Links...

There's a new book out there "Best software writing" a collection the best articles on the web. These two are worth a read:

1. ea_spouse - EA: The Human Story
2. A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes)

There some interesting stuff out at pawlicki's page . This comment ringed so true to me :)

... To all of us plebes who tread streets of concrete, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference how the Solar System came to be in the shape it is in during our mayfly lives. One story is as good as another as long as it stops the kids from asking `How come?' when you want to put them to bed....

Developer tools...

The tools that we use largely effect how efficient we are in our everyday work - don't get started on effectiveness vs efficiency discussions :p. Some one has done a pretty good job of listing most of the good ones over here. I am sure most people are going to find some useful utility which they have not used before.

Customising your command shell

Taking care of automating common stuff is a very important way of ensuring that your fingers and mind last a little while longer in this IT field :)

Usually the first complaint that people the unix background will have when they use a windows machine is the command shell. The lack of aliases, .profile etc. Internal to MS there are many utils which make this possible, but recently I figured that there is something which does the same thing on any windows machine. All you have to do is

doskey /macrofile:macros.txt

where macros.txt contains your aliases (called as macros for some weird reason in the windows world ...) like
ep=e:\progs\editplus\eppie.exe $*
h=pushd e:\jars\hibernate
env=sysdm.cpl,3

Now the final missing link is automatically executing this everytime you start your shell. Luckily there is a hook for this too. You can specify a batch file to run on each invocation by setting the following registry key.

[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor]
"AutoRun"="e:\\progs\\tools\\init.bat"


Now the final missing link is sharing histories across command shells. I usually open many command shells during work and often I want to execute the same commands which I executed in the other shells and I am not aware of any way to do this in cmd (similar to shralias in 4nt). If you know to get this to work in cmd, I would be eternally grateful for that information :))