's some of the highlights and lowlights. TLDR, it's working well enough that I'm probably going to continue using it as my primary development machine going forward. The Good NVIDIA CUDA drivers just work. I was blown away that I ran conda install cuda -c nvidia and it worked the first try. No farting around with Linux kernel header versions or arcane errors from nvidia-smi. It just worked, including with PyTorch. JetBrains products work a lot better now in remote development mod...