tips

As a new arrival to social media (especially Twitter), I sometimes find the amount of information available via these channels to be overwhelming that I either end up drowning in the morass of data or, in frustration, I just switch it off. I find Twitter is a major culprit in this area especially if you try to use hashtags (the words you see prefixed with a # symbol i.e. #azure or #ruby) to follow topics and even more so when people start repeating, or retweeting as they call it, such that you see the same data repeated over and over again.

Thankfully Twitter has actually thought about this, though information is rather scarce. If you go to http://twitter.com/search and keep hitting refresh you get a few useful tips. You can try advanced search (http://search.twitter.com/advanced – though I can never find this link on the main site and instead I have to use google) to get an idea of just what is possible. However if you use a twitter client on your desktop or your phone then this is a bit tiresome. You could try the operators, see http://search.twitter.com/operators. But again nothing immediately obvious until you remember that a lot of the retweets are normally prefixed with a RT or VIA (an alternative way to retweet) and notice that Twitter have supplied an exclude option via the minus(-) operator.

Thus armed you can prune the retweets by adding -rt (and also -via) to your searches and remove all the repeated twitterings e.g. to search for all tweets that have been tagged with azure or cloud but to ignore the repeats I would use:  #azure OR #cloud -rt -via

Now the amount of information is reduced and, assuming your search is limited in scope i.e. does not involve a trending topic or major celebrity, manageable.

Have you ever wondered what the cmd equivalent for the unix command pwd?

To those unfamiliar with pwd, it’s a UNIX shell command you type on a terminal screen to get the Present Working Directory (pwd). Why is this useful? Well it can be used as a shortcut for operations on the current directory you’re in. It’s also useful when it comes down to calling shell scripts and passing directory refences around to properly locate other files that you expect in specific locations relative to the present working directory.

So what’s the cmd equivalent?

Open Windows Explorer
Ever been stuck in the terminal screen and wanted to open Windows Explorer in the current director? This command will save you multiple mouse clicks and help you visualise the directory quickly.

If you run explorer on the command prompt, it opens Windows Explorer but doesn’t navigate to the spot where your directory is. I have found this to be a great annoyance and just not that useful. Passing in a directory will cause explorer to open that directory up. This is a little more useful, but the folder view in XP seems to be hidden. You have to click on folders to see something useful.

So, to address this, run this instead

The /e argument causes explorer to open in its default view. A comma is needed to delimit arguments to the explorer program. This opens the explorer in a much more familiar view. If you’re after more options, check out the following page on the command-line arguments for Explorer.exe.