A world of git clients

In the world of git clients, I have found what I believe is the king of git client. Kraken. I'm sorry, there is just NO better UI.

Cortana Search Box - Frozen

Had an interesting situation where my Cortana Search box was frozen. Clicking it accomplished nothing short of frustration

I tried to "fix" it by re-registing my Cortana download by executing the powershell command:
 
Get-AppXPackage | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy

Didn't work, received all sorts of invalid manifest errors in angry red. More research yielded a similar thing for the "reinstall" of a corrupted Windows Calendar. I modified the powershell script and executed:

Get-AppXPackage -Name Microsoft.Windows.Cortana | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

  SUCCESS!

A few notes:

1. You push run powershell as administrator
2. You must have the windows firewall turned on
3. You must have the windows store bound to a valid account. 

 Why? who knows.

Inside Apple

So, at work lots of people have been reading this book that came out called Inside Apple. Normally I would skip books that I tend to see become prolific around the company but I thought from the title that it would be useful from my Org. Behavior 7000 level class. Inside Apple from the cover purports that it is "How America's Most Admired and Secretive -- Company Really works". Now, I've read this thing from cover-to-cover and it really just talks about "Jobs" and what he's done for the company. Now, it was VERY interesting from an organizational behavior perspective and I will indeed quote it for my final paper in the class; but I felt shorted. Most of it has been written before and felt like a rehashing of existing material. But there were parts that have been insightful. I was not aware that most folks in the executive level lacked understanding of general business matters. It almost makes me want to cry for the money I'm shelling out for my MBA. All in all a very good read; would I highly encourage it to folks: No. Would I say its good for a plane ride? yes.

So My in-house SAN was at it's limits; but considering I had built it before I had arrived at Ping it had served its purpose. It was time to go! I had a few reasons 1. I am considering going without a home PC. 2. It wouldn't work right with my MacBook. 3. I had no access to my files from my iPad / Android Phone I started reviewing the solutions out there as well as considering my online options. I ended up ruling out online options as I wanted to be able to stream / view from boxee box(s) as well. I was stuck with going back to a local SAN. I have long been a reader of TheRegister and ran across a article from the hardware side called 10 local storage solutions. I loved the reviewof the WD Live box. I personally don't care about the throughput as long as it is quick enough for my purposes. The single terabyte size isn't good enough and I was happy to see Fry's carried a 2 TB version. There are lots of plus's to this device. 1. It manages its own share's and its DLNA certified so I can attached from any device! 2. Its super tiny, and is a fraction of the size of my previous solution. 3. With the myCloud solution, I can access my files from anywhere. 4. Very economical for the size and purpose. Now i need to find a off-site backup solution...

E-Books

I've been a fan of e-books for quite some time. From epub, to pdf, to Kindle. I was actually an early adopter of the Kindle platform, first owning a 1st gen to the DX model where I happily stay. When it was announced that Ottawa would migrate to e-books I was absolutely thrilled! That is, until I had a class that used them. The company is called CourseLoad and it is more locked down than some IT departments PC's! No copy-paste, printing is throttled, and the resolution is horrible. My thinking is that this is some-kind of anti-theft model; however, the book is auto-charged at registration you don't have a choice. Given my warm-and-fuzzy personality, I have written the company and suggested they enroll in some reader program as their software sucks.

Camping

Just got back from camping, with 8 (yes 8) kids. Ages ranged from 18 to 5 and I think we hit our maximum. It was a mixture of ours and nieces and friends of the kids and we had a blast. We visited Jerome and the gold mine near it, something some of them had never done. Had ice cream at the artists park and talked and laughed and built some memories. Sadly I look around and not too many parents do that with their kids today, I know mine didn't do that.

The Hammer Approach

I ran across this interesting little tidbit today while waiting on my son:
"Decision makers engage in solution-focused problem identification because it provides comforting closure to the otherwise ambiguous and uncertain nature of problems"

The coarse is a masters level "Organization Behavior" which while interesting to me; is not in my core learning passion block (more later).  What stuck me to it is that we see this everywhere, even in IT.  People tend to grow comfortable with their daily approach to problem solving and  they tend to become rooted in their approach from motivation to implementation.  Most people characterize this in the phrase "When all you own is a hammer, everything is a nail".

If you apply this to software development, people tend to pull out the language they know, the toolkit their used to, the design pattern they know.  It is comforting to know that the problem is a human nature one, not a skill-rot problem that we see so often.