Wisdom is the prime thing

I’m constantly finding myself in need of small, quick, personal database programs. Something light and flexible. Quick to mock up, quick to write, easy to use, painless to dump. And I find myself wanting and writing the same kinds of applications again and again.

Sometimes a text file just isn’t enough. And writing redundant SQL queries can get tiresome. Perhaps I need to print nicely-formatted reports. Perhaps I need some web connectivity for retrieving remote information. Or, what if I want to give this program to someone else to run? How many people know how to do database administration? The data needs to be conveniently stored in one place for the easiest possible backups.

What I really need is a framework. A cross-platform framework that will allow me to create these types of applications in a heartbeat. I should even be looking forward to the two minutes it would take to copy a template project and build a whole new application and have it up and running in minutes. Any changes I want to make to the data model should be immediately reflected everywhere with no extra work. But if I want something powerful, I want the framework to be flexible enough to let me get in and make it so.

Interested? Here’s my solution… » Read the rest of this entry

Today I wanted to mount a USB drive from Windows. But when I did and tried to ls the directory, all I got was “????” for the filenames, lots and lots of question marks. After some searching around, I found out that you have to provide a vfat drive with a character set to convert long filenames.

mount -t vfat -o iocharset=utf8 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/drive

According to the mount man page:

   iocharset=value
       Character set to use for converting between 8 bit characters and
       16 bit Unicode characters. The default is iso8859-1.  Long file-
       names are stored on disk in Unicode format.

What a difficult and arduous process this was! I’m not even sure that I am interested in doing it again, but I figure I should record this here for posterity’s sake, or to help some other poor soul trying to do the same.

The goal was to get a free setup on a Windows computer to do compilation with FLTK and Chicken. I used the Visual Studio 2005 Express edition, which was free from Microsoft. So, here are some problems I faced and the solutions I eventually found.

» Read the rest of this entry