In my last job I worked with a team of about 50 other developers all working on the same project. A senior developer had set up a source control system that allowed us all to play together without overwriting each other's code.

When I moved to my current, much smaller team there was no source control system. We didn't seem to need it, except the few small times a month when we did. None of these moments seemed big enough to warrant setting up a proper source control system. However, when you add them all up, we could have saved ourselves a lot of heart ache.

I decided I wanted to fix this, but didn't really know where to start. I found Eric Sink's series of articles on how to do source control incredibly helpful. They helped me understand the basics so I could choose a suitable system and be able to install and use it.

I now have a working Subversion Source Control Server and I'm using Tortoise as my Source Control Client. The nice thing about Tortoise is that it integrates really nicely into Windows Explorer.

I'm evaluating it at home before I try and set it up at work. I've only been using it for an evening and I've already found it useful. Soon, just like my mobile phone, I don't think I'll be able to remember how I coped without it.

At work my developers end up making a lot of contact and feedback forms for different parts of the organisation. Now we're about to upgrade to ASP.NET I wanted to make an elegant way to do this quickly.

I've created a control called emailMe. The content of any input fields inside it will get sent to the address specified in the control. It's not completely finished but this site now uses it for it's contact form.

I want to add an auto-responder option and make it tie in with my earlier ajax validation controls.

It's taken me a day, but making any new email contact forms will be very quick and easy.

I've just recently started leading another art project. This time I'm working with the adult group from Pyramid of Arts. The BBC have very kindly leant us some sound recording equipment. We've used this to record some sounds and we're going to splice them together into something musical.

We spent the first few weeks of the project exploring sound. Making it, listening to it, drawing it and recording it. We've just got back from a sound recording trip to Thwaite Mill. We recorded a huge array of sounds made by the mill and pretty much anything else we could find that made sounds.

So, now we've got all our sounds, we just need to put them together into something musical. The difficult part is not going to be finding good sounds, it's going to be choosing the best ones from the hundreds we've got.

This isn't really a project, but it's been a problem that's bugged me for a while. When I download lots of pictures from my camera, how can I rename them all to something more suitable than IMG_0564.

I like to give my camera pictures a descriptive name followed by a number if it's one of a set. I've wasted a lot of time in the past renaming them all by hand. This morning I finally got round to working out a better and much quicker way.

There will be lots of ways to do this, but I've wanted to try a language called Powershell for a while. Powershell is an extension to Windows and is like DOS, but with knobs on.

Just like DOS, it's all done from a command prompt. It took me a little while to get the hang of, but I finally came up with the following line of Powershell code that did just what I wanted it to.

ls *.jpg |sort-object creationtime | %{$i=1} {Rename-Item $_ -NewName "Nice-picture_$i.jpg"; $i++ }

When I get time I want to play about with adding my own function and turn this rename thing into a nice easy to use function. Powershell offers lots of ways to make file management easier. I'll play about with this as problems pose themselves.

If you want to try Powershell you can get it from here:

• Download Powershell