Disabling SVN on Windows

Windows has some fascinating characteristics and other not so amusing.

Antivirus often get in the way of new files that are created and rendered my use of SVN to a true nightmare.

Hence, I needed to remove SVN from one of the projects that I'm working and there is no single straight forward way of doing this from the coding IDE.

Looking around for advice I see how many people recommend just removing all files starting with ".SVN". However, this is a lot of manual work when the project is of medium dimension.

I've tried it once but it's too time consuming. So, looking around the web I found a nifty way of cleaning SVN from a project.

Create a .bat file, place it on the root of your project and place the following code inside:

FOR /F "tokens=*" %%G IN ('DIR /B /AD /S *.svn*') DO RMDIR /S /Q "%%G"

I take no credit for the snippet as it came from this page: http://www.sean-barton.co.uk/2009/07/how-to-recursively-remove-svn-directories/

Hope it helps if you ever run into the same nuisance.

Getting real, the software development model

Found a very nice description of a software development model called "getting real". In a world where processes become the salvation to achieve efficient results in complex systems, we find a group with a different twist of perspective.

They advice that when competing, one should scale down the features instead of scaling up and avoid common decisions that are made too early in the project development and eventually lead to a result that nobody is happy about.

I can't say that I agree with all their comments, but in good truth should admit that our development of WinBuilder followed a good part of their guidelines to thrive.

Here's one of the things you might find inside their pages:

Be An Executioner

It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an nda to tell me the simplest idea.)

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Explanation:

• Awful idea = -1
• Weak idea = 1
• So-so idea = 5
• Good idea = 10
• Great idea = 15
• Brilliant idea = 20

• No execution = $1
• Weak execution = $1000
• So-so execution = $10,000
• Good execution = $100,000
• Great execution = $1,000,000
• Brilliant execution = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.

That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution.

—Derek Sivers, president and programmer, CD Baby and HostBaby

You can read about them here: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php

:)

Partnership with 360Amigo

We've become the official discussion forum of products released by 360amigo a company that recently began releasing their tools to the public such as a System Speedup, a free tool for home users.

Their forum section is hosted at VirusRemoval.pro right next to the discussion forum of Ninja pendisk - http://virusremoval.pro/forumdisplay.php?fid=12

At VirusRemoval we sometimes receive invitations from security companies to test a given security suite. As a house policy on these cases, we only test and help products that are at minimum free for home users.

One of these security companies introduced us to 360amigo and the dev team behind it are good guys, so we decided to help them and bring some visibility to their free tool while also bringing some diversity to our forum discussions. A win-win situation for both ends.

You can visit the company site at http://360amigo.com and let us know at VirusRemoval your opinion.

:)

http://ous.in acquired

It costed some whooping 8 dollars to acquire this short domain that allows setting up domain hacks like http://fabul.ous.in, http://danger.ous.in or even marvel.ous.in amongst any others that you might imagine.

Despite having no idea of use in sight for "ous" at the moment, it was a good opportunity at a reasonable price. Good enough to compose hundreds of common words for domain hacks in English language at future projects.

This kind of reminds me of the Delicious website that was initially using http://del.icio.us before it was acquired by Yahoo! Inc. Funny enough that Delicious itself was founded by a Carnegie Mellon student, Joshua Schachter.

But back to earth, if you have any suggestions regarding how to put this URL into some good use, then do let me know!

:)

Boot Land keeps rising up the charts.

I'm really proud in seeing how well Boot Land is achieving good results in terms of popularity and overall ranking on a global scale.

Over these past few days we've kept on moving up and surpassing a giant site like MSFN, reaching a position on the top 30 000 sites around the globe.

30k is certainly far from reaching the top 1000 but considering the fact that our community does not deal with mainstream topics like fashion, movies or even generic PC support then I would say that things are looking bright on our arena when comparing to other sites in a similar specialty field.

Congratulations are due to the Boot Land community!

:)

New laptop - Toshiba R630

Lo and behold, I'm back on Windows!

Yesterday I've got myself a brand new machine that comes native with Windows 7 x64.

Guess this concludes a cycle that began two years ago when I removed Vista and installed Ubuntu to use it as a full time replacement desktop OS -

http://nunobrito1981.blogspot.com/2008/06/bye-bye-vista-say-hello-to-ubuntu.html

At that time, Vista was a serious nuissance and moving to Ubuntu was a real blessing to prevent me from getting bald in early age.

Now Windows 7 came. Lots of mistakes learned the hard way, hardware continuously evolving and even more experience on my side as I've been using Ubuntu and Mac OSX during this interreign.

Won't spend time talking about the good or bad things on either side but in a true sense can also say that trying to use each one of them for a certain period of time is certainly an enriching experience.

Now, I'm back on my roots and ready to have fun.

Choosing a new machine wasn't easy. So I've asked for opinion to a hardline no-nonsense structural engineer that follows the laptop trends. He needs to work intensively with Autocad, probably the most resource-hungry application in the world, so, who better to ask for an opinion? :)

This guy also happens to be my younger brother and it is interesting to hear his thoughts on new technology.

He recommended the Toshiba R630, a laptop that judging by the pictures that I saw online was probably one of the ugliest and un-sexiest machines on the market.

However, the machine is in fact a hidden gem when you read between the lines and compare it against other laptops.

It comes with an i5 processor (with 4 Intel x64 CPU cores), 4Gb of RAM, battery runs up to 8 hours on economic mode and weights some stunning 1.5 kilograms packed with all that processing power.

And when looking at the machine on real life, it is very discrete and small sized.

There's no fluff on the laptop. The display is not glossy, there are no dummy buttons and it goes against the current trend of PC manufacturers to look like a cheap copy of the MacBooks.

It's a real PC and I'm happy with it.

:)