Recently I’ve been needing an easy way to paste two versions of a text, and get the differences between the texts, specifically changes within a line (most diff programs only show which lines have changed). After some searching, DiffMerge came up as one of the best free diff programs that would work on the Mac. DiffMerge is great in many aspects, however, it lacked the interface to paste in text to diff right off the start. I set out using Mac’s Automator tool to create an application to prompt the user for two texts, create the temporary files, then pass it into DiffMerge. Continue Reading
Make Word spell check uppercase words
It’s a little known fact that Microsoft Word by default does not spell check uppercase words. I had the opportunity to read through many co-op resumes from a couple universities this past week, and the typos I’ve seen seem to support this observation. The problem comes when you have a section heading in capitals, such as “ACHIVEMENTS” or “RELEVENT SKILLS”. Microsoft Word by default doesn’t indicate that the spelling is wrong! I’m not sure why this “feature” is enabled by default, as I’d think it would be better to have more false positives than to have typos go undetected. In Continue Reading
Reindeer Sightings
We have two reindeer buses roaming the streets of Metro Vancouver, one conventional based in Vancouver and a shuttle based in Port Coquitlam. Rudolph Rudolph is a little shy and only comes out occasionally for short trips in the Vancouver area, however, there have been sightings of him in other municipalities in the region. This year, Rudolph was decorated with additional external lighting. Where is Rudolph? Rudolph Shuttle The Rudolph shuttle, on the other hand, isn’t shy at all, and is usually out and about on many shuttle routes in the Coquitlam area. Where is Rudolph Shuttle? Other Reindeer Buses
Sweeping the disks
Every now and then it’s necessary to make some extra room on the disks. I’ve found a set of free tools that helps me see what is taking up all the space. JDiskReport (Multi-platform) JDiskReport presents multiple views for getting the statistics of file sizes. The default view is a pie chart showing the sizes of each of the subfolders in the current selected folder. Alternate views are included to determine the file types that use the most space, largest files in the entire tree, file size and file age. It is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and other Java-supported Continue Reading
Updating VMware ESXi
Back in January I built a VMware ESXi 5 whitebox as my home server. I updated the hypervisor today and I thought I’d record the process so that I can refer back to it later. The blog post I found most useful was from VMware Front Experience. If you’re looking for the detailed procedures, I’d suggest you look at that post. Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1 The upgrade file can be found here on the VMware download site. For an upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1, the file to download is: VMware-ESXi-5.1.0-799733-depot.zip. After downloading the file, scp it to the ESXi host, Continue Reading