People like to have heated discussions about which operating system is better than another. This joke explains it very well. Just don’t forget that you are arguing about an operating system and competition is always good. Just don’t forget to tell someone else why your operating system is better than theirs.
Sometimes I make things more difficult than I need to. I know this is the case with other people too. We just have come to expect things to be hard so we make them even harder than they need to be sometimes.
For example. Today I was trying to match a literal % character in an expression within vim. For some reason I thought it needed to be escaped with a \ or even multiple \\. When in reality it is just matched wthout any escaping. I was making it more difficult than it needed to be. This is a simple case, but it happens many times each week. I would imagine if most technical types kept track of how often they do this it would be more often than they expect.
I’m going to start making an effort to try to find a simple solution before looking for a more complex one.
I needed to programatically print a pdf from the command line. This was easier than I expected it to be. Simply use acrobat reader to spool the pdf to the printer. In Windows this meant running something like “acrord32.exe /t filename.pdf” the /t switch was the key. The most difficult part was finding the documentation for this feature.
I wanted to get a screenshot in Windows on my MacBook Pro today and couldn’t figure out how to do it. Apparently this is now supported in newer versions of bootcamp. I don’t currently have this installed though, so I had to find another way for the time being. I found a handy resource that showed how to do it with a Windows tool I was unaware of called On-Screen Keyboard. Thanks to this great tool I was able to get my screenshot. This could also be useful on a system where the keyboard may not be working or other similar situations.
AMD anounced they were buying graphics chip maker ATI today. This should make for interesting competition between AMD/ATI and both Intel and Nvidia. It will be very interesting to see what type of products they are able to bring to market. Hopefully this will help bring better CPU’s and GPU’s to market and lower costs.
See the engadget article on the merger.