sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install update-manager-core sudo do-release-upgrade
I was recently interviewed by Fairchild TV (a national Chinese language station) for a segment about the Vancouver tech scene.
If you’re interested in the story, here are links to the video. Note that it’s a Cantonese language station.
(You can download the video if you find it's playing too slowly on the site.)
Part 1:
http://www.fairchildtv.com/newsarchive_detail.php?n=27&topic=375&episode=690
Part 2:
http://www.fairchildtv.com/newsarchive_detail.php?n=27&topic=375&episode=691
If you haven’t tried Snagit, you should check it out. It’s much better than relying on the old school screen capture mechanisms. When I was taking screenshots for my books, Snagit saved me a great deal of time. As just one example, try capturing an open dropdown menu using just Windows screen capture shortcuts—it’s like trying to catch a greased pig.
I just upgraded to Snagit 12 and found that every time I take an image capture, I’m prompted to select either a video or image capture (see the big blue buttons in the screenshot below). I rarely use the video capture, so this is a waste of time. Here’s how to turn it off.
First, check if you’ve got an old version of Snagit installed. I had 11 and 12 installed and was not getting the behaviour I wanted. I had to uninstall Snagit 11 to get rid of the old editor.
Next, go to the preferences window and check the hotkey associated with the default capture profile. I like to use print screen, so I’m going to change the “Global capture” shortcut key to something else. To get to the preferences window, you can right-click the icon in the task menu (bottom right corner of your screen with the hidden icons), then choose Preferences and the Hotkeys tab.
After I’ve freed up the right shortcut key, I’m going to associate that key (PrtScn) with a profile that doesn’t ask if I want to take video.
To do this, choose the “Send to Clipboard” profile from the Manage Profiles dialog, and then click the Hotkey button at the bottom to associate this with the keyboard shortcut you’d like to use. Note that I wanted to go directly to the Snagit editor, so I have that enabled.
Now I’m back to the lightning fast capture that I’ve come to love. When I use the hotkey, I go straight to the Snagit editor. If I wanted, I could add styles (such as borders) as part of the profile and they would be automatically applied.
p.s., If you’re wondering how I captured the Snagit windows. I cheated. I used Alt+PrtScn to do it old school.
Office 2013 and SharePoint apps are great, but I have to admit that I haven’t done much with them yet. Today, I found myself wondering what I’d have to do to get Wikipedia to open when I right-clicked on a word or phrase in Word 2013.
To add Wikipedia, all I had to do was choose Insert from the Ribbon menu at the top of the screen and then click the Wikipedia icon. If you click “My Apps,” you can navigate to the Office 2013 app store and check out what other interesting apps are available.
Once you click the icon, you’ll need to confirm that you trust this new app.
After you’ve trusted the app, you can now quickly look up words or phrases from your Word documents in Wikipedia. Very cool!
Switching the app that opens by default when you choose the “Define” option is not obvious. To choose a different app, you first need to hide the Wikipedia app my clicking “My Apps” in the Ribbon and then clicking “Manage My Apps.”
For example, let’s say you wanted to use the Bing dictionary for the Define option. You can add the Bing app, then choose Manage My Apps—which opens a web page—and hide Wikipedia from that page. Once you hide an app, you should be able to click the “Refresh” button in the My Apps view and see that the app is no longer there.
After you’re done, you can unhide Wikipedia. Note that some people have reported that they had to restart Word after hiding Wikipedia.
I should mention that it’s also possible to have multiple apps running. In the screenshot below, I have both the Bing dictionary and the Wikipedia app open.
Just like everyone in the software industry, I’ve used many, many different text editors over the years. vi, Emacs, Notepad, Notepad++, TextPad, nano, gedit… to name a few. But, of course, there is a ridiculously long list of text editors and I haven’t tried that many of them. The one that I’ve been working in for most of this year is Sublime Text. Sublime’s tag line is “Sublime Text: The text editor you’ll fall in love with.” I may not be in love yet, but I’m definitely checking it out a lot.
In addition to having excellent functionality built-in, Sublime also supports a plug-in model. There is the GoSublime plug-in for golang code and there’s the RegReplace plug-in that allows one to write find/replace commands using regular expressions and save them in script as Command Palette commands.
To install RegReplace on Windows:
Step 1: Install Package Control for Sublime Text
As you can see in the installation instructions for Package Control for Sublime Text, all you have to do is open a Sublime Text console (Ctrl+`) and paste in the install code.
Step 2: Install RegReplace for Sublime Text
Option 1: After installing package manager, download RegReplace, unzip it and paste the unzipped folder into your Packages folder (e.g., C:\…\Sublime Text 3\Packages). Next, go to Preferences > Package Control and choose “Package Control: Install Package.” Then choose the package you want to install from the list.
Option 2: This requires you have Git. Open a command prompt. CD to your Sublime Text 3 packages directory, then enter the following command:
git clone -b ST3 https://github.com/facelessuser/RegReplace.git RegReplace
Step 3: Add a Default.sublime-commands file -- with your command added
I had to manually create the folder: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 3\Packages\RegReplace
Once you have the file, you can add your own custom commands. (Remember to add a comma to the command above.)
// Test RegReplace
{
"caption": "Reg Replace: Test",
"command": "reg_replace",
"args": {"replacements": ["test_reg_replace"]}
},
Step 4: Add your custom command to the Command Palette
To do this, choose Tools > Command Palette > Then type “setting” and you’ll see “Preferences: Reg Replace Settings – User.” Choose this option and paste the example one that comes with RegReplace into the new file that’s created.
This will create the file: /C/Users/username/AppData/Roaming/Sublime Text 3/Packages/RegReplace/reg_replace.sublime-settings
After the file is created, add a new command to reg_replace.sublime.settings. For example:
// Test the RegReplace Sublime Plugin
"test_reg_replace": {
"find" : "testxxxxx",
"replace": "it works!"
}
Step 5: Try it out!
Once you have everything set up, you can use the Command Palette to run your new custom find/replace regular expressions scripts.
Note: After installing RegReplace, I received the an error when trying to add my test code to reg_replace.sublime.settings. The error was something like “Cannot save. Can’t create .tmp file in RegReplace folder.” To work around the issue, I opened the security settings for the folder and added write permissions for all users. A bit overkill, but in my case, it’s a secure machine.
The basic requirements for enabling remote access to SQL Server are pretty straightforward:
1. Ensure that “Allow Remote Connections” is enabled in SQL Server Management Studio.
2. Open your firewall to allow communication (by default TCP port 1433).
To get access to your SQL Server running on a Windows Azure Virtual Machine (VM), you need to take some additional steps—just as you would using an Amazon Web Services virtual machine. The same is true for opening HTTP access (e.g., over port 80), or any other port for that matter.
Note: This post is not about SQL Azure. This applies to an install of SQL Server on a Windows Azure Virtual Machine.
2. Click on the Virtual Machine you want to configure and then click “Endpoints.”
3. By default, SQL Server will use TCP port 1433, so add an endpoint with any name (using the allowed characters and character limit).
(I haven’t read up on it yet, but I’m assuming the public port is what you’ll be using from the outside and the private port is the one that will actually be forwarded to the VM. To keep it simple, I left them the same in my test.)
That’s it, you’re done! Now you can connect from a client machine to your remote SQL Server machine.
