Category Archives: windows

gem install error – ‘cl’ is not recognized as an internal or external command

Posted on by

UPDATE: See my new blog post on the issue

If you’re here,  you are probably getting an error like this during a gem install on a windows box.

cl -c  -nologo -O1 -MD -Zi -DNDEBUG -DWIN32 -D_CONSOLE -DNO_STRICT -DHAV
E_DES_FCRYPT -DPERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT -DPERL_IMPLICIT_SYS -DPERL_MSVCRT_READFIX –
O1 -MD -Zi -DNDEBUG    -DVERSION=\”6.4\”  -DXS_VERSION=\”6.4\”  -IC:\Perl\lib\CO
RE  BitVector.c
‘cl’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
NMAKE :  U1077:
Stop.

The fix is easy if you have visual studio or the .NET SDK installed.

If you don’t then either go download Visual Studio Express or the .NET SDK (anyone out of 1.1, 2.0 or 3.5 should do)

Now, do a search on your local machine for ‘cl.exe’ Continue reading →

How to run a Webkit Nightly build on windows.

Posted on by

This is very straight forward, but for those who think it might be complicated. Here is all it entails.

inside a webkit nightly build folder Continue reading →

Safari/Webkit Nightly scores a 90 on Acid 3 test …

Posted on by

I am  a huge fan of Safari and Webkit … what it lacks in cool features, it more than makes up for in blazing fast speed and javascript performance.

When the Microsoft released a beta for IE8, I was prompted to run the Acid3 test on the browsers I had on my system.

Here are the results I got on my windows box, testing all the installed browsers against Acid 3 Continue reading →

How to run both mysql5 and mysql4 on the same windows Machine.

Posted on by

I finally made the jump from mysql 4 the other day, to take advantage of mysql’s new “INSERT … ON DUPLICATE UPDATE” command (which I think is spectacular by the way).

I didn’t want to actually upgrade from mysql4 to mysql5, just run the two mysqls side by side … so I looked around for a bit and figured out that all you need to do is get both  servers running on different ports. The trick is to remember to reference localhost:port (eg: “localhost:3307”) instead of just “localhost” whenever you connect to it, in php, for example. Below are screenshots of the things you need to watch out for when doing this on a windows machine. Continue reading →

How to get rid of the Automatic updates nag “Do you want to restart your computer now?”

Posted on by

Just a quick note to help folks who want to get rid of the annoying restart prompt that keeps popping up after an automatic update has installed.

  • Press the windows button and R (windows button + R) for the run prompt
  • If you’ve done this before the command will be pre-filled … if it isn’t then type in
  • net stop “automatic updates” <——— note the quotes?

Do you want to restart your computer now?

Remember … you really should restart your computer after an update has installed. So make sure you do that eventually.

PS: Starting certain applications will cause the automatic update service to start running again and the nag will come back. Just Rinse and repeat 🙂

Nifty email application feature: Windows live Mail

Posted on by

This is a neat little feature in the new Windows Live Mail.

windows live mail feature

For those who don’t know, Windows live mail is the Microsoft’s email replacement for Outlook Express 6.

I love this feature so much because now, my email client won’t corrupt my contacts with a ton of useless entries (if you use craigslist a lot you’ll know what I mean).

Its exellent logic, because if I exchange emails with a person a couple of times, then its a pretty good bet that I want that person in my contact list but am too lazy to do it manually.  Now Live Mail does it automagically, so you don’t have to … thats called an “intelligent default”. Makes for excellent application design because it “doesn’t make me think”

What would be even better would be the ability to set the threshold number manually.

Broken Safari for windows.

Posted on by

Safari for Windows (3.0.4) became my current favorite browser by (to my trained eye) slaughtering Opera in Javascript performance.
Hopefully that changes with Opera 9.25. Of late though, I’ve been having trouble with it. Safari initially broke on my Windows Laptop a few weeks ago, popping up a debugger prompt and closing immediately if I cancelled out of it.It kept running on my main workstation, however … that is until this evening, now its doing the same on my desktop.
I realize how poorly supported this browser is, because there is no place to file a bug report except from in the browser itself. Shouldn’t there be an active bug database or something for Safari on windows?

If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know … I want my super fast javascript back!
[Click on Images to see bigger versions]

Broken Safari

Visual Studio debugging Safari Crash

Hotmail outage …. arggghhhh!

Posted on by

Trust microsoft to make me look stupid on the rare day that I wade in to defend them in this unfair pile-on (5 lame exuses from people still using hotmail for email).

Hotmail is inaccessible today … and I’m ripping my hair out.Hotmail outage message December 18th @ 4:20pm Central Time.

The url says something about being unable to access my user data file?!?!
sigh … I have a gmail account too, BUT I can’t remember the last time they had an outage.