Watch the exclusive trailer, I will not be at work on July 4th! I took the day off for the Matrix and I will take the day off for this ... enough said.

I was recently doing a TRACERT command and was attempting to paste IP address' into the DOS window. This required me to click on the icon in the top corner several times, which was a royal pain. In my previous employment we used mostly Windows 2000 machines and remembered that this was much easier. Here at Corillian I am in the world of XP and 2003.

After looking at the properties of the DOS window I realized that there was a property called 'Quick Edit Mode' that was unchecked. This particular option allows you to immediately copy text in a DOS window by highlighting it with left mouse click. You can then copy the text with a right mouse click, and finally paste the text with an additional right mouse click. This actually makes the XP\2003 DOS prompt work like the defaults of Windows 2000.

"Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times." - Niccolo Machiavelli

Scott Gu is the man, and his latest post really nails the major Silverlight questions. As always his demo's are thorough and thought provoking. I have nothing to contribute here, just check out the videos!

I was watching the latest edition of DNR and was formerly exposed to a couple of tools that I have had for a couple of years, but not put much thought into. DebugView and TCPView (from SysInternals).

DebugView is an application that lets you monitor debug output on your local system, or any computer on the network that you can reach via TCP/IP. It is capable of displaying both kernel-mode and Win32 debug output generated by standard debug print APIs, so you don’t need a debugger to catch the debug output your applications or device drivers generate, and you don't need to modify your applications or drivers to use non-Windows debug functions in order to view its debug output.

TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the owning process name, remote address and state of TCP connections. TCPView provides a conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows NT/2000/XP.

I used the later when trying (for giggles) to see what ports and locations a Trojans was using on a friends machine (it was a long weekend). I love the simplicity and the lack of installation, both these applications are in my tools folder on my USB stick, a must have!

"To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should." - Jean Rostand

I love the convenience of laptops, the portability, the 'I am cool' factor, however, I have consistently balked at anything smaller because it simply becomes impractical to use for long periods of time.

Case in point is the recent release of the FlipStart. It really looks good but the problem is not in the looks, the battery life, or the CPU.

Take a long hard look at this picture and tell me what the problem is?

Who in their right minds wants to write anything of significance with their thumbs. It is just not natural. I have spent a tremendous amount of time attempting to ensure that my QWERTY typing skills are adequate for today's world of business only to be reduced to using my thumbs!

To be sure there are some nice mouse like artifacts that make using the FlipStart tolerable, but this is not a solution for typing more than a couple of sentences, and this is not just me. If you follow an SMS message thread you will see that people just do not want to type whole sentences on small devices (e.g. lol, btw...).

I do have a proposal, if not a solution, that may make things a little easier and faster for everyone. It does not require that you ditch all your hard earned typing skills.

One handed typing using the Half QWERTY, Half Keyboard layout.

Promote a keyboard scheme that is basically half the QWERTY keyboard as in the following diagram. This would allow you to hold the device in your left (if right handed) and type with your right. To get to the other half of the QWERTY layout you would have to use flip function but that is the point at which you would need to learn new skills.

I do not pretend to have run any practical test on this system myself but there are people out there promoting and using this system.

"A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad ... and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly." - Emily Bronte