WinDirStat and TeamViewer

WinDirStat is a nice free utility that shows you via graphs which folders and subfolders are taking up the most space on your drives.

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TeamViewer seems to be a good program, if you ever need to help someone with their computer remotely. It is free for non-commercial use. I only did a small test with it so far, but it worked. The other person only needs to download and run a small program; they don't need to install anything, or search for their IP number, or change any router settings. The program displays an access ID and password, which the other person can read to you over the phone, so that you can then connect to their computer and take control of it.

On your side, you can either install the full version, or you can run the portable version if you don't want to install anything. On Windows 7, the full version starts a process which accesses the internet after you boot your computer, even if you don't have the program set up as a service, and even if you have it set not to start with Windows. Regarding this, the manual says "Note: A TeamViewer service is always running under Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Do not stop this service manually! This service is used to optimize TeamViewer for Windows 7 and Windows Vista." This doesn't make sense to me... if I only need to use the program sporadically, not on a daily basis, and only for connecting to someone else's computer, why would I want a service running on my machine all the time? Why can't it do whatever it needs to do when I start the program, rather than when I start my computer? My first thought was to change the service from automatic to manual startup... although based on the note in the manual, that makes me wonder how it would affect the functionality of the program. Then I discovered that there was a portable version that doesn't even need to be installed and which doesn't start any services, so I think I'll just use that instead of the full version.

coding peeve

My company is working with another company to get one of their large COBOL applications translated into java. The other company doesn't think that including white-space in the code for legibility is important. Apparently the people on my side don't think it's that important either, as we surely could have requested it be done anyway, and how difficult could it be to add spaces and line-breaks?

So a lot of the translated code that we're getting looks like this:
( cut due to width )

This peeves me.

A lot of our programmers are new to Java. So when they start working on the code and updating it, they will likely mimic the above formatting, possibly not even realizing that it's possible or preferable to put in whitespace and linebreaks.

(no subject)

OMG. It's f**king 4am! I wanted to get to bed earlier tonight, not later....

off to bed.