Tag Archives: windows

A simple Perforce backup script for the home

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I use the free license of Perforce on my home network just to ensure version control and management of home coding projects, university thesis stuff, and general files that I just want to ensure I have previous versions of. It’s a really nice part of the Perforce licensing model that I can get two users and five clients for free. My network has my main PC (with Perforce depot), my personal laptop, my wife’s laptop, and my work laptop all connected. It’ll get worse when my four-year old starts wanting to source control things from his PC!

Having been responsible for some pretty heavyweight Perforce installations in my working life, I did not want to forget the golden rule of checkpointing and backing up. While it would not be a disaster if my Perforce data got lost or messed up, it would be an inconvenience. The scripts published on Perforce user forums, however, tend to be focussed on industrial installations and can be quite complex. For the home it is nice to have something more simple.
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Perforce server logging problem

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When setting up a server it is often useful to enable one of the logging levels. The admin guide states that you need to do this:

  • p4 set P4DEBUG=server=2


which sets the server logging level to 2. You then need to restart the Perforce server.

However, if Perforce is running as a service (the default under Windows), then this does not work. The reason is that “p4 set” only sets the variable in for HKEY_CURRENT_USER in the Windows registry. However, when running as a service, p4d picks up its environment variables from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. To do this you need to set the ‘-s’ flag. E.g.

  • p4 set -s P4DEBUG=server=2

Streamlining your PC to play games

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Overview

Before I run a resource intensive game, I execute a little batch file that kills a bunch of background processes that are simply not needed when playing the game. I’ll explain the details below, but don’t forget to click here today to find out about one of my favorite gambling games.

I have also noticed that before I used to do this, I experienced awful crashing problems with my PC just locking when playing. Since killing these extraneous processes, however, I have not had a buy CBD products in-game crash that I used to get regularly with both BF2 and BFV. I think this shows that something in my system is having a bad interaction with the game – probably the graphics driver. I used to think it was an interaction with Panda antivirus, but recently I modified the script to not kill Panda and things still run OK. This makes me a little happier that I can keep my AV program running at all times.
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Gotcha on setting up a data connection

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This one gets me every time. When you set up a new data connection to a database running on a local copy of Sql Server Express, in the “Add Connection” dialog you need to prefix your machine name to the defaulted value of “SQLEXPRESS”. E.g. if the network name of your PC is called “devpc”, then the connection string is:

  • DEVPC\SQLEXPRESS

While this is the obvious choice and works for many circumstances, a subtle variation is to use the following instead:

  • localhost\SQLEXPRESS

This now points the connection to an instance of SQL Server Express running on your local machine. If working in a team where each developer needs their own local copy of a database, then setting this in the web.config file can be a real help.