Archive for March 23rd, 2005
Favourite Software Tools
Posted on March 23, 2005, by Conor, under Uncategorized.
Not flu - vicious throat infection and tonsil infection. Still in bits. Still agony to swallow saliva. So up late again. I got a new twin-CPU machine in work on Wednesday. I decided to write a list of all of the tools I definitely needed to install on it in addition to the corporate installs. I assumed it it would be 10 or 15. Bloody hell, more like 40. Some are obvious, others are quite nichey. Here’s what I can remember off the top of my head (most are free apart from the obvious ones)
* Firefox (+ Adblock, Sitebar, ReloadEvery, Flashgot, User Agent Switcher, ieview, Image Zoom, Linky, Jump Link, BugMeNot, Mozilla Archive Format, Slashfix, Disable Targets for Downloads, Tabbrowser Preferences, BetterSearch, Bloglines Toolkit and Livelines. Whew!)
* Thunderbird (+ Enigmail)
* OpenOffice 2.0 Beta
* Cygwin - pseudo Unix env on your PC. Free XWindows is top notch.
* Dexpot - Good virtual screens tool
* FreeMind - Great Mind Mapping tool
* eWallet - Secure Password storage for PC and Palm
* Filezilla - Good FTP Client
* Inkscape - Good SVG Editor
* Irfanview - Fantastic Graphics viewer
* Maxthon - For sites that only support IE (Bloody Ulster Bank - care to join the 21st Century? Netscape 4.7 for the love of god)
* NVU - HTML Editor
* Open Workbench - Nifty MS Project replacement
* Password Safe - Good simple Password manager
* PSPad - Fantastic Text Editor with syntax highlighting support for lots of languages
* RapidSVN - Reasonable GUI for Subversion Version Control System
* TortoiseSVN - Better Subversion GUI
* TrueCrypt - Free Disk Encryption
* UltraVNC - the best of the VNC’s
* Gaim - the best multi-protocol IM client
* GIMP 2 - Great graphics editor
* GPGTray - neat GPG tool for the System Tray
* PDFCreator - Fantastic free PDF Maker
* Process Explorer - For killing those processes that Windows can’t
* ZipGenius - The best of the free WinZip Clones
* Google Desktop Search - Words fail me……
* SyncBack - Handy Sync/Backup tool
* Putty - Great SSH Client
* J2EE 1.4 - Everything you need for basic Enterprise Java Dev
* .Net 1.1 - To use any of the .Net Dev Tools
* NetBeans 4.1 Beta - Great Java IDE. Supports J2EE 1.4
* Eclipse 3.0 - Another Great Java IDE (and Perl too if you are feeling weird)
* Perl IDE - Nice free dev IDE and Debugger for Perl
* Activestate Perl - For those scripting jobs
* Activestate Python - FOr those scripting jobs where others have to read your code
* Inno Setup - Fab Setup tool like Installshield
* Jude Community - Lovely UML tool all the way from Japan
* Visual Studio .Net 2003 - A mother of a piece of software
* SharpDevelop - If you can’t afford Visual Studio .Net 2003
* MySQL - For some of my web tools
* SQL Server 2000 - Only €40 or so for the developers edition
* Oracle 9i - Free for development purposes
* Apache 2 - For all my web tools
* Tomcat 5.5 - For all my initial Servlet and JSP development
* VMWare - One of the greatest software tools ever developed. Pity it is so pricey - you need this software.
* Crystal Reports - The best of the mid-range reporting tools
* Crystal Enterprise - Web Portal version of Crystal Reports
To come - non-work tools on my home PC and my fave Linux tools (specifically on Fedora)
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Dungarvan Follow-up
Posted on March 23, 2005, by Conor, under Uncategorized.
I was home sick all day today - vicious flu. Slept most of the day so now it’s midnight and I’m wide awake. But my day was brightened by a letter we got in the post from the secretary of a small Kilkenny GAA club. When we had stayed in Clonea Strand Hotel, there had been a lot of shouting and banging in the middle of the night for about 20 minutes. Woke us up but we weren’t that bothered. This letter offered profuse apologies for any distress that had been caused. It had been the first time ever the club had stayed overnight anywhere and their good spirits got the better of them. I laughed my ass off. The poor gob-shites have probably got themselves in more trouble by getting all of the guests names and addresses and infringing on their privacy. Imagine if you’d been on a dirty weekend away. Oops.
Reminded me of the weekend Catherine did the Dublin City marathon. We stayed in the City West Hotel and in a hilarious contrast of bookings, people were either competing in the Marathon or competing in the Darts Tourament in the Hotel. What a difference in body weights! The female darts supporters were either indistiguishable from the men or looked like street walkers. The muppets who run the hotel put runners and darts players on the same floors of the hotel. We went to bed at 9pm only to be regularly woken by fat cretins shouting “let’s play darts”. We had breakfast at 6am and I took great pleasure in shouting “let’s play darts, wankers” on the way back to the room.
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