Logaan’s Site

I use the Run app in windows an awful lot. I know the new start menu in Vista/7 offer a more advanced indexed version of the run command but I just can’t shake the habit. Also it doesn’t do the common folders a developer is looking for, such as Desktop, Temp folder etc etc.

The main problem with it after you have moved all of the profile folders to another drive, is that you cannot get to folders like the desktop, Windows just cannot find them anymore. I know you could probably go into the registry and start hacking around and telling Windows where else to go for the user folders but that just never sat quite right with me.

So here is a neat little trick I found, goto the user folder (C:\Users\Logaan) and create a shortcut with the same name as the folder you wish to get to.

Its so simple and I cannot believe that I found this years ago.

Its so cool you can even create links to other folders that you cannot usually get to in this fashion.

Enjoy.

I was working on a small project today, when I attempted to open the settings for my project. At whch point Visual Studio just closed.

I have seen this behaviour at few times, generally I have just assumed that the settings/resource files have become corrupt or something. And usually deleting them seem to do the job, however on this occasion it did not.

Also every time I went to access the project properties VS died. Even attaching to VS gave no hints to what the problem was.

Looking around on the net it seems to be quite a common problem yet, quite difficult to reproduce.

I have seen several connect issues opened and closed where support could not reproduce it. Seems a bit poor that MS would close so many issues that have similar symptoms.

Most of the solutions I have found were around closing open XAML files in VS and docking any floating windows. This didn’t help.

After removing almost everything from my project short of the project itself I deleted the supporting project files and this seemed to cure the problem (this time!).

If you run into the same problem and can’t find a fix that works, try deleting all of the .suo and .user files and anything else you can find. Trim down your solutions to thier bare minimum (ie, the code), and get rid of anything that is not part of the solution.

The company I work for packed me off to the PDC last month. This had a load of firsts for me; my first time to America, my first time on a plane.

The plan journey was 11 hours there in cattle class… not particularly enjoyable however I did get the chance to watch lots of movies on the journey that I had wanted to watch for a while. The flight back was less than 10 hours, I think the pilot had is foot planted :P Only there was lots of turbulance, every time nature called, the plane would hit a whole new patch of turbulance. It was very disconcerting.

I think this trip solidified the fact that I am not a travelling person, it took me 4 days to get over the jetlag, the waking up in the early hours of the morning wide awake. To compound the problem the hours were long, I would get up about 6:30am to get on the bus for 7:30. Spend 10 hours in the convention center, then get back to the hotel for an hour before diving off out for the evenings event.

To make things worse, my laptop would not connect to any of the wireless connections available at the convention center so for half the trip I was carrying at least 5kg of dead weight. The only useful job the laptop played was to charge one of my colleagues iPhone as he forgot to bring his mains charger and his laptop bricked itself.

We arrived in LAX late on Continue reading ‘PDC 2008’ »

This weekend just gone, I reinstalled my machine from XP to Vista (Ultimate).
Now, having used Vista at work for quite a while I have come to accept it. I can understand and use UAC correctly.

In fact, not long after installing Vista did it impress me with its ability to recognise my hardware and also find the latest drivers for me, and failing that, even point me to the correct vendor pages where I could find the right driver.

Brilliant. So far so good. Even after wrestling with Vista for control of my sound panel, where it wanted to put most of my sounds on loud as it could since it thought I was deaf, then put my microphone as low as possible with no boost since it thought no one wanted to hear me complain moan what I had to say. I was prepared to let that one go. (I still won)

But the war continues, I am very good when it comes to the organisation of my files. My documents and files go onto another drive, thats what I want to backup. But no, Vista (and OneCare which just started trying) wants to backup parts of my C: (WHY!? I mean, thats where my programs are kept) then wants to grab everything off my E: (servers and junk… ) then all of my music from my F: that I backup separately…. Wait.. I can exclude folders from backup… nice, so whenever I create a new folder on E: I have to exclude it from my backup.

Thats why I loved NT Backup so much, I could include everything I wanted, even down to the AppData/LocalSettings folders where some games kept thier saves and not include the folders where various programs keep a copy of thier installs etc.

Ah well… more open source or script majik to ensue…

 Then, only a minor annoyance. I have two different monitors, 19″ at 1280×1024 which is the primary monitor and a 21″ at 1600×1050 and Vista just cannot get the wallpaper right. In XP its was fine, I would pick a 1600×1050 wallpaper, ask it to center it and in the smaller monitor it would just cut off the edges.. fine, nice.
In Vista however, doesn’t matter whatever setting I use, it tries to fit it in the primary smaller monitor and never fits into the secondary, then always looks odd. Looks like I have either got to resort to a proper dual monitor background or stick two wallpapers into one large one just so that it looks ok in vista. I could using something like NView, but its been bloated with features that I do not care for (IE Popup Blocker… don’t need another, I already have 100s from other programs trying it on)

Apart from that its been behaving itself… I cannot deny it is a nice OS for the standard user. My father has managed to get on much better with Vista than XP. I just can’t help but feel that Vista treats me like a deaf dumb user who doesn’t know what hes doing…

 EDIT

After having stuck two wallpapers together to try and make one… the center behaviour from XP seems to occur in Vista as well. What I don’t understand is why right clicking on an image and setting it as the desktop background is different from selecting the image from the browse menu.

I also found this article: http://www.petri.co.il/installing_windows_xp_ntbackup_on_windows_vista.htm which should solve my backup problems. Bacula seems to be too advanced for my needs.