Ed The Dev .com » Solutions

Freeing up space on Windows hard drives

Edward Delaporte — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 02:14:49 +0000

WinDirStat is freeware for Windows that creates a visualization of the largest files on your hard drives. It’s priceless for freeing up that extra gigabyte that you need to install that new game.

It found that my World of Warcraft installer files were wasting 8GB of space, even though I had removed World of Warcraft, itself.

Also, there’s a MAC version called Disk Inventory X, which is also quite awesome.

My vimrc file

Edward Delaporte — Sat, 29 May 2010 20:40:40 +0000


map! ^[OA ^[ka "For Solaris
map! ^[OB ^[ja
map! ^[OD ^[i
map! ^[OC ^[la
set nocompatible "Don't emulate old vi bugs.
set autoindent " Yay!
set smartindent
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
set showmatch "Parenthesis matching.
set vb t_vb= "Flash instead of beep.
set ruler
set nohls "Do not highlight search matches.
set incsearch "Search as I type
" Type :help options within vim to get a complete list of options.

set nowrap "Do not wrap long lines of code.
set textwidth=120
set foldmethod=marker

"Place all vim backup files into the user home directory.
set backupdir=~/.vimbackup

The new best way to make sure that your browser is safe.

Edward Delaporte — Fri, 21 May 2010 03:42:51 +0000

Browser plugins are rapidly becoming the most common way to get a computer virus infection.

Normally I lecture people about switching to Firefox, installing NoScript and checking at least monthly that Java and Adobe are up to date. The folks at Mozilla seem to be on a quest to save me from forever repeating those instructions, and I thank them kindly.

My instructions are now a bit simpler:

Switch to Firefox
Use this website to make sure that you are safe. https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/plugincheck/
Check back with the website weekly.

Background noise for programming

Edward Delaporte — Sat, 15 May 2010 07:01:33 +0000

It’s a lot easier to write software in a noise-free environment, or predictable consistent background noise. A good set of headphones is a must, and an iPod application or two can be really handy.

White Noise by TMSoft is currently my favorite. Their boat rocking, railroad tracks bumps and various types of rain are great for relaxing just the right amount.

I also highly recommend the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movie sound track, and just about anything composed by John Williams.

Update: My friend Rob pointed me to the incredibly awesome Trance Around the World Podcast. Highly recommended.

Android on iPhone

Edward Delaporte — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 03:13:00 +0000

It’s now possible to dual-boot your iPhone with Andoid. EdTheDev.com using your existing Yahoo.com, Google.com, or Facebook.com account (and about a million others, actually).

Get a long random string from /dev/random

Edward Delaporte — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:58:24 +0000

Use word count to make sure you’re getting the length you expected.

cat /dev/urandom| tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9-_!@#$%^&*()_+{}|:<>?=' | fold -w 1048 | head -n1 | wc -m

And use this to actually fetch the long string.

cat /dev/urandom| tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9-_!@#$%^&*()_+{}|:<>?=' | fold -w 1048 | head -n1 | wc -m

Here’s a much simpler example, in case you just want a quick four digit number:

cat /dev/urandom| tr -dc ’0-9′ | fold -w 4 | head -n1

C# Debug output

Edward Delaporte — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:33:18 +0000

Here’s a snippet that I use to push debug output to the console, only when compiled in Debug mode.

private static void DebugOutput(String message)
{
   DebugOutput(message, null);
}

private static void DebugOutput(String message, object details)
{

if DEBUG

System.Console.WriteLine(message, details);

endif

}

Podcasts with WordPress

Edward Delaporte — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:01:46 +0000

Handy for publishing PodCasts: Boy N Panda .com, I needed to increase the allowed upload size on my server.

This article was really helpful: