Links to try during a Gmail outage

Lifehacker had some links to try during a Gmail outage:

Plain HTML: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html
Safe Mode: http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0
Old version: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1
Bypass browser checking: http://mail.google.com/mail?nocheckbrowser
Mobile version: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=mobile
iPhone version: http://mail.google.com/mail/x/gdlakb-/gp/
iGoogle gadget: http://www.google.com/ig/gmailmax

CodeRush Xpress

This is a free tool for VS 2008 that's been pretty useful.

CodeRush Xpress for C# and Visual Basic inside Visual Studio 2008 - Mark Miller:

CodeRush Xpress is a powerful developer productivity tool from Dev Express. The product is free, licensed by Microsoft on behalf of all developers working in Visual Studio 2008 in all paid-for product skus (e.g., Standard, Professional, Team System). Note however that CodeRush Xpress will not load in the Express Editions of Visual Studio.

CodeRush Xpress includes features that support common developer tasks

Quick-Kill Multiple Programs with Batch Files

Quick-Kill Multiple Programs with Batch Files - Batch scripts - Lifehacker

The basic trick is to open the Windows Task Manager, find the executable names (like firefox.exe) of the apps you want to kill, then open a simple text editor and add a line for each app, like so:

taskkill /im program.exe

One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Here's a bit of programming humor that made me laugh.

One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages: "Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++. The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence. Build times suffer."

Run IE8/IE7/IE6, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera from the web

Haven't tried this yet but it might be useful.

Run IE8/IE7/IE6, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera from the web: "The Xenocode Browser Sandbox allows all popular Windows browsers to be run simultaneously, directly from the web. Web designers, system administrators, and other users can now evaluate Internet Explorer 8, 7, and 6, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome directly from the web in a risk-free manner."

Update: I tried their IE6 sandbox and it worked great.

Chickenfoot

Chickenfoot: "Chickenfoot is a Firefox extension that puts a programming environment in the browser's sidebar so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing. In Chickenfoot, scripts are written in a superset of Javascript that includes special functions specific to web tasks."

Useless Windows XP services

Here's a list of XP services that are normally useless to home users. I had most of them off already but there were some on the list that I didn't realize were useless.

Devoted Geek » Blog Archive The ultimate guide to tweaking useless Windows XP services

Free E-Book On SQL 2008

Microsoft Press - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Free E-Book Offer: "Learn about major new features in SQL Server 2008 including security, administration, and performance."

MSDN Low Bandwidth Bookmarklet

There's a low bandwidth feature on the MSDN site that can be activated by adding (loband) to the file name right before the .aspx (like this system.object(loband).aspx) or by using Jon Galloway's MSDN Low Bandwidth Bookmarklet.