How to use ssh-agent on Windows with TortoiseSVN

TortoiseSVN uses Plink, the command line member of the PuTTY suite, to perform SSH connections. This means that TortoiseSVN has the entire featureset of PuTTY (and thus SSH) available at it’s disposal. Some of these features require a good deal of setup work, but can pay off in the long run.

The feature of primary interest is that of ssh-agent functionality under Windows, where we set up a public/private key pair, authenticate with the server once, then use the ssh-agent to manage our password and session from then on. This gives all of the benefits of security associated with SSH, while not requiring the user’s password for every operation.

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Installing scipy

I happen to be a big fan of using Python in various stages of software development. My focus on graphics and image processing requires more robust array and matrix datatypes and their associated operations than what Python includes in its standard library. There are two extensions to Python that provide this functionality: numpy, for efficient, native memory arrays and matrices, and scipy for numerical tools such as solvers, optimization, and Fourier transforms.

While the default installs of these modules are significantly faster than any Python-native implementation, they are still quite slow. The code included in with numpy and scipy to perform this computation is not very efficient. Optimized libraries have been written for the methods that numpy and scipy rely on, so the best of both worlds would be the ease-of-use provided by Python and the performance of tuned architecture-specific math methods, which is what this explains how to install.

This article is a step-by-step set of instructions on how to install the latest Python, numpy, and scipy along with optimized versions of the native code libraries they depend on. It’s most useful if your operating system does not have pre-packaged versions available, you’d like to install a potentially faster version of the modules than provided, or you don’t have root access to use the package system on your platform.

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