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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