http://www.flickr.com/photos/flysi/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Want to copy *everything* from one drive to another, or make a complete backup of your stuff. Well, forget about using the age old drag and drop method, one might think using the cp would be sufficient, but again: no. The ultimate solution is robocopy.

Robocopy is a simple tool you can download from microsoft. At first glance it looks like something only for Windows Server 2003, but it works on XP just fine. Download the file there, and install it. Then fire up cmd, and type:

robocopy /?

You’ll see there are tons of options, more than I care to even think about. Here’s the only stuff that’s useful to me:

robocopy source destination /E /COPYALL /R:5

/E says to copy everything, going into subdirectories

/COPYALL says to copy everything, created date, last modified, etc.

/R:5 says to only try 5 times to copy something, if those don’t pan out, skip it and go to the next one. (You’ll get a full report of the copy at the end, so you’ll be able to see which ones were missed.) /R:5 is handy incase it finds a file that it doesn’t have access to. You don’t want it to keep trying and trying (the default is 1 million times), most likely you want it to try a couple times, and move on.

Download here

Tweaked the standard Aqua Blue Mac background, added a paper cut out of our son Noah. Enjoy.

Text Substitution pre-built into any text area.

One thing I deeply missed when I started using a mac as my main system was the auto-capitliazation of the letter “i”. When I was typing an email, or document it was almost second nature to just type “i” because I knew that Word would have me covered and auto-capitlize that puppy into “I”. I wouldn’t have to worry that I might look like a fool when I shot off an email or document with lower case i’s in it. Well, hello OS X, the dream OS with funny commercials. Low and behold the all-mighty mac doesn’t auto capitalize i. So when I went to write emails or documents, I had to always remember to go back and capitalize the i’s so I didn’t look a lazy teenager when I sent stuff out. I googled a couple times to find a solution, but nothing stood out as a simple fix. Until I found the ‘Text Substitution’ option which is an OS X option, prebuilt into almost any area where one could type text.

• Right click (or control click) anywhere you don’t actually have text
• Select “Substitutions” -> Show Substitutions.
• Click “Text Preferences”
• Click the + sign on the lower left, and add the substitution i and I.
• Then on the Substitutions window select “Text Replacement”

There you go. And the beauty is that you can do this in almost any area where text is available: Textedit, Mail, Addressbook, iCal, Web Sites, etc.

http://twitterrhea.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/icons/

Say your company has blocked twitter and/or you don’t like all the extra bloat on the twitter home page. I have found it very useful to create my own page. Even though facebook and other social networking sites are accessible, and even more ironically some of my companies own advertising actually promotes following them on twitter, the site is blocked on our network. But, here’s a simple work around I created.

Using some simple API calls to twitter, I’m able to recreate my twitter feed home page, and gather some basic information about myself and my followers. The page works fine behind the firewall because the twitter calls are actually being done from my host (godaddy).

Here’s what I wanted:

• Simple feed (possibly with icons) of the people I follow.
• Ability to add people I want to follow
• Some basic information about the people I follow, and about myself (Number of followers, time, etc.)

Here are the API’s and functions I used to create my own (useable behind a firewall) version of twitter.

// Adds ‘friendname’ to the list of people you follow.
http://twitter.com/friendships/create/friendname.xml

// Updates your ownstatus. Add status=’foobar’ as a post field to update.
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

// Get list of last 50 updates from your friends.
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?count=50

// Get various information about yourself. (Number of followers, number of people following you, your number of tweets.
http://twitter.com/users/show/russds.xml

To make these API calls, I used PHP functions of curl. Most of the calls are all the same, and involve these simple steps:

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT, ‘http://link.to.api.page’);
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, username:password); //your twitter username/password
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, “”); //empty string to just make the call. Populate if you want to send something, such as ‘status’.
$result = curl_exec( $curl );
curl_close( $curl );

When printing the list of status, I added similar functionality to the ‘@’ and ‘#’ symbols, I used these functions:

// Add links to strings that look like links.
$str = ereg_replace(“[[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]”,”<a href=\”\\0\” target=_blank>\\0</a>”, $str );

// pull out the words with # in the beginning for use with searching (not implemented yet)
$str = preg_replace( “/\B\#\w*\b/i”, “<a href='http://twitter.com/#search?q=$0' target='_blank'>$0</a>”, $str );

//get strings that start with @ to follow them.
$str = preg_replace( “/\B\@\w*\b/i”, “<a href='t.php?follow=\\0' title='Click to Follow'>$0</a>”, $str );

The corporate ladder

http://www.flickr.com/photos/proimos/ / CC BY 2.0

What’s the difference between you and your boss? Seriously, what’s the difference between you and your boss? If you could narrow down the differences to tangible character traits, what would they be? Experience? Education? Knowledge? Determination? Honesty? Friendliness? Tenacity? Creativity? Relationships? Ambition?

Even if your boss is Michael Scott, there must be a reason they have that position and you don’t. Some of us may have many more skills than our boss, much more knowledge, etc, but how come they have their position and we have ours? What skills or traits gave them the opportunity for the job and not us?

There are two scenarios we may find our selves in – we are very similar to our boss, or completely different from them.

If you find that you are actuality very similar to your boss, you might get some great perspective by figuring out why. What exactly is holding you back from being more successful? Is it fear? Is it your education, experience? By finding those minute differences, you might find it very easy to obtain what you lack. Maybe it’s as simple as a couple classes, or knowing the right people. Whatever it might be, when we reduce it in this way, we can see clearly what we need to get to the next level.

Sometimes, however the differences may be large, you may be completely different than your boss? What can you glean from your boss then? In this case, I might ask if I was in the right industry, or the right area of that industry. If I was that different than my boss, I would have to wonder if I was really pursing something I’m passionate about. If I really have the desire to move forward and become more successful at what I’m doing, I have to have at least have some similarity with my boss.

Even if our boss is a micro-managing bozo, there must be some reason (even if it’s just plain luck) they have their position and we have ours. What’s holding us back from finding those differences and overcoming them?