Monthly Archives: March 2007

Byebye MSN t-shirt

MSN t-shirtToday one of my longest-lasting geek t-shirt goes to meet its maker. It was an MSN beta tester shirt, sent to me in 1995 just after the Windows 95 release. It now has too many holes in it to be of use anymore.

Back then, of course, MSN was not a web site. It was the anti-Internet, a closed proprietary network using a bunch of jumbled technologies (some, like MediaView, were really really ugly) that I somehow got involved in testing… In retrospect, it was always doomed to failure given the rise of the Web, though I admit, I didn’t really appreciate that at the time. I blogged about it here, some time back.

So, hasta la vista, MSN t-shirt.

Programming for beginners (The Next Generation)

Microsoft are doing more in the beginner programming area, with the Coding 4 Fun web site and the Beginner Developer Learning Centre, backing up their various Visual Studio Express free packages. No doubt to fight back against the onslaught from PHP and other open-source tools, but hopefully it also helps get some more people into programming, particularly kids whose brains pick up such concepts so fast and have the imagination to make use of this kind of thing.

But I wonder if we’ll ever again see the heyday of home computer programming that there was in the eighties. Call me a teary old nostalgic if you like, but it strikes me that the eighties was the sweet spot sparking interest in programming: you had millions of computers going into homes with a relatively easy to use programming language built-in (all those variants of BASIC), but crucially, you also had a shortage of the kind of productivity software that lets people express themselves nowadays on computers without having to program anything.

For instance, back in the day, I used a Commodore 64 and a BBC B to do video titles for friends’ productions. To do this, I had to program them. Initial attempts were pretty pathetic, but let me tell you, the Doctor Who starfield sequences I eventually got working were pretty damn good. Thanks to the miracle of colour palette manipulation, along with some year 10-level mathematics I got not only stars flying out of the screen, but galaxies spinning around and wormholes appearing. (Unfortunately for that particular production an earlier, decidedly less impressive and readable credits sequence made it into the final edit.)

These days something similar would be done on Powerpoint or in a video editing package, which would probably have its own built-in titles editor. It’s undoubtedly easier, but half the motivation to dabble in computer programming is gone. OK, so this is just an example, but it’s something you see in various areas of computer use, such as web page design (do beginners still learn HTML?) or games (why code up your own Donkey Kong like you love in the arcades when you can just get it on MAME?).

This is not to say the huge variety of software enabling high productivity on computers is bad, of course, but I do think it means people are much less likely to get into programming these days as a hobby.

Setting up SFTP/SSH on Windows

I’ve been wrestling with OpenSSH for Windows to set up an SFTP server. I’m still ironing out some of the fine detail, but the basic steps are below.

This article covers the initial setup:

  • Install the software
  • If the FTP user doesn’t already exist in Windows, create it.
  • Open a command prompt in the c:\program files\openssh directory (assuming that’s where it’s installed)
  • Set up the group file: mkgroup -l >> etc\group
  • Set up the passwd file: mkpasswd -l -u username >> etc\passwd
    The -l means local user. If it’s a domain user, use -d. Type just mkpasswd for help.
  • Create the home directory for your user. If following the IIS standard, that would be c:\inetpub\ftproot\username — but it can be anywhere
  • Edit the passwd file to put the home directory in. Load it in Notepad or another text editor. As with all the files to do with OpenSSH, passwd is in Unix format, so you may do better to use an editor that knows Unix end-of-line characters. Anyhow, change the second last field to match the home directory. Cygdrive notation needs to be used, eg for the above /cygdrive/c/inetpub/ftproot/username
  • For domain users, you’ll have to make sure the Domain Users group is added to the groups file. This can be done by doing a mkgroup > textfile.txt and then extracting the line for Domain Users from the file and adding it manually to the etc\groups file.
    Also double-check that the group ID (the third field in the groups file, which is delimited by colons) matches the ID your user(s) in the passwd file (the fourth field).
  • Start the OpenSSH service (note that when adding additional users, you do not need to restart the service

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