Friday, February 26, 2010

Revert the Revert, brilliant

Greetings, Intellij IDEA9.0 has a great Local History feature. It keeps track of your changes, you can give a name to a change, and you can revert to an old change.

Even better it doesn't rewind everything, it adds a revert action as the last action, so that you can revert your revert!

It lets me send out a fix for review part 1 and then work on part 2 immediately w/o checking in.

Brilliant.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Calendar for Computer Maintenance

Greetings, I realized that I never remember to defrag, chkdsk (see last post), backup, etc consistently. So I decided to add a bunch of events to my Outlook calendar to remind me. When I get sick of doing something or other every night I'll make it automatic.

My schedule is:
Monday - checkdisk (Don't want to do anything on a bad disk)
Tuesday- Uninstall old programs (they accumulate)
Wednesday - Disk Cleanup or CCleaner (they'll catch any old files from the uninstall)
Thursday - Defrag (now that we aren't messing with the file system this week anymore)
Friday - Backup (now that everything is as pristene as it'll get)

We'll see how it goes.

AppQuest: ChkDsk++

Greetings, today I tried out HD Tune (http://www.hdtune.com/download.html) as a replacement for chkdsk. The free version has benchmarking ("is the Raptor drive REALLY faster?") and an error scan that doesn't require a reboot like chkdsk. There is no "scan all drives" feature though, you have to start each scan yourself.

The Professional Edition has command line functionality, so it could be remedied with a script though.

TimeBridge / MeetWith.me evaluation

I'm trying out MeetWith.me. It looks at your calendar (gmail or outlook, but NOT both) and creates a web page that just displays if you're busy or not. It may work out since I'm a busy guy, but it's $15/mo.! I'm not sure if it can deliver that much value, but if it lets me cram in one more friendship / social group into my life, it'll totally be cost effective.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Perl: "Can't find cmd.exe" worst error message ever

It turns out that it really means "The program that you specified with the system() command couldn't be found". It can be triggered with something like 'system("nonExistent.bat")'.

I spent hours fiddling with the PERL5SHELL variable to no avail before I Googled the answer.