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So what gives with SyncToy 2.1 on Windows 7 64-bit? Last night I manually closed Outlook, then after it had exited cleanly I executed my folder sync. As mentioned previously (here, and here, and here) the sync command runs all my “active for sync” folder pairs in SyncToy 2.1, of which there are two. The [...]

I got caught in a silly little trap this morning, and it cost me an hour or so of debugging time. Usually I enjoy debugging, when the error I am chasing is legit, meaning a reasonably good programmer could have caused it. But then there are those times when I just screw myself by being [...]

My last word, that is. When I set this site up I vowed to myself to focus on the historical, the technical, occasionally the literary, and stay the hell away from the political. But alas it seems strange, here on the eve of perhaps the greatest change in our government since Johnson’s Great Society, to [...]

So last night, the actions taken by my script caused a problem with Outlook’s storage file. Just to review, what the script did was: a) execute the Outlook.Application.Quit method to instruct Outlook to shut down; b) wait until outlook.exe dropped off the process list; and then c) execute a SyncToy folder pair that backs up [...]

So a couple of days ago I wrote a post on the subject of Outlook and how it locks its PST file, making it impossible for SyncToy to copy it in my nightly backup. I don’t know what Outlook does to put such a bear hug on this file. Lots of other stuff is running [...]

I suspect that children are losing track of where stuff is. Not things like socks and backpacks, which they have never been able to locate reliably, but counties, states, nations, rivers, mountains, hemispheres. I already knew that my own kids have no sense of where stuff is in our locality. How could they? They never [...]

If you recorded last night’s episode of Lost on ABC and you haven’t watched it yet, unread that headline. Charles Widmore does not show up at the end cruising in a submarine just off the coast of the Mysterious Island (apologies, Jules). Actually, who cares? If you’re watching Lost then by this time you must [...]

“Have you seen that thing?” “What thing?” “That thing that does that thing it does.” “Oh, that thing. No, sorry.” ~ thing; noun; from Old English thing, assembly; akin to Old High German ding, thing, assembly; Gothic theihs, time. ~ I’m not known for brevity. Whether speaking or writing I tend to use a lot [...]

AvalonLife is a pretty complete and full-featured implementation of John Conway’s Game of Life, which I created a couple of years ago as an experiment in WPF programming. I ended up writing a long feature on the creation of the program, which begins here. It has a ton of information on the background of the [...]

I use Microsoft’s SyncToy for nightly backups. In the past I’ve used many different solutions, from custom xcopy scripts to robocopy to the built-in backup program that started shipping with Windows back in the NT days. I also keep complete disk images for those rare occasions when a full recovery is needed. But for making [...]