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.

Printing Long DIVs

I encountered a problem recently where printing a page with Internet Explorer caused a page break before the main content, chopped the content off after the 2nd page of the printout and then printed a blank page. So the users would get 3 pages, a page with the header, a page with the top part of the content and a blank page.

The issue turned out to be caused by a DIV that was being styled as overflow:auto that contained a long table. The table had recently increased in size so it now spanned two pages.

To fix it, all I needed to do was set the DIV's overflow style to visible in the page's print stylesheet.

overflow: visible !important;

Superdense Computers

Cool article by Hans Moravec from 1986 on building computers and other technology from neutronium, magnetic monopoles and Higgsinium. It's slightly out of date since the theory that allowed for Higgsinium has changed but it's still interesting.

Superdense Computers

DebuggerStepThroughAttribute

The DebuggerStepThroughAttribute sounds like it could be useful.

Pedram Rezaei's Ramblings : .NET debugging made easier: "As far as the CLR is concerned, there is no semantic attached to this attribute. However Visual Studio does not step through methods or classes that are decorated with this attribute"

You can use it to skip over stuff you don't need to step through while debugging but you can still set breakpoints in the code if you uncheck "Enable Just My Code (Managed only)" under Tools | Options | Debugging | General.

Accelerator keys you should avoid for Asp.Net 2.0 controls

The list of accelerator keys that are already used by the browser.

Accelerator keys you should avoid for Asp.Net 2.0 controls:
"ALT + F
ALT + E
ALT + V
ALT + I
ALT + O
ALT + T
ALT + A
ALT + W
ALT + H"

SwapMouseButtons

This is a pretty cool tool.

SwapMouseButtons - Freeware: "An easy way to share a computer between left-handed and right-handed persons"

I'm ambidextrous so it lets me easily swap the mouse to whichever hand is most convenient.

LINQ: Building an IQueryable Provider

The Wayward WebLog : LINQ: Building an IQueryable Provider - Part X: "find a nice shady tree, relax and meditate on why your world is so confused and full of meaningless tasks that it has kept you from pursuing the perfection of writing IQueryable providers"

.NET Developers’ Reference Cards

This guy has compiled a list of developer's reference cards / cheat sheets for .NET developers.

.NET Developers’ Reference Card Roundup | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

Making PowerShell Start Faster

Windows PowerShell : Update-Gac.ps1: "people run this script long after their install and things get a TON faster"

Visual Studio 2008 Keybinding Posters

Charlie Calvert's Community Blog : Where are the Visual Studio 2008 Keybinding Posters?

He's got links to the Visual Studio 2008 keybinding posters and to the C# keybindings as a spreadsheet.

Sunblock

I'd been wondering why my sunblock didn't seem to work as well as it used to. This site did product comparisons on sunscreens and most of them don't work well.

Cosmetic Safety Database - Sunscreens: "Does your sunscreen work? An investigation of nearly 1,000 brand-name sunscreen products finds that 4 out of 5 contain chemicals that may pose health hazards or don't adequately protect skin from the sun's damaging rays. Some of the worst offenders are leading brands..."

Auto-Formatting Removes Tabs

Turns out there's a way to get Visual Studio 2008 to preserve your spacing if you've lined up your declaration statements.

Karen's Space : Auto-Formatting Removes Tabs: "A new option was added to Tools | Options | Text Editor | C# | Formatting | Spacing | Set other spacing options.
The option is a check-box and says: “Ignore spaces in declaration statements”."