Using Notepad++ for Version Control

I have what you would call a love/hate relationship with Version Control Systems. On the one hand, it is oh so nice to be able to revert back to a working version of your document when you accidentally make way too many mistakes, and it no longer works. But on the other hand, it is a total pain in the ass.

I am duty bound to tell you that if you are doing much of anything involving code, you need to be using some sort of Version Control, however I am not going to ram Subversion or Tortoise SVN down your throat. I understand why programmers use them, and I have used them myself in the past. Since I try to live the whole “Least Amount Of Administrative Effort” thing, I just really don’t like them. Let me explain.

Ok, setting up full on Version Control makes sense if any of the following are true:

• You spend a large portion of your day writing code (like your job title is “programmer” or something similar)
• You spend more time fixing things you break while writing code, than writing code
• Anyone else is going to suffer consequences if you totally wreck some code
• Someone else is going to maintain and administer the Version Control System
• You work on files that multiple other people also edit

However it does not make sense if any of the following is true:

• You write code for your own use only
• You could care less if it gets broken or accidentally deleted
• You don’t have time to administer or maintain a Version Control System

Even if all of the last bit are true for you, it is still a good idea to use Version Control. Wait, what?

Version Control is a process, and if done correctly it works very well. If done poorly it gives you a false sense of security. Version Control is not necessarily a software package or commercial system.

If working with end users for all these years has taught me anything it is this; if a system is easy to use (especially if you don’t have to actually do anything) it will get used, if it is complicated (or time consuming) it will not get used. This also holds true (even more so in most cases) for the IT professionals I know.

Since don’t write enough code to make Visual Studio a wise investment, I use Notepad++, and unlike Visual Studio, I can take my IDE with me on a USB drive (Notepad++ Portable!). In the same vein, I don’t really write enough code to really justify setting up and maintaining a Version Control System, so I do it with Notepad++. Least Amount Of Administrative Effort.

So here is my solution:

I use the Backup settings built into Notepad++ to take care of my Version Control. To set this up:

1. Install notepad++
2. Open Notepad++
3. Select Settings > Preferences
4. On the Backup/Auto-completion tab, change the backup setting from None to Verbose

If you change nothing else there, now when you save your file, Notepad++ will automatically create a copy of the file without the changes since the last time you saved it. The copy will also be saved in a subfolder (named nppBackup) in the same folder where the document is saved. The copy will be named FileName.Extension.Date_Timestamp.bak by default. So a file named “test.vbs”, saved today would have a name similar to “test.vbs.2009-06-29_151927.bak”.

Cumbersome to be sure, but I am guaranteed to use it every time I work with a document.

Please don’t mistake this for something it is not. This is not a Version Control System. You do not check files in or out, and it doesn’t differentiate who made what changes, all it does is save every iteration of your document. It is Version Control in the truest sense of the term.

Win a free dx9000 TouchSmart PC from HP and AskTheAdmin! (Developer Contest)

Hey there loyal AtA readers! I know the posts title caught your interest and now you are reading more to find out how you can win yourself one of these innovative new systems that you can see pictured above. I have been going back and forth with HP trying to figure out the best way to open up this contest to our readers. And here is the proposed contest:

I have two of my best clients that are on the lookout for custom TouchSmart applications. By creating an application for one of these two companies which we will detail below you can be chosen to win one of these TouchSmart’s for yourself. And after all isn’t that all we want… Nice shinny uber cool gadgets? Oh is that only me??

To participate in the contest you will create an application for the TouchSmart. It can either match one of our two scenarios or you can submit your own ideas for the application. Once we finalize the ideas that you guys will be creating we will start accepting applications.

We will then demo them and show them to the company they relate to. Once we select the winning application we will send you your very own dx9000 TouchSmart.

• The first company is a high end clothing manufacturer in New York City that wants an application to show off their beautiful completed garments as well as concept designs.
• The second company is a Computer repair shop that wants to allow customers to use the TouchSmart to enter their information when dropping off their computer for repairs.

There are already a bunch of apps for the TouchSmart that people have developed—TIME and Adobe made one for the TIME 100 which is free to download—and a few businesses that already used custom-built apps, which we’ll talk more about when there’s a dx9000 here for me to play with!

So do you want to know more about this contest? Maybe you want to know more about the TouchSmart platform or even how to create applications for the TouchSmart… Then drop us a line at info at askTheAdmin dot com or leave a comment. We will be posting more details as they become available to us and as always we are open to your tips, ideas or death threats…

The dx9000 TouchSmart starts at around $1400 usd so if you think you can come up with the winning application…

THEN GO GET STARTED!  You can also read the full press release after the break…

A nifty little demo of the TouchSmart can be found here and

Check out the TouchSmart developer guidelines for some good how-to info!

Read more »

Check out this Extended Task Manager for Windows.

The Extended Task Manager provides additional Windows process management features and information about disk activity and network port usage.

The new “Disk I/O” chart allows you to monitor which applications utilize most of your disk at the moment:

Features:

* Displays disk input/output activity with information about related applications
* Displays network port activity with IP addresses of external computers
* Displays information about applications that utilized most of the CPU or memory at any time presented on the charts
* Displays all files locked by a select process.
* Finds all processes locking a specified file.
* Includes “Summary” tab for quickly assessing the overall state of the Windows system
* Allows freezing individual Windows processes
* Offer various visual and functional improvements over the standard Windows Task Manager

http://www.extensoft.com/?p=free_task_manager

[Molly via EeeUserForums]

How to lose your data

See that picture? When it happens to you, it may not look quite that bad (or be quite that obvious), but data loss sucks. And it does happen. I’ve been working with computers for 10+ years, and I’ve had it happen a couple times myself. Did I mention how much it sucks?

I’m not going to spend a couple pages telling you why you should backup, I’m just going to be straight about it, unless you really couldn’t care less if that happened to your computer, you are flat out stupid if you are not backing up your data on a regular basis.

Instead of telling you why to backup, I’m going to tell you how to ensure that you are not going to get your data back, even if you think you are backing it up.

Method 1: I’ll just back the data up to CD/DVD.

Well sure, this will work for a bit, but:

1. Ever try to save 20GB to CD? Or 250GB to DVD? Ugh.
2. How long do you think that optical desk is going to be readable?

Going this route, you can quickly end up trapped behind a small mountain of plastic. Or lets say you manage to somehow keep the optical disks to a manageable quantity, will the marker you labeled it with make the disk unreadable in a year, or is the dye layer unstable, rendering your disk unreadable in six months, or will the glue on the label you made for the disk make it worthless in a year or two? These are just a couple of examples of why optical media should not be considered an archive grade solution.

Method 2: ok then, I’ll just copy the data to a USB hard drive.

Sure it’s better than nothing, but single HDD solutions are not going to keep your data safe. Hard drives fail. In fact it will happen to every single hard disk you will ever come across. The only question is; when? It’s not a matter of if, or of MTBF (mean time between failure), it is more a matter of “you never know, it could fail in ten years, or in ten seconds”.

Don’t get me wrong, if this is the only way you can back the data up, then it is your only choice, and it’s better than nothing. Just be aware, as soon as you copy the data to that USB HDD, the “Clock of Death” is ticking.

Much better would be to copy the data over to a machine with a RAID storage system (preferably RAID5).

Method 3: I bought actual Backup Software (or use a vetted Open Source solution), and run Incremental Backups (to tape!) every single day!

Ok, so you spent some money on a tape backup solution, spent hours reading the manual and configuring your backup. Congratulations, I bet you think your data is safe! Until you find out how Incremental Backups really work (this usually happens after a disaster, and the tapes is all you have left of your pr0n, illegal mp3’s downloaded movies warez mission critical data).

Let’s pretend for a minute that your backup tapes look something like this:

Full_backup_tape (tape 1 – doesn’t matter what you tell it to be, the first backup is always and without exception, a full backup)

Incremental_backup_1 (tape 2)

Incremental_backup_2 (tape 3)

Incremental_backup_3 (tape 4)

Incremental_backup_4 (tape 5)

Incremental_backup_5 (tape 6)

And then you have a catastrophic failure. So you’re sitting there at 2am merrily running the restore, and you hit a snag: tape 2 won’t read. Doesn’t matter why, the tape could be bad, maybe you left it out of the tape safe overnight, and the radio station next door managed to erase it with the magnetic waves they transmit (this actually happened), the data is gone. So is all data after it. See Incremental backups require that all tapes since the last full backup be present and working. So tapes 3-6 may as well be empty, because you are never getting the data off of them. Ever.

If you can’t run full backups every day, use Differential backups instead of Incrementals. Let’s say that in the scenario the user had been running differentials rather than incrementals. They could then restore to current using just the original full backup, and the last differential.

Method 4: Now I’m running differential backups to tape every single day!

But you fail to check the backup logs every day, and the backup job you though had been running for the last year actually failed 273 days ago, and has been requesting the “correct” tape since then. I’ve seen this one a lot (in fact, I think this would be the most popular reason for data loss if you have backup software running).

You’ve got to check your backup logs. It sucks, and it’s boring, but it’s one of those things you just have to do.

Method 5: Alright, I’m running differentials to tape, and have been checking my logs for the last 2 years every single day!

But you’ve never run a test restore. If you haven’t restored data from the tape successfully, there is no data on the tape. The tape was bad, the backup software failed (silently of course), the gremlins ate it.

Method 6: Ok, now I spend two hours reading the log and then randomly restoring files from my backups (before putting the tapes in the tape safe) every single day!

And then your server room catches fire. All machines, and the safe holding the backup tapes are destroyed. You never took any offsite, because you have a tape safe. It happens. It’s unfortunate.

Method 7: Enough, I give up on tape! Now I run a full backup to a RAID5 NAS every single day!

But you ordered your NAS with the drives form the manufacturer, and they used 4 HDD’s from the same batch, and two failed. This is the one that always gets them! The strength of RAID5 is that more than one drive has to fail before the RAID is unrecoverable. The weakness is that hard drives from the same batch tend to fail at the same time (or thereabouts).

To strengthen your RAID system, always make sure that you have drives from different batches, if not from different manufacturers (this is not always the best idea, but that is an argument for another time). For instance: to take care of my backup needs at home, I bought a Buffalo Terastation. Unfortunately, Buffalo sent me a Terastation with 4 drives from the same batch (you can usually tell if they all have the same date on them, sometimes there will be a batch code on the drive). I bought 3 more of the same model drive from 3 different manufacturers, and now have the most healthy RAID I can.

These are not the only ways to lose data, but they are by far the most common. How would I know? I was the Worldwide Manager of Technical Support for a backup software company for several years. And I always got to be the one to explain to the customers why their data is gone.

So what do I do?

There are as many answers to that question as there are IT shops with backup systems. Here is how I protect data at my office:

I backup all data every day (full backup) to a NAS configured in RAID5, with a hot spare. I check the health of the RAID every day (it takes about two minutes). Once a week I backup the entire RAID to LTO3 tape, and take the tapes offsite (currently I am taking them home, where they go into a DATA rated fire safe (there is a difference, do your homework), and then into my large safe where I keep all my other valuables. My ideal would be to have them delivered to a bank safety deposit box, but that costs money.

At home, I back up all my data to the aforementioned Terastation. Once per month, I copy all the data off to a USB HDD (actually two of them), and take one to work where it goes into the tape safe.

Is it perfect? No. Does it stand a much better chance of keeping that data alive through a catastrophic event? Absolutely. You don’t have to go to these lengths to protect your data, but you should be aware of the risks.

Simple Trick to Keep Your Computer from Locking Up

How many times have you been working on your Windows computer and without warning it locks up. Unfortunately many of us will say that this happens much more than you’d like.   One of the key reasons that your computer locks up is due to a non-responsive program, in other words a program or file running just gets stuck.

Fortunately, windows has an option that allows you to get one step closer to avoiding those very annoying lockups.  This isn’t a cure-all, but can be helpful.  This only requires a simple tweak to your registry. Here’s how….  (note: I always make a backup of my registry before making changes, so I recommend you do this first but not required).

1) Go To Regedit: Start -> Run ->  Type: Regedit

2) Find the correct directory: HKey_Current_User -> Control Panel -> Desktop

3) Find the correct file: Look on the right side and scroll down to find WaitToKillAppTimeout.  You’ll notice that this likely says 20000 today.  That’s the time in miliseconds that it waits before it stops an application that has locked up.  That’s 20 seconds!  But we’ll change that…..

4)  Modify the File: Double click on WaitToKillAppTimeout.  You’ll then get a new window that allows you to edit the “Value Data”.  I changed mine to 1000 (1 second).  Then click “OK” to complete the modification.

5) Close out of the registry. Click the big x on the top upper right.

6) You’re done….

One step closer to a finely tuned machine.

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website that allows you to lookup and report unwanted phone calls.  You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.

Admin’s Arsenal: Evernote 3.1

Initially I had some trepidation about doing an AA on Evernote, because as of v3, it is web centric, and some of the great features of the old v2.2 have been removed. But man is it useful!

ok, so what is Evernote? It’s difficult to explain correctly. Basically it is a note taking application on the order of Microsoft’s OneNote (which I like, but can’t justify buying a copy of for every system I work on, so it’s kind of limited in its use for me), but taken to a whole different level, oh, and it’s free (sort of).

Here is the description from the Evernote site:

Remember everything.

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. Did we mention that it’s free?

Yeah, that’s about accurate. Currently there is a free Evernote app for Windows, and Mac OS X (Leopard), a bookmarklet that will work on just about any browser, a Firefox extension, and apps for the iPhone, Palm Pre, Windows mobile phones, and limited Blackberry models .

It requires Blackberry OS4.6 or above so at the moment it is limited to the Bold (and since I just got one, this is a good thing), Curve (the new one), and Storm, however I have no doubt that RIM will update all others to 4.6 soon.

The thing that makes this a killer app for me is that Evernote can make text in images searchable. So if I take a picture with my Blackberry of say, a BSoD error message, and save it to Evernote, I can then access it on my desktop (or another machine connected to the internet), and figure out what that error message is telling me.

All in all, the ability to clip portions of websites, entire web pages, text from documents, and email from Outlook (yeah it integrates with Outlook), makes this a really really handy tool for IT work (not to mention blogging).

The free accounts are limited to 40MB of Monthly upload data (text, images, audio, and .pdf files only), whereas the premium version gets you 500MB per moth, removes the small advertising window in the desktop app, and can sync any kind of file.

While 40MB may not seem like much, it is roughly 20,000 text notes, or 400 mobile snapshots, or 270 web clips, or 40 audio notes, or 11 high resolution photos. 500MB is roughly 12.5 times that amount of data.

The cost of the premium account is $5/mo. or $45/year.

If you’d like to try Evernote out, you can sign up and download it here: http://www.evernote.com/