I’ve been a loyal follower of Norton Ghost for many years. I’ve used it regularly in the past to copy, clone, and restore drive images. I’ve always used a dedicated drive image tool to create my own system restore points. The last DOS version of Ghost running from my boot CD with USB support to store the image was the zenith of Ghost usage for me I think. Feature bloat and a really terrible recovery CD in the latest version forced me to begin a search for an alternative.

cruft /kruhft/ [back-formation from {crufty}] 1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more. 2. n. The results of shoddy construction. 3. vt. [from `hand cruft', pun on `hand craft'] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see {hand-hacking}). 4. n.

CLR via C# – another great “roll your sleeves up” book. As the author says, there are a lot of “top down” books out there that will teach you how to use a tool, an application, or a framework, but fewer that will take you on a “bottom up” tour of the underlying technology.

As site I’ve been working on recently required that all pages be XHTML Transitional compliant, with one exception. A special document page of the site needed to be in XHTML Strict format. 
 
The problem was how to get ASP.Net 2.0 to render all the pages in the site as Transitional, while rendering the special page as Strict.
 
Setting the xhtmlConformance option as bellow in the system.web section - will render all controls and pages as Transitional.

As a favour to anyone else out there that may hit this one.svn: Can't open file next-ids: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.If you see this message on your Subversion server - it's likely that your real time anti-virus software has got a hold of the next-ids file while it was being written, locking Subversion out. Exclude the transactions directory in your repository from your AV software.

Abraham Lincoln: “ If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend four hours sharpening the axe.”...that and other lessons in 'The Art of Project Management' by Scott Berkun. I've not had my yellow highlighter out as often in a long time. A fantastic read and an even better bibliography.

One to be updated in the future. Will create a category for Theory and Fundamentals at some point. Having written a fair amount of high-level language code, VB6 and C#, I figured getting to grips with the fundamentals might not be a bad idea.Here are a few titles that have 'moved me' in this direction.

Waiting to board before flying back to Bangkok from Singapore. WiFi promotion here at the airport meant downloading and installing Firefox 1.0. WiFi is wonderful.

Having finally joined the online community of bloggers what better way to start than to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
 
Tony