Interesting article by Tom Phillips interviewing developers about Windows 8 and it's closed Windows Store, with this gem of a quote from Introversions' Chris Delay:

"I really don't want to see the PC becoming a closed platform. Microsoft is not a company that's able to benignly oversee that process. They will f*** it up. We'll all be doing Kinect support and 16 language versions, we'll all be supporting a Microsoft Office plug-in. It's my own worst nightmare.

[...] “The PC continues to be as relevant as it was ten years ago, despite consoles coming and going, because it is an open platform. If that changed it would be terrible.”

It's interesting times for the gaming industry, indeed.

#games #windows

PHP 5.5 will no longer support Windows XP and 2003. Those systems are around a decade old, so PHP is pulling the plug on them.

#link #php

Today a problem came up where the files on my Samba fileshare did not indicate to my Windows system that they were changed. Software that relies on this information such as TortoiseHG and SimpleLESS would not know that the file had changed. This was especially obvious with SimpleLESS which should take the .less file and process it, but wouldn’t.

#link #linux

This sounds like a situation where I hope some rep from Microsoft will intervene and offer the guy his reward.

via I Won The Windows Phone Challenge, But Lost “Just Because”

#windows

This post describes a step by step guide on how to combine multiple Subversion repositories whilst keeping individual history (and commit messages).

Dumping

Exporting from pagefeedbacktool repository the /trunk/public folder and integrating that into the services repository under /trunk/public/pagefeedback:

Dump the repository including only /trunk/public as follows:

E:\\Repositories\\pagefeedbacktool>svnadmin dump .| svndumpfilter include --drop-empty-revs --renumber-revs trunk/public > ..\\services\\filtered.dump

Loading

However as pathnames are stored as part of the dump (and replacing the path with a texteditor corrupts the dump), we have to include the full path under a different parent directory:

In VisualSVN create a /trunk/public/pagefeedback/trunk/public folder structure (try without the final public if import fails) then load the dump as follows:

E:\\Repositories\\services>svnadmin load . --parent-dir "trunk/public/pagefeedback" < filtered.dump

The dump is successful but at the wrong path:

currently: /trunk/public/pagefeedback/trunk/public
should be: /trunk/public/pagefeedback/

Post-correction

Open two Windows Explorer windows with both paths side by side, select all the files that should be moved, then RIGHT click drag them to the destination folder and choose SVN Move versioned files here...

Commit from the repository root.

It is now safe to remove the trunk/public folders under /trunk/public/pagefeedback/

Commit again.

#development

To quickly access the files you've been working on today, create a new Favorites item for these files.

To do this, open Windows Explorer and select your Libraries link on the left. Then in the search box, enter modified:today and click the Save Search toolbar button.

Enter a name, such as Libraries Today, and press enter. You will now see the new item appear in your Favorites menu.

You can select this item whenever you need to access recently worked on files.

#windows

When you press Win + left/right it will now correctly occupy half the screen, which was annoying me for a while. Essential app.

2011-07-12 PuTTY 0.61 is released

PuTTY 0.61 is out, after over four years (sorry!), with new features, bug fixes, and compatibility updates for Windows 7 and various SSH server software.

via PuTTY: a free telnet/ssh client.

#windows

I was fedup with the poor experience of editing my host file, which is often needed when developing websites. So I quickly created an AutoHotkey script for the purpose.

15:03:50 - me: anyone knows a host editor app that works under windows 7
15:04:51 - me: fed up trying to first find the hosts file, then not being able to save because I again forgot to run notepad with admin privileges.

Download @ Host Editor 7 - Hassle free host editing for Win7-XP - DonationCoder.com.

#hosteditor #windows

WindowsPager: One of the more accomplished virtual desktop solutions that work well with Windows 7

#windows

Create a smart playlist with all unplayed podcasts. By using this playlist you no longer have to find the next podcast on your iPhone whilst driving back home. Make sure that you include the smart playlist on the Podcast tab of your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

Update:
Although this seemed a great solution in theory, there are some issues with this approach in practice. As diskspace on the iPhone is at a premium you will have to limit the amount of podcast data stored on your device. However, because there is not an option to keep 1 unplayed episode per podcast in the smart playlist editor you have to set the amount of diskspace used. When you have several podcasts and some are updated more frequently then others you will end up for some podcasts not being on your device and others that are continuously listened to. Therefore I opted for http://vemedio.com:80/products/instacast">InstaCast which caches 1 episode per podcast and comes with continuous playback in its latest update.

#windows

Updated again (version 0.3.0.3) - I have fixed all known bugs.

Changes since 0.3.0.0:

• instructions updated
• Fixed problems remembering what directory we're working on.
• Fix: now lists samples with mixed case or uppercase extensions
• Removed tray icon
• Menu item to AudioLibraryFolders now works correctly
• Resizing now works as expected
• Remember windows position and size between sessions

Download the latest version

#bard

A while ago I had to normalize values in an Excel sheet where some of the values contained an asterisk (*) and some did not. However it's not immediately clear how to search for a asterisk. It turns out the escape character is a tilde so searching for ~* is the correct way to do this.

[caption id="attachment_247" align="alignleft" width="300"] Searching for ~* to search for an asterisk in excel[/caption]

#windows

Wouldn't it be useful if iTunes would (have at least the option to) sync app updates to your device automatically after downloading them? How often I have forgot to sync and find out later in the day that my apps are still out of date.

#macos #windows

What's the Deal With These Windows PC Guys Saying Stupid Things in Australia About the iPad?

Microsoft cannot get a tablet out so it's best to marginalise the whole market.

Via Daring Fireball.

#ios

As a hobbyist music producer, I have a lot of samples of sounds. As I have decided to start organising these, I needed a quick way to fire off samples in wav and mp3 format through Windows Explorer.

So I created InstaPlay. This is a simple sound player. To install it simply unzip it in a directory that's in the path, and then associate wav and mp3 files (and whatever else you want to use) with it.  It also has a few features:

1. Just double click or run a soundfile to hear it play.
2. Nice speaker icon in system tray while a sound is playing. Double click it to quit InstaPlay and stop playback.
3. Run  another sound file to switch playback to that instead.

This program will help you categorize more efficiently as you can move the sound that's being played without pesky 'file in use' prompts.

Download Info
Download the latest version (v1.0 - updated 14/oct/2010)

#projects #windows

This is a problem I have been trying to solve for some time on and off. Under Windows/IIS I need to periodically run a webpage that uses Windows Integrated Authentication. This rules out most of the VBS scripts and WGet solutions. I got it to work today using a batch file like below. Just add it as a scheduled task.

start /min "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://domain.com/webpage
PING 1.1.1.1 -n 60 -w 60000 > NUL
taskkill /F /IM iexplore.exe

The two most important parts is starting the application with the 'start' command (windows 2003 server in this case) so that the batch file will continue while the program is running. We then use a trick by pinging every second for 60 seconds (1 minutes) to wait for the webpage to finish what it's doing. Finally we kill off the original program.

#windows

PowerShell is a complete replacement for any of Microsoft's DOS or Windows command line interpreters. It is a full fledged object oriented system administration scripting language. With PowerShell knowledge you would run circles around any sysadmin that works predominantly from through the GUI, as well as be able to get Windows to do things that you just can't do through a GUI alone.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/msh/cmdlets/index.mspx

#powershell

From Eurogamer: Unangst said Microsoft would "continue to invest" in Games for Windows, which apart from giving its games an Xbox Live-style service layer with friends lists, Achievements and the like, also insists that games be easy to install, support widescreen displays and include parental controls.

It all sounds promising. The one thing I was most impressed with on Xbox 360 is the whole integration and lack of configuration for games, if they can bring that to Windows Vista then a lot of people will be very happy.

Some ideas:
You can see how they could potentially take the experience index benchmarking framework and develop that into something that can adjust games visual quality, automatic updating and applying of patching without user intervention, matchmaking and the community features could all be very useful and add value to PC gaming. Even some sort of integrated anti piracy tool developed for Microsoft that doesn't rootkit your machine which would be less painful to consumers would also be an improvement over the current situation.

#games

Apparently they have not processed my 200+ logs I sent to them:

• Windows Vista users generally experience 20 percent fewer application “hangs” than those running Windows XP.

Source (Microsoft)

#windows

What it does
I made a small AHK script I thought you might want to use: AltTab Fingertips. Press a configurable hotkey (F10 by default), and get a menu at the mouse with all the current windows on it. You can exclude processes using the tray menu.

Many thanks to ak_ for creating "menu at cursor" idea with FileDraft, which inspired this. It's like alt-tab but quicker. A lot of code comes from my PutAside script.

Small screencast:

Changelog:
v1.3 - Recompile, shiny new icon, INI in the same folder as the script for portability!
v1.2 - startup message is now only shown once. Added "show desktop|restore programs" option to menu, (windows-d)
v1.1 - allows to exclude processes via system tray menu.

Download the latest version

Comments are welcome either here or on the related Donationcoder thread.

#alttabfingertips