Thoughts from recent CoffeeBreaks:

Christ’s Resurrection… in Little Switzerland

31 . July 2010
written by Clemens Lang at Jul 31st 2010, 0:55

Seen in a village in Little Switzerland:
image stating Christ's Resurrection on a sign
The text reads “Christ’s Resurrection”. I had a thorough look, but couldn’t spot what that sign was trying to point me to… maybe it’s stating the obvious: Jerusalem is located in Little Switzerland? wink

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whatthecommit.com git hook

3 . July 2010
written by Clemens Lang at Jul 3rd 2010, 19:23
whatthecommit.com generates commit messages for the lazy… but being one of the laziest people, this isn't just easy enough!

I currently use Git for most of my version control needs. I'm keeping all of my hand-ins for university under version control to be able to sync them between university and my laptop easily and to make it easy for others to contribute (and sometimes they actually do!). But those of you using version control systems know what the biggest problem with version control is: Thinking of a commit message. Wait no moar! The ultimate solution is here!

whatthecommit.com is a website that provides you with a fresh commit message every time you load it. So all you have to do, is copy and paste the line into your commit window. Still too much work? That's why git comes with hook scripts. Paste the following code in .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg in your working copy and make the file executable and you'll be provided with a wonderful commit message every time you type git commit automatically! 

  1. #!/bin/sh
  2. #
  3. # A hook script to prepare the commit log message.
  4. # Called by "git commit" with the name of the file that has the
  5. # commit message, followed by the description of the commit
  6. # message's source.  The hook's purpose is to edit the commit
  7. # message file.  If the hook fails with a non-zero status,
  8. # the commit is aborted.
  9.  
  10. case "$2,$3" in
  11.         ,|template,)
  12.                 line=$( wget http://whatthecommit.com/ -O - 2>/dev/null | grep -o '<p>.*$' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' )
  13.                 file=$( sed '1d' "${1}" )
  14.                 echo "${line}" > "${1}"
  15.                 echo "${file}" >> "${1}"
  16.         ;;
  17.         *) ;;
  18. esac

Posted in Development, Linux | 1 Comment »

Windows 7 on MSI K9N Platinum (nForce 570 SLI)

26 . December 2009
written by Clemens Lang at Dec 26th 2009, 2:41

Recently, a fresh Windows install[1] was due on my home PC primarily used by my parents and family after my switch to a MacBook about a year ago.

However, whenever I tried to start the installation routine, the setup would boot into the "Windows is starting"-screen with the nicely animated glowing 7-logo[2], but stay there indefinitely without an error message. When starting the setup in safe mode (I had to press F5 or F6 during start-up IIRC), the setup would just hang after

  1. Loaded: \Windows\system32\drivers\disk.sys

I started searching the internet for similar problems and found a couple of recommendations related to nForce chipsets. Some told you to disable your on-board LAN ports (which I happen not using anyway) and a lot of similar disable-some-hardware tips, which, unfortunately, did not help at all. I had almost given up on Windows 7 and re-installed XP, when I decided to try a BIOS-update as a last resort. After using MSI's rather comfortable LiveUpdate[3] the Windows 7 setup did work fine[4].

  • [1]: MSDN-AA is one of the benefits of being a student smile
  • [2]: http://images.google.de/images?q=Windows%207%20boot%20screen
  • [3]: It's an Internet Explorer Active-X plug-in optimized for IE5 and 800x600, but other than that, it works pretty good. I can even update your BIOS from within the OS (does a hard reset after finishing, but that's probably the better alternative to shutting down on a possibly non-working BIOS)
  • [4]: Sorry for the excessive usage of footnotes wink

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