I have been evaluating different version control programs for my company for the last month or two. My current evaluation is that all of them are broken, although I hope to discover a good solution someday soon.

On all the windows machine I use, I have auto-completion turned on for the dos prompt. Apparently, I must have gotten that behavior from TweakUI, and since I always install it on a new machine, I thought it was on by default, but apparently not.

I needed to create a floppy disk today, and needed to find RawWrite again, since my Cygwin dd seems to not be making it correctly. I found a nifty GUI version of RawWrite that is nicer than the old command line version. Sure, the command line works fine, and I am all for command-line things, and no mouse usage, but sometimes it is nice to not have to remember the command-line options.

When I was installing RT (Request Tracker) I got an error, since I hadn't ever set up CPAN before. After searching for a bit, here is the solution. I figured I would post this here to help others in the future find it in google quicker.

I added a small color changing picker (bottom right of this page), if you don't like my purply colors. Of course, you can only pick the colorsets that I let you, and right now there isn't much interesting, but I will get around to making some more at some point.

Ever notice how it now takes a year for Acrobat Reader to load up? You can speed it up about 20x or so, by moving the plugins you don't use out of the "startup" folder. If you put the files into the "optional" folder, I believe it will still be able to find them when you want to use them, and it will load them then.
A reasonable default is to leave ewh32.api, search.api, and reflow.api in your plugins directory, and move everything else into the optional folder.
You can make a disabled_plugins directory if you want them to be really gone.

Since I just wasted a bit of time trying to figure out how I had configured Cygwin the first time, so as to help someone else set up their account, I figure I will post the instructions here:

Lime Daley's (even before the name "Lime Daley" existed) first project was to create a device that could measure the spacing between two giant rollers (40 feet long, 6 feet in diameter) in a paper mill.  Measuring the thickness of deformation of the rollers against each other (with the sensing device in between) we were able to accurately display how far apart the rollers were from each other. The idea is to make sure that the rollers are aligned properly to produce paper of an even thickness.

The existing system did the job, but could only measure at 16 points across the 40 foot span, and the customer desired more data points, but without all of the extra wires.

Scott Hansma originally wrote a plugin for Eudora in 1997. When he graduated, he asked if I wanted to take over control of the source, as he wasn't interested in working on it any more.

One project that Jon did while working at Carnegie Mellon University was to create a "button box" that collected data from a subject inside an MRI scanner as well as data from the scanner itself.  The project was "real-time" in the sense that we needed the hardware and software to be accurate within 20 or 30 milliseconds (which depending on what field you are in, you might laugh at that number being "real-time").