I’m going to be scouring the Microsoft website (and to a much lesser extent, the Internet at large) looking for interesting freebies to put on my disk. Furthermore, I’ll be analyzing and tweaking installers to get them to deploy silently and to the location that I want. The end-result will be a DVD with the latest XP + patches, with automatic installation of all the goodies I happen to dredge up (disk imaging is too fragile for my taste; auto-installation might be slower, but it’s more robust).

I’ll do my best to include all the links, (self-written) scripts, and step-by-step instructions for how to build your very own version of the disk.

I’d like to thank Lorelle VanFossen for the inspiration she provided — she is ultimately the reason I got started with this project. I’d also like to thank Scott “Skippy” Merrill for the original codebase, and his support in transitioning the project off to me. Of course, I’d like to thank my users for not only using my plugin, but being so kind as to report bugs, translate, and even leave a donation now and again.

I would very much like to find a new maintainer for this plugin; however, if you would like to pursue a developed alternative, Organize Series is also available, and now has many of the features of In Series.

I found this plugin very easy to use. [It’s] so easy that I thought I was using it wrong. I kept checking it to make sure it was working. It is a great plugin for writing series posts.

– Robert

I’ve heard “easy to use” come up before. But “[It’s] so easy that I thought I was using it wrong” made me grin ear to ear. :)

Thanks Robert, you made my day!

P.S. — I really should thank the author of the article here, too; I generally do that in the comments of the article itself (this case is no exception). However, it seems a bit rude to thank the commenter here without also acknowledging the article writer. Thanks Cowboytf!

My article on using source control systems is available over at linux.com. And for the curious/speculative, yes — this is my late Sunday post. :)

In any case, there is good news — I’ve written a few tests, in this case, for the %first and %last tokens. This was actually a rather large change in the end, through the accumulation of a lot of little details that had to be updated. However, the tests are written, working and passing, so that’s one fewer thing that needs to get done for an official 3.1 release. Furthermore, all the bits for testing are finally checked in (for 3.1 anyway), so anyone interested in running these tests themselves (or maybe helping to write new ones :D) should be able to set up an environment mostly like mine to work in.

Finally, just as an FYI for those who hadn’t noticed, I have an RSS feed available for my checkins. It doesn’t automatically update (yet), but it should keep interested folks roughly up-to-date with what I’m working on.

Have a read through the full paper. It’s been a couple years since I’ve touched the topic, but this methodology is used both to rate the quality of code, and rate the quality of auditors, and can be used to rate the quality of the coders (shame on them if they accepted bad patches from someone else :).

This and all other translations are available on the In Series project page.