dale lane

I wrote a bunch of command-line apps a while ago that let me control my Outlook task list. As a big GTD devotee, everything that I do revolves around my task list. And as someone who spends a lot of time at the command prompt, these apps mean being able to add something to my task list when I think of it – without interrupting what I am doing. It means not needing to Alt-Tab to Microsoft Outlook, waiting for it to wake up, opening a new Form… all of which takes me away from what I was doing when I thought of whatever task needed capturing on my list.

But recently, Outlook started throwing up security warnings when I use them… which means I have to Alt-Tab to Outlook anyway to tick the box telling it it’s not under attack. 🙁

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windbg is a debugger for Windows. It can step through programs while they run, or be used to examine the dumps produced when Windows crashes or hangs (including when you get the infamous blue-screen-of-death).

And with a couple of simple commands, it can get you a long way towards figuring out the cause of the problem.

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I’ve been having a bit of a play with Java 5 to see what is new, and I’m impressed. There’s lots of neat little things to give developers less to worry about. One of these is the introduction of in-built support for thread pooling.

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