You might have come across the same problem I have faced pretty often: You want to write a small snippet of code for a friend who's not into programming to solve some task. You want to use the scripting language of your choice (yeah, [Perl](http://www.perl.org/)). But for many people, especially Windows users, explaining them how to [install perl](http://www.perl.org/get.html), install some modules from [CPAN](http://cpan.org), and finally how to use the script from the command line is tedious and often takes more time than writing it in the first place. And sometimes it even takes more time than solving the task by hand which is quite frustrating.
So I always wanted to build stand-alone applications with a GUI for those cases. But building GUIs is usually a huge pain in the ass, so I always avoided it; until I got the idea to build web applications with [Mojolicious](http://mojolicio.us/) as GUI. Building stand alone executables without the need of installing perl, modules, or libraries can be solved with [PAR-Packer](http://search.cpan.org/dist/PAR-Packer/). So far, that was just a thought.
A few days ago I got a small task: My brother wanted an application to automatically correct one kind of systemic error in large data sets. So I wanted to put that idea to the test. It worked out quite well!
Do you want to know more?
I have a folder
data with stuff in it. I am not using an Administrator account on my Windows machine, and that folder is supposed to be owned by my user. When you search for how to take ownership of all files and folders in a certain directory recursively, you get told to use TAKEOWN, a lot. Well, it has a little catch: You can only really use it to take ownership. Not to give it. A much more giving command is
ICACLS C:\data /setowner rattle /T
/T switch that makes it recursive.
It seems that you can't ((Force Windows 8 Metro Apps to run lower resolutions below 1024x768)) ((Windows 8 Metro style apps running on low screen resolution netbooks)) ((How to enable Windows 8 Metro style apps on an older netbook)) ((Google-Suche)). If you are ok with a squeezed look, set all registry values of
Display1_DownScalingSupported to 1 and change the screen resolution to at least 1024x768.
Under Cygwin, you can install the 64 bit mingw version of GCC, but you don't get the gnu multiprecision library for free with it, you'll much rather have to compile it from source. I ran into a bit of trouble here: It will not suffice to tell the configuration script about the new compiler, there are now mingw-64 versions of all relevant binaries that should be used instead. Basically, you go like
tar -xjf gmp-5.0.4.tar.bz2
cd gmp-5.0.4
./configure \
AR=x86_64-w64-mingw32-ar \
AS=x86_64-w64-mingw32-as \
DLLTOOL=x86_64-w64-mingw32-dlltool \
DLLWRAP=x86_64-w64-mingw32-dllwrap \
CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-4.5.3 \
NM=x86_64-w64-mingw32-nm \
LD=x86_64-w64-mingw32-ld \
OBJDUMP=x86_64-w64-mingw32-objdump \
RANLIB=x86_64-w64-mingw32-ranlib \
STRIP=x86_64-w64-mingw32-strip
make && make check
libgmp.a in .libs and native 64 bit bignum action ensues!
In the recent weeks, we have acquired the phony habit of customizing our Windows desktop PC's. The following is my checklist for making a Windows PC more pretty.
## Making Windows Themable
You go and download the universal theme patcher:
* Universal Theme Patcher Homepage (Author's Blog)
* Universal Theme Patcher on nullteilerfrei
Then, you click it. You can find a ton of themes on deviant art, but I'd strongly advise against overly dark themes, it really does not make for a healthy working environment.
## The Logon and Boot Screen
To customize the windows login screen to look really nice, we have to do several things.
* To change the background image, you simply use the Tweaks Logon Changer:
* Tweaks Logon Changer Homepage
* Tweaks Logon Changer on nullteilerfrei
* To remove the little branding logo on the bottom of the login screen, you open the file
%SystemRoot%\Branding\Basebrd\basebrd.dll
%SystemRoot%\System32\BioCredProv.dll
Why would anyone want to use Windows 2008 R2 Server as a workstation? The main arguments in my case are the superior firewall and user account control. Now, if you want to do the same, you can go to win2008r2workstation.com and get a really detailed howto with screenshots - or you can read this post for a really short checklist, something I prefer to have for future installs of the same variety. Do you want to know more?