Ryan McCue's blog

Hey guys,

Long time, no see, eh? I must say, it has certainly been quite a while since I've been on the forums or even doing anything PA related. So, on that note, it's nice to see you all again. Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated. While I've been gone I've been doing a variety of things, such as school stuff and working on other projects.

I see that in the meantime quite a bit of stuff has happened, so congratulations on winning in the SF Community Choice awards! There are ~20 pages on the tracker of unread posts, so I'll be taking a look at those at some point.

I've personally wanted to have the launcher and installer source code on Subversion for a *long* time, it makes things so much easier.

So, I figured, I'd put my money (what little I have) where my mouth is, and as of today, both WinMerge Portable's source and Songbird Portable's source are available from http://padp.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

I'm not intending to include the original app's binaries on SVN, as SVN is no place for binaries. I've made one exception to this rule: sqlite3.exe is available with Songbird Portable as it's so small, and it's not part of Songbird itself.

As you may have noticed, we get a lot of talk from users here on PortableApps.com wondering why they get this box popping up when they plug their USB drives into the computer. The users simply expect the menu to come up without having to do anything else. As they say, if U3 can do it, why can't we?

The reason behind autorun being disabled is an extremely valid one: security. Some users argue that simply autorunning a piece of software can't do anything bad to their system. Well, let's take a look at a type of virus that has been around for quite a while: the boot sector virus.

And when the time of its dissolution draws near that it must die, it builds itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices, into which [...] it enters and dies. But as the flesh decays a certain kind of worm is produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird, brings forth feathers. Then, when it has acquired strength, it takes up that nest in which are the bones of its parent, and bearing these it passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis. And, in open day, flying in the sight of all men, it places them on the altar of the sun, and having done this, hastens back to its former abode.
— The First Epistle of Clement, chapter 25.

I play-test Krugal and review it

Just discovered: I found a new HTML trick!
Try this:
<!-- <script></script> --\> Viewed in Firefox but not IE-->
Oh Yeah!

Well, I decided to learn C++ so that I will be able to help Steve Lamerton out with Libertà. I went and bought C++ for Dummies and am making some simple stuff.
Anyway, I made a simple calculator. I believe it's portable, the size is under a megabyte and it's open source.
Get it here:
http://rmccue.stsolutions.us/downloads/input.exe
And source here:
http://rmccue.stsolutions.us/downloads/input.cpp
Well, I'm off to learn more C++.
Wish me luck.
UPDATE 30/04/2006: Added decimal support and help.
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From the bloggable mind of R McCue

In this post, I will discuss Koders and krugle, two code search engines

HowTo: Put HM NIS Edit on your USB drive.

My review of Puppy Linux from both a Portable Apps user/developer and a first time Linux User.