Dealing with ISOs in Vista

Vista can’t natively write ISOs to disc. I always used to use Fireburner on XP but that doesn’t seem to work on Vista because I can’t see where to disable Vista’s built in burning app. After some searching I found the solution: ISO recorder. Here’s some good stuff on how to write iso files to cd and how to mount iso files in Vista.

WinZip frustration

So I’m backing up my laptop by zipping up my user directory and copying it over to another box. After more than 20 gigs of archive have been created I run out of disk space. What does WinZip do? It aborts! Would it be so much to ask for it to prompt me to abort or retry so I can free up some space and not have to wait forever to do this all over again? While I’m on the subject, backing up my windows boxes is annoying. What is the best software to backup windows?

Things that are good

While I’m waiting for my backup to complete I might as well write about some stuff that pleases me to balance the negativity of the last post. In no particular order, here are 20 things that rock:

1. Skype, Easy to use, cheap, and sounds better than my cell.
2. PuTTY, Although it lacks all the features of OpenSSH and pscp performs worse than scp it is highly convenient.
3. OpenBSD, Secure? Maybe. But everything that comes with it just works and is documented. pf is by far the best packet filter out there.
4. Intellisense, I never want to write code without this again.
5. mutt, Email is meant to be text.
6. bash, Your shell sucks.
7. screen, If you don’t use this for all your remote shells, you should.
8. WPF, Offspring of web applications and windows applications. mmmm shiny.
9. Perl, Perl doesn’t have to be unreadable. It’s regex support is unmatched. It’s already installed everywhere. And there’s CPAN, which makes it better than the alternatives right now.
10. del.icio.us, Shared bookmarks with tagging. So simple, but so useful. Especially if you use multiple web browsers or more than one computer.
11. Catalyst MVC framework, Great framework for making web applications with Perl.
12. Subversion, Bloated pig with mad dependencies, but it’s sure convenient.
13. Tortoise SVN, Awesome subversion client for Windows
14. PostgreSQL, My database of choice
15. Google, Can’t leave this off the list since I use it for everything. Hopefully it doesn’t get too Big Brother for my liking.
16. windbg, a great debugger for Windows
17. gcc, Where would we be without good old gcc?
18. Windows sysinternals, Particularly tcpview, process monitor, and zoomit (which I never understood the purpose of until I saw Mark Russinovich use it)
19. vim, the best text editor
20. WinDirStat, Want to know where all your disk space has gone? The powerful treemap can help