Custom Windows Control Panel
The Windows control panel contains a lot of stuff and it seems to take forever to open. My solution to this has either to make a bunch of shortcuts on the desktop, or to just suck it up if it is a machine that I work on only occasionally. I came across this hack for creating a custom control panel via the Lifehacker blog. This is a much better solution.
Windows Power Users: Unleash your Inner Unix!
Microsoft has released Windows PowerShell as part of Windows 2008 Server, and it is also available here for 2003 Server and Vista and XP. Microsoft has always had scripting languages for its various operating systems: DOS, Windows Scripting Host (basically, Visual Basic lite), and a myriad of 3rd party languages. So what is different this time? The depth and breadth of the Windows PowerShell brings it close to the functionality of Unix shell scripting. Here are a few highlights:
- The syntax and keywords are similar to C#
- The commands can be strung or piped together, i.e. the output of one command becomes the input for another.
- Windows servers can be administered remotely, including the starting and shutting down of services, retrieving errors from log files, etc.
- Many resources and sample scripts are available, and a blog is being written by the PowerShell team.
Windows PowerShell is built in to the operating system, and it can automate many of the endless tasks necessary to keep a server farm running. If you do any Windows server administration work at all, time spent learning PowerShell would be time well spent.
Tool #1 in the BI developer’s toolbox
If you are an IT professional working with business intelligence software, or any software for that matter, than you accumulate a collection a of software tools that help you get the job done. Tool #1 is the text editor. Text is software’s raw material, used when coding, scripting, configuring and documenting. The default text editor for Windows is Notepad, and it is what most people end up using for everything. However, there are many better options. The importance of a text editor in the IT industry is evidenced by the massive collection of open source editors available on SourceForge and Freshmeat.
The Pragmatic Programmer offers some guidelines for making an informed choice of text editor:
- Configurable - the look and feel must be comfortable, and keyboard shortcuts must be available
- Extensible - integrates with other tools (like Cygwin or Perl), has a plug-in architecture
- Programmable - ability to automate multi-step tasks that have to be repeated ad infinitum
- Syntax highlighting
- Auto-completion
- Auto-indentation
- Templates
- Access to help systems from within the editor
- IDE features - compile, debug, preview
The best advice the authors offer is simply this: “Use a Single Editor Well” (Tip 22)
My current favorite editors for Windows are Metapad (which replaces Notepad) and Notepad++. For Unix/Linux, I like VIM. I rarely work on a Mac, but if I did more often, I would surely use TextMate.
Copying files into the Windows Vista Program Files folder
One of the many annoying things when working with Windows Vista is the way the operating system protects certain directories, as part of the many security enhancements now built into Vista. For the average user, this is probably a good thing, but for any IT professional or developer who needs to test and tweak files all over the place, it can be a huge inconvenience. I use the following steps as the quickest way around this:
- Open up a privileged command line prompt. Type “cmd” into the Start Search box (the “run” box in previous versions of Windows), and hit Ctrl+Shift + Enter (as opposed to just the Enter key). A User Account Control dialog window will pop up. Click the continue button or use the Alt-C keyboard shortcut. Thanks to the How-To geek for this tip.
- Take ownership of the directory into which you wish to copy files with this command: takeown /f “directory name”
- Grant yourself full control of the same directory with this command: cacls “directory name” /G user account:F
- Use the robocopy command (now included with Vista) to copy the files or folders, or launch Windows explorer from this privileged command prompt with this command: explorer
If you need to do this often with the same files, the commands can be put into a batch file that can be run as administrator. The commands takeown and cacls are also useful for deleting or overwriting system or other protected files. A complete list of Windows Vista and Server 2008 commands can be found here.