1. ls, cp, rm
2. scripting for it is super easy
3. there’s a build tool that works with the native scripting
4. you get to treat core windows services as protocols, i.e iis://nodename
5. you can fire off c# inline, almost like what anders did at pdc, but not quite.
6. I can do my source control, testing, building, and generate Guids from the same place

Cons:

1. for some reason long commands keep the screen from repainting till you hit a key
2. since its not “native” it doesn’t boot with the machine
3. the profile storage isn’t straight forward till you find where it is

Overall, I’m really really pleased to have my nix commands on my windows box. This beats cygwin because it understands the permissions model of windows. So if you like command line, and you like nix syntax, give powershell a shot.

Now: Chris + Alicia = Alex

This is, at least so far, a lofty and unacheivable goal for a work-a-holic.

As far as the running goes, its been slowing down at the same rate as my postings. But I’m playing soccer every sunday for about an hour. Loosing inches, not lbs but feeling awesome.

Will post soon, again sorry for the silence. Not that anyone was listening anyway.

I have run into quite a large problem, I need to organize and mange my library. I have music that I used to like, or I have whole albums with exactly 1 track that I’m enamoured with but for the sake of completeness I have the whole album ripped, including art.

So my question is, how do I get my music in a consumable format, while appeasing my compulsive need to hoard music I find ok, but not good enough to make the prime time rotation?  Ranking on the 5 star system seems to be the most logical solution, but iTunes uses this for a statistical percentage of play, when party shuffle is on. So 1 star may mean, no dice but organized, for you but itunes will still play that track in party shuffle all be it only once a year or so, its still a pain.

The only answer I can find is to point party shuffle at a smart playlist that is 2 or greater stars. So far this works.

Does anyone have a real way to keep their music under control? Am I the only person who “collects” unlistened to tracks, just because the artist is good enough to make a hit?

ItunesKeys for windows, and equivalent on OSX are a godsend for this kind of reorg.

Google announced late yesterday that they are entering into the arms race that is the modern browser market share race.

The difference is, they are applying modern engineering to the memory and tabbing model to make the browser more stable. Even a few years ago, needing your browser to just “take a licking and keep on ticking” was not of utmost priority, today however, performing vital business tasks is a job for browser based applications.

They have the rundown of the application and how they decided to do things, in comic book form, on their google books site, here.

Enjoy a little Chrome, its supposed to be downloadable later today. I’ll link it up, as soon as I find it.

The first of these challenges is, balance, once you work from your home, your home is your office and leaving the office at the office is really a task. I’m lucky in that I have a room, dedicated to my needs as an office. I highly recommend this as it allows you to shut that door when you are off work and not be at the office.

Most people tell you that you should close your door during the day to avoid distractions, this may help some, but it proves impractical, since it impedes the underlying purpose of working at one’s home. If you can’t talk to other people at home, while you are at home, rent an office, it will serve you better in the long run for balance purposes. Of course when I’m on a long phone call, and really require privacy, the door is nice, and my family understands.

I also have done something different than I have done in any other office, I don’t eat meals at my desk (snacks are fair game), unless its an emergency cleanup situation.  This helps with balance, it seems backwards, but I assure you, constraining your time, and getting 30 minutes out of the office, even if its just spent in your dinning room or breakfast nook, and it has been great.

If you have any other solutions for balancing your work at home, I’d love to hear them.

its so addictive, we are calling it crack overflow. Its a lot like experts exchange, except its free.

Check it out, let me know what you think.

Along with the pushups I’m also trying to get back into running. For that I’m using the ZenHabbits.com “Sedentary to running in 5 steps“.

I’ll check back in every few weeks with a status. Currently I’m walking 30 minutes 3 times a week, step 1, and am maxing out at 7 real pushups. I know, I know, weakling, but everybody starts somewhere. The goal is, 100 real pushups, and to be able to run for an hour 4 times a week.

One of my favorites is alt+d which gets you to the url bar in most web browsers. I know what you are thinking, thats the browser, not the os. I thought the same thing, except, on OS X using firefox this keyboard shortcut doesn’t work. What does work on OS X then? Command(ctrl on other os’s)+L.

So why should you care about this? Well because ctrl(command) +L works on every other OS as well. Look for the keyboard shortcut, although slightly more annoying in say windows, that works everywhere. It will save you a lot of time and frustration in the end.

Note: for those of you thinking “just use the mouse”. Talk to me when you realize how much more efficient you’ll be actually utilizing all 104 functions that lay in front of you.

Yesterday I began the safari into ubuntu. I took my most modern, and least used computer and wiped it, reinstalled windows on a much smaller partition, and installed ubuntu on the latter 3/4 of the hard drive. I only installed windows because you never know, and if you install windows at all it must be first. I was very pleasantly surprised, the ubuntu install was not only easier, but much faster than the xp install I had completed just minutes before. Now I am faced with a vast surface to discover.

As the machine gets used more prominently I will let everyone know how it goes. My wife has already mentioned that she likes it. Solely because gnome came with mahjong, which she is utterly addicted to. The immediate question I got was, why doesn’t apple put games on the mac? It may seem trivial, but people like my wife are the people that apple needs to win over in order to be out of the minority of the mainstream. So apple, get some games, the gnome suite is decent, and a good start.

If you think about the way most people do asp.net programming in c#, almost all of them have 3rd party controls they purchased. Whether you purchased them for the good or bad reasons, the api of these controls is generally quite poor. You usually have to know the companies brand name quite intimately to use such controls. For instance Telerik has a suite of controls, every single last one of them is called Rad<Control Name>. Within these controls, there is also jargon for methods, and a lot of ceremony to doing almost anything. The one place I have found piece with using these extension methods, is to cleanup, and shortcut many of these painful tasks.

So the best (only) place to use extension methods, is to wade through smelly code from a 3rd party.

The only time you will have to use these waders, is if you are in fact saddled with 3rd party code, that you can’t refactor. Otherwise, extension methods are pretty useless. You’re better off using your old utility class syntax, and saving yourselves the headaches of trying to use code later in extension methods. Especially if you are going to write extension methods for fancy tostring operations, more on that next. Microsoft is a 3rd party to your c# code, and their messy smelly code for certain things, deserves some extension methods.

A bad use for extension methods, is fancy ToString operations. Not because nobody needs fancy ToString operations, but because you can’t actually access your neat snippet, via ToString. You’ll end up with -13.MyFavoriteWayToSeeNegativeNumbersMulitpliedBySixBeforeTheyHitTheScreen(). Who needs methods like that? Why not just call  IntUtils.MultiplyBySix(-13).ToString()? As verbose and horrible as the latter is, its way better than the habbits and bloat that are caused by trying to glom on new methods to perform fancy ToStrings.

• This Week In Tech
• Macbreak weekly
• Floss Weekly (bi-quarterly, when the moon is in alignment appropriately)
• Deep Fried Bytes
• DotNetRocks
• Diggnation
• Hanselminutes
• Polymorphic Podcast
• Ruby on Rails podcast
• Rails Envy podcast
• Stackoverflow

Most of these podcasts have canned entries and announcers and ads, but if you are a constant listener, you learn to skip the first x seconds and that at minute x skip another 2 minutes, that kind of thing, and they are back to just talk. However I must say, on all the twit.tv podcasts, the ads are 1000% more relavent than the ads that are on the .net podcasts I listen to. Enjoy, hopefully you are already listening to some of these great shows.