Dark Side of the Carton

I get asked on a pretty regular basis what kind of software I use to do my job or make my life easier. I decided to go ahead and type up a list of everything I use.

Crimson Editor - A powerful source code editor for Windows. It features syntax highlighting for most major languages, user tools, macros, and spell checker. It also has a fantastic Find and Replace that allows the use of regular expressions. It has a Visual Studio like “project explorer” for managing multiple files within a large or small project.
Cost: Free
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

SSH Secure Shell - For all my remote file transfer/ssh needs I use an old version of the SSH Secure Shell program. They used to give away a non-commercial version, but they have since stopped doing that. I am using 3.2.9 and it supports all sorts of features such as multiple profiles with various favorite folders for sftp.
Cost: Used to be Free
http://www.ssh.com

Ant Renamer - I do a ton of file renaming for Snackbar Games. I like to keep the naming convention the same for all the screenshots. Manually renaming them to ss01.jpg, ss02.jpg, etc gets old real quick. Ant Renamer makes that a 1 second job. Simply drag the files I want to rename onto the program, click enumeration and type out my patter and click Go. It is that easy. It has a massive number of renaming options. It is easily one of the best utilities out there.
Cost: Free
http://www.antp.be/software/renamer

Bulletproof FTP - From time to time I am forced to use an FTP program instead of my SSH app. For these times I use BPFTP. It is the best FTP program I have ever used and the newest version just got a visual overhaul. You can store login/pass info for as many sites as you want to make managing them all easy. You can queue downloads or even schedule them. It will also resume a file transfer if it gets disconnected. This tool isn’t free but I have been using it for 5 years now and it has never let me down.
Cost: Free trial. $29.95
http://www.bpftp.com

Google Desktop - I am a disorganized person normally. Google Desktop and it’s many plug-ins have helped me turn that around. I use the Sidebar layout with my local weather, a ToDo list, the Scratch Pad, gdTunes (to control iTunes), System Monitor, Adsense Status (to see how much money I am not making), and a calendar. The searching ability is fantastic and the plug-ins are stellar and widely available. Just make sure you have some extra screen real estate for the Sidebar.
Cost: Free
http://desktop.google.com

SoftPerfect Network Scanner - How many times have you forgotten the ip address of a device on your network? If your network is large then odds are good that you have. This network scanner will scan a range of ip addresses to let you know what devices are on your network. It can resolve hostnames and Mac addresses as well as tell you what ports are open and identify shares on the remote machines. Very handy indeed.
Cost: Free
http://www.softperfect.com/products/networkscanner/

TreeSize - TreeSize is a tool that allows you to view a folder hierarchy view of a local drive in your machine. The nice thing is that it tells you the size of the folder/file next to it. This is very handy for tracking down rogue files that are taking up copious amounts of disc space.
Cost: Free for older version, $20 for Personal and $45 for Professional
http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

WinRaR - WinRaR is a tool similar to WinZip only I find it to be much faster and better overall. It costs about $29, but I love it.
Cost: $29, Free Trial
http://www.rarlab.com

CDex - I rip all the CDs that I buy onto my computer on Day 1. For this I use Cdex. It is as good as EAC, Exact Audio Copy, and a lot easier to setup.
Cost: Free
http://cdexos.sourceforge.net

DameWare NT Utilities - I manage about 35 computers here at my office and they are spread out across 2 buildings and 2 stories. I don’t like to walk 1000 feet just to click a single checkbox. DameWare NT Utils makes it so that I don’t have to. This program is actually 2 parts: NT Utils and Mini Remote Control. NT Utils allows you to do basically anything you want to a remote machine you have access to. You can browse the filesystem, make registry changes, start and stop services, etc. It is far too robust to describe here. Mini Remote Control is basically a VNC style app that you can push out remotely so there is no setup involved on the client side. Simply connect and take control of the machine. This is definitely not a free program, but I can’t live without it anymore. NT Utilities includes the MRC portion so the cost for MRC is just the standalone version of that program.
Cost: NT Utilities: $289; Mini Remote Control: $89.95
http://www.dameware.com

We are about to leave for Austin for the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Launch event. I should never see my clock say 5:anything…

Lauren and I ventured out this weekend to catch an early showing of the new Harry Potter. I have to say that the HP movies never cease to impress me. I liked the dark overtones of this one and I think Ralph Fiennes did an amazing job as Voldemort. Movie Thunder has a review online.

An open source update to the popular but heavily underpowered Microsoft Paint program is now available. Paint.net is apparently a much needed improvement over the bundled version of the software. Ars Technica has a short little review of the program.

Although storage space is no longer the premium it once was, physical backups and external media have been slow to catch up. While recordable DVDs may be fine for backing up a single workstation, large servers are still forced to rely on swappable drives and tape backups. But holographic disc technology could be changing all of that in the very near future. Holographic Versatile Discs (HVDs) have been in the works for some time now by various companies, including InPhase Technologies (formerly part of Lucent) and Japan’s Optware (which claimed to have made the first recording of a movie on a holographic disc last year). InPhase’s HVDs, scheduled for release in 2006, are said to hold 300GB of data, 60 times that of a conventional DVD with only a slight increase in size. That translates to more than a day’s worth of HD-quality video. Not to mention the drives themselves can read and write at ten times the speed a normal DVD drive. One of InPhase’s partners in HVD research, Maxell, is working towards even more storage on a 1.6TB disc.

I definitely think a 300GB HVD would be awesome. 1.6TB is just insane though….

Source: Slashdot

Browser security is something that all the developers think they can master on their own. What they fail to realize is that a unified set of security guidelines would help the users/consumers of their products. That being said, it is great news that they have agreed to implement a set of security measures across all the major browsers.

I am really looking forward to IE7 despite my rampant love for Firefox. There are occasions I have to use IE and IE6 just doesn’t cut it.

Being back at work after having a 4 day weekend is always tough, but here I am. We spent Thanksgiving at my Mom’s house this year. In the past we would go to both parent’s houses and just eat until we felt like we were going to die. Instead we are going to alternate from here on out. It just makes life easier.

The morning after Thanksgiving the doorbell rang at 8:30am. I have been waiting on an Xbox 360 from Microsoft so I got my hopes up that it had arrived. No luck. Instead it was a box of stuff from Nintendo. We spent the rest of the day playing DDR: Mario Mix and Mario Party 7.

In an unrelated topic, I think that I am going to apply at Rackspace this week. I don’t really want to change jobs, but my ability to advance my career is severly capped here and I’d really like to grow my skills. I don’t feel like I can do that here. Here is to change.

Bram Cohen, the guy who invented BitTorrent, just signed a deal with the evil people at the MPAA. I can’t say that I blame him. He could get blamed for massive amounts of piracy. This releases his liability as far as they are concerned. Most of us would sell out a bunch of random Internet-ites for a chance to make a lot of cash.

That being said, expect it to be a little more difficult to score movies on BT. Not that any of you trustworthy people would dare steal a movie…

My son is quite familiar with most of the classic Star Wars characters. He has the entire set of Hasbro Jedi Force action figures. At 19 months he can name Chewbacca, Yoda, Han, Luke, and Vader. Last night we put on Episode III and I gotta say that it was highly enjoyable to watch his reaction to it. He has seen the original Trilogy, but he was much younger. Lauren’s family continued to watch it after we went upstairs and Ethan kept running out of the room to watch the movie through the banister railing. It looks like I am raising my son in the ways of the Force.

Apparently after one guy robbed a store at gunpoint another set of thieves beat a kid up after he walked out with his brand new Xbox 360 last night. People can be so dumb.

Source: in-forum