TeX doesn't suck..

Formatting documents to look consistent and structured is one of the things that used to always irritate me. I personally just could not do this with Microsoft Word or any document editor... I realize that it's probably just a lack of artistic ability (and patience) that I could not accomplish this simple task, but I am here to tell you that there is a better way.

Way back in the day(which was a tuesday, in case you were wondering), a man named Donald E. Knuth created the TeX formatting system to help him create a book for the math course he was teaching. TeX is a typesetting language - it allows you to focus on the structure of the document instead of the appearance. As long as you aren't stupid, TeX will produce a very professional looking document every time.

The initial version was called TeX, but these days your best bet is to download a version of LaTeX - which is basically TeX with a bunch of other common files - that way you don't have to worry about downloading them separately. There are some editors specifically intended for LaTeX, however I prefer using Notepad++ with the nppexec plugin.

Another strong benefit of using TeX (especially for documentation or things of that nature...) is the fact that you can check the raw tex files into a source control system and easily tell what has changed between versions of a given file. This isn't very easy to do with other formats(doc,pdf,etc...).

Anyway - That's all for now... I really do recommend giving this a shot. It has made my life a whole lot easier when writing documentation or anything that needs to look professional.

Check out their home page - it has tutorials and mirrors to download LaTex(Called TeX Live just to confuse you some more)

TeX Live

PsTools doesn't suck

Ever get all comfortable and situated on your living room couch or recliner with your trusty laptop and suddenly realize that you need to make some changes to your (windows *cough*)desktop computer way on the other end of the house? Chances are that most of us have had this problem, but where others have failed - you will succeed. I will give you the necessary tools to prevent such situations from ruining your laziness. Most of you that have this problem probably have already installed some type of remote access service on your desktop(vnc,rdp,telnet,etc...), but since that would defeat the purpose of me writing this blog, let's assume that in this particular situation you have just formatted your windows box in the other room and forgot to do this...(those of us running OpenBSD or some other *nix variant will use ssh if we have half a brain)

Anyway, long story short - use pstools. PsTools is a suite of applications originally developed by Sysinternals... Microsoft bought them eventually, so It's a microsoft product now I suppose... Even still, it's a very handy set of applications(especially for a network admin). The one that I use most often is psexec, so I will briefly cover some of the things you can pull off with it and leave the other applications in the suite for the reader to discover.

Psexec will allow you to remotely execute an application on another machine(As long as you have an account name and password handy for that box). It will allow you to execute a remote executable or copy an executable from your machine to the remote machine and execute it. You can also use psexec to run commands with the SYSTEM account, which has it's benefits at times.

*DETOUR*
Ever tried used Macrium Reflect to back up a system only to be constantly irritated with the NTFS Permissions from the image when attempting a restore? Launch a cmd shell as the SYSTEM account and you will be able to browse all of the files from your mounted image without troubles
*END DETOUR*

You launch a remote cmd shell from psexec to gain telnet-like access to a box without actually turning telnet on. Let's be honest - once you have a remote cmd shell, you can pretty much make any changes to the system that you would want to do, so I'll stop blogging right here.

*SIDE NOTE* - If you're running *nix, there is an application called winexe that will supposedly let you execute commands on a windows box remotely just like psexec. I have not tried this application yet, but it sounds promising.
Home of winexe

Go Download it and try it out
Home of PsTools