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If you have been spoiled by the developer heaven that is a well running Linux machine and you have to run windoze, this is what I’ve found that begins to almost make it bearable. You must first open file explorer (windows-e) and do Tools->Folder Options->View and then check, “Display the contents of system folders,” and uncheck, “Hide extensions for known file types.” Also, View->Details is recommended. Right-click on the question mark down near the bottom-right of your screen, left of the clock and all the icons (in the Taskbar), and chose “Hide the language bar” (or whatever the annoying thing is). Right-click on the Taskbar itself and check “Show Quick Launch” and uncheck “Hide inactive icons” On any command windows (cmd.exe, cygwin, etc.), fix the font. Click on the icon in the upper-left corner of the window and choose “Properties.” Click on the “Font” tab, and choose ...

I didn't completely escape the clutches of Microsoft when I found my new job. This new place does some development for windows CE, it turns out. I've been struggling through some build issues with some code for the last couple days, and my early impression of developing for windows are not good. I'll admit possibly a little bias, but I'm really trying to keep an open mind. Really. First of all, the command-line tools are severely lacking in Windows. My mentor here is showing me all kinds of command-line tricks to get stuff done, which I really appreciate, but cmd.exe is awful, copy-n-paste is weird, you can't resize the window by dragging the edge. Useful commands like which, grep, find, just don't exist. Agony. I know about cygwin, but I've never been able to integrate that well with the rest of windoze, and especially not with Visual Studio. My second complaint is online help. MSDN appears to be quite voluminous, and somewhat helpful actually, ...

This is kind of funny. At least I thought so. I fired up my windoze kvm instance for the first time since upgrading to Hardy Heron, and I got a pop-up dialog from XP telling me that hardware has changed significantly (click to see the full-sized image): Weird.

I just read this scary story written by Jeremy Allison about a poor 11-year old and Windows Vista. Here's the poignant quote from the tale: Copy and paste were disabled. Think about the fear and paranoia that led to that decision in the product design meeting for the trial version....What this means is that if you use the trial version of Office 2007 for thirty days, all documents you create will be completely unreadable by any other software unless you buy back access to your documents by purchasing the full version of the software. No easy way to get your documents out. I'm speechless.

This was originally posted on my family blog on 3/13/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. More on making my windoze box work like my linux box. Focus follows mouse, copy to clipboard by only highlighting, pasting with the middle button, and sinking windows to the bottom of the pile with a right-click, all with the True X-Mouse Gizmo . It's very nice. The only downside is that if you want to change the default settings it takes a registry hack. Since my new standard issue work laptop doesn't have a middle mouse button I'll need to do this. Dang, if all these tweaks work well enough maybe I won't have enough motivation to install linux on this thing...nah, I'm sure I still will!

This was originally posted on my family blog on 3/13/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. I love multiple virtual desktops. I have to work on windoze sometimes at work, which doesn't have virtual desktops, but I found Virtual Dimension , and it rocks!