I just came a across a nice little add-in for Visual Studio called Mindscape File Explorer.  This utility is free and the two things I like about it are the open command prompt feature and the snap to solution feature so that you can just focus your browsing on the current solution.  I assigned this to Ctrl+Alt+M for quick access.  For those who don't know Ctrl+Alt+L opens the solution explorer.

I regularly use irb for debugging my Watir scripts, and have always disliked the fact that I can't paste anything into it.  Well that is no more because I today I figured out if I turn on quick edit mode in my command prompt I can paste right into irb.  Wahoo!

NOTE: You might actually have to set this setting while you are in the irb.

This morning I found out about WinDirStat a nifty little utility that allows you to easily see how all your hard drive space is utilized.  After doing some cleanup I noticed that the Mircorosft.NET directory in my Windows directory was huge!  After drilling down I came across the culprit. The directory inside the "Tempororay ASP.NET Files" directory for the project I work on all day during the week had grown to over 24 gig.

These directories are safe to delete, so with I quick (sorta) delete I recovered 24 gig of space.

I've never been a fan of how the command prompt looks by default. It has a big font, small box and limited buffer. Here are the settings I use to make my command prompt a lot cooler. You can access these settings by right-clicking on title bar and selecting properties.

Notice the QuickEdit Mode is turned on.  This allows you to just select text at any time on the command prompt and right-click to copy to the clickboard.  The Discard old duplicates made sure your command history doesn't have any duplicates which can be annoying.

Having a really small font is very important.

Make your height buffer really big so you can keep your history.  Also making sure the prompt always opens up in the upper left is helpful when you want to set a height that is as high as your desktop.

Here is a nice off black color for the background.

Here is my favorite color for the text.  Do with this as you please.

Here are results.

Here are some commands that will allow you to do the imaging discussed in my previous post over a network using port 1234. If you are using Slax you will need to download the netcat module because it isn't included.

NOTE: Make sure you start the target machine first!

Source machine:

dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=16065b | netcat 192.168.0.1 1234

Target machine:

netcat -l -p 1234 | dd of=/data/w2008_20080109.img bs=16065b

NOTE: You can check the status using the "kill -USR1 PID" like before but only on the source machine and make sure you use the PID of the dd command.

Using a direct server to server cable over gigabit ethernet I'm getting ~46MB/s which is really good in my opinion. I haven't figured out how to gracefully close the netstat process after the transfer is complete so that is something you'll have to figure out on your own.

I'm am setting up test servers that I will use for performance testing and some other things.  To make my life easier I wanted to be able to save images of the hard drive in different states.  In my search for something simple I found out that I can just use the dd command in linux.  I have used dd in the past for making floppies from image files, but what I didn't realize is that I could use dd to make an image of a partition and save that as a file and then restore it at any time.

I have Windows 2008 Servers and I use Slax as my Linux Live CD.  My OS partition is 25GB which has everything and then some room.  I then have a 450GB partition for storing the images.  I found that formatting this partition as Ext2 allowed for saving the images much faster.  For some reason writes to an NTFS volume in Linux is really slow.  For saving and restoring I use the following commands.

UPDATED: Use bs=4k for better performance

Save HD image:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/data/w2008_20080108.img bs=4k

Restore HD image:

dd if=/data/w2008_20080108.img of=/dev/sda1 bs=4k

You can also check the status of dd at any time by issuing the following command (PID is the process id of dd).

kill -USR1 PID

I added a “What I Use” page and a podcasts to RandallSutton.net. I think it is interesting to see what software other people use so that is why I posted “What I Use”. I hope to get a podcast out in the next couple weeks which shouldn’t be a problem now that I have a place to post them ;)