Saturday, August 11, 2012

A tiny but very powerful image viewer

IrfanView is my image viewer of choice, but MycView has me very interested. It's so tiny - 37kB! But, it still manages to pack many useful features including command-line and keyboard shortcuts. Here's the complete list:

- Reading image format JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, DIB, RLE, PNM, EMF, WMF, ICO, CUR.
- Reading lists LST files, SLD (XnView).
- Automatic closing at the end of the slideshow with the parameter "/c".
- Display in a window or full screen with the key "Enter".
- Opening a new file with the keystrokes "Ctrl-O".
- Opening a new directory with the keystrokes "Ctrl-D".
- Number of loops defined with the parameter "/l".
- Number of seconds per image defined with the parameter "/s".
- Open the context menu with the Right-clic or "M".
- Change the background color with the option "/b".
- Automatic rotation with the exif information.
- Browse images with thumbnails.
- Zoom and scrolling the image.
- Interface and help in English, French, German.



Grab MycView here

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Add tabs to Word, Excel and Powerpoint 2007/2010

One of the silliest decisions Microsoft made with Office is butchering the Multi-Document interface (MDI) accessible by tabs with a hybrid interface, which is counter-intuitive and confusing. Almost, every program that supports multiple documents supports. Here's a solution that fixes this problem, aptly called Office Tabs.


Monday, August 6, 2012

error: cannot spawn "C:\Program Files\TortoiseGit\bin\TortoisePlink.exe": No such file or directory fatal: unable to fork

I've gotten this error several times when trying to use git over ssh:

E:\web2py\applications\k32>git clone ssh://k32@k32.com/gits/k32.git
Cloning into 'k32'...
error: cannot spawn "C:\Program Files\TortoiseGit\bin\TortoisePlink.exe": No such file or directory
fatal: unable to fork

Surprisingly, google couldn't help me. But, it turned out to be a very simple fix.

The problem was the space in the GIT_SSH environment variable pointing to TortoisePlink.exe. I copied the "C:\Program Files\TortoiseGit\bin\" directory to "C:\TortoiseGit\bin\" and set GIT_SSH to "C:\TortoiseGit\bin\". I actually created a symbolic link, instead of actually copying it. I didn't want to risk breaking TortoiseGit, so I didn't actually move the directory. Of course, the right answer would be uninstall TortoiseGit and reinstall it in the above folder without a space in the path, but I really wasn't in the mood for yet another can of worms today.

Update Oct 15 2015:
This happened to me again on a new machine.

error: cannot spawn C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\plink.exe;

Git_SSH was already set to the right path. Changing it to use %ProgramFiles(x86)% instead of the full spelled out path didn't help. After making a symbolic link to Putty on the root folder and pointing Git_SSH there, it started working.