cygpath quoting for directories with spaces in their name

Had to experiment with quoting with cygpath to patch up some scripts under cygwin.
I was trying to properly quote an environment variable defined on the Windows side: 

MSSDK=C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0

• Just using
  
  

  cygpath –u $MSSDK

  
  resulted in a multi-line return of:
  
  

  C:/Program
  Files/Microsoft/
  SDKs/Windows/v7.0

  
  
  
• 
  

  cygpath –u “$MSSDK”

  
  returned a single line:
  
  

  /cygdrive/c/Progarm Files/Microsoft SDKs/Windows/v7.0

  
  
  
• and finally
  
  

  echo \”`cygpath –u “$MSSDK”`"\” 

  
  returned the directory properly quoted:
  
  

  “/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Microsoft SDKs/Windows/v7.0”

  
  
  

Hurray. Back to script editing…

Boost for Visual Studio 2008 and Qt

Needed Boost for a Windows project.   After struggling with the build and install for a bit I wimped out and used the BoostPro Binary Installer for Visual C++.  I wanted to use this with a Qt project so I added the lines below to the qtvars.bat file:

@if not "%BOOST_ROOT%" == "" (
    echo -- Adding boost from %BOOST_ROOT%
    set "PATH=%BOOST_ROOT%\lib;%PATH%"
    set "INCLUDE=%BOOST_ROOT%;%INCLUDE%"
    set "LIB=%BOOST_ROOT%\lib;%LIB%"
)

and defined BOOST_ROOT to be the directory where I installed boost.

Install HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 Network Access Software on Windows Vista x64

Bought an HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 to support wireless printing and scanning. This thing was an incredible pain in the butt to get installed.    The error dialog I got is shown below.


I had to manually install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x64), install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86) and disable my anti-virus software during the install so the HP installer could complete.

Another gripe…Yahoo Toolbar as a default part of the installer?  HP that really does not set the tone as this being a professional office product when you are shilling for Yahoo.

Finally, had to manually install a Critical update to fix Thai fonts.

Make VideoLAN – VLC media player the Default DVD Player in Windows Vista

I’ve been searching for a while  for a way to make VideoLAN – VLC media player the default DVD player in Windows Vista (32 and 64 bit).  After, several minutes of fruitless searching I finally came across a lifehacker reference to Autoplay Repair and a guide explaining usage. 

To use VLC I created an entry for DVDs with Autoplay Repair

See the VLC documentation for command line parameters.  I used dvd://%L for now.

Then ran the Vista AutoPlay tool to make sure that VLC is the default.

Inserted a DVD and was off to the movies.

Flintstone Vitamins Character Recognition Guide

Just in case your kid’s ask you which character a Flintstone Vitamin is here’s the Flintstone Vitamins Character Recognition Guide.

Fred Flintstone	Wilma Flintstone	Pebbles Flintstone
Barney Rubble	Betty Rubble	Bamm-Bamm Rubble
Dino	The Great Gazoo

Which OS for Wii (embedded PowerPC) homebrew project?

Googling about for an open source OS that would work for a Wii (embedded PowerPC 740/750 work alike) homebrew project and I’ve narrowed my choices down two categories: a real-time OS or an embedded Linux based OS.

While I’m more comfortable with the toolchains and feature sets provided by a “full blown” embedded Linux, BlueCat Linux for example, I like the configurability and architectural layering philosophy of eCos, while RTEMS has cool points for being used in space projects.

My main concerns with eCos are: it does not have a USB stack (only USB Slave code is included); no Bluetooth stack; and does not appear to support dynamic loadable libraries.  Probably, need to just go check out the GameCube/Wii Linux scene.

Using mixed toolchain – GNU build system with Visual C/C++ compilers

I’ve been searching for an automated way to use the GNU build system to build autoconf based GNU libraries like libiconv using Visual C/C++ compilers instead of GCC.  The end goal is to create Windows DLLs that I can integrate into Visual C/C++ projects.

Found two alternatives that I want to check out: simacros from Systems in Motion; and parity by Markus Duft and Michael Haubenwallner.  The two have a similar goal and similar approach.  Both include source to shim/proxy software that translates GNU GCC command line options into Visual C/C++ command line options; and both require modified autotools. 

A big difference is that simacros uses cygwin for it’s execution environment and parity is designed for the Windows Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA).  Another difference is ease of access.  Parity is readily available as a stand alone SourceForge project.  I found simacros is a bit difficult to extract out of the various web links and downloads at the Coin3d website. 

Based on initial code spelunking and the ease of getting to the parity source code I’m leaning toward porting parity to cygwin.