// Notes from an IT student

things I find and do

[programmingisterrible]

My advice is to ignore the monks in their monasteries, complaining that teaching the plebeians to read and write won’t give us better software. When you ask them how to learn, they will tell you to learn how they did, on awkward and old machinery, in what they describe as character building exercises, and yet at the same time they will dismiss you if you learn for the same reason they did: Curiosity.

[robbe-vdg-blog]

Chatting on IRC over telnet

Quick run through on how to chat on IRC without installing third party software on Windows. This works on Windows 7 and virtually every other earlier version of Windows(might not work in the home editions).

Go to Control Panel, (set the view to small icons) click 'Programs and Features'. In the sidebar you will find 'Turn Windows features on or off', clicking on it will open up a new windows. In the new window scroll down and search for 'telnet client', make sure the checkbox is checked and press OK. Restart if required, although I don't think it's required for telnet, certain programs on that list will only work after restarting your PC.

Now that you have Telnet, let's get into the action. Open up your command prompt. <Command/Windows key> + R (this will ask you what you want to run), type 'cmd' then <ENTER>. Okay and we are now in the command prompt. If this is your first time in 'cmd' and you liked the movie the matrix type 'color 0a' for bonus points(I prefer 'color F1').

Ready? Lets connect to an irc server. In this case the freenode.org irc server.

telnet irc.freenode.org 6667

The '6667' is the portnumber on which irc runs by default. Now that we are connected it is time to choose a nickname and identify ourselves as a user.

NICK robbe USER robbe * * : rvdg

robbe is going to be our nickname on irc and rvdg are my initials but that's where you are supposed to fill in your full name. By now you should be seeing a large deal of text scroll over the screen with the message of the day and the rules of the server you are connected to. Now lets have some fun and join a channel.

JOIN #testung

You should now have joined the channel en received the NAMES list from that channel. (to see who else is in the channel you could type NAMES #testung) To send a message to another person or to the channel you use the PRIVMSG command.

PRIVMSG #testung :The starts from the first colon until you press enter. PRIVMSG other_user :What about a nice game of chess?

Also very important to know is how to reply to the PONG of the server to show that you are not inactive. Everytime you are inactive for a certain period of time the server will send you something like this PING :hitchcock.freenode.net and you will have to reply with the proper PONG. In this case

PONG :hitchcock.freenode.net

If you do not do this in time you will get a Pingtimeout and you will be disconnected from the server. You can join multiple chatrooms at once, although this is not really advised when chatting over telnet. If you would like to leave a room you could use the PART command. Exiting is done with the QUIT command. Both commands accept a reason parameter but this is optional. You can leave out the colon and everything after it. This message will be visible for the other people that are in the room.

PART #testung :You guys are boring QUIT :Sorry I can't stay online, gf is here

So I hope you learned something here. If you'd like to use a decent IRC client you could use:

Quassel

Chatzilla

Ow and one more thing. You can request all the channels that are running on that IRC server with the LIST commando. HOWEVER, this list could contain hundreds to possibly a thousand channels and are listed with their full description if you issue the LIST command. So this is only useful on small IRC servers, big mastodons like freenode.org will ony give you a Matrix impression(which is cool, right?). 

If you really want to get into IRC via telnet, or program your very own IRC client. You can read RFC 1459, 2810, 2811, 2812 and 2813. Those will provide a full view of the IRC chat protocol. Good luck!

[wihtiko]

A documented bug is not a bug; it is a feature.

James P. MacLenna (via wihtiko)

[robbe-vdg-blog]

Changing login background with a batch script

Wrote my first batchscript today. Feel a bit dirty, as I imagine one should feel after writing a batch script.

It is changes the background login screen in windows. Few things you should know though if you are going to try to use this. You should invoke it from a commandline that has administrator rights and as argument it needs the path to a jpg image that is less than 245KB. 

You can download the script and an example image. Good luck.

I based this script of a tutorial from teksyndicate, if you don't trust the script because you can't read it. It will show you how to do what the script does manually.

[robbe-vdg-blog]

Skynet mail on an iPad, things to remember

A simple task, yet so much that can go wrong. For those who don't know, Skynet is part of Belgacom, a Belgian ISP and with most Internet Subscriptions from this provider you will get some mailboxes on the skynet.be domain. This will not be a step by step walk-through, just  a few things you should know about this. First, check if you REALLY do have the right username and password. You do this by logging into https://webmail.skynet.be/

Choose POP over IMAP as incoming mail protocol. Incoming host should be pop.skynet.be, outgoing relay.skynet.be

Do not use SSL. By default it will try to force you to use SSL.

After configuration you should restart the iPad. It will not prompt you to do this, you should just somehow know you need to do this.

[robbe-vdg-blog]

First post, about a failure.

I want to make my Perl script into executable's. A quick Google search got me to this module: http://search.cpan.org/~rschupp/PAR-Packer-1.013/lib/pp.pm

Looks great. Just type in <pp myscript.pl> and it renders you an executable. Great thing I have a Perl Package Manager (I use ActiveState Perl).

... oh, so the package doesn't exist in the package manager apparently. But I can compile it on my own right?

Download the source and the Makefile.pl, make, make test, make install procedure should do. So I downloaded the source and executed:

perl Makefile.pl

Ah no compiler detected. So what do I need. Ah, the nmake.exe from microsoft. Great thing that the official link from microsoft( http://download.microsoft.com/download/vc15/patch/1.52/w95/en-us/nmake15.exe) is dead (found here). I did get my hands on the executable though. Microsoft still hosts it on ftp ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/Nmake15.exe. Lucky me right? Wrong!

It's a freaking 16-bit application. I should stop reading online documentation that's over a decade old. The problem isn't that hard. All I need is a C compiler. Now where do you find C compilers on a Windows machine? Visual Studio, that's where. Since Microsoft called their C compiler nmake 10 years ago they might still do. Let's see if I don't already have this file on my PC.

Open up cmd

  I do am lucky today. I not only have an nmake.exe in my Visual Studio, my XAMPP even has one. According to the Perl documentation I just need to dump it in Perl64/bin/.

perl Makefile.pl

Runs fine.

nmake

Runs fine.

nmake test

Test Summary Report

------------------- t/30-current_exec.t (Wstat: 512 Tests: 1 Failed: 1) Failed test: 1 Non-zero exit status: 2 Parse errors: Bad plan. You planned 4 tests but ran 1. t/40-packer_cd_option.t (Wstat: 512 Tests: 0 Failed: 0) Non-zero exit status: 2 Parse errors: Bad plan. You planned 2 tests but ran 0. t/90-rt59710.t (Wstat: 512 Tests: 1 Failed: 1) Failed test: 1 Non-zero exit status: 2 Parse errors: Bad plan. You planned 3 tests but ran 1. Files=5, Tests=2, 3 wallclock secs ( 0.14 usr + 0.08 sys = 0.22 CPU) Result: FAIL Failed 3/5 test programs. 2/2 subtests failed. NMAKE : fatal error U1077: 'C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe' : return code '0x2' Stop.

That's not good. I'm not even going to try the follow up command.

nmake install

How could all these tests fail so hard? I go back to the module page on CPAN to check the known bugs:

After seeing how many open bug reports there where I gave up. That big pile of bugs might even be the reason why ActiveState doesn't put it in their Perl package manager.