Software

Found: One brilliant article about being a programmer
Source: MeFi

When I got my new laptop a few weeks ago I thought it was pretty cool that it came with Office 2007. The nifty new toolbars and embedded wavey swooshes are slick. I don’t really mind that by default Word and Excel assume you want to save files with a .docx or .xlsx extension. (That’s fine with me; makes it easier to remember to not save something as an ‘07 file if I need to share it with others that are still using Office XP or 2003.)

What I cannot handle is the fact that Outlook 2007 is using over 130 MB of RAM. 130 MB?! I wouldn’t mind that much, since apparently it’s supposed to play nicely with Windows and just use whatever RAM is available. But even using as much memory as it is it’s still slow slow slow. And this is even after I disabled iTunes 7.3’s ridiculous Outlook add-in. 130 MB?! Are they crazy?

Yesterday I became the proud new owner of a Dell D630 Latitude. Today I began the tiresome task of transferring my life from my old D610 to it. The old laptop was Anchor. (Previous computers were Budweiser, Guinness, and Corona.) The new laptop is Maui. Here is a list of the software that Dell decided to install on my new machine that I either immediately disabled or deleted:

• Google Desktop
• Google Toolbar
• AOL Setup
• Intellisonic Speech Enhancement
• the “language” taskbar toolbar
• Dell’s Wireless WLAN Card monitor

Let’s say you want to create a smart playlist in iTunes that will contain the 25 highest-rated Beatles or Bob Dylan songs that you haven’t heard in a while. That would be pretty cool, right? It’s not that simple, but it can be done. I’ll show you how.

The main roadblock you’re facing is that iTunes only gives you two ways of restricting / selecting songs. You can build a smart playlist based on songs that meet all of your criteria or one based on songs that meet any of your criteria. This any / all option really puts you in a corner. First I’ll explain why, and then I’ll show you how to fix it.

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Awesome LifeHacker DOS trick: Give a folder its very own drive letter.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an iTunes song he thought I’d like. Of course I was unable to open it because it came delivered as an attachment. (Cue scary music.) Microsoft thinks that I can’t possibly be trusted to not open some flesh-eating virus, so by default Outlook blocks everything. It’s usually one of the first things I “fix” when I get a new computer. Here’s how to do it …

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Zeldman does a spectacular job explaining why I hate when people use Word as their email editor.

From the Department of Inexplicable Corporate Decisions: Pocket PC integration discontinued with Microsoft Money 2007.

Looking for a way to clear some of your computer’s clutter? Getting rid of empty directories is a good start. I was looking for a file and realized that my machine was spending a long time searching through folders that I knew had nothing in them. A quick Google search returned a handy DOS trick to zap them all. It took me about one minute to delete just over two thousand empty folders. There’s nothing like a little command-line scripting to get something done.

All three of the televisions in my house are connected to either a TiVo box or a DirecTV box. Both of these systems give me the option of displaying a “guide” in a grid right on the screen. If I want to see what else I can watch, I click to the guide and browse until I find something I like. That way I can search all I want without changing channels and stopping whatever is currently being shown from being recorded. I love this feature.

My girlfriend fiancée hates it. When she is watching TV she never uses the guide. She just punches the code for E! or VH1 and goes right to the channel. This bothers me both because she sometimes stops recording something by changing channels and also because it just feels inefficient. Why not just use the guide?

I can’t really get upset about it, though, because her method is the same one I use to read my blogs. I just can’t seem to get into feeds. RSS is certainly cool and I dig the ability to subscribe to the feeds of the sites I like. But I never do. I have a bookmark folder in FireFox called “Blogs” and that’s where I save the links of my favorite online reads. About once a day I scroll to the (incredibly cool) “Open All in Tabs” link in that bookmark folder and pop open all my blogs at once. This is definitely less efficient than using an RSS reader — or the system included with Firefox — and only checking the blogs which have been updated recently. Why in the world do I do it this way?

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The schedule for the University of Florida 2007 football season has been published. You can find it at the University Athletic Association website. They even give you the ability to import the schedule directly into Outlook!

It took me a few minutes to find it, of course. There is just a lot of stuff cluttering the site … Y’know … all about how we won the National Championship in basketball last year, and then the BCS Championship in football this year, and then the National Championship in basketball again this year.

The feature I’d most like to see added to iTunes “smart playlist” building is the ability to exclude songs based on metadata. I like to listen to music that I haven’t heard in a long time and / or that I haven’t heard very often. The only problem is that when I choose to select songs based on the criteria “Least Often Played”, iTunes annoyingly adds its own sub-sort based on Artist. That means that my 50-track “smart” playlist will include, for example, 25 songs by Bruce Springsteen. That doesn’t give me much randomness and it drives me crazy.

What I should be able to do is create a “Recently Played” playlist (or use the existing one) and add a limiting factor to a separate playlist like this:

Artist is not in the playlist “Recently Played”.

That is what I’d really like.

Washington — At least two federal government agencies are refusing to upgrade their computers with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista operating system, citing concern over costs and compatibility issues.

In a Jan. 19 memo to staff, Dan Mintz, the Transportation Department’s chief information officer, imposed an “indefinite moratorium” on upgrading desktop and laptop computers with the new operating system, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.

Mintz wrote that there is “no compelling technical or business case” to upgrade to the new products and specific reasons not to upgrade.

Think I’m crazy for saying there’s no reason to go to Vista right now? At least a small village’s worth of friends and family have asked me if I’m upgrading to Vista, when I’m upgrading to Vista, whether they should get Vista on their new computer, and why the hell am I not all excited about Vista. I’ve told each and every one of them that I’ll upgrade to Vista someday, but not in 2007. XP works just fine for me, thank you. I don’t have the time or the patience to spend half my working hours for the next six months installing service patches and emergency updates. I’d never buy the first year of a new model of car and I’ll not upgrade my OS the same year it’s released. My operating system is probably the only thing in my life that I choose not to have on the bleeding edge. Sometimes it’s just not worth it to be an early adopter.

Friday Five: Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts

1. CTRL-W (Firefox)
   Closes an open tab.
2. CTRL-S (almost every Microsoft product)
   Saves.
3. CTRL-SHIFT+arrow, SHIFT-END, & SHIFT-HOME (almost every text editor)
   Highlights (selects) a word and / or line of text.
4. ALT-F4 (Windows)
   Closes the current window.
5. ALT-SPACEBAR-X (Windows)
   Maximizes the current window.