Just discovered at me via Facebook, the ultimate time sink.
DOFI-BLOG, a blog about games, life. Simple yet addicting Flash games. Try “Cat with Bow Golf” and “Slug Slayer”. Genius! Now somebody please confiscate my mouse.
The Bulk Rename Utility is a free Windows app from the makers of ViceVersa.
And it is awesome.
Of course, this is something only a true geek like myself can get excited about… but in all honesty it is the single most welcome addition to my arsenal of software tools in many years.
Every so often (or, as seems to be the case lately, every freaking day) I need to rename a large number of files from pattern X to pattern Y. Usually this involves firing up Cygwin and working out some kind of rename script snippet. Not rocket science this, but enough to make me groan inwardly.
I’ve tried a couple of rename utilities over the years; none powerful enough to replace script writing.
BRU is different. You can see from the screenshot that it has intuitive (well, kind of) filters for just about any possible renaming combination. Best of all it gives you a preview of how your files will be renamed… before you accidentally mung that entire directory tree. BRU includes many, many more features, including exotic transformations such as renaming photos from EXIF extensions as well as renaming MP3 files using ID3 tags.
Anyway, enough gushing of the geekery. It’s a nice tool. Recommended.
Annoying. If, like me, you’re suddenly seeing this (despite assurances that it’s been fixed), I have two recommendations:
SmartSVN is a Java-based free and “pro” drop-in replacement for Tortoise. Unlike other SVN clients, you can use it exactly as you were using TortoiseSVN. Possibly not as feature-rich, but considerably more polished than our favorite old Testudine. Runs everywhere. And it works over svn+ssh.
Some time back I did a review of various web shopping carts. In particular I needed a cart into which we could integrate a minor, third-party payment processing system. We also wanted something that had the following functionality:
These are the carts that I found in the order they were discovered and reviewed.
APIs and Frameworks
Started on the assumption that we would want to build and manage our own shopping cart. It quickly become apparent that a customizable stand-alone application would get us more functionality with less mucking around.
Stand-Alone Applications
Lots and lots of apps out there. I was surprised, however, to discover that many of them are branches of earlier code bases.
In the end we went with CubeCart. So far it’s been “okay”. Template organization is indeed haphazard; it can be difficult to figure out which templates apply to which step in the purchasing process. Documentation is also fairly thin on the ground. Integrating the third party payment system, however, was not too difficult. And since we paid for the product, support has been fairly good. Recommended if you want to get a simple yet customizable and feature-rich cart up as quickly as possible.
For the longest time I’ve been looking for a good universal messaging app so that I don’t have to run three instant messengers, plus Skype, plus deal with email. And nothing has really fir the bill.
Years ago I originally used Psi, based on the Jabber protocol. I quite liked Psi, and it worked well for awhile, but development started to wane and I really needed something that could keep in sync with ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo protocol changes. (That said.. looking at the site it looks like there is a new development team. Worth checking out.)
Since then I have tried Pidgin, Miranda, and a host of other smaller open apps. They all worked for the most part, but the interfaces tend to be clunky and, until recently, UTF-8/Japanese support has been spotty at best. I finally settled on (and purchased) Cerulean Studio’s Trillian round about the time it was turning the corner from version two to version three.
Trillian was great for awhile. Its got a large database of user-created skins and a variety of useful plugins. The problem with Trillian is that version three came out over four years ago… and has been in a time warp ever since. Its once innovative sidebar interface can no longer compare to other available apps, and actually tends to get in the way. And the next version, Trillian Astra, seems to perpetually be in a kind of secret alpha mode.
(If you comment on the above in the Trillian forums, angry users will flame you with comments along the lines of “great things take time”, etc. WTF? This is not wine. Trillian’s release cycle is now longer than Microsoft’s.)
Recently, however, I stumbled up on Digsby. Digsby reminds me of a streamlined version of Trillian with built-in email, mobile messaging, and social network messaging support (brilliant!).
What I really like about Digsby is its non-intrusive messaging popup. Unlike other messengers (namely Skype), you don’t have to hunt through a host of windows every time you hear a message come in. The popup allows you to reply right there leaving the state of your desktop undisturbed. (This need to constantly shuffle through windows has become a major source of frustration during my workday.)
Finally, I don’t think I’ll have to wait years for updates from Digsby. They seem to be pushing out updates on a weekly (daily?) basis, often in direct response to comments left in the Digsby blog. Now that’s how software should be built.
Go Digsby.
Looks like Celestia 1.5.0 was released the other day. This is one of my all-time favorite free apps; an absolutely stunning desktop planetarium that allows you to zip around the solar system (and beyond). Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
What’s more, the Celestia Motherlode hosts over 10 GB of add-ons uploaded by various creators, ranging from detailed planetary texture maps to dozens of spacecraft, Voyagar to Enterprise (though I have yet to see V’ger).
Definitely worth a look if you’re a space buff. There’s a new release every year or so which always prompts me to loose at least a couple of hours jumping back and forth between planets. Wasted time nevertheless soulfully well invested.
Occasionally I get a bit obsessive compulsive about new applications and will run one on my laptop and another on the desktop to better compare them. Lately I’ve been comparing Stardock’s freeware ObjectDock to open source RocketDock.
Both get high marks for doing what they’re supposed to do, which is be a Mac-esque dock application for Windows. In terms of look and feel, RocketDoc is a little closer to the Mac version I think.
That said, I’m going to stick with ObjectDock for one simple reason: It always works. RocketDock has a nasty habit of not popping up after an hour to two have gone by. This gets to be very frustrating very quickly. A good dock app can soon become an indispensable part of one’s daily desktop routine. And a broken dock breaks the routine.
The easiest way is to go “under” Emac’s head and not bother with Tramp at all..
The currently distributed version of Tramp (2.0.x) has a design flaw wherein it assumes that ports are designated with a “-p” switch. If you’re running Emacs on Windows, however, you will probably want to use Putty’s <code>plink</code> command instead of an command line ssh client. Problem is plink uses a capitalized “-P” to indicate the port. Urgh. (Supposedly this is fixed in Tramp 2.1.x..)
Rather than muck around with this, consider tools that map the remote connection such that it appears local. The well done open source app WinSCP does a pretty good job of this, though is a bit clunky in the way it syncs up its temporary cache. South River Technologies’ WedDrive, however, is practically seamless. Well worth the $60 for a one year license.
While I love the reports that Cacti produces, I really hate setting them up. And most of the time I just need something “quick and dirty” to get a better window into what’s going on with a small web/db server combo.
webminstats is a nice little plug-and-play Webmin module that does just that. It will automatically try to setup a dozen or so round robin scripts to collect data against a variety of common services (web server, database, memory, processes, etc.) It can take hours to get the same kind of reporting working in Cacti.
The output isn’t as “pretty” as that of Cacti’s.. but then again pretty doesn’t fix servers.
Yet another de facto Linux command that is oddly missing in Windows.
Some simple log files from a custom app were getting out of control. Google revealed that while basic rotation is possible for the standard Windows event logs, there’s no command in particular for log rotation, aside from some odd looking bat scripts that required typing output to temp directories and the like.
Tried rotatelogs.exe from the Windows distribution of Apache 2.2, but that didn’t seem to work at all.
Today, however, I stumbled across CHOMP. Works a peach, and surprisingly quick. Recommended.
(BTW, looks like the author has his own implementation of tail as well. Maybe this is the replacement for Cygwin tail that I was looking for last August.. Update: It don’t work so well.)
online
