Hate McAfee...

Got this security product with the DELL otherwise I wouldn't be running it.  It has one of the worst user interfaces I've seen so any time I need to use it I end up doing a lot of swearing.

Well the picture on the right gives me one more reason to hate it.

Not only isn't there a virus but McAfee told me it knew that in a separate popup (which popped up in the background and unfortunately I didn't capture).

It couldn't actually scan the file as it was in use, the message on the right is in my opinion a very stupid way of saying that...

It frequently fails to do anything at all when selecting something like "history and Logs", I've just realized one of the reasons for this it often opens it in a new window of the same size UNDERNEATH the current one so its effectively invisible.

Of and one of my other pet hates is products that force an update then nag for reboots, hoping that you'll accidently agree to it while in the middle of doing something important.

Recursive touch command for Windows by Steve Miller

It took me a while to find so I'm documenting it here but this is the only windows command line "touch.exe" program that I could find that not only handles file masks but has a recursion option to process a whole directory tree!

Its another application by Steve Miller and is bundled in his "Win32 Console ToolBox 1.0" download.  I knew it was a winner as soon as I realised he is also the author of "Dependency Walker" and "pure text", the latter is in my opinion is a must have application on any windows machine.

Microsoft 'Improves' IE to Break Automation

If you are finding that IE automation ("InternetExplorer.Application") is hung then you can blame Microsoft for an extremely badly thought out "enhancement".

If IE dies and you manually invoke it it will may display the "Your last browsing session closed unexpectedly. Would you like to restore your last session, or go to your home page?" dialog shown on the top right.

Not related to automation (so bug #2), notice that there is no button for "continue doing what I told you to" option so basically command line automation/invocation is also broken.

Anyway back to automation, if IE was in a state where it wants to display the dialog, it will hang when automated. Some really bright people designed this...

IE has recently become so reliable I have converted to Chrome :-)

DropBox allows you to Sync across Phones and Computers World Wide

DropBox is a area of your hard disk ("My DropBox") which is automatically synced to the dropbox web site and/or other computers (Windows, Mac 10.4+, Linux, and Mobile).

If you go to a friends place then you will be able to access your files via the web interface (password protected) or if you are on the run with your phone then you will be able the access them that way.

I just found the link "https://www.dropbox.com/anywhere/apps" which I assume is for applications that have been officially certified to work well with DropBox file sync.

I've been using Dropbox for a fair while now and while the Android (iPhone and other phones also supported) version could use some more work it has worked well. The ways I've used it (or plan to):

• Installing portable programs.
• SplashId is not portable but I can sync its data which is in the DropBox, so it syncs between the computers and I just need to sync my phone's SplashId with my home computer.
• I put my favorite tools on there (I used to keep these on USB stick), you know the tools you need when your friend asks for help :-)
• Transferring files from one computer to another.
• I put backups of some important files in DropBox. The web version keeps some revisions of files giving me some additional protection.
• Making files easily accessible via my phone or anyone's internet connection.
• I plan on setting up an encrypted filesystem (perhaps using TrueCrypt) to hold some more sensitive information and sync that along with the rest.
• You can have a public area in your dropbox so you can easily share selected files with others.

Anyway if you want to try it make sure you use a referral from someone as you will be allocated more free space (2.25 GB) than if you just went to the site to sign up. The referrer will also benefit.

Now that I've used it for 5 months I'm happy that its reliable and can recommend it, if you wish to sign up you can use my referal link "http://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTY3MzU2NTM5", thank you ;-)

You can buy additional space if you wish and this allows for more revisions of files being kept and other extra features, I'm using the free version.