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September 17, 2005

Markdown with SmartyPants

I wasn’t happy with FSCKEditor (very slow and “glitchy”) so I’m trying the Markdown plugin. I also added SmartyPants — a module that allows cool stuff like automatically creating “curly quotes” and proper dashes… ah, that’s much better.

Have I ever mentioned that I hate HTML?

Posted by Steve at 09:40 AM | | Comments (0)

Patrick Tisseghem on SharePoint Announcements from PDC '05

Patrick Tisseghem has some good reflections on the SharePoint announcments coming from the PDC.

“Some will see new challenges and opportunities, others see there current solutions melt away as Microsoft is delivering that specific functionality out-of-the-box. It is probably time for many companies doing SharePoint stuff, to reflect on where to go from here. My advise to them is not to panic. Yes, Microsoft is filling up the gaps and to me, there will be less demand from customers to extend WSS or SPS in a horizontal way to deliver something that ‘Microsoft should have done’. Good example of this in the current version is item-level security or security trimming of the UI. To me the real opportunities are in the building of vertical solutions on top of the WSS platform.”

Posted by Steve at 07:53 AM | | Comments (0)

September 14, 2005

VMWare 5.5 Beta

Check out the VMWare 5.5 Beta with the ability to open Microsoft Virtual PC images and Norton Ghost files natively. Very. cool.

[via Larkware]

Posted by Steve at 01:40 PM | | Comments (0)

September 12, 2005

Windows shell (aka Monad) Beta 2 is Public



I've been on the nexgen Windows command shell private beta for over a year now. Today Microsoft released Beta 2 of the new shell (code-named "Monad") publicly. Get it here.

More information as it comes in.... gone to try it out.

Posted by Steve at 04:32 PM | | Comments (0)

September 10, 2005

SharePoint Backup Scripts

I've been sitting on an automated SharePoint Portal Server backup script for a while, considering whether or not I'd release it to the community. The problem was that I wasn't happy with the amount of error trapping that it was doing.

I finally took a few hours over the last few days to polish the scripts to the point that they do a pretty decent level of error trapping and logging, including e-mailing the results of the log file, and adding appropriate entries to the event log.

This script will backup:


  • The portal using the SPSBackup utility

  • The IIS Metabase

  • The computer's System State using NTBackup

  • Template and Config, Inetpub, log, and other miscellaneous files not backed up by SPSBackup


If you know batch scripting, it should be clean enough for you to extend. I'll also be creating a version just for backing up WSS servers.

You can download here.

You can view the README file, or take a quick peek at the script before you download it.

Please see the license in the script file before you put it to use on your production servers. While I've used the essence of the script in many configurations, including a server farm environment, the new error trapping additions haven't been heavily tested yet. So use at your own risk.

Still, I hope that the SharePoint community will find this helpful.

Posted by Steve at 01:03 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

September 01, 2005

CMD.EXE - Continued...

To continue on my command line tools theme... to view the help files for all command line tools included in XP, go to "Help and Support Center" and search for "Command-line Reference". You'll be shown the A-Z reference.

Here are a few things to point out today:


  • Do you ever miss deltree? Frustrated trying to del a folder that contains files? Used to being able to rm -r / on unix? Well, rmdir now has a /s switch to delete folders that contain files and sub-folders. So try rmdir /s on the root of your drive sometime and be as cool as your unix friends.

  • fdisk is no longer included in XP. Now you have to use diskpart. I've never used this before, so I have no idea what's involved.

  • There are a bunch of new command-line tools on Windows Server 2003 that aren't on XP. A couple of note are choice for prompting the user for multiple options, and clip to redirect output to the Windows clipboard. Nice for doing something like dir | clip so you can paste into notepad or an email without having to use the silly console mark action.

Posted by Steve at 07:29 PM | | Comments (0)

FCKeditor in Movable Type 3.2

I installed FCKeditor in Movable Type according to these instructions. Sweet. Now I get true WYSIWYG for entering posts from the web-based MT admin.

Posted by Steve at 07:14 PM | | Comments (0)