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Call for Windows hackers (_yes_, Windows)

Wintel Love Another in Danny and my ongoing series, in which we basically beg other people to do our work and finish this Godforsaken book for us.

In today’s installment, Danny pleads your help with the one thing we’re both ready to admit we know almost nothing about: cool Windows hacking. (Yes, thanks, I do see the irony of the high and mighty Mac dork asking for help from the people he supposedly scorns [or so spins the long-discredited urban myth]).

So, of course, all the usual admonitions about Windows talk are abolished for this post. It’s Thunderdome, people! The Mac-centric people humbly yield the floor.

Thus, Danny writes…

GREETINGS PEOPLE OF EARTH

Being an O’Reilly book, our fine (and Godforsaken) book contains lots of Deep Geek solutions: Perl and Python scripts, webapp glue, that kind of thing.

I’d really really like it to be cross-platform. One of the Life Hacks rules was that it shouldn’t matter what computer you’re sitting in front of: the tricks, as much as possible, shouldn’t depend on the plumbing underneath.

Which means I’ve got a stack of really neat ideas, implemented using Linux and MacOS tricks: all of which could probably be implemented in a few lines of Windows code too, and would probably make hundreds, nay, zillions of Win users lives better.

That means I’m on the search for a few good VBScript, C#, and just general Wintel modders.If you’re interested, post a note about it here in comments or with a pointer to something cool you’ve done, and let’s talk.

I now return you to your usual programming. Ahaha. Do you see the clever pun I made there?


Like the man says, spill. Got some amazing Windows fu for us?

Lucas Emery's picture

The thing that has made...

The thing that has made my Windows experience tolerable for the last couple of years was installing Microsoft's Services For Unix.

It used to cost 99 bucks but now you can download it for free (gratis) from Microsoft's website:

www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/ sfu/downloads/default.mspx

Propably a lot of people will mention cygwyn, but I think Services For Unix has got it beat. For one, it's a full POSIX-compliant subsystem, not an emulation layer, so running your bash shell scripts (or Perl or Python or whatever) happens speedily and without a lot of tweaking.

Then there's the folks over at interopsystems.com who are busily porting over a lot of very popular Unix software to run on SFU; you can have Apache, OpenSSH server, whatever.

Also, it can work with NetBSD's pkg_add system, so you can use all the NetBSD packages. And it comes with GCC, so most tar.gz packages are just a "./configure, make, make install" away.

So, hopefully, with SFU all your uber-leet shell scripts can run on all three platforms.

Oh, my other favorite Windows "hack" is a "Shutdown" shortcut. A conventional shutdown requires THREE mouseclicks (Start Menu, Shutdown, Shutdown) and any geek worth their salt knows that's entirely too many! So I put a new shortcut on the desktop and for "Command Line:" put "shutdown -s -t 01". Now shutting down just takes a double-click.

P.S. Really looking forward to the book!

 
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