Install applications without admin permission on windows machine

Off late I am living under processes and restriction world. Got confused correct? I am consulting at a place where I don't have any permission on my own laptop. I am not complaining about installing stuff but coping under certain directory and changing the environment varibales are restricted too.
Being a developer I live in code and wants full access to environment where I am living.  I found out that if you don't have Admin access to your machine you can still do things like administrator.
Create a "Temp" directory under c:\ drive. create a wintv directory under it and copy the cmd.exe underneath it. Boom now you can do anything on your machine. Copy any exe here and you can run them, install them. To change the environment variable just open the command prompt from c:\Temp\wintv directory and open Windows\System32\sysdm.cpl file. BOOM BOOM!!
You are unstoppable again :) Manisha

"." to open the home directory in windowns

Yesterday I was tweaking with my setting.xml which resides under ~\.m2\conf directory.

I was opening my explorer and then was making hundreds of click to reach there :O. A friend (Sachin) who was standing next to me showed me a nice shortcut to open home directory with one click.
Start -> Run -> Type just "." and hit enter.. Tadaaaa it will open your home directory. Thank you for showing Sachin.   I will remember, it now. Manisha

Maven: Could not calculate build plan: Failure to transfer

Last day a very simple thing took little while for us to resolve. I was trying to setup a new project on a machine and did not have all my environment variables setup properly.


I was trying both the command line and eclipse options interchangibly. Initially I had the wrong repository settins in settings.xml so it could not download any jars and I ended up having *.lastUpdated files all over.

Eclipse maven plugin seems to stop downloading the dependencies if it seems *.lastUpdated files. I had to remove the all the *.lastUpdated file and plugin starts to work agian.
I read same clean up can be done using mvn -U clean too.   happy reading Manisha