Windows allows you to execute programs with another user’s credentials. You are probability thinking “Simple right?”. Well, it isn’t. Using this feature seems to consistently corrupt the RunAs-ed user’s profile. Corrupted profiles seem to be a mysterious thing with little to no way to fix them; creating a new profile is basically the only solution. In my case I restored from a nightly backup (because I know stuff like this is bound to happen on Windows). My takeaway:

Disable RunAs on Windows!

Here is how.

Both of the programs depend on the GL and GLUT libraries. At runtime the correct DLL is loaded depending on the OS type. There wasn’t a setting for Cygwin so I added one. The thing was that I specified the wrong file name: /usr/lib/libGL.dll.a and /usr/lib/libglut.dll.a.

It was an uneducated guess in the first place. I figured there would be a one to one mapping. After Marco kindly kicked my butt on the Ikarus list though, by asking some basic questions like has it ever worked and have I checked out the difference in error messages, I got me thinking that I should have read up on this.

The Cygwin documentation here and the Redhat documentation here seem to explain it… Windows DLLs need additional information to be linked against. On Cygwin, when GCC sees .dll.a files it “knows” how to get the additional data out of them in case you want to link to Win32. Reading on in the Redhat documentation, it lists the DLL search path when you specify -L argument for GCC. In that list I saw that /bin is included. That surprised me.

It turns out that on Cygwin, DLLs that are not compiled to work with Win32 are located there. At least, this is my understanding. When you link to these DLLs though, the OpenGL demos work just fine on Cygwin with Ikarus.

Is this also your understanding? I need to dig in more to this topic.

I had been trying to get so many things working this weekend that I didn’t invest the amount of the time that this deserved, or most of those things for that matter.

It was great for the language; it made it easy for loads of developers to get productive quickly. While something like this can certainly be abused via copy-and-paste; you can also use it to learn. Hopefully a lot of developers did learn. I wonder if something like this would be interesting for the RNRS world?

The reason is that the revised reports are just that: reports. They are not standards in the sense of the Common Lisp standard. Rather they are a report of the commonalities across different Scheme implementations.

The features provided by R6RS make it is a tad more convenient to write “portable” code. In light of that, I wonder if it would be of any value to have a sort of Scheme developers almanac written only using R6RS code for example. Things like this exist today with Schemewiki, and nearly every individual distribution, but, it might be nice to see how much you can do with only what the report provides along with the libraries that folks have implemented on top of it.

Have you felt it lately? How?

Did that lull us into false sense of security where we assume that drinking container vendors would only provide us with things that would not poison us?

There are plenty of indexes of Scheme distributions out there; but all that I wanted was a convenient index to all of the active email lists.

If you have Microsoft Office 2000 and newer versions, you can get the Arial Unicode MS font, which is the most complete. To get it, insert the Office CD, and do a custom install. Choose Add or Remove Features. Click the (+) next to Office Tools, then International Support, then the Universal Font icon, and choose the installation option you want.