Tag: software

Killing hung, frozen or zombie programs

As a web developer, I’m often doing new (and interesting) things to stretch the boundaries of the browser. Sometimes, in doing so, the browser can hang or freeze, remaining in a state that makes it unresponsive.

Here are a few simple methods to force-close the browser on Windows and Linux, they can be expanded for other software executables as needed.

Windows:
taskkill /f /im iexplore.exe
taskkill /f /im firefox.exe
taskkill /f /im chrome.exe
taskkill /f /im safari.exe

Linux/Unix:
for i in `ps -A | grep firefox | awk '{print $1}'`; do kill -9 $i; done

Free Antivirus Software

So, a family member has recently approached me about virus scan products for Windows. It seems that, while he runs a commercial product, it’s a little dated and he does not keep up on the frequent updates, unfortunately this has put him into a position where his computer was infected and has become almost unusable. Using the same commercial products he’s unable to clean up the mess and has already lost many files.

I’ve been a convert to Avast for several years and even run it on my servers to scan for malicious content, it’s both free for non-commercial use and updates automatically.

Other products worth considering:

For Windows:

Unix/Linux:

Mac OS/X:

Cheers!

Windows Registration Key Finder

If you’re like me, you’ve probably got more than one computer configured. The problem comes when you want to re-image one of them, but don’t have an accurate idea of which software license key’s are used by individual machines. Windows makes this difficult to recover as it doesn’t store them in a logical manner where any human could find and read them.

Additionally, it’s not until late in the installation process of Windows that you even have the option to enter a key, at which time you have to call Microsoft if the key was used by a different machine. (There’s some funny logic around this related to hardware configuration changes too).

Magical Jelly Bean KeyFinder searches and displays the keys on any post Windows-95 installation:
http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder.shtml

NOTE: This not only displays the Windows key, but also other installed software like Office and even many games.

Cheers!

Open Source Image Editing Software

I’m usually a considered by most to be just a “programmer”, but occasionally the need comes up for someone to edit or create an image for a project. I might not be a designer, but I still need similar tools to accomplish this, but can’t justify the cost of Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator.

Here are some great (if not better) alternatives that are FREE and available on a variety of operating systems, not just Windows and Apple Macintosh.

GIMP – is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction.

Currently Supports:

  • GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

Inkscape – is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets it apart is it’s native use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard.

Currently supports:

  • opening only SVG and SVGZ (gzipped SVG) formats.
  • save as SVG, SVGZ, Postscript/EPS/EPSi, Adobe Illustrator (*.ai), LaTeX (*.tex), and POVRay (*.pov).
  • import most raster formats (JPG, PNG, GIF, etc.) as bitmap images, but it can only export PNG bitmaps.
  • With the help of extensions, Inkscape can open/save as PDF, EPS, AI, Dia, Sketch and some others.

Together this suite can tackle most work that previously required costly software that isn’t available on many Operating Systems.

Happy drawing!