40+ great open source apps & games to trick out your new Windows install This weekend I finished setting up a fresh triple-boot install on my MSI laptop. With my operating systems ready to go, the time had come to start reinstalling applications. While it wasn't a conscious decision, I noticed that the majority of my apps were Open Source - so I decided to keep the ball rolling. Even if you haven't just gone through a reformat, these are great applications and well worth installing. If you have, then hopefully this list will provide you with a solid base of programs to get you started with your fresh, new Windows install! Web Browsers: Chromium, Firefox They excel at different things, so I install both browsers by default. Office: OpenOffice.Org, Sumatra, PDFCreator For lightweight PDF reading and creation from any Windows app, Sumatra and PDFCreator are solid options. Media: Songbird, VLC, Handbrake, DVD Flick I've been using VLC for ages, and it does everything I need as my video player of choice.
Useful Web Caching Tutorial for Webmasters Recently, I have been doing research on Web Caching. And I have found Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters , which is a detailed, informational document published by Mark Nottingham. A Web cache sits between one or more Web servers and a client or many clients, and watches requests come by, saving copies of the responses — like HTML pages, images and files — for itself. Web Caching can reduce latency, because the request is satisfied from the cache instead of the origin server, it takes less time for it to get the representation and display it. And also, Web Caching can reduce network traffic, because representations are reused, it reduces the amount of bandwidth used by a client. You can also get more information about the type of web caches, how web caches work, how to control them, tips for building a cache-aware site and etc… Source: Caching Tutorial for Web Auhors and Webmaters License: Creative Commons License
Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top blogs were in the field. Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments. Unfortunately, Technorati's not what it used to be anymore. How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? Here's a comparison of the pros and cons of six different services you can use to do so. Technorati Pros: Cons: Del.icio.us StumbleUpon AideRSS Ask.com Blogsearch
Install Ophcrack to USB – Windows Password Cracker Create a Ophcrack USB Flash Drive: Ophcrack is a free Windows Password Cracker or Windows Login Password Recovery tool that uses rainbow tables to retrieve Windows login passwords from password hashes. The tool is available in two versions (Vista Ophcrack and XP Ophcrack). In the following tutorial, we explain how we created an All In One USB Ophcrack Flash Drive. This bootable flash drive utility can then be used to recover, reveal or crack both Windows XP and Windows Vista login passwords. Having Ophcrack for Windows Vista and XP on a USB thumbdrive can come in handy for those who may have lost their Windows admin or user Login Password and need to quickly recover a lost Windows password. Ophcrack running from a USB flash drive: Distribution Home Page: Minimum Flash Drive Capacity: 1GB Persistent Feature: No – Doesn't need to be USB Ophcrack flash drive creation essentials: How to Create a bootable Ophcrack flash drive:
Weekend Project: Host Your Own Web Services One of the great things about the web today is that you can choose from hundreds of services that will host your blogs, lifestreams, photos, videos, and music. One disadvantage of this, however, is that you typically have very little control over the actual experience. You can't, for example, make changes to themes on Wordpress.com or customize the way your pictures are shown on Flickr. However, thanks to a large number of open source projects, you could do all of this if you hosted your own blog, photo gallery, or mixtape service. A lot of you probably already host your own blogs and know how to register a domain and transfer files with FTP. Tools and Information to Get Started Obviously, to tackle these projects, you will need a few tools and some space on a server to host your projects. Hosting You will need some space on a server and your own domain name if you don't have one already. Here are RWW, we host our site on MediaTemple, but their cheapest plan is $20 a month. Mixtapes Drupal
Track Hot Topics On Niche Blogs With FeedVis Want to put your ear to the ground and find out what any group of bloggers are talking about? Some types of bloggers link out to each other a lot, making it easy to see what the hot topics are (see Techmeme, or Technorati). In some circles, though, blogs don't link to other blogs' posts regularly. That's what a new service called FeedVis offers. Put it on Your Server Users can put FeedVis on their servers, upload a collection of blogs in OPML format and add a list of "stop words" to exclude from those terms from the popularity contest. There's a demo site available at FeedVis for up to 100 blogs, but there's not a way to upload a list of words to exclude so the analysis is of limited quality. The source code to put FeedVis on your own server is quite simple and easy to customize.
Internet Explorer market share falling like a ton of bricks OK, I guess technically a ton of bricks falls at the same speed as a single brick (thanks gravity!), but Internet Explorer is still losing market share is still falling like nobody's business. Last month, research firm NetApplications reported that Microsoft's share of the web browser market had dropped to 69.77%. Today the number is down to 67.55%. Google Chrome use has apparently picked up a bit, although the browser still has just over 1% of the market. And Firefox continues to pick up new users every month. In other words, part of the reason Microsoft is losing its share of the browser market is because there's another company doing exactly the same thing Microsoft does: bundling a web browser with a popular operating system. [via ReadWriteWeb] Tags: google-chrome, internet-explorer, safari
LastPass now handles logins and form filling in any browser Since I started using LastPass, it's become one of my top three Firefox addons. Yesterday, the development team released a new feature that allows you to securely access your passwords even if you're not using the Firefox or IE plugins. LastPass can now work from a bookmarklet - great news for users of Opera, Google Chrome, Kmeleon, or virtually any browser on any platform that supports Javascript. It even works on your iPhone or iPod Touch. To install the bookmarklet, log in at LastPass.com and look for the icon on the left side of your control panel. Joe Siegrist of LastPass offered a rundown of how the process works: "Your bookmarklets have a random number embedded in them that is generated locally using JavaScript, and then that number is embedded into the bookmarklet's code (also with Javascript). While it's not action footage, the gallery will show you what steps to go through. The LastPass addon is a free download and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. LastPass rocks.
LastPass Password Manager MySpace open sources advanced browser performance tool for IE Monday, June 29th, 2009 <p>Developers tend to tease MySpace for its look, but the insiders are incredibly impressed by some of the engineering behind the scenes (e.g. their internal monitoring tools are said to be second to none). They have surprised us again with their new tool MSFast which is “a browser plugin that help developers to improve their code performance by capturing and measuring possible bottlenecks on their web pages.” The IE 8 tools are getting better, but in general no one has been able to touch Firebug (and the new WebKit Inspector improvements) but this tool is actually plugin for IE! That is some impressive data, and great to be able to test on IE where it has been SO hard to do so in the past.
Spice up ASP.NET validation with AJAX Control Toolkit 0 Comments Introduction of AJAX Control Toolkit has opened many interesting possibilities for developing rich UI in ASP.NET. Add an awesome IDE like Visual Studio to it, and you can get astounding results without doing much. In this article we will see how to enhance client side validators using AJAX Control Toolkit. Given below are screen shots of what we are trying to achieve. Creating a simple form Using, Visual Studio (or Visual Web Developer) create a new 'AJAX Control Toolkit Website'. As you can see, it looks like any other form you might design with ASP.NET. Adding those cool validation callouts First we place a 'ValidationSummary' control on the page. Incredibly, that is all which is need to get those nice callouts. Creating the Modal Dialog (With diabled background !) The best part of our modal dialog box is that it disables the parent/window completely. We have set 'PopupControlID' property of ModalPopupExtender, to 'SummaryDiv' which is actually the id of the tag.
Top 10 Productivity Basics Explained - Productivity - Lifehacker These are some things that I've found work for me: Dual screens. Some may view having dual monitors as a luxury, or simply just not necessary, but let me tell you, it makes a huge productivity boost. Put all your non-mission critical stuff on one side (the left for me), such as iTunes, chat boxes, etc,... stuff you tend to keep open and interact with frequently but isn't the core of your work. Then use the other side as pure work mission control. Not only does this give you more screen real estate, but it also has the effect of constantly making you aware of whether or not you're wasting time. Multiple input devices. My iMac acts as the first monitor (non-essential on the left) and my second monitor (mission control on the right) is a Wacom Cintiq 21ux mounted on an articulating LCD arm. Take breaks. If you find yourself sitting and staring at blogs for hours on end wishing you could make yourself just get started on some work, you need to get up. Keep your space clean. Deal with it.