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.

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.

:)