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For years I've only done development work on Unix machines. It's just easier - everything is there, and for the most part it works. Compilers, debuggers, parser generators, they're all there, they're all free and standard.

My memory of Windows development is rather different. You used to need Visual C++ (better yet, full-on Visual Studio), and that meant either a cash layout or a trip to dodgy software land. I have a rule with my new development machine, that there will be absolutely nothing on here that's not 100% legit. That means no Visual Studio, because I refuse to pay that much money for a toolchain and an IDE, however good they might be.

Now I'm trying something different. I have Eclipse, for my sins. I have installed the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) feature, and now I'm going with MinGW. I have Cygwin as well, but that ties me to the GPL and to having the Cygwin DLL present. I have no problem with the GPL, but it's annoying to not have a choice. So: MinGW it is.

Eclipse is a fine IDE, but it's a complete monster - Visual Studio was a lot easier to grasp at first. I've been using Eclipse for a little while now, and it still feels like I'm barely in control of it. Luckily we spent big on my dev machine, because a lesser laptop would struggle.

To my amazement, the instructions that ship with the CDT are right, the toolchain installed as documented, and the sample application built and ran first time. I almost feel cheated - I was ready for a fight.

My gorgeous HP laptop shipped with Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit. For the most part, I'm pretty happy with this - VIsta 64-bit is very stable, pretty fast, and properly supported by the vendor. There is a little problem, though, and I want to share it.

THERE'S NO FUCKING FULL-SYSTEM BACKUP FEATURE ON VISTA HOME PREMIUM.

Let me run that by you again:

THERE'S ...

Ok, enough. My point, even though this is my blog that hardly anyone reads so I don't actually need a point and anyway so what, is that it is criminally stupid to ship an OS without a proper backup program. Every (NT-based) version of Windows before Vista shipped with a basic but entirely competent backup system.

Vista Business has a full-system backup, but Vista Home Premium does not. This is odd; for a business user, the chances are that (a) you have a standard OS image that someone else manages, and (b) you would be a fucking idiot to have data you need only on the laptop. [The world isn't short of idiots, of course, so that kind of data loss happens all the time.] On a home PC, you'd have none of that; further, you're unlikely to have someone competent enough to reinstall for you. It's completely the wrong way round - home users have more need for a full backup than business users.

So now I have to buy something to do a job XP could do perfectly well for itself. Let's see how that goes.

Back in the old days, when I ran my own email server on qmail, I used 'hyphen' addresses to identify where spams were coming from, and to make writing filters easier. E.g. bob-facebook@domain.com would end up in bob's mailbox. That's essentially a qmail feature, and Google Apps/gmail and Postini don't support it.

Gmail and Postini do support 'plussed' addresses, bob+facebook@domain.com. That's the Sendmail way of doing things. Annoying, but hardly surprising, that Sendmail and Dan Bernstein don't do things the same way.

Trouble is, I have lots of these 'aliases' set up, and no real database of where they go. So, in order to make it work, I set up the gmail default address to go to my mailbox. That's not great, because it means that all the random shite sent by spammers to nonexistent addresses ends up in my inbox, rather than getting smacked down by Postini.

The level of nonexistent address spam has become unacceptable. I've become used to not getting any spam, so getting ten mails a day to a nonexistent address just isn't good enough. I've added (at cost!) another Apps account to which I direct the default address, so I can figure out which hyphen aliases I'm actually using. Once I've captured the important ones, I'll either change the target email address or add specific aliases in gmail, then turn off the default address feature.

This would be a lot easier to solve if gmail supported wildcard or regex searches. Sigh.

Stumbled upon this, only a week or so late: Python is moving to the Mercurial (Hg) version control system. How spiffy - another VCS tool to learn.

I'm sure it's a sign of good health that there are so many credible VC choices now, instead of everyone being stuck with either CVS, SourceSafe, PVCS or ClearCase. On the other hand, it means a whole bunch of different (but very similar) commands and options to learn, which is a pain. Oh well.

At least Hg is a properly distributed VCS. I quite like Subversion, probably because I'm used to it, but it's a nuisance to have to keep phoning home all the time. I didn't spend enough time using git to get really comfortable with it, but it made a lot more sense to me. I used svk at work for a little while, and whilst I could admire it and even be impressed with it, it never became something I actually liked using.

Next problem: As I use Eclipse more and more, every VCS has to have hooks into idezilla to become really useful to me. I hope Hg shapes up.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8015623.stm

To steal shamelessly from Douglas Adams: I am above criticising Microsoft in the same way that the sea is not above the clouds; but it's hard not to admire a company with 23 years worth of quarterly sales growth. Quite incredible.

Gmail now has an offline mode. This is very cool. Not so important for my home PC, but a complete godsend on my laptop.

Amazingly, it works a whole lot faster on Google Chrome. Doesn't help my laptop, though, because that runs Linux and Chrome doesn't.

Time to try Google's Chrome browser. Amazingly, it's installed, successfully imported my Firefox bookmarks (and apparently my Firefox passwords!) and it just works.

Check out the incredible cartoon introduction to the browser's features. It's an insanely clever way to get people looking at what are rather dry technical facts.

I have an inherent distrust of such a large company coming out with a product like this. However, my experience with Google Apps has been so positive, and it is time for a new browser. Firefox 3 is better than Firefox 2, but it's still a pig.

First Chrome 'problem' found: Some of the keyboard shortcuts in FCKEditor don't work :-( It's a rather minor problem, and Chrome is still a beta.

It's time to give Sun one more chance to get x86 Solaris right. For the uninitiated, Solaris is fast going the way of Betamax - despite its superiority, people prefer the other format, in this case Linux.

This time, I'm trying OpenSolaris, mainly because it takes ten minutes to slog through all the pointless questions Sun's website asks one before allowing you to actually download something.

I'm not going to clutter my blog with all the detail, that's over on my OpenSolaris experimentation page.