David's Blog

Just got out of a screening of Paranormal Activity.

*This* is the movie to see to get your scary movie fix for Halloween. This movie really got me…and the main reason is that it all seems so real.

Highly recommended!

Posted on October 20, 2009 10:04 PM | Permalink| Comments (2)

Windows/DOS has had a *bad* command shell for a long time…but that is about to change with the October 22nd release of Windows 7.

Windows 7 ships with PowerShell 2.0…and it is *really* good.

PowerShell 2.0 features:

• Unlimited output buffer (command prompt had 300 lines by default, and a max of 9999)
• Easy text selection (command prompt could only do “screen space” selection, which made selecting multi-line text virtually impossible…no more!)
• Aliases for standard Unix shell commands (pwd, cp, man, rm, rmdir, mv, ls, cat, grep, ps, kill, tee, clear)
• Aliases for standard cmd.exe commands (cd, cls, copy, help, del, rmdir, rename, dir, type, find, findstr, tlist)
• Support for paths with either forward or backward slashes
• Support for network resources *without* mapping a drive (i.e. can do this: cd \\share\mypics)
• All commands follow a consistent verb-noun naming convention (get-childitem, write-output, etc.) which makes the commands self descriptive and easy to learn
• Can use standard file system commands (cd, dir, rm, cp, etc.) on…
• The Registry
• Environment Variables
• Variables
• Aliases
• User supplied custom data
• Command and parameter tab completion
• Really good documentation, with examples via get-help (or help/man)
• Script debugger with support for breakpoints, stepping, call stack, and hover over variables to see values
• Commands are chained together via *objects* instead of text. Nice example of this powerful feature here.
• Can output your results in rich text format to out-gridview. I *love* this feature. Read about it here.
• Supported on Linux/Mac via Pash

Here is a nice table that compares all the different shells and their features. PowerShell comes out as the most advanced shell.

Windows 7 marks the first time Windows has had a better default shell than Linux or Mac.

Other Linux advantages that are no more with Windows 7:

• Windows 7 has support for symbolic links (actually added in Vista).
• Excellent free C++ compiler via Visual C++ Express

Posted on October 11, 2009 11:58 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)

This is impressive. C3 Technologies creates 3D cities. To do Stockholm took less than 3 days!

Check out the intro video on the home page.

Here is a demo of Las Vegas.

Posted on October 11, 2009 10:19 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)