Tortoise SVN-Missing context menus

Well, why would someone bother to write something in her blog, on a Monday morning? Very well. After several attempts I have now successfully installed Tortoise SVN in my Windows 7-based PC. What's the big deal?

I have TSVN installed in a Win-XP based PC, a couple of years ago. It was a straight forward installation. With the Win-7 installation, it simply did not work. I mean, the context menus did not show up at all.

But for everything, there is always Google. After reading several posts, I found one useful. I did reinstall/uninstall/ the TSVN and restarted the PC. Still did not work.

Then, I installed the TSVN and did a "repair" installation immediately. Guess what! this works.

Strange, but I would imagine that there are at least a few others who may stumble upon such a random misbehavior. Perhaps this post is useful for a few, if google lands you here.

Scientific poster templates

Aha! moment ;-)

I came across neat power point templates for poster and easy to use ones at the following link . http://www.posterpresentations.com/html/free_poster_templates.html

I initially did not believe that someone would provide neat scientific poster templates for free. I was suspecting that there would be hidden watermarks or whatever. But, this one was quite good. The templates provided are very easy to use and I could make a decent looking, scientific poster in less than a few hours time.

Definitely recommend this website for the ones in need of scientific poster templates (esp. A0 formats). But make sure that you check the page-setup option in power point for exact poster size requirements.

Map files

[Click on the title to follow the link to the article]

Map file: One of those files which we overlook and try to solve errors which can so easily be debugged and solved. The article says "Map files ... or Painless Proactive Problem Pinpointing" - I totally agree. It is not only useful for debugging but also for memory occupancy and size measurements of your code.

I had to make a study of % increase in memory occupancy because of using "some" code in an embedded target and Microsoft environment. For the embedded target, the KEIL-ARM compiler (this is what I use) has a very neat debug-info generator and map-file creator. The map file, thus created, has all sorts of info that an (embedded) software engineer is looking for. There is even split up of RAM/ROM occupancy sizes of each file. Awesome!

It is very different in the Microsoft environment. (I guess no one really bothers much about memory usage in the first place, then talk of RAM/ROM, etc, which are so critical on embedded target platforms). There are linker switches (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y0zzbyt4%28v=VS.80%29.aspx) to generate map file in the windows environment. However, this does not have image component size information.

Well, there are some tools that come along with VC++ (as pointed in the article) for this purpose. "dumpbin.exe" is one such tool. (There are so many tools in VC++ "tools" or "common" directory, which I have never even bothered to look so far. I am not sure if all of them are really useful). There are also tools with which one could get the symbol table information and so on. And, it is all there in your PC, you don't have to "Google" for a freeware that will help you find this. There are already several articles in the Internet to help you and just a click away.

Have fun!

A bunch of batch file commands

[Click on the title to read more on the topic-it directs to a web page]

Yesterday I had to deploy some Rhapsody generated "C" files to a location, build and then use them in the embedded target. I was suggested that I could use batch files. I must say, I am really impressed with the sheer simplicity with which it works. The job turned out to be really easy with a bunch of batch commands.

I am sure a lot of "software" folks out there must be using this. But for those who haven't, here is one more not-so-sob story about yet-another-set of commands.