March 2007 Blog Posts
Just discovered this great little utility from Pixelab Inc. Succintly described as xcopy on steroids, it's a command line tool with a huge array of options. What I like is this one:
XXCOPY M:\SOURCE\ E:\DEST\ /CLONE
which synchronizes a destination directory with a source directory ignoring files that haven't changed and deleting files no longer in the source. It's a much easier way to backup my data files - especially my photos and music. Just gotta put a few of these lines in a batch file for a dead simple backup method.
A few months ago, I wrote a small .NET application I've called the Send HTML Wizard. It was cool doing a bit of coding in C# again and actually finishing it.
Download Send HTML Wizard
To install, you just need to unzip and run. You will need the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 installed on your machine as well.
The wizard prompts you through five steps:
Get your SMTP server information
Get the path to an HTML file on your local hard disk
Get the list of TO and CC recipients you want to send the message...
Hairball alert. This has been bugging me recently; I've concluded there are three devices I want.
The first device functions as a phone above all else. I also want it to be a decent MP3 player - at least 4GB. It must do calendar and contacts well. Email is good. I don't mind if it has a camera too and maybe some games but it's not critical. However, it's very critical that it has a really long battery life. It makes sense that it would be a flash-based device and must survive nasty shocks. The good news is that these devices are coming...
Last Christmas, I got my wife a TomTom One Europe GPS car navigation system. She had been lusting over this little device for quite a while. I did some research and all the reviews were very good for it.
She doesn't really use it a whole lot since we usually know where we're going. However last week, I borrowed it and took it to Austria for a ski trip. It's the first time I ever tried relying completely on a GPS system to get me somewhere. I must say it worked really well and both my travel companions are now considering getting...
I recently bought a new server on behalf of the local junior school. I wanted a good name brand server for which they could get support. Custom building a server wasn't an option because of insurance/liability issues.
I did quite a bit of research to source it. I wanted a multi-core CPU and much preferred an Intel Core 2 Duo for its excellent performance and lower power consumption. I also wanted a case that could hold at least 3 hard disks and a motherboard with spare SATA connections.
The cheapest server that offered all this was an HP ProLiant ML110 G4. It was...
I found two free PDF print drivers recently. This is always a useful thing to have on a PC so that you can print receipts from a browser or any other document you want to archive or share.
The first one I found was doPDF but version 5 doesn't embed fonts. You have to upgrade to their pay-for product to get this feature. Then I discovered PrimoPDF which does embed if you select the prepress option. Seems to work great. Recommended.