A new little icon for the UWIN ksh console

I've been using the korn shell for over twenty years now. Not only on solaris/opensolaris, but I also use it on windows, through the Uwin project, a port of the ast toolkit - a portable set of all standard unix tools, including the shell, but also nawk and the usual cat,sed,tr, list of tools.

Today, I finally created an icon for the UWIN shell console - the original icon, with the letters UWIN in bright colours is not displayed on the console window title bar. It is too large, and the title bar reverts to the standard C:\ icon.

I never paid much attention to it, but tonight I figured out the issue - the title bar icon should be no larger than 16x16 pixels. Once I realised that, a new fitting icon was created quickly, and here it is:



Yes, it's tiny. It's also just what I want for the shell window in my windows quick launch toolbar.

Here's a bigger view of the design. Getting the dollar sign sharp at three pixels wide was a bit of a challenge, but I was quite satisfied.


There's a zip here with the icon as a windows .ico, plus the .png above, and the development version with an odd colour in the background, which can easily be turned transparant when you save with Irfanview.

I've modeled the icon after the 16x16 Windows CMD icon. That is, I've used the measurements of the frame, although the pixels are mine.

Author: Henk Langeveld, shell icon, Oct 2008: zip
Copyleft: This is a free work, you can copy, distribute, and modify it under the terms of the Free Art License http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/

In addition, the files can be distributed under the Common Public License
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cpl1.0.txt

Update:
Windows actually uses multi-page ICO files. For the title bar and toolbars it'll look for a 16x16 bitmap or substitute another icon of that size. For the desktop it will use the largest icon available. Does anyone know of a simple method of combining icons in a single file? Free tools preferred. I did see a method using Photoshop, which seems a bit of overkill...

Enjoy

Another case for CIFS and ZFS?

Microsoft has released kb/946676, detailing a problem with Windows Home Server shared folders.

When you use certain programs to edit files on a home computer that uses Windows Home Server, the files may become corrupted when you save them to the home server.

The article warns about certain applications that are not supported with shared folders. Users should copy their files to local storage before opening them with any of the suspect applications.

That basically halves the functionality of WHS, which is being touted as a NAS/backup appliance.


I wonder though, whether the problem described here is inherent to the way windows applications use their datafiles. The typical approach I remember is that applications do live updates to the original files, after making a temporary backup file. This in contrast to the traditional unix way of life, where you first create a working copy and when done use that to replace the original.

I really should build my own home NAS based on Solaris/CIFS server and ZFS next year. Let's see what kind of budget I have...



Update: It appears to be a reliability issue under heavy load, and was hard to reproduce. I claim it would not happen with NFS. That's why NFS (and any NAS) write performance can suffer badly, if you don't have the hardware to help it along.

Links:
mswhs.com UK fansite
Computerworld article

Jim Gray tests Thumper

Jim Gray has tested Thumper on windows server 2003 and ntfs, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins U.
The summary is very positive:

This is the fastest Intel/AMD system we have ever benchmarked. The 6+ GB/s memory system (4.5GB/s copy) is very promising. Not reported here, but very promising is that we repeated most of the SkyServer Query log analysis on this system – performance was 3x to 100x what we experienced on previous systems – largely due to the 64-bit SQL and to the 16GB of RAM. We hope to report the SkyServer query results soon.

Nice box,Thumper
(fixed typo)