I have always felt that the spell checking engine and grammar checking engine should have just been an open API in Windows1. During the desktop suite feature war of the 1990s, when I worked on the Lotus suite in Japan, every new version of Word (and the other suite applications) brought more and more sophisticated spell checking and grammar checking. That has now stagnated and while Word has great spell checking, Internet Explorer and other basic applications do not. Moreover, many other applications come with their own spellchecker built in which means that you have to enter those words which are unique to you in multiple applications supplementary dictionaries.
In the past, I downloaded a spell checker for Explorer and it was so useful that I used Explorer for all those tasks that required significant text entry. Today as I randomly browsed the Opera documentation2 I found that it supported GNU Aspell, so I downloaded and installed it. When I fired up Opera, nothing changed! The spell checker was still greyed out. I checked the Aspell documentation and found that I didn't have any dictionaries installed3by default. Going back to the Aspell home page and scrolling a little further down the page gave me the dictionary downloads section. With an appropriate dictionary in place, Opera's "check spelling" option became active and I can now use it on every multi-line text input box. sigh...
Why did the restrict it to multi-line controls? Don't subjects and titles need spell checking too??
1: Maybe it is! But why don't more apps use it?
2: I really should read more product documentation.
3. Ahem. This is in the Aspell documentation.
Oops...I used W.Bloggar to post the first version of this and forgot to spell check. As a result it was full of errors...
At Vanguard we had really strict Java code formatting conventions. It drove some people nuts but most people came round to the advantages in the end. With a fixed style, all the code in the company is written to a higher standard as people take more pride in their work. It is easy to do code reading and refactoring as there is no need to reformat the code. Arguments about the one true brace layout style or tab indentation size go away because the chosen style, whatever it is, is the law. People who can reliably code to a set format also tend to reliably code to a set specification. At that time, I started use CheckStyle to check my own code and would have liked to have included it in the pre build checks to warn of coding violations. Using a tool to verify the code also helps as you can't argue with the tool and niggling about badly formatted code becomes less personal.
If you search Google for java code style checker the first site that comes up is the Checkstyle Home Page.
If you search Google for C# code style checker you get links to various Coding Style Guide documents.
I would have thought that someone would have ported CheckStyle to C#. Maybe C# programmers don't care about their code looks...
Both of the following tools are useful for finding what is eating the space on a drive and they or their equivalents should be in every sysadmins toolbox.
WinDirStat is another Windows tool to give you a Treemap display of the contents of your disk.
DoubleKiller searches out duplicate files on your disk and lets you delete them.
This is the best Windows productivity tool ever. SlickRun gives you a small clock in the corner of the screen that when clicked, or invoked with with the Windows-Q key, becomes a command line. By assigning commands short names you can configure SlickRun to do anything: run programs, fire up your email client, open a web page. I set it to so that MAIL brings up my mail program, EXCEL brings up Excel, TODO brings up my Excel sheet with my todo list in it and ME executes a mailto link with my email address in it. The command line even has completion so you don't have to type all of the command. Right now "Windows-Q,T,Enter" brings up my todo list. How quickly can you fire up yours?
I combine this with my small Wiki so that it will bring up the page that relates to my personal contacts i.e. Windows-Q JOHNTA brings up my personal Wiki page about my friend John.
I was using some other software to do this but it required a yearly subscription which put me off it..that software allowed you to type in the shortcut anywhere you were typing which caused more problems than it solved.
Later... as a result of using SlickRun I have been looking up the command line options for Windows programs to see how I can integrate them.
Sunaga-sensei told me about this a long time ago but I forgot about it. This only works for phones that can play QCP files which includes Au phones in Japan. If your phone can record QCP files it probably means that can play them too. I have only used this method on my Au phone so I can't help you if you are using another phone network.
Ideas:
Notepad users pile in on, Microsoft insider, Raymond Chen's blog about the new features in Notepad and Calc. Just about everyone (who is too lazy to download a better freeware one) wants Notepad to be better and Raymond explains why it won't change.
I have been looking for a self contained Wiki that I can put on my Flash Drive and carry around with me. Today I found Mini Ruby Wiki. After I read the source and figured out it wanted a hostname and port numbers as parameters it worked straight away.
Pros:
Why does this happen? It must be something to do with Mime types somewhere. When I download a tar.gz file in Opera it thinks that it is a .tar file and then renames the extension to just .tar. Then, Winzip launches and says it can't handle the file since it is now confused by trying to open the .tar.gz file with the a .tar extension. So then, I have to close Winzip, find the file on the file system and rename it. Renaming it in Opera's Transfers screen just confuses Opera.
Does the problem lie in Opera's Mime type handling or is it that the web servers that are serving the .tar.gz files are saying that they are .tar files?