Archive for May, 2008

Not just Linux books

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Although it’s titled Free On-line Linux Technical Books and Tutorials, there’s lots here of interest to Windows folk as well:

Produce, or consume, produce, or consume…

Monday, May 19th, 2008
The Single Most Important Career Question You Can Ask Yourself

How to get Vista to show the “Command Prompt Here” on a Folder List

Sunday, May 18th, 2008
For many years, on many PCs running various versions of Windows NT, 2000 and XP, applying the “Command Prompt Here” Powertoy was one of the first things I would do to customize the vanilla Windows environment (i.e. make it usable). Right-click a folder, select “DOS Prompt Here” or “Command Prompt Here” from the context menu, and voila, a DOS box opens, set to the folder you clicked on:

I was happy to find the same feature already baked into Windows Vista: hold down the shift key, right-mouse click on any folder in the view pane, then select “Open Command Window Here” from the context menu:

But try the same trick on a folder in the Folder Tree, sorry, the command’s not there:


For some reason, in their wisdom the Microsoft UI engineers chose to omit the command from this particular menu.

Quite by chance, I discovered that the choice is available on the File menu in Vista, but it’s not invoked in the same way: instead, select a folder in folder list, hold down the shift key then left-click (i.e. normal click) the File menu:

Vista then displays “Open Command Window Here” at the top of the menu. Okay, happy to have it back, even if it’s in a place I didn’t expect…

Deleting the .ncb file fixes Intellisense Crash in VS 2008 Express

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Argh! Visual Studio 2008 Express was crashing every time I right-clicked on any code belonging to the C++ template class declaration I was writing for my C++ course assignment. Googling “2008 intellisense crash” turned up a link to an MSDN forum discussion about VS crash when updating intellisense, wherein one of the posters suggested deleting the .ncb file. Before launching my project for the nth time, I deleted the .ncb file. Voila! Intellisense works again.

It was SOOOO easy…

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Man, I saw the link to the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, and I thought “Yeah, right, like this is really gonna work”. But WP’s been bugging me to upgrade from version 2.3.something every time I log in, and it’s a Friday night, and I can’t be bothered fishing around on the WordPress site to read up on how to do the upgrade, and it’s a pain to do the backups, so I went for it.

And you know what? It Just Worked. Migrated all my stuff, kept all my plugins (although, it didn’t reactivate them, maybe it wasn’t supposed to, I don’t remember). Otherwise, it was killer - good feedback, lotsa hand holding and reassurance along the way. Fetched, unpacked and installed the whole thing. Click, click click. And now I have a spiffy new WordPress 2.5.1 install.

Best part? It’s free. I made a donation to Keith nonetheless, because he made the upgrade so easy, and to encourage him to keep up the good work. If you’ve been putting off a WP, hop on over to Keith’s site, grab the plugin and try it. I think you’ll be happy, and support him, too.