So, I've decided to be a sheep and invest my time in learning git. I'm using Windows 7 as my development platform. I have an account on github. There's a lot of tutorials around on the net, all of them point towards a windows client called msysgit. I've been poking at this thing for awhile now, but recently I refreshed my machine with a reformat. So, in setting everything back up again, I noticed there's a new msysgit build out.

So, I pulled up my usual websites that I follow along to install msysgit, and there's a change in the new installer. It no longer prompts for plink.exe and I can't find anything on google about the removal of it. After bumping along tutorials and such, I've come to realize you no longer need it.

So, my suggestions are to follow this instruction first:

• Generate your private key.

Once that's done, everything worked - except, now I have to type in my passphrase every time I commit. Annoying. I came across this:

• Auto-launching ssh-agent on msysgit

Doesn't look like it is for windows, but it is. Just follow the directions. So, make sure the bash window is open and then just type: 'vi ~/.profile' - hit 'i' to insert, paste in that entire block, then hit 'escape' then ':wq' to save the file. Once that's done, it'll look like nothing happened, but the next time you open up bash, you'll be prompted for your passphrase and as long as you keep that bash window open, you won't ever be prompted again.

Which is good. This means I no longer have to keep PuTTY's pageant.exe running in the background. One other piece of advice, you'll be tempted to download / use tortoisegit. Don't. Learn the bash / gui first. tortoisegit has issues and in my findings it runs slower.

Last night, I was completing the Railo install with Tomcat on Windows 7. As I was wrapping up, I noticed something odd. Railo's WEB-INF directories were all over the place in Tomcat's subfolders and they weren't supposed to be.  It's because of my server.xml <host> was wrong.

I had:

<Host name="testhost1">
	<Context path="" docBase="C:/Dev/websites/testhost1" />
</Host>
<Host name="testhost2">
	<Context path="" docBase="C:/Dev/websites/testhost2" />
</Host>

When it should have been:

<Host name="testhost1" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">>
	<Context path="" docBase="C:/Dev/websites/testhost1" />
</Host>
<Host name="testhost2" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">>
	<Context path="" docBase="C:/Dev/websites/testhost2" />
</Host>

Thanks to Sean Corfield and Jamie Krug for the assist. As soon as they mentioned it, I facepalmed. I figured because I wasn't setting up Railo wars, that I could do away with all the extra attributes and it was a bad assumption on my part.

I've already fixed my previous blog post. Sorry for the issues.

So, about 2-3 weeks ago my quad-core/8 gigs of ram beast of a machine at home running Vista 64 started BSOD'ing completely randomly. I noticed a lot of windows updates were rolling out, but it got bad enough that it prompted me to re-install. It's hard doing development when you're completely stressed out over a silly machine. It was never consistent either, but I couldn't prove that it was windows update. Running memtest, my computer passed with flying colors.

I have Windows 7 on Pre-order, but wouldn't you know it, the one day I decide to give Windows 7 a shot, Microsoft had already pulled the RC. Friend of mine had the Microsoft Action pack and gave me the ISO (sans serial number), because I just wanted to install it and see if my machine was stable again. I installed Windows 7 last night and I have to say, wow. I'm impressed! It was seriously fast. All my BSOD issues have gone away, my computer can be put to sleep again without issues. If you're running Vista and you're running into issues, take a look at the windows updates and hunt down which one is causing issues. For now, I'm going to keep extending my 30 day trial (you can do this 3 times) until my real copy of Windows 7 comes along.

Before any of you come along and say, "get a mac..." *ahem*Snow Lepoard*ahem* :P