Month: September 2004

I spent a few minutes on Friday fiddling with Gnupg and Winpt. Winpt is the Windows Privacy tools which is a front-end to Gnupg. I think I got started in this direction when I saw a post about someone will be signing all future updates using gpg. So I went back to check on Winpt and Gnupg and found that both had been updated. I played a little bit and learned a lot about the correct way to use them. I was proud that I actually remembered my passphrase so I could validate some keys. I also ended up opening up port 11371 so the keyserver query would work correctly.

I do not know what possesed me to download and install Eclipse but I did. It was probably curiosity since I have always had a soft spot for development. Since Eclipse was recently featured in Dr. Dobbs it was probably inevitable that I check it out.

The download(85MB) was taking forever so I let it run overnight. When I unzipped the file I found out that there wasn’t anything to install. Oh, yea! This is java! I started the program and after a minute I was up and running. Java is slow to load but has adequate performance when loaded. The IDE is very nice and I really like the idea of using one ide to support multiple programming environments. Almost everything was there. I wanted the C/C++ compiler and the subversion plug-ins so I had to setup a couple of remote sites to download the plug-ins. For kicks I created and ran the Hello world program. Despite all this effort I only wasted an hour or so. Pretty cool!

Over the last couple of days I installed the 1.0 preview release of Firefox and Jedit 4.2 using the windows installer. Firefox is a great browser. I especially like its conformance to standards, tabs, and small size. Live bookmarks is a fascinating new feature which I learned about by accident. When I went to one of my websites I found a RSS down in the lower right hand corner of the browser status bar. Firefox had figured out that the site had an rss feed and was willing to add the rss feed to my bookmarks. I added the feed to my bookmarks and then found that I could view the posted items via the browser.

I installed the Jedit 4.2 again recently. My previous verions had some files types associated with Jedit. Since I had uninstalled the old versions prior to installing the new version I had lost the file type associations. Unfortunately after installing the new platform independent version I could not associate file types. So I researched the problem and found that the jedit launcher was no longer part of the jedit package. I found a user supplied alternative and it worked but it was a little clunky. For awhile I seriously thought about fixing the clunky version. I even downloaded a compiler! Then I did a little more research and found the answer. If you use the windows installer version to install jedit it will add registry entries to make jedit available on the context menu. So I downloaded the windows installer version and installed it. I was almost there. I could now right click on a file and use the “Open with jedit” option. Since I was almost there I did a little more research and figured out how to associate a file type with a java program. I had to use a bat file but I can now double click on a file to edit it with jedit. Whew!