Open Source File Compression Software

For years I was an advocate of PKZip and WinZip (That I own a “floppy” disk of), but after discovering the advantages and freedom of open-source, I discovered 7Zip.

7-Zip is a file archiver with the high compression ratio. The program supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CHM, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats.

While it’s only available on Windows, similar software is native on most other Operating Systems, Microsoft added only meager support in Windows XP (which in fact often crashes machines).

References:

Version Control comments

When working on large, multi-group projects I’ve found that it often helps to have information about the ‘version’ of an asset written into the source file (HTML, JSP, PHP, CSS, JS, or other ‘text’ formats).

This is easily accomplished with most version control packages and is done automatically if the following are added inside of an appropriate comment section in the file. The below examples are Java based, but can be easily adopted to any file type.

This is especially helpful when reviewing JavaDoc, and crucial for deployed text files such as CSS and JS as it makes debugging them much easier.

These work with CVS, Subversion, Serena Changeman DS, MKS Source Integrity and a variety of other products.

Raw Source:

/*
$Id: $
$Author: $
$Revision: $
$Date: $

<pre>
$Log: $
</pre>
*/

At check-in becomes:

/*
$Id: project.readme 1.1 2007/07/30 10:42:39CDT Scott dev $
$Author: Scott $
$Revision: 1.1 $
$Date: 2007/07/30 10:42:39CDT $

<pre>
$Log: project.readme $
Revision 1.1 2007/07/30 10:42:39CDT Scott
Scott. test
</pre>
*/

Cheers!