"What we want is some product that can mostly just keep running by itself, and it will generate some ad-based income from the traffic alone - or perhaps by subscriptions. All we'd have to do is get the service up and running, and keep it running."

I saw this Cheat Sheet for using Windows PowerShell (MSH / Monad) to help people who are used to cmd.exe to easily move to this new syntax.

PowerShell is really great for doing complex tasks with it's object approach to data, but there seems to be somewhat of a learning curve to this syntax. I haven't looked into it, but just from looking at these examples it looks like a confusion of cmdlets and pipes and switches, and this "$_" thingy.

So, dir is now replaced by get-childitem (dir still works though as an alias). That's ok, its a more general naming convention. But what you could do easily in cmd.exe now seems a bit more tricky. Sorting by date was "dir /ad", now it onvolves a pipe and a where statement and this $_ thing, and becomes "get-childitem | where { $_.MshIsContainer }". Quite a handful right there.

It seems a lot more general and powerful, though I'd have to read up on that syntax before I could get anything done with it.

Here's an example from the same page of a dir function that sorts by name with folders on the top:

function dir {
   get-childitem $args -force |
   sort @{e={$_.MshIsContainer}; asc=$false},
        @{e={$_.Name}; asc=$true}
}

Which is the same as "dir /OGn" in cmd.exe

I like the fact that the F1 help in Visual Studio 2005 uses online help so I don't have to install that whole huge library, and it can be updated without me installing it all over again.

But why is it so incredibly slow to open? I press F1, and first it takes a good while for the window to appear, and then it takes what seems like forever to locate the page. And in the meantime there is no indication to whether it has found the correct page, so I might end up getting help on something irrelevant.

It's actually a lot faster to just google whatever I'm looking for, even though I'm still ending up on the same msdn2.microsoft.com site. And that's a shame, because F1 is actually very useful as it can locate the help pages by the context I'm in. But I'm just ending up not using it anymore.

"it's really good for my sanity to have some moments of solitude and be working on my own little projects. But now the problem is I'm getting isolated from what's going on in the rest of the house. I'm all alone on a different floor, sometimes with headphones on, and the door closed to keep the heat in"

"In the shower today, to my amazement, there was a bottle that I could actually read."