I'm still installing stuff on my new laptop, and I just found myself trying to control it with my left hand and continue to use my main computer with the right.
With some concentration, I can make it work...

Check out this site, automated backup to a hardware solution with versioning
From what they are saying in their site it sounds suspicously like some sort of linux + cvs / subversion on the server and a client that simply watch directories for changes.
I would really like one of those, but the price a bit prohibitive.
I just bought a DVD burner so I could do back up (recently managed to burn my mother-board) my stuff.
I'll just wait until I've ruined my computer again and find out that I forgot to back up recently / forgot to back up the really imprtant stuff.

In other news, at work there is this super important excel file that contain about 90% of the stuff that we do {there is an internal application to replace excel, but it's not working on the computer we have, it's too old (and the application was written with VB5/6)}.
I managed to completely screw up the file and all its data.
I was facing enterring all this info manually again (about five hours, with a lot of cross referencing to printed files, and checking, and totally taking us down).
Five minutes after I started this I remembered that yesterday I'd copied this file to my disk-on-key.
I checked, and there it was, and it only took me another five minutes to restore it to the way it's supposed to be.

Seeing that, and lacking any backup software/internet access/programatic access, I decided to bite the bullet and attemted to write a shell script to copy the file every day to a backup directory (because I'm more concerned with people like me ruining the file than some distater or malicious intent).
I spent about three hours on a default install of win2K trying to find a way to get a datetime base file name so I could do something like:

copy really_important_file.xls "\buckups\"+datetime.replace("\",".")+".xls"

Couldn't find it, I know squat about the shell, so that didn't help either.

Finally I used Excel's Macro editor to search FileSystemObject and had this script save as backup.vbs

Dim fs, filename
Set fs = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
filename = "c:\backups\" + Replace(FormatDateTime(Date, vbshordate), "/", ".")+ "-" + Replace(FormatDateTime(Time, vbShortTime), "/", ".") + ".xls"
fs.CopyFile "really_important_file.xls", filename

Then doing:
at 21:00 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su "backup.vbs"

And you got a very poor man backup.

Just saw it on Google Groups, how to schedule ‎a task on the last day of the months?

" Or you could determine if today is the first day of the month and if so, then run the job yesterday."

I finally got myself a laptop (been thinking about it the last nine months).
It's a Dell Latitdue D500 with 1.3 Centrino Pentium, 1 GB RAM, DVD-CD-R, 30GB HD, and all the normal ports (parallel, eternet, 802.11b, etc).

I'm currently installing WinXP Pro SP2 on it, (started 10 minutes ago).
It would be interesting to see what software I consider essensial to take with me.
My current Windows Xp installantion is 2 years, 5 months, and 7 days and survived mother board switches, HD crashes, and constant abused by me.

I morally object to reformat & install, so I have quite a bit of stuff in my system (just last week I spent two hours searching for a tool that I already had installed).
Sometimes it bites me big time, like thinking that some of my VS plug-ins are built-in to VS, or that all windows installation has TortoiseSVN on the default install.

I'll post a list of what I'm installing there when I'm done.

It never stops to amaze me how much good stuff come out of Peli's workshop.
Now he bring up an easy way to test for even more wierd cases.

File IO blocker as an attribute, cool!

Check it here

I noticed that BugZilla 2.18 is finally capable of working on windows, so I decided to make a grab for it and finally have something better than an excel sheet to list my bugs.

This page tells you how to do it.
I found it very amusing that the first sentence in this page is: "Bugzilla version 2.18 is the first release that runs unmodified on Windows."

Then it follows with a 15 pages of instructions of how to install it.
In order to get it to work, you need:

• Install MySQL 4.0.
• Install MySQL Control Center.
• Manually create bugs data base and users.
• Install ActiveState Perl.
• Create a temporary directory at "C:\Temp".
• Install perl's modules using some arcane syntax. {Case sensitive}
• Install Apache2 and configure it as a service (not to run as SYSTEM).
• Configure Apache2 by editing strange configuration files.
• Grant write access to several directories.
• Edit Apache2 configurations file.
• Hack the registery.
• Download some utitlies and hack the code so I wouldn't have to have a usr/lib directory
• Now you get to run the bugzilla script
• Edit some more configuration files (this time bugzilla's)
• Run more scripts
• Set some scripts to run as scheduled tasks
• Launch browser and set personal info on the bugzilla system
• Setup backup for the system.

And now you can use this.

First, a big thanks for Byron Jones, who created the list above (the 15 pages version, that is).
Second, if this is running unmodified, I would hate to see what it was like before. {As a matter of fact, that was the reason I avoided it until now.}

Third, it took me about four hours to make this work.

OpenSource .NET Development By Brian Nantz

This is a book I just started reading, it talks about Open Source software and fill in the biggest gap that I've in using them, which is a good documentation.
So far I like what I read, very good converstaion of the tools, I'm waiting to get to the part where he explains about NAnt, log4net, etc.

Fun ;-)

Just saw this, O'Reilly got a new way of learning.
I read the sample chapter on Design Patterns and instantly liked it.

The only problem that I've with this is that it's hard for me to read in on the computer {like I usually do with computer books}. This is a must have in a tree-killing version (at least for me).

Good idea, waiting for them to have something that I'm interested at (Just finished the GoF's Design Patterns, after that, I need a little rest :-) )

 

I opened a suggestion on ladybug to have the IDE show a red squiggle under code that is known to be bad (missing methods, namespace decleration, etc).

Please vote here

Check this movie, it answers some of my previous complaints about missing ReSharper in C# express.

I'm loving this features, but the errors are muted. I really like the way that in ReSharper, it screams at you "Your code is bad, here is how you fix it"

C#Express just sort of hand you a note.

I'm going to check if there is a possibility to fix this.