A little-known trick in Windows for arranging desktop windows quickly is to hold down CTRL, select items in the task bar, then right-click: you can cascade, tile, minimze or close the group of selected windows together.
The result is immediately-positioned windows, as you like them. Apparently, this window-controlling feature has been around since Windows 3.1
With FTP a bit old-skool (and insecure), and all the firewall problems with FTPS and its variants, online web-based file sharing tools have sprung up over the last few years.
Of these, box.net and yousendit.com are the best known, but suffer a common limitation of many of these services, with small upload sizes (unless you pay), and are based in the US, so upload and download times are increased.
The best UK-based site for sharing large files seems to be DropSend (yes, all the good names have gone), which offers up to 2GB uploads for free, an – crucially for me in terms of respectability – displays its UK registered company number on the home page, unlike some other sites like Pando which seem more like spam factories, with inappropriate adverts (see screenshot).
I am now running Subversion 1.6 for my client’s SVN repositories. I upgraded mainly to take advantage of the Merge tracking introduced in Subversion 1.5, and improved in 1.6. In particular, Subversion now creates its own “mergeinfo” entries, so you no longer have to use the svnmerge.py script. Subversion 1.6 now has better detection of “tree conflicts” – essentially, problems with the local working copy caused by renames, missing files, etc.
I used the new release of VisualSVN Server to install and upgrade SVN in a painless way (see earlier post on VisualSVN Server). The new version installs over the top of the previous one, so back up your SVN repositories first.
An important part of the Subversion philosophy is “don’t break things”. Even though VisualSVN Server 2.0 runs Subversion 1.6, the underlying repository format is not upgraded automatically, meaning that the new merge tracking feature is still not (yet) available. To get this working we simply need to run “svnadmin upgrade PATH”, like this:
> svnadmin upgrade D:\Data\Svn\DevDoctor Repository lock acquired. Please wait; upgrading the repository may take some time... Upgrade completed.
Following a working copy svn update, you can run svn merge. In this case, I used TortoiseSVN:
Here, we were merging from the development branch, so I selected Reintegrate a branch. Once the correct settings have been chosen, you can even “Test merge”, which gives you a report of what would happen if you went ahead with the merge. When the changes are successfully merged, Tortoise shows the results:
As normal, the merge needs to be committed, but the crucial difference after the commit succeeds is that Subversion itself has tracked the merge using the mergeinfo property:
You can see that an svn:mergeinfo property has been set on the folder, showing the branch from which the merges were done, and the revision numbers (here, 400-409).
All this means that merging (both from branches to trunk, and from trunk to branches) is all much less tricky and error-prone than before (with Subversion 1.4). Subversion 1.6 is also noticeably quicker than 1.4 for all operations so far.
Further reading: http://scm.jadeferret.com/subversion-16-new-features-explained/
We have just finished some custom PayPal integration for Eaton Square Concerts (ESC). On the ESC booking page, you can now select all the tickets you want before heading to PayPal, thanks to the PayPal “cart upload” feature. Previously, the site was using the single-item “Add to cart” which is a bit clunky, and means the user heads back and forth between the ESC site and PayPal.
We handle the form submission on the ESC site, work out what the user want to buy, read their response to the optional questions, and then send the form off to PayPal. The intermediate step is needed because PayPal refuses to accept a zero-count for items, forcing us to check the item count before POSTing to PayPal.
The GUI in Windows XP later OS’s allows only NTFS as the format type for external drives; not too handy when you want to transfer files both ways between a PC and a Mac, as Macs can only read (not write) NTFS partitions.
However, you can drop into a command prompt to force formatting using FAT32:
format /FS:FAT32 X:
This is good for drives up to 32GB, which is still a bit small. For drives of up to 8TB, you’ll need a partition tool such as SwissKnife, PartitionMagic or Acronis Disk Director.
Original info from here: http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/formatting-external-hard-drive-to-fat-32/
Matthew Skelton 