Better photos than mine.

For various reasons, I find myself spending more and more time in win32 these days.  Blech.

Luckily lots of useful programs have been ported to Windows lately so I am not entirely without tools.  However, there is one glaring problem which I can't seem to work around.

Rumour has it that the command-line interface to Windows isn't a program at all, but some kind of awful kernel service.  cmd.exe is also some kind of horrid abomination.  Here are some things that are wrong with it:

• Command Window
• • It doesn't draw the same style of window borders as every other window.
  • You can't resize it horizontally, interactively.
  • • You can't maximize it horizontally
    • On a system with multiple desktops, you can only maximize it on one desktop
  • There is no keyboard shortcut for pasting text.
  • "QuickEdit mode" isn't the default, so the window is unresponsive to the mouse
  • • and even when it is turned on, it behaves extremely bizarrely, unlike xterm or any other Windows program
  • The scrollback is unbelievably pathetic - only 999 lines?
  • You can't select monospaced fonts such as ProFont, only Lucida Console and the default VGA font
  • Regular window keyboard shortcuts don't work: you can't close it with Alt-F4.
  • It ... conflicts ... with some video card drivers.  I had to update my nvidia drivers just so I could drag command windows around!! How is that even possible!??
• CMD.EXE
• • no tab-completion of commands
  • no tab-completion of commands
  • you can't tab-complete commands
  • history behaves weirdly: you seem to maintain a global position in it, except... you don't
  • going back to your home directory is harder than starting a new terminal, seriously:
    X:\>%HOMEDRIVE%
    X:\>cd %HOMEPATH%
  • there is no shortcut like ~ to refer to your home path in other commands, either
  • there is no shell-startup file
  • .bat language is almost perversely crippled
  • the shell doesn't do expansion, so tricks like 'echo *' don't work.
  • the whole idea of %PATHEXT% is weird; how do I make this compatible with scripts for any other platform?
  • did I mention that tab-completion is broken?

Now, I realize that you can use cygwin's bash.exe to correct some of the deficiencies of the shell, but it has its own issues.  Is there anything that can replace the command window, so that I can use cywin's bash, Python, and other command-line tools without cringing constantly?  In particular the horizontal resize and maximize issues are the worst.  I have already tried xterm under cygwin as well as local SSH with PuTTY - both of these don't work very well with actual Windows command-line programs (such as Python) so I'd like something designed specifically for Windows.

Cyan Worlds has laid off all but two employees. Wow.

This company was a huge inspiration to me when I was growing up. The first time I ever thought I'd get involved with a software company, rather than making games as a hobby on my own, was watching the "Making of Myst" video that came as a companion disc with the first Myst CD. Apparently I'm not the only person who feels strongly about this company.

I've been really busy for the last few years in general, and haven't had time to play a Myst game since Myst III (which I haven't finished) - so this feels a little like finding out that a friend that I've been "too busy" to call has gone and died. Of course the murmurs of how this was caused by the inhuman churning of the mechanism that drives the game industry seem to echo the recently-published angst of other prominent game designers, and that doesn't make it any easier to hear.

I hope that this giant's demise at least warrants a comic strip.

Today I realized what Q2Q is. It is a (I swear, this just came to me, I was not even trying to make it sound like anything) Self-Certifying Remote Endpoint Authentication Mechanism, or "SCREAM".

A SCREAM in this sense is a mechanism whereby connections are authenticated by cryptographic means; where the handshake includes information identifying the connector to an arbitrary level of precision (in Q2Q's case, via an SSL certificate, that the connection is authenticated with)

It is self-certifying because the connection itself identifies itself, via both an in-band nonce and by TLS. All security is transport security.

It refers to a remote endpoint which is the other end of a networked communication. It identifies not only the user, but their agent, and optionally the capabilities and permissions of their agent.

It is an authentication mechanism because you use it to prove that your connection is authentic.

Also, Vertex will blow a hole in your NAT device the size of a watermelon: no kidding. Vertex is the Divmod implementation of Q2Q. We really want Q2Q to become a standard so we are making a big deal out of the separation between product and protocol.

(I really feel like there are some uses for this thing that I've missed. I really hope I have enough time to work on it in the next 6 months to see something through to fruition: other, less focused, worse P2P and identity solutions are starting to get some traction, and it bothers me.)

Alan Cox on Twisted:

"6Mbytes of unauditable weirdness"

"First they laugh at you", etc. :)