git config --global alias.add-commit '!git add -A && git commit'

After this, you can simply check in all new, modified, and deleted files with a simple

git add-commit -m 'My commit message'

I have aliased this command also to git ac in order to save further on typing. I never thought that this combination could be that useful, but actually I think it really is. Thanks to the questioner for bringing the idea up.

PostScript files are almost plain-text files, and if you set core.autocrlf and core.safecrlf, they might cause problems with the EPS binary encoded parts, as they might be detected as text-files and therefore remove any CRLF and replace it with single LF, which can mess up the whole image.

To force Git to consider a file binary which it would consider as text-file otherwise, the easiest way is to add a .gitattributes file to the directory containing the file or to any parent directory. In my case, I normally add a .gitattributes file in the root of the repository, containing

*.eps -crlf
*.jpg -crlf
*.png -crlf

In the file you set attributes to a path (or a pattern), or unset them (with the minus sign).  The crlf attribute is the attribute which tells if a file is affected by the core.autocrlf options. If you unset it, Git won’t mess with the line endings in the file.

More details can be found on the gitattributes man page.

Global settings:

git config –global user.name Martin Carpella
git config –global user.email xxx@yyy.invalid
git config –global color.ui auto

Per-repository settings:

git config core.autocrlf true
git config core.safecrlf true

Per-repository .gitignore for Visual Studio/C# projects:

bin
obj
*.user
*.suo
Thumbs.db

Primary tool in managing any network is using monitoring software which tells you if everything is alright or if you should worry. For various reasons I have become a huge fan of Nagios for monitoring networks I am responsible for, especially for the simple extensibility by writing your own check scripts (plugins).

While working through some issues in a network, I suddenly decided to try an approach I spontaneously called “test-driven network management”¹. The steps are easy (and are a one-to-one translation of agile software-development principles):

1. Write a Nagios test which checks for the requested/required feature.
2. This test will fail.
3. Implement a solution satisfying the test.

The same advantages of automated testing (better: unit testing) in software development also apply to the network management tasks:

• The test documents what you want to achieve in a quite formal way.
• You will (almost) immediately know when your solution breaks other requirements (if tests exist for them).
• As networks tend to be even more fragile then software, you have to monitor whatever you implemented anyways

Whenever possible, I try to add a test (or tweak an existing one) for any trouble-ticket / feature request I come around. In my experience, customer satisfaction tends to increase, because you start noticing problems before they do and you also implement measures to prevent the same problems to occur over and over again.

¹ I am quite sure there is another technical term for it, as I am quite sure I am not inventing anything new here… If you know how this is called by others, please tell me in the comments.

[tags]development, network, sysadmin, network management, test-driven development, nagios[/tags]

TextRenderer.MeasureText() with ModifyString and EndEllipses will modify your string to match the ellipsed text if ellipsing happens. You can look at this VB# example on codeproject using TextRenderer.MeasureText() for trimming text on how it is used.

The string seems to be modified directly in native code by DrawTextEx from user32.dll. Additionally to the scary fact that strings are not immutable, the length of the string is not updated, regardless if the resulting string is shorter!

For instance if you have a string “aaaaaaa” which will be truncated to “aa...“, the Length property will still return 7 for the shortened string. The debugger shows that the string will in fact be “aa…\0a” after the operation. So maybe it might be right that the string is still 7 characters long but most outputting functionality like Console.Out.WriteLine() gets confused sometimes and stops any further output to the debugger or console under certain conditions.

A very quick investigation of the System.Drawing assembly using Lutz Roeder’s fabulous .NET Reflector showed that at least there should be no memory corruption in case “WW” would get ellipsed to “W...“, as DrawTextEx takes the length of the buffer and should result only in “W.“.

Summing up, I find the corruption of an immutable string by an official Microsoft API very troubling.

This technique can also be used to remove objects from a given image. There is a nice demo video available on YouTube (it’s the same as in jfo’s coding blog, where Krispin originally found the information):

[youtube vIFCV2spKtg]

(via jfo’s coding and slashdot)

Download details: Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure 2.0 Release

Update 2006/03/26: As I just noticed at Mono’s “Contributing” page, they won’t accept any contributions from people who had a look at the download.

Well, after all, for me it seems to be three things:

• Additional money through additional drivers going through WHQL,
• Anti Open-Source projects,
• Building up the infrastructure for an (almost unbreakable) Digital Rights Management system.

Update 2007-01-23: I have to revise most points of this, as I now learned something new about it. Vista x64 will accept digitally signed drivers, but they do not necessarily be signed by Microsoft. Read more in my updated article.

It is a JVM implemented in .NET, contains a .NET implementation of a lot classes from the Java class libraries (JDK), compliance of 1.4 almost complete and contains tools for interop between Java and .NET.