I post a lot about open source applications, WINE is another notable contender as it gives users an option to run many mainstream Window applications on a Linux (even Apple’s OS/X variant) platform by providing access to the Windows API’s to those host operating systems.
http://www.winehq.org/
http://appdb.winehq.org/ – List of applications supported
Ah, for those of you still running IBM’s OS/2 platform, you too can run Win32 applications with Odin:
http://odin.netlabs.org/
Cheers!
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!
Windows, due to it’s MS-DOS heritage has a lot of problems due to disk fragmentation. To maintain optimal disk read speed, it is advised to “defrag” on a regular basis. Whether or not LINUX has similar problems remains a subject of debate.
I’ve used many different defrag utilities over the years, my current choices are Diskkeeper Lite and Defraggler.
Most of these vendors are free or provide free trials of their software, I’ve noted the versions I’m familiar with.
Here’s the run-down:
I have not used the following, but they appear to be worth a look:
WARNING – if you use hard-drive encryption, defragging may cause your drive to become unreadable. Defrag with caution.
Happy Defragging!
I’ve posted a lot of information about the common ‘free’ open-source software that I routinely use, however… I just realized that I missed one of the most important applications you use, the Operating System itself.
While my “day job” relegates me to use Windows products for much of my work, I do a lot of additional work at home and for friends.
Currently I use and highly recommend Ubuntu Linux for most users, it’s got most of the usability features of Microsofr Windows and Apple OS/X, but without all of the additional baggage. It’s updated regularly, with new releases every 6 months and software patches made available almost daily. Updates are as non-intrusive as the Windows Update process, and only a very few ever require a reboot.
To quiet the other Linux users out there, I’ve used a lot of Linux ‘flavors’ in the past… each has had it’s place and may do so again…. this is my opinion for the moment and will likely change again in a few years. 🙂
Here’s the list:
Cheers!
I typically use the open-source Eclipse IDE for most of my Java and PHP work. For my corporate work, this means that I use IBM‘s packaged RAD and WSAD offerings that are based on various versions of the Eclipse framework.
When working on Internationalized (I18n) applications, most experienced Java architects rely on ResourceBundles to store the various text that is needed for different languages, problem is that editing these files becomes problematic, especially when dealing with multi-byte character sets as are often used in Unicode (non Latin-1, aka ISO-8859-1) languages.
The best editor I’ve found for this case is, as you may have guessed, free for download.
Here’s the links:
Cheers!
There eventually comes a time when you’re not satisfied with the “latest” version of some software, often this is due to increased resources required to run on older machines. Sometimes it can be due to ‘free’ software becoming nag-ware or no longer free.
Here are a few websites that I have found useful when looking for such older software.
Obvious Warning – older software may have security concerns and known bugs… as such, be careful when using them!
Cheers!
Most IT professionals are already aware that Microsoft routinely publishes updates to their operating systems on the second Tuesday of each month, early notification and download access is also available to select groups.
There are also several semi-automated tools that will scan your Windows computer on demand to list updates that are available to you.
I should mention that while the application from Secunia only scans Windows, their website discusses updates for most other popular operating systems and software
Have a happy and safe 2008!
I often find it necessary to compare separate branches of large programming projects in Java/JSP and PHP. Comparing single files manually proves to be very time consuming. I’ve found that software to do the recursive comparisons makes this much easier as it greatly reduces the effort.
Personally, I’m currently fond of WinMerge (on Windows platforms), though I’ve got a lot of peers that swear by Beyond Compare. Regardless their usage is very similar.
WinMerge:
Beyond Compare:
Cheers!
As an old UNIX developer, I spent a significant portion of my work experience using VI, as my development environment became more focused on Windows, I used Homesite for developing text formatted documents. I’ve found that the current offerings from Eclipse and other IDE’s are notoriously bad at displaying the source of many document types, particularly JSP, HTML, XML, JAVA, JS and CSS files; where you often want to see exactly how a document is structured. Additional spaces, tabs and carriage returns can cause display formatting issues and wasted bandwidth in many cases.
Many of my peers are fans of TextPad, but I’ve found Notepad++ to be quite up to the task:
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net
Happy coding!
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: