Simon's Win32 Cheat Sheet

• Press Start/Settings/Control Panels
• Double-click System
• Press Advanced
• Press Environment Variables
• Under System Variables, select PATH
• Press Edit
• Add ";C:/whatever/" to the end of the string (for example)
• Press OK

I know of two ways to do this (below).

To fix it, add the line (found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base):

  NUMLOCK=OFF

• Right click in the title bar of the cmd window.
• Select Properties.
• Check QuickEdit, and click OK.
• You're then asked whether you want the change to apply just to this instance, or to all instances; choose the latter.

There are various other things you can change in the Properties pane for a cmd window, such as the background colour and window size. Thanks to Reenen Kroukamp for telling me about this.

• Run... certmgr.msc
• Pick Personal, and right-click the certificate that's about to expire; pick "All tasks..." and "Renew certificate with existing key".
• Follow instructions from there

MDM is the Machine Debug Manager, and it is installed with Internet Explorer. Like me, you probably don't need it. Here is how to tun it off/disable it. Go to the Control Panels and click Internet Options. Click on the Advanced tab and check the box 'diable script debugging'. This should stop it appearing.

The slow solution is to extract the file, rename it, and then double-click on it. Less slow is to right-click on it in the WinZip window, select "View...", and then select gsview as your viewer.

But the best (albeit hackish) solution is to tell Windows that ".ps[1]" is a suffix meaning "here's a Postscript file; run gsview". It's easily done. In an file browser window select "Tools/Folder Options" and click the "File Types" tab. Click "New". In the new dialogue window type "ps[1]" as the new file extension. In the same window, click "Advanced", and select "Postscript" from the huge list you are offered.

Now do the same for "ps[2]", "ps[3]". (I've never needed more.)

• In the "System" Control Panel (also accessible via Right-click/Properties on "My Computer"), choose the Remote tab, and check "Allow users to connect remotely to this computer".
• In the "Network connections" Control Panel (also accessible via Right-click/Properties on "My network places"), select Right-click/Properteies on the local-area connection. Pick the Advanced tab, and click the "Settings.." button for Windows Firewall. Pick the Exceptions tab, and ensure that the "Remote Desktop" checkbox is checked.

• The Desktop folder is copied. If you have big files (not shortcuts) on your desktop, they'll get copied up and down.
• The Favorites folder is copied.

• The Local Settings folder is not copied. This is a good thing, because it's big:
  • Application data: machine specific application data.
  • History: Internet Explorer history.
  • Temp: temporary files.
  • Temporary Internet Files: Internet Explorer offline cache.

You can change whether you have a roaming or local profile thus:
My Computer/Properties/Advanced/User Profiles Settings/Change Type/Local.

Changing this setting affects only the computer you change it on. A single account can have a roaming profile on one computer and a local profile on another.

• You can selectively turn items on/off via the msconfig utility under Win98. Do Start->Run, type "msconfig" and then look under the Startup tab of the UI that pops up.

The problem turned out to be Exceed (at least in V7.0). Exceed is an X server that lets you display X windows on your machine. In its default configuration, Exceed prevents the screen switching off. To fix this:

• Get the Exceed configuration window up. Either use Start/Programs/Hummingbird/Exceed/Xconfig, or right-click the Exceed icon in the task bar and select Tools/Configuration...

• Double-click "power management".

• Uncheck the box that says "Prevent display from being shut down". You can ignore the promising looking boxes about "Refuse sleep" and "User interaction"; they didn't seem to affect anything.

Here's how to change the default behaviour:

• Open "Start/Printers and Faxes"
• Right-click the printer and select "Properties".
• Click the "General" tab
• Click the "Printing preferences..." button
• Click the "Layout" tab
• Click the "Advanced..." button
• Expand "Document options/Printer features"
• Click on the underlined "Staple off" item and change it to "Staple on".
• Click OK twice, so you are back to the main Properties window for the printer.
• Click the "Advanced" tab.
• Click th "Printing defaults..." button.
• Click the "Layout" tab, the "Advanced..." button, and change the settings just as you did before.
• Take a moment to wonder why you had to do it all twice. Conclude that you have no idea.

You can also do this on a case-by-case basis. When you are about to print your document:

• Select "File/Print.."
• Click "Properties" in the Printer panel at the top
• Click the "Paper/Quality" tab
• Click "Advanced..."
• Now you are back to the dialogue described above....

• Step 1: jiggle your DHCP connections. DHCP is the magic by which your laptop gets an IP address from the LAN it is connected to. After a while, especially if you have disconnected, you may need to force your machine to re-negotiate its IP address with the DHCP server. This is essential (and reasonable) if you are plugging into a different network than the one you unplugged from, especially if you did the unpluggery while the machine was suspended (so it didn't notice). Even if you are reconnecting with the same network that you left, your DHCP "lease" might have expired, in which case renegotiation is required.

  Here's how to do it:

  • Open a cmd shell.
  • Type "ipconfig /release"
  • Type "ipconfig /renew"
  You can see how many network interfaces you have running with "ipconfig /all" , and you can tell it to release or renew a specific interface by putting it's name at the end, like "ipconfig /renew ethernet".

  Sometimes you don't need the "release" step, but it can't hurt.

• Step 2: make sure your proxy settings are right. If you are inside a corporate network, the external Internet is probably accessible only through a proxy server. There seem to be two sorts of proxy servers: HTTP proxy stuff and Winsock proxy stuff. Internet Explorer definitely uses the former. SSH definitely uses the latter. You identify your proxy server for these two in entirely different ways, and the two servers don't need to be the same.

  So you have to do this:

  • HTTP proxy: in "Start/Settings/Control Panel/Internet Options", click "Connections", then "LAN settings", then check "Use a proxy server" and fill in its name. You can get to the same dialogue from an Explorer window: "Tools/Internet Options/Connections/Lan Settings".
  • Winsock proxy: in "Start/Settings/Control Panel/WSP Client", check "Enable WinSock Proxy Client". You have to fill in the name of a server too. Click "Update now".
  If you are outside a corporate network, your proxy server is probably inaccessible, so you need to un-check both of these settings. (Fortunately, doing so doesn't lose the name of the proxy server, so re-enabling is easy.)

• Step 3: wiggle the Winsock proxy client. (Do this only if you are using a proxy.) Sometimes the Winsock proxy stuff seems to get hung up. To wake up you Winsock proxy, do this:
  • Open "Start/Settings/Control Panel/WSP client". Click "Update now".
  With a bit of luck it'll say "Refresh operation completed successfully". Click "OK". It offers to restart Windows. Don't; I have not found it to be necessary.

  Just because you get "Refresh operation completed successfully" doesn't mean that the proxy server is offering Winsock proxy service. The only way I know to find out whether it really is doing so is to run "ssh -v machine-name" from a cmd shell, where machine-name is the name of some machine outside your firewall. If ssh gets stuck and hangs, the Winsock proxy isn't working. If it gets through to the end and either logs you in, or says "Aborted by user", you're ok.

  If you aren't ok, you have to try a different proxy server; type its name into the WSP client box and try "Update now" again.

• Step 4: re-enable the network card. Open "Start/Settings/Control Panel/Network and Dialup Connections". Right-click "Local Area Connection", and select "Disable". Wait till the control panel window shows it disabled. Now right-click and select "Enable". If the control panel window doesn't show it disabled, try Step 4.

  I'm really not sure what this step does, if anything.

• Step 5: reconfigure the device (if all else fails). In the "Network and Dialup Connections" window (from Step 4), right-click on "Local Area Connection" and select Properties. In the window that pops up, at the top is a "Connect using..." panel, with a button called "Configure". Press it.

  A device window appears. If it says "device working properly" then Step 5 isn't going to help. But I often find it says something else (like "disabled"). If so, press the "Reconfigure" button (I think). Then press "Next" and with a bit of luck the device will get reset.

  After this I invariably find that Step 3 is required.

It turns out that it's a program called Scanpst.exe, which I found using the "Find files and folders" search engine. (It was deeply buried in Program Files/Common Files/System/....)

The name "Inbox Repair Tool" seems to be a misnomer: it'll repair your personal.pst file too.

• Press Alt-PrtScrn. This puts a screenshot of the currently-active window on the clipboard. (Plain PrtScrn will take a shot of the entire screen.)

If you just want to save the picture as a file, one simple way is this:

• Open Start/Programs/Accessories/Paint
• Paste. (Press 'yes' to the message about a large clipboard.)
• Save As.. Choose PNG (portable network graphics) or GIF (albeit only 256 colour) format; they more compact than BMP (the default) or JPEG (photo-oriented).

  defrag c:

Someone told me that if you carry on working while the defrag process is running, it continually restarts from scratch, so didn't make any progress. But this didn't happen for me. It just clunks away happily in the background.

Here's how to do this as a scheduled task so it happens overnight. Create a batch-file, e.g. defragall.bat and put in into a directory in your path. The batch-file looks like this:

  @echo off
  defrag c:
  defrag d:
  defrag ...

The only way out is to kill Explorer from the Task Manager. Alas, that kills my desktop too, so the Start button and taskbar disappear. One way to solve this is to log out and back in again, but you don't need to do that: here's how to restart your dekstop.

Do a Ctrl+Alt+Delete, go into Task Manager, then ensure that the 'Applications' tab is selected and then press 'New task'. Type 'explorer' and yey presto, your desktop reappears.

• You can read the contents of the .reg file by right-clicking it and select "Edit". (This opens Notepad. For some reason, emacs only sees gibberish.)

• If you are scared about fiddling with the registry (I am) you can always back up just the little branch you are changing, creating your own .reg file containing the old piece. Select "Start/Run...", type "regedit". Navigate your way down the registry keys to the one you are planning to change; in this case, it's

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
  

  Now right-click it, and select "Export". The dialogue box lets you say where to save it; check that "Selected branch" is chosen in the "Export range" panel. That'll create you a little .reg file; double-clicking it will re-install it if the patch went wrong.

Powerpoint is widely available, and is an excellent drawing editor. I particularly like the fact that connectors stay connected when you move boxes around, and that box labels stay with the box. Generally, the user interface is jolly good. The trick is to get it to dump a picture you can include in LaTeX:

• You can do global search-and-replace across all the source files in your programming project, using tags-query-replace. It's interactive; it works on regular-expression patterns (like query-replace-regexp); the response "!" tells emacs to do all the changes in the current file, and then move on to the next file.

• I often find I need to refresh the tags table because the source files have changes. But I was constantly frustrated: I'd update the TAGS file, but no matter how often I said visit-tags-table thereafter, emacs always used the old TAGS table. Sigh.

  Finally I found a function that doesn't appear to be documented in any of the obvious places: tags-reset-tags-tables. It does the obvious thing.

  But there is one more gotcha: if you are editing the TAGS file in emacs itself, you must kill the buffer (not just save it) before visiting the tags file anew, else it seems to just stick with the old bogus one, even after you do tags-reset-tags-tables.

Printing (very) plain text. In 20.4, you should start by clearing out ALL printing-related settings from your .emacs, especially packages like print-nt that were written for older releases. If you have a printer physically attached to your computer, then I believe the default settings will very likely work just as they are (assuming you have already configured Windows to support the printer, and can successfully print a test page). So first try loading a small text file, and then selecting Tools -> Print -> Print Buffer from the menubar.

If you don't have a printer physically attached, or it is not attached to the standard parallel printer port (LPT1), then set `printer-name' accordingly:

  (setq printer-name "LPT2:")                      ; non-standard port
  (setq printer-name "//some-server/its-printer")  ; network printer

• Load c:/texmf/miktex/config/miktex.ini into your editor. (In an earlier version it was miktex.environment.)

• Edit the paths in this file. They are all well documented in comments. A suffix of "/" means "look in this directory". A suffix of "//" means look in this directory and its subdirectories recursively.

• If configure.exe exists in the config directory, run it. In later versions, this step seems to be unnecessary; indeed, configure.exe does not exist.

• One person says: don't use pdflatex if you can avoid it. Use ordinary latex, then dvips then ps2pdf. pdflatex is finicky and accepts fewer inputs. If you have a tool that creates EPS (or EPSI), you're out of luck.
• Another says (about converting EPS): epstopdf which comes with Ghostscript, and is also packaged with MikTex. It has always worked fine for me.

\usepackage[ps2pdf,colorlinks=true]{hyperref}

Here's how to make yap your default DVI viewer, so that double-clicking a DVI file will open it. In a file browser window pick "Tools/Folder Options...". Click on the "File Types" tab; check that DVI is not in the list of known extensions; click "New"; type "dvi" into the extension box; then click OK. Now select the DVI item in the scrolling list of file types, and click "Change". I get a window saying "Windows doesn't know how to open DVI files". Click "Select the program from a list"; in the new dialogue box, click Browse.. and navigate to "C:/texmf/miktex/bin/yap.exe". Now OK your way out.

  ssh-keygen -d

ssh-keygen will ask for a passphrase. The passphrase is a password that protects your private key. In response to the 'Enter passphrase' question, you can either:

• [Recommended.] Enter a passphrase, which you will quote each time you use CVS. ssh-agent makes this entirely un-tiresome.
• [Deprecated.] Just hit return (i.e. use an empty passphrase); then you won't need to quote the passphrase when using CVS. The downside is that anyone who can see into your .ssh directory, and thereby get your private key, can mess up the repository. So you must keep the .ssh directory with draconian no-access permissions.

To protect your .ssh from access by anyone else, right-click your .ssh directory, and select Properties. If you are not on the access control list, add yourself, and give yourself full permissions (the second panel). Remove everyone else from the access control list. Don't leave them there but deny them access, because 'they' may be a list that includes you! ssh-keygen -d generates a so-called "Version 2" key pair. Version 2 is more secure. However if you want a Version 1 key pair, use

  ssh-keygen

Important grungy information about Cygwin:

• Cygwin doesn't deal well with filenames that include spaces. "Program Files" and "Local files" are common gotchas.
• Cygwin implements a symbolic link as a text file with some magical text in it. So other other that don't use Cygwin's I/O libraries won't recognise such files as symlinks. In particular, programs compiled by GHC are meant to be runnable without having Cygwin, so they don't use the Cygwin library, so they don't recognise symlinks.

I have never used SFU, but I've seen a demo and it looks pretty good. It's free too, I believe, from version 3.5 onwards.

There is a very nice graphical front-end to CVS for Win32 platforms, with a UI that people will be familiar with, at