Category Archives: Stuff

The Microsoft School of Error Messages

Up until now I’ve managed to avoid ranting here, but I can no longer resist! After all these years of experience, why are the error messages in windows still generally meaningless? Is it because there are so many of them?

The problem I faced was trying to patch a game. Downloaded the patch, tried to apply it, but got the message “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135)”. Much confusion. Downloaded from another source, tried again, same error. Tried on my laptop, and this time it worked perfectly. What’s the problem?

Turns out the patch is written in .Net, and I don’t have the correct version of the runtime installed on my desktop, but I do have it on my laptop. I only had .Net 1.0, and it needs a newer version. Good thing the error message told me that in the first place then, isn’t it…

Trac Wiki HTML Scraper

A few of us are using Trac for an internal project at work, and at some stage in the process we decided to use the wiki as the distribution documentation. Everything has been going wonderfully, until we realized we that we wanted the documentation to be available without having to run Trac. After some digging around, I found this ticket on the Trac dev site where Alec Thomas put up a diff to allow you to download Trac wiki pages as HTML. After applying the patch, I found that it worked well, but there was still no easy way to pull the whole wiki down as HTML. So I wrote a python script to do it, and the script is available here for those who are interested.

The new site

So, after a short stab at blogging over at http://netnix.blogspot.com, I decided to start blogging at a domain name that was more me. Not because what I was writing about was of huge interest to people, or had lots to say. It’s just because I can. I’m going to leave the NetNix stuff where it is, as I don’t see the point of moving it. All new stuff will simply appear here.

Currently, the interesting stuff I’m working on is creating build production lines for software, and messing with virtualization. As soon as I have something interesting to report on either of these, you will see it here…