Better Cygwin Terminal

I recall at last week’s hackathon we were trying to push stuff using git on Cygwin.  It took a while to figure out ssh was missing, which is weird – you’d assume that’d be included in the default install.  After spending time at a decent terminal on a decent OS, the Cygwin shell definitely leaves something to be desired.

So I searched for ‘better cygwin terminal’ and the first result tells you exactly how to do it.  Basically, you go into C:\cygwin\Cygwin.bat, replace the line that reads:

bash --login -i

With:

start rxvt -sr -sl 10000 -fg white -bg black -fn fixedsys -fb fixedsys -tn cygwin -e /bin/bash --login -i

Okay, I realize it’s kinda lame to re-blog top Google results, but more people should know about it – no one deserves to be squinting at a 80 by 25 window that you can’t even copy and paste from, nor can you scroll up and down on, nor can you resize.  The command line rocks, and people might never realize it experiencing it through Cygwin.

Also, I found that manpages were scrambled with special characters appearing as garbage in rxvt.  A fix for that is to add the following to .bashrc:

export LANG=C.ASCII

week 3

Frustration is this week’s theme.

XP/Vista Networking

• Goal: Connect from Vista to printer shared on XP
• Problem: XP box not detected
• Went through the Windows troubleshoot list with no success
• Installed LLTD responder on XP. Result: XP shows up on Vista network map but still inaccessible
• Gave up after searching a dozen threads to no avail

I wonder if it’s just my attitude to Windows that made me give up, or that it was the declining quality of the threads the further I searched. It’s also one of the few times I actually touched Vista, so maybe I’m too quick to make excuses and quit.

Topcoder

• I still can’t grok the algorithm of lexicographic permutation, though I understand how C++ STL’s next_permutation could be used
• Have no idea on how to tackle the crypto problem. I will at least get something runnable coded up before Wednesday.