No Long Days

I use the brilliant NotePad++ editor. It is free and very light weight. So, I wanted to configure svn to call NotePad++.

There are several ways to specify an editor for svn. You can use environmental variables, the registry, specify it on the command line or within the subversion config file.

Specifying it in the config file made the most sense to me. I am using Windows 7 so the config file can be found at:

\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Subversion

If you are running with the default windows explorer settings the AppData folder is hidden.

I am an avid reader and Kindle owner and am always looking for a new author to add to my list of favorites. I recently saw a thread on my favorite forum over at MobiledRead.com about a book for $.99 and while I don't buy every book for $.99 this one was highly recommended by some of the members. It turns out the book was a sequel and the first book was 1¢. Yes a penny. So I bought the two books for a buck.

The books are [Soul Identity][soulid] and [Soul Intent][soulintent] by Dennis Batchelder.

For me surfing the web and trying to remember a different password for each site is a difficult if not impossible task. So, I did, what I'm sure many people did, I used the same login credentials at most every site. I did this with the exception of my email, bank, paypal, brokerage, and other sites where my private information was critical.

However, I knew in the back of my head this wasn't the most secure method. While I have an OpenID very few sites support it today. In addition it isn't to the secure level where a bank or brokerage.

Yes people it is finally that time. After running Windows 7 Release Candidate on my new PC (that's another blog entry) it was time to install the final release version (RTM) and all it's goodness.

I figured I would document here all the "essential" stuff that I install on it, and the order I follow.

Add to the domain After Windows7 Professional is installed the first thing to do is add it to the company domain. After it is joined to the domain I choose to not restart it. Then I go an add my domain user account into the local administrator group.

Over the past week or so I have been working on automating a Visual Basic 6 build. My tool of course is Nant. It works very well for the most post.

The build compiles the VB programs and builds the installer. This has been working great. However one of the requirements was to only keep the last 5 Install CD images that the build created.

I prefer to not extend Nant to keep the build scripts as portable as possible. I have done many things using the Nant XML rather than dropping down to C#.

Believe it or not this was not an easy problem to solve.

Dear Microsoft,

According to all reviews Windows 7 is going to be well accepted. However, there is still one barrier to that acceptance and this is the price. The following proposal is based on the following goals for Windows 7 acceptance.

• All customers will opt for Windows 7 pre-installed on new PC purchases.
• Customers will buy retail upgrades for current PCs running Windows XP or Vista.
• Reduce the amount of pirated version of Windows that people are running.

Let's face it, Vista was a retail flop. Even inclusion rates on new PCs was disappointing.

It has now been about 9 months since I have been using an iMac as my home PC. I originally bought it to learn something new and it has been quite a fun journey. There are many things about that Mac which I absolutely love. Of course, as someone who used Windows for years there are some things that are a bit frustrating at first. Of course, once you get used to them it is not a big deal.

One of the best "tools" that I purchased for my Mac was a subscription to [ScreenCastsOnline][]. This is a weekly video podcast about using the Mac and Mac software.

It is surprising to me after ten years of client and server operating system from Microsoft that they still don't know what client-server is all about. I am still amazed every time I copy or delete stuff using Explorer from my PC that is on a server that all the files have to move over the network to my PC then back to the server.

This isn't so bad when I am on the LAN but on the WAN it makes working with folders on the server very slow. The only option is to remote desktop in and work there and I really don't like people remoting into the server console.

I have been a FeedDemon user for many years. I originally bought Newsgator for Outlook in 2004. However, I wanted to read feeds on more than one machine and not have to repeat what I was reading. I think it was back in 2005 when they announced the Newsgator Sync playform. At the time if you subscribed to Newsgator.com you could also d/l the Client readers for free. Well, they weren't free they were included with your subscription.

Since I didn't use outlook at home I opted for FeedDemon on my PC and Newsgator for Outlook at work.

This week I have been tasked with creating an automated build script for one of our legacy Visual Basic 6 applications and putting it under CI.

I planned to use our current build server which is a Xenon 3Ghz machine that currently builds our .Net/VB6 combo projects. It is pretty fast so it works well. The current build is done on an old Dell workstation running Windows 2000 and an old Pentium CPU.

This legacy application has been around for quite a while and uses several 3rd party components like True Grid, Sheridan Data Widgets, BeCubed OLE tools and various other .ocx files...