cygwin-ports

cygwinports seems to be just what i was looking for to get packages that don't come with the standard set. they have rtmpdump and mplayer, and i'll check back there before trying to compile stuff again.

windows python in cygwin

finally solved a problem (or found a workaround, at least) for something that had bothered me for a while: when i tried to use windows python (not cygwin python, which worked fine) in a xterm, it seemed not to be connected to stdout, stderr, and stdin. neither the interpreter nor the debugger prompt would show up, and nothing happened when i used print or sys.stdout.write. the mysterious thing was it would work from a non-x cygwin shell. but i needed mouse action on the desktop and screen (which uses a text-based x windows server) remotely. turns out the problem is how cygwin interfaces a non-cygwin console app from the terminal. it talks to it through pipes rather than with a real pty, and the issues there are deep and woolly. so all these windows programs are buffering in the pipe, not realizing how impatient i'm getting on the other end. fortunately, python has an easy workaround. the -i option makes it assume interactivity, skipping the tty check. i can use it on the cli or #! shebang, and now it's working. only problem is it drops me into an interpreter when the script finishes, so i have to type quit() (c-d, c-z, c-c are all ignored). ref here

scraping off microsoft's look and feel

visually impaired people have at least one thing going for them: the high contrast windows theme is much better than windows standard. and the opticwhite theme for google chrome helps as well. now i don't feel quite so out of place and my eyeballs won't melt.