My Favorite Short Cut: ALT-TAB

You can tell how long someone has been using computers by paying attention to the short cuts he/she uses to navigate on the computer. I usually have quite a few application running on my computer and I need to be able to quickly switch between them. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Windows 3.0 first came on the market, I used to only have one or two apps running and could easily just click between them. It didn't take long to quickly exhaust that functionality, especially with the small screens on laptops we had back then.

I remember leading a training session on a new database tool and I kept having to switch between a PowerPoint presentation and the tool. I would escape out of presentation mode, minimize PowerPoint, and show my demo. Once I completed the demo, I would expand PowerPoint and go back into presentation mode. Then someone showed me the power of ALT-TAB that allowed me to instantly switch between all running applications. I thought it was great and still use that key combination today even though there are more advanced ways of switching between running applications. For instance, you can see the running applications in Windows by just looking at the toolbar on the bottom of your screen. I still prefer ALT-TAB.

There are a number of other computer short cuts that will give away the length of time someone has been using computers. My work laptop run Microsoft Windows but I am an old Unix guy. When I open the Windows Power Shell it is a hard to remember not to use the "ls" command to get a directory listing of files instead of the preferred "dir" command familiar to those who learned "DOS." Fortunately Power Shell understands both commands and so I don't get the old "Syntax Error" I used to.

Another trick that really shows how old I am is from when I started using Oracle version 4. When you wanted to get a list of all the tables in the database, you would run the following command:

SELECT * FROM tab;

The result was a very simple listing of tables and some other basic information. Oracle later added more complete table definitions but I still use this simple command. Why? Because it is so simple and easy to remember. Are there better ways to find out what tables are in your database or schema? That depends upon how you define better. If you have to go to a manual and look it up, nope.

I used to work for a company that took PostgreSQL and made it look like Oracle for a lot less money. The first thing I tried when I sat down to play with the product was the command listed above. When it worked, I knew there were others at the company that appreciated quick and simple. I also knew they had people on the development staff that had used Oracle for a very long time, an important fact to me at the time.

Classic MS-DOS Games

It is no secret I work for a video game company and so it is not uncommon to see people playing video games at work. Today someone showed everyone in the office a site where you can play about 2,300 old MS-DOS games in your web browser. Naturally everyone dropped what they were doing and spent a few minutes reliving the past. I went looking for an old game I spent many a night playing when I was back in college. Unfortunately I didn't find it, but I did find a number of other games that held my interest many years ago.

It is amazing to see how far video games have come in the past few decades. Increasing hardware performance has helped usher things along and it is great to see the progress. There are still a number of old video games that are a lot of fun to play even now. One of the guys at work confessed to only being able to beat a specific game one way even though there were four possible paths and he continues to work at the game. It was also interesting to see how simple even the most complex games were back then.

I have been trying to figure out what to do with my time on the boat this evening. There are a number of games I could play on my PlayStation 3. Perhaps I will search this game site and see if I can't find more of those old games I used to play. It could be fun.