Have a look at Fences[^] for organising your desktop. Works great for me.

Subscribe to Digital Blasphemy[^]. Then you won't want to have icons covering your desktop.

I'd say you should look at mercurial and git. I would recommend mercurial because I use it and like it, although I haven't been able to find a real difference between the two. Slight syntactic differences but... For hosting, I like Bitbucket. You can have an unlimited number of private repositories with 5 users. On Github, you can have unlimited collaborators, but only 5 private repositories. For VS I use a combination of VisualHG (I have the pro version) and TortoiseHG and command line HG.

I have a Lenovo T520 with an Intel HD 3000 card and it does work. I think it started in the last system update. Very cool tip. +5 Update Just found out it's Lenovo's On Screen Display in the display adapter's properties. There is a setting "Enable Auto Scroll function" that enables and disables this.

I disagree. There are plenty of hackers looking at Linux. Even taking viruses into consideration, if you run a Windows box without good protection, you deserve every single thing that happens to you. Stop breating my air! Your main vulnerability points I feel (completely unjustified) are the apps you use, in particular your browser. Throwing away the red herring of security, look at the rest. If you either want to play games use Windows. That's it. Btw, wine (Windows Emulator) does not work. Neither does that wine rip off to let you play games. It takes 17 times as long, you have to sacrifice a goat and performance sucks. If you're a Windows or .Net developer, use Windows. And Visual Studio is better than Monodevelop or Vim (Go googling for vim integration into VS2010, it rocks!). (Side note: everything is better than emacs, even notepad. Yes I said it! And I believe it!) If you have an iPhone, use Windows. No itunes on Linux. Yes you can plug it in through Amarok etc, but Apple stuff does not play well with non Apple stuff. Ease of use is simple. If you know Windows, it's a win. If you don't, toss a coin. If you're a networking guru, run Linux. You should be. It's just a gajillion times nicer. If you admin a windows network, run windows. If you admin a *nix network, run Linux. If you admin a mixed network, run Windows and buy SecureCRT. Learn how ssh keys work. Performance wise, yes you can slim Linux down more than Windows, but then you don't get all the features. They're 6 to 1, half a dozen to the other. If you want to get the best possible working environment, use linux. Warning: It will take some years. I've put 14 in so far and am getting close. If you enjoy playing with computers (I guess so cos you're here), run Linux. If your girlfriend/mother/sister non technically competent relationship person has to use the machine, Windows. Yes, in theory you can teach them how to use Linux. Also, in theory, theory is the same as in practice... I've been running Windows since 3.11 in the early nineties and Linux since Slackware 3.5 in the late nineties. Both OSes have improved incredibly in terms of usability, stability, features and getting out of my way so I can get shit done. Windows has a HUGE lead on games, and the edge on Windows development. The rest of it comes down to preference and experience. From a fresh install, it takes about 3 days to get a Windows box the way I like it. As I said earlier, I've been working on my

I live in Zimbabwe so therefore have a very slow, very intermittent link to the internet. When it comes to this setup, Steam is HORRIBLE. It's net code is shocking. It's continually updating and the download servers are so slow it's unbelievable. It takes somewhere between 3 and 15 minutes to log in when everything is up to date (which has only every happened to me once. It was a Tuesday...) I bought Modern Warfare 2, used my friends media to install it, then had to update the game. This took me 4 weeks. I finally got to play and the next day there was a 200 meg update. Well sod playing for another 2 days. The number of games I have bought on Steam and then pirated so I can play the offline, single player is not insignificant for this very reason. I guess (but don't know) if you live in a country with real internet, then these problems go away. Apart from that, I find the Steam interface somewhat buggy and it crashes quite frequently. You often have to wait a long time for games to load and Steam will just die on you for no reason. What I'm saying is, if you can buy a game from somewhere other than Steam, do so. It's worth paying extra to get the crap out of the way.

I bought a Crucial OCZ 120G. When I first put it in, it was definitely HolyCrap fast. Now I'm used to it, but when I use my colleague's laptop (exactly the same brand and model), I cannot believe how sluggish and unresponsive it is.

var does compile time inference of the type. It looks at the right hand side of the equals and says, ah that's a string therefore that's what I shall be. Not an int. Not a double. Not even shall I pretend to be a DateTime. The day that someone tries to made me a TcpClient, I shall have my trusty compiler beat thee with a stick.

var transaction = repository.GetTransaction(id);

I'm guessing that transaction is going to be of the type AKittyLitter. Yes that makes sense. Oh and id is the name of my CEO's pet gerbil. (If you use Notepad / vim / anything else stupid, I'm not talking to you) You're working in Visual Studio, not nano. Use it.

var x = y.Foo();

The bloke who actually has that in his release project should be shot. I agree with a previous poster that your variable names and method names should mean something. If repository.GetTransaction doesn't return a Transaction object, then I've designed my code stupidly. If Transaction doesn't have a decimal Amount property on it, well, then Visual Studio will tell you before the 3rd letter. Go read this: http://omergertel.com/2010/07/04/how-to-read-code/[^]

But you still have to type in the type the first time round. Plus the line is longer and more cumbersome to read.

What I really like is that the dragging the window around thing can also be done using Win+Up, Win+Down, Win+Left, Win+Right

You can do that with Emacs you know...

"\S\p\a\n\i\s\h\ \I\n\q\u\i\s\i\t\i\o\n" Escaping the Spanish Inquisition

I'm running a dev team of 4 (me included) that is in a somewhat unusual situation. We have a large number of active projects (~50). However the projects are generally fairly small, i.e. 3 weeks from start to finish. We use SVN for source control and currently store all notes, bugs etc in text files in a /doc directory of the svn project. To keep track of the projects and what we're all working on, we have a shared spreadsheet with Client, Project, Developer etc. All the projects are maintained, bug fixes and feature requests do come up, but we're coping at the moment. Our company is going through the transition from small business where everyone knows what everyone else is doing up to a medium enterprise where we need structure in order to know what is going on. Since I've been moved from lead developer to Manager (capital M important) the challenges I'm facing (management and technical) are: 1. Who is doing what and when will it be done? 2. Who is giving us work and how do I allocate it? 3. How do I keep track of billing the work to our clients? Dev time for new products is not chargeable because there is a license fee. Bug fixes are not chargeable, but feature requests are on either a Time and Materials or whatever I feel like. 4. Is there a bug tracking system that is *quick* to setup new projects in? Preferably one that I can link commits from subversion into. 5. I haven't looked at CruiseControl or the like, but is it quick and easy to setup a new project? I haven't been able to find anything on how to manage a team in these circumstances. Can anyone here help me blunder a little less disastrously and slightly more quickly through the management responsibilities that come up on a day to day basis.

^KD is more common for me (Format code) My email client doesn't like it either surprisingly.

Regular Expressions. I tend to "see" matches for certain groups of items, for example, shopping. /.*milk.*/i Whenever someone says something thought provoking, my mind starts making up regex's that will match various parts of the statement. And after a sixpack or 2, my mates aren't really sure what I mean when I slurr "slash whack dee plus slash beer".

How do you pronouce "ghoti" Answer: fish Enough - f sound Women - short i sound Nation - sh sound Go English. On a slightly more serious note the strange spellings and pronunciations and grammar comes from English being a peasant language that has been taking other languages into dark alleys for years and mugging them for words and sentence constructs.

16th of August

Saving Private Gerbil The Gerbil Identity; Gerbil Ultimatum; Gerbil Supremacy The man with the golden gerbil Lock stock and two smoking gerbils Gerbil Hunters Gerbil Potter Iron Gerbil Little Miss Gerbil I Am Gerbil The Boondock Gerbils March of the Gerbils Sweeny Todd - The Demon Gerbil of Fleet Street

Because it will go off topic very very soon. http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=2951514#xx2951514xx[^] Take a movie title and replace one of the words in the title with "gerbil". I'll start Dude! Where's my gerbil. (See it didn't even need a response to go off topic)

telnet. actaully nc, telnet funges escape characters for you...