Windows 7 Taskbar is a Disaster!

Look it's early days (day 3) so there's a good chance I'll soon learn the knack of organizing the W7 taskbar, but at present it's hitting my efficiency I can't one-click to my favorite applications. My taskbar is chaotic my applications seem to be able to hide on it, I have to click icons from the desktop (fortunately there's a "List Desktop" gadget) or horrors go wandering in Start-Programs!

The applications I pin to the task bar seem to wander about or disappear, yuk !!

DropBox : Share Files without FTP

You have probably known the frustration of trying to email a large file to a group of people and then getting replies from some of them saying they didn't get or couldn't access the attachment.

Well DropBox solves this without the fuss of FTP.

The photo below is logically on my PC, You can access it via the following URL

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/2154649/frugal-foods-shop-doorway-with-mudscraper.jpg

Now what's great is that you can this to a group of people and they can access your file without needing to know anything about

However if you want to use DropBox yourself obviously you need to install it which you can by clicking here getdropbox.com (free up to 2GB)

Hence forth you can share a file or folder simply by dragging it it the dropbox folder on your PC/MAC/Linux.

Now this is where DropBox is really neat is that you don't have to do anything complicated if you are using DropBox to send/share files with different user groups because each group can ONLY see the files you send a link to!!!

The Only Way to Tell You've Got Windows 7 and Not Vista

You can instantly tell that a PC has Windows 7 (W7) by noticing the "Show Desktop" icon which is now to the Right of the System Tray Clock!

At present I am seriously bothered by with W7 Taskbar which will not remember which applications I want to keep immediately accessible, or does so in an odd random way

Deleting a Bad URL from FireFox's URL cache

You know how your browser e.g. Firefox helpfully predicts the URL you are typing which is great. Except when it brings up a BAD url you once entered months ago. Well I've found you can delete these.Hover over the URL in the drop-down and simply hit delete

Now Running Windows 7
Hi quick post; am now running W7 upgrade from Vista Home. No apparent problems so far (touch Wood).

Had 2 problems installing:-
1)The Windows Upgrade Advisor simply didn't work even after following MS recommended advice. (you click the start button and nothing happens)

2)It wouldn't accept my genuine accurately typed Product Key. Fortunately has the Microsoft Dinosaur finally learned something about customer relations, it allows you to proceed without a key and I have 30 days to sort the problem out. (By the Wat : The Product Key Issue is a KNOWN bug in Windows 7)

So I have apparently successfully done an upgrade and have all my applications and files intact : TOUCH WOOD as Phil Michelson never says!

Day 2
W7 has done something odd to the Task Bar (show desktop has zoomed off to the bottom right corner) it has done away with my beloved Quick Launch, but I'm beginning to suss it out; you have to "pin" applications to the task bar and you still drag icons onto the task bar.

So far I have one application Pegasus Email which has a disappearing tool-bar (but that's no great problem) and I had to re-add my Canon MP500 printer which I think effectively changed the driver. Anyway so far all is painless.

Day 3
The scanner won't work remotely (Cannon MP Navigator) apparently Cannon aren't ready for W7.
My first serious worry about W7 is the Taskbar which seems to be all over the place and to be a bit weird. My pinned applications "move about". Before on Vista all my important apps were 1 click away in the the Quick Launch Window.

Using CVS (Source Code and Version Control Systems)

CVS stands for Concurrent Versions System and is free and available for both Linux and Windows. Curiously I've never used it using instead my own ad-hoc backing up system. Now I've spent the time to understand it I can see that it's a marvelous system, amongst other things it provides a log of differences between versions.

For Instance to see a list of store versions of a file

> cvs log notes.txt

To See difference between current version and last stored version

> cvs diff notes.txt

or a specific version

> cvs diff -r1.1 notes.txt

I shall be using CVS for on all my text, config and source codes from now on!

The Sony Walkman is Thirty learn more here

Just Show Me an Example!

When I was studying at University I had a text book which posed a problem and then said that the answer was so obvious he would leave it the reader to work it out; I still don't know the answer!

Just now I was Googling to find a simple PHP-ZEND-MySQL script example I found a few but they left out how you invoke Zend. I'm sure that's so obvious to them but not to someone dipping his toes in the water for the first time!

Any way having read tons of technical documents in my time it seems to me that technical authors very often leave out a vital fact so blindingly obvious to them but which baffles the newbie. That's why I say cut the blabber show me the example!

I find the documentation more digestible when I've got some idea of the basics from playing with actual example scripts.

Vista Goodbye and Good Riddance

My W7 disk will be arriving soon and I'm installing Ubuntu on my other PCs. Anyway time for a last rant about Vista! The best bit about XP was Windows Explorer I just thought it was ideal for file management, but I realize now that after all this time I've never got the hang of Vista's Windows Explorer. This is because it is supposedly intelligent it alters its behavior depending on what files are in a directory in that irritating big brother fashion.

I was just doing some house keeping today in a directory moving obsolete files into a sub-directory unfortunately W-Explorer decided that I didn't need to see the date of my files; I could however uselessly have a slide-show of them!!. Windows Vista an Operating System designed by Franz Kafka!

Hasta La Vista, Vista No Thanks!

Filter out an email address from a pipe

tel blenkinsop | grep -o "[[:alnum:][:graph:]]*@[[:alnum:][:graph:]]*"

Where tel is a simple address book script, in this case I just want the email address and not the whole address

A Baby Could Install Ubuntu! (FUD)

Our communal room Windows XP PC which everyone uses but nobody owns was infested with viruses , and although I kept eradicating them with various virus programs things got worse and then finally Windows refused to boot. So I had a choice reinstall XP, re-download the service packs, Open Office etc etc or try Ubuntu.

So with nothing to lose I went to the Ubuntu website downloaded the CD image and blew it to a CD (if that worries you they will send you a CD for free). Inserted it in the CD drive (had to press F12 to get it to boot from the CD) and it asked if I wanted to install or just try Ubuntu out.

Cautiously selected try it out and it fired up straight away, I opened Firefox and could immediately browse the Internet. Amazingly I could see the old Windows file structure and I download all photo and files to a portable hard-drive.
Then everything being OK selected full install. The only thing I have to select was Time Zone! Now here's the beauty you get a fully working system with Open Office etc.

It was absolutely painless; now why didn't I do this years ago? Well it was because I'd read all these FUD articles (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) in the technical press, where the writers had made out they'd had trouble with Linux/Ubuntu, now I wonder if these articles weren't ahem sponsored by Microsoft!?