Vista
How-to show a Message of the Day (MOTD) at the Windows Command Prompt
One of the features available under UNIX is the Message of the Day (MOTD). This is run every time you start a command prompt and displays the content of a file. In addition, the UNIX shells allow all sorts of stuff to be run and configured every time you start a new prompt using the .profile and .bashrc command files. Windows users don’t generally expect that kind of flexibility from their command prompts.
Running Komodo Edit Open Source Code Editor Under Windows 7
The open source version of Komodo’s code editor and development environment Komodo Edit is a great tool for development. I use it for PHP, HTML, JavaScript and more. However, I haven’t done any serious coding for a while so I haven’t needed to run it under Windows 7 even though I had it installed. When I did, I was disapointed to find it behaving very poorly. It wouldn’t resize properly without messing up the screen.
How-to use WebDAV on Windows Vista and Windows 7
Windows is supposed to have a built-in WebDAV client. However, it doesn’t ever seem to have been especially robust and certainly since Vista a lot of people (myself included) have found that it simply doesn’t work on many supposedly WebDAV enabled sites. Thankfully there are a couple of free (and some not free) options that, while not as nicely integrated into Windows Explorer, do enable you to transfer files back and forth.
Keeping Control: File and Folder Links for Windows Users
A good backup strategy for any computer involves keeping control of where stuff is stored. The fewer locations that contain files that change, the fewer locations have to be maintained. UNIX users have always had the ability to keep things wherever they wanted and then to LINK that information into the required location. Basically, links create a link or tunnel between one file or folder and another. Most of the time, you will not notice that you’ve entered a tunnel and you are not interested really.
How to get and use your local IP address in a Windows 7 (and Vista) batch command file
If, like me, you spend a lot of time on a variety of customer sites, you will probably be familiar with the issues around swapping networks. I’ve already blogged about the problems with Windows 7, Vista and Firefox proxy settings and I will do some more articles on getting on with problematic proxies later. However, I wanted to let people know how to get hold of your IP address from within a batch (command) file.
proxy.pac files, Mozilla (Firefox & Thunderbird) and Vista or Windows 7
I’ve found a problem with Mozilla based products and proxy settings. To automatically configure a proxy for use by Internet browsers, you can use a file called “proxy.pac“. This is a JavaScript function that is loaded into the browser when it starts and redirects requests via a proxy where required. All of the descriptions for this file you will find on the Internet will provide the following example of checking your current IP address.
