Scott Hanselman

I've written before about the idea of Imposter Syndrome or being a "Phony." It's the idea that on the surface you're an accomplished technologist but inside you're always questioning if you're really good enough. It turns out that this is SUPER common. You're not alone.

That little voice or feeling that "I can do better." Or, "I'm not 100% qualified but I think I can push through this" can sometimes be a motivator.

This wonderful index card is by Jessica Hagy of This Is Indexed. Explore her blog and book! 

Remember that while you may feel like a phony, those around you who think they are awesome may not be!

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes.

But the most important part is:

...people with true ability tended to underestimate their relative competence.

My excellent friend and very accomplished phony Chanelle Henry will be exploring these concepts on stage at SXSW 2015...if our panel is accepted!

You may have heard Chanelle on Hanselminutes Podcast episode #401 on "An Internet of Inclusion" or read her viral essay "Is it too late to be awesome?"

You can help us by quickly making a SXSW account and casting your Thumbs Up Vote (and leaving a comment) for our session proposal! Even better, tweet or blog your thoughts and encourage others to vote if you'd like to see content like this at the South By Southwest Interactive Conference.

Go read my blog post called "I'm a phony" and if it helped you, help me by voting for our session at SXSW! Thanks!

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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We've got an older HP TouchSmart all in one computer that we use as the "Kitchen PC." It's basically a browsing, emails, YouTube, and recipes machine. It's lovely machine, really. I've actually seen them at Goodwill, in fact, for cheap. If you can pick one up inexpensively, I recommend it.

Mine was starting to get sick so I opened it up (a challenge, but OK if you count all the screws) and replaced the Hard Drive. It comes with a 500gig 5400RPM full size SATA drive as I recall, but that was on its last legs. I happen to have a first gen 64G Intel laptop SSD around, so I use some 3M Command double-sided tape and basically taped this tiny hard drive to the inside of the thing and reinstalled Windows. This time, however, instead of the Windows Vista that it came with, I put on Windows 8.1.

You'd think I'd be asking for trouble. In fast, it's amazing. Literally everything worked, first try, with ZERO third party drivers. Blueooth, wireless, graphics, everything. Worked and worked immediately. Nothing was banged out in Device Manager. Even the touch screen worked, but only with 1 point of touch. That meant no pinch to zoom in browsers or maps. Cool, but I wanted to see if I could fix it.

These HP TouchSmarts had touch screens made by a New Zealand company called NextWindow, except they recently went out of business. Their website includes a few drivers, but not the one I needed.

I've mirrored them here because I don't trust that their website will be around long.

• NextWindow 1950 Driver​
• NextWindow 2500 Driver
• Touchscreen Calibration Tool

Here's the actual driver I needed for the TouchScreen. It doesn't appear to be available anywhere else, so I'm mirroring it here, as-is. It's the "HID Driver" (Human Interface Device) driver for the NextWindow 1900 TouchScreen. It's version 1.4 from May 24th, 2012. It works with NextWindow 2150 and 2700 touchscreens as well and it works under Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, and now Windows 8 and 8.1!

• NWFilter.zip - NextWindow 1900 Multi-touch Windows Driver

This completely brought my HP TouchSmart new life with proper multitouch. It's paved completely with a new Windows 8.1 installation and just one third party driver and NO HP crapware.

Hope this helps you, random internet visitor.

Related Links

• Windows 8 Missing Instruction Manual - Video

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Most folks learn how to use Task Manager pretty quickly. We've all been on the phone with non-technical-relative and ask them to open up Task Manager.

As we move from user to technical-user we are introduced to SysInternals tools and perhaps Process Monitor for finding out what's happening to a disk. However, I find that for quick questions that using Resource Monitor is faster to access and the information is easier to interpret.

You can bring Task Manager up, of course, by right clicking the Taskbar and clicking Task Manager. Or, hit Ctrl-Alt-ESC as a hotkey for Task Manager.

From Task Manager, you may never have noticed the Open Resource Monitor link at the bottom of the Performance tab.

Click that and open up a whole new insight into what's going on.

Disk

This is all great stuff but I find myself exploring the Disk tab the most.

Remember to sort by Read or Write bytes/sec. I often sort by Total and often find things like DropBox in there.

CPU and the CPU usage of Services

Task Manager is great but it doesn't easily show how much CPU is being used by a Service. Resource Monitor not only lets you easily Filter processes with a checkbox, but you can also sort services by CPU usage.

On the CPU tab, is an Associated Handles pane. If Resource Monitor is a well-kept secret, then Associated Handles is a secret within a secret. You can search across all processes for an open file name (or any handle), as well as filter by Process or Service.

Network Activity

The Network Activity tab is super useful and jam-packed with information. It makes it easy to find a process from a port or TCP connection.

You have this tool and all these views now, and I suspect you might not be using it to the fullest. Perhaps you pull from a number of smaller applets or shareware utilities to pull it all together.

Once I reminded myself that Resource Monitor could be launched directly from the Task Manager (an app that I have open often a lot already) I started using it even more. I may just pin it to the Taskbar!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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If you right click in Windows and try to make a new text file with a . period/dot in front of it:

Name the file...something like .gitignore, for example.

You'll get the "You must type a file name" error.

But, rather than typing .gitignore, if you include an ending dot also, like

.gitignore.

Then it works fine.

Thanks, Mads, for the tip!

NOTE: We're assuming that you have "File name extensions" turned on, because if you don't, you're likely not a programmer. ;)

UPDATED: Mads has created an "Add Empty File" Extension for VS that makes it easy to create . files as well!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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While I'm not 100% gaga over Markdown as I know many of you are, I definitely appreciate it's usefulness and it's clarity. Some folks would say I shouldn't rest until every binary document on my hard drive has been converted to Markdown. I say, nay nay. That said, I totally dig MarkdownPad and you should use it every day. It's lovely.

If you don't want to install anything, check out http://dillinger.io and quickly edit some Markdown in the browser.

But, I digress.

Note: Be sure to check out all the NuGet packages of the week! There's more!

The general idea behind Markdown is that HTML is way too complex for 90% of what you need, so rather than <ul> and <li> and all that, why not just express bullets with asterisks? We can all get behind that. There are many other simple Markdown syntaxes that you can learn in a few minutes. Once you've created some Markdown, you can easily generate PDFs, HTML, Word Documents, whatever you like.

Recently I stumbled upon Stuart Wheelwright's article on Using Markdown for Effective Logging over at CodeProject. Here's the first image borrowed from his excellent article where he clearly shows why Markdown is simpler than HTML:

Stuart has taken Markdown and created a wonderful little library called MarkdownLog. It's a brilliant little idea that one of us should have come up with first! Kudos to Stuart. ;)

[MarkdownLog] is designed to make it trivial to produce Markdown formatted text from an application's data structures. Using just one line of code, a collection of .NET objects can be output as a table or list. And, because the output is Markdown, it can later be converted to HTML for publishing, if needed.

Even better, MarkdownLog is a Portable Class Library (PCL) and can be used with any .NET platform, including iOS with Xamarin. In fact, it's an iPhone app written with Xamarin that compelled Stuart to write MarkdownLog.

Here's one of his first examples. This C# code:

var myStrings = new[] { "John", "Paul", "Ringo", "George" };
Console.Write(myStrings.ToMarkdownBulletedList());

Gives you this simple Markdown.

   * John
   * Paul
   * Ringo
   * George

At this point, you are likely unimpressed. But wait! There's more! There's a whole series of nice extension methods that make it easy to create templates from objects of any shape. Here's another example of his:

var data = new[]
{
    new{Name = "Meryl Streep", Nominations = 18, Awards=3},
    new{Name = "Katharine Hepburn", Nominations = 12, Awards=4},
    new{Name = "Jack Nicholson", Nominations = 12, Awards=3}
};

Console.Write(data.ToMarkdownTable());

This gives you a Markdown table, of course. This looks nothing like an HTML table, but remember, Markdown is source code that can be translated into other formats like HTML and PDF.

 Name              | Nominations | Awards
 ----------------- | -----------:| ------:
 Meryl Streep      |          18 |      3
 Katharine Hepburn |          12 |      4
 Jack Nicholson    |          12 |      3

Be sure to explore the full CodeProject article and the home page for MarkdownLog. Think about how you could add this to your existing logging framework and create better logs for tests, builds, anything. Take a look at the HTML render of one of Stuarts's Test Suite Runs and tell me that you want immediately want to get to work updating your old .LOG files.

Related Links

• MarkdownLog homepage
• Using Markdown for Effective Logging

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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