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To quickly access the files you’ve been working on today, create a new Favorites item for these files.

To do this, open Windows Explorer and select your Libraries link on the left. Then in the search box, enter modified:today and click the Save Search toolbar button.

Enter a name, such as Libraries Today, and press enter. You will now see the new item appear in your Favorites menu.

You can select this item whenever you need to access recently worked on files.

When you press Win + left/right it will now correctly occupy half the screen, which was annoying me for a while. Essential app.

2011-07-12 PuTTY 0.61 is released

PuTTY 0.61 is out, after over four years (sorry!), with new features, bug fixes, and compatibility updates for Windows 7 and various SSH server software.

via PuTTY: a free telnet/ssh client.

I was fedup with the poor experience of editing my host file, which is often needed when developing websites. So I quickly created an AutoHotkey script for the purpose.

15:03:50 – me: anyone knows a host editor app that works under windows 7
15:04:51 – me: fed up trying to first find the hosts file, then not being able to save because I again forgot to run notepad with admin privileges.

Download @ Host Editor 7 – Hassle free host editing for Win7-XP – DonationCoder.com.

When administrating a database server, you will definitely have to put a backup solution into place. I normally run mysqldump on the database and save it to a file. However when the database server has several dozens or more databases, setting up a process for each instance quickly becomes unwieldy.

Instead, I wrote a batch file to automatically create SQL backups by quering all databases. Simply set up a scheduled task to run it at the desired interval.

Contents of dumper.bat:

@echo off
mkdir dumps
mysql -N < list_dbs.sql > dbs_list.txt
for /F "tokens=*" %%A in (dbs_list.txt) do ping localhost -n 2 > nul & echo dumping %%A & mysqldump --add-drop-database --database %%A > dumps\%%A.sql

Contents of list_dbs.sql:

SHOW DATABASES;

I have noticed that the database server becomes quite highly utilized even with the the pause between dumping each database, so as with all solutions please test it in your environment first before implementing if this is an issue for you.

PowerShell is a complete replacement for any of Microsoft’s DOS or Windows command line interpreters. It is a full fledged object oriented system administration scripting language. With PowerShell knowledge you would run circles around any sysadmin that works predominantly from through the GUI, as well as be able to get Windows to do things that you just can’t do through a GUI alone.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/msh/cmdlets/index.mspx

From Eurogamer: Unangst said Microsoft would "continue to invest" in Games for Windows, which apart from giving its games an Xbox Live-style service layer with friends lists, Achievements and the like, also insists that games be easy to install, support widescreen displays and include parental controls.

It all sounds promising. The one thing I was most impressed with on Xbox 360 is the whole integration and lack of configuration for games, if they can bring that to Windows Vista then a lot of people will be very happy.

Some ideas:
You can see how they could potentially take the experience index benchmarking framework and develop that into something that can adjust games visual quality, automatic updating and applying of patching without user intervention, matchmaking and the community features could all be very useful and add value to PC gaming. Even some sort of integrated anti piracy tool developed for Microsoft that doesn’t rootkit your machine which would be less painful to consumers would also be an improvement over the current situation.

Mike Davies works as a web developer for Yahoo Europe and has some insightful comments on the Internet Explorer rendering switch (see source).

When a user upgrades from IE7 to IE8, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. When a user upgrades from IE8 to IE9, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. Notice the trend. [...]
Effectively, with this meta tag proposal, Microsoft have either absolutely guaranteed that they will remain the dominant browser on the web, or it has sown the seeds for its ultimate destruction. If it’s dominant IE7 will be the instrument to hold back all standards compliant progress, just like IE6 before it.

Source [isolani.co.uk]

I can only agree. It seems to me the switch will result in better fitting websites, but not by using more standards. But I noticed this at the whole Eolas patent debacle: the IE team doesn’t take enough responsibility regarding standards. Even though the code was fine they wanted developers to implement a javascript workaround for their own workaround solution in all their pages with embedded content. They didn’t want to (or couldn’t) pay Eolas so people now have to click to start embedded media. Even though it’s a browser issue.

And the same happens in this case: if the browser vendor took its responsibility and improved its implementation, the whole issue  wouldn’t exist for webdevelopers’ if their sites written to standards (and valid) don’t display properly. So the whole “the users have to be protected from broken pages” card is a smoke screen in my opinion.

Just be frank then: corporate partners costcutting is more important to Microsoft than the freedom of the web.