There’s something comforting about Windows CLI applications, I think. Maybe it’s the idea that I can, after all, just open a shell and actually do something. Of course Windows XP’s built in shell sucks in every conceivable way; maybe it’s the years of living in denial, acting as if the command line isn’t a nice thing to have around.

It is. Appupdater (thanks a lot for the long name: there’s a reason ls and man and rm are short, thank you very much) is sort of like apt-get for Windows, though not nearly as graceful or integrated into the system. But it’s useful still! If someone could actually get an integrated repository working on Windows that auto-updated, that’d be ever so nice. There’s nothing worse than every program having its own installer and update mechanism.

I don’t get file extensions. Okay, maybe they were needed thirty years ago when the first rudimentary file-systems were created, but we have meta-data and the ability to read file headers and all sorts of neat things like that. Why do I still have to name something .whatever?

(Yes, I know this doesn’t apply to *nix, shut up.)

I just had to restart a Windows 2000 server. I would like to know why I had to restart the server, and I would like to know if there was any way to avoid doing so.

It seems at this point that,

• My knowledge of the subject is limited and there are real ways to diagnose problems such as these; or,
• There’s no real mechanism to diagnose problems, such as CLI output, logfiles, and the like.

It could very well be the first option there. It the meantime, it occurs to me that both our servers would probably be faster if we were running them on one Linux box (or Solaris, or BSD) under vitualisation.