Hirlpoo West : Tips 'n' Tricks

Playing with Writer

ddysart — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 22:38:00 GMT

Though hardly breaking news at this point, I'll point folks to the new Windows Live Writer blog posting tool. I've been playing with it for a couple weeks no (we were under quarantine about talking about it) and like it pretty much so far (though I still have a tendency to use the web interface Community Server gives you). The public seems to like it too. I'll be curious to see what folks do with the plugin API. Tim Heuer has already put together a Flickr plugin that eases inserting Flickr images. The photo below is a photo of my son that I've got up on Flickr:

Inserting that took a couple clicks, though on Flickr itself, getting the HTML to insert a photo elsewhere isn't too difficult.

BTW - the above shot is one of my first "keeper" photos I've taken using the awesome techniques outlined by David Hobby on the Strobist blog. David is a photojournalist for the Baltimore Sun and has been sharing load of techniques for doing off camera lighting (all for real cheap, assuming you already have a DSLR).

Windows Command Line Auto Completion

ddysart — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 22:58:00 GMT

Having explained this to a number of people in as many days, I thought I'd share this tip for working with long paths on the command line. The easist way to expalin this is to jump in feet first:

Open a command line (<Windows Key>-R, CMD<Enter> is engrained in my hands at this point in my career)
At the prompt, repeatedly hit tab

You will be cycling through all of the files and directories in your current directory. Now try this:

At a clean command prompt, type "dir \P" then start hitting tab.

Now you'll be cycling through all the directories that start with "P" in the root of the current drive (in my case, it cycles through "Program Files" then Projects). You'll also notice that for files with embedded spaces, quotes are automatically added. This works for as many characters as you wish to type. After you cycle to the directory you want, type a backslash, then hit tab again and you'll cycle through the files and sub-directories in that directory, and so on. On my current machine, I can type the following to open my machine.config:

notepad \win<tab>\mic<tab>\<tab>\v1.1<tab>\con<tab>\m<tab><enter>

This results in the following command line, which would take considerably more keystrokes or mouse clicks:

notepad \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\config\machine.config

This works at just about any point in a command, as long as you are starting from a space. It will also work on UNC paths staring at the share name (Assuming you can authenticate to that particular share):

dir \\fileserver\share\<tab>

There may be a delay as CMD goes an enumerates the items on the share, but if you are trying to get to something deep down in some huge directory structure with really long path names, this helps a ton.

Though this has been in CMD for some time, I don't think it was enabled by default untill Windows XP which may explain why it isn't well known. If you're stuck on a Windows 2000 box (or, gasp! NT4), you can edit the registry to enable this (Standard registry disclaimer applies - don't do this unless you know what you're doing since you can render a box un-bootable with sufficient registry tweaking.):

Set HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompetionChar to 9

KB244407 covers this in detail.

I used to hate the command line becuase I'm lazy and didn't want to type out huge paths (which I would end up misspelling). No longer!

Cool Notepad Trick

ddysart — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:11:00 GMT

This neat trick came across on an internal alias. I hadn't seen this before, but I'm guessing it isn't new. Pretty handy for notetaking (if you're a plain text sort of guy/gal).

Open a blank Notepad file
Write .LOG (in uppercase) in the first line of the file, followed by Enter. Save the file and close it.
Double-click the file to open it and notice that Notepad appends the current date and time to the end of the file and places the cursor on the line after.
Type your notes and then save and close the file.
Each time you open the file, Notepad repeats the process, appending the time and date to the end of the file and placing the cursor below it.

[Update: Evidentally this is explained in KB260563 which makes it look like this feature has been around since Windows 98. Still pretty cool in my book.

I was in a presentation today with Jeff Sanquist and as he was scrolling through his blog on screen saw he picked up on this too.]