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August 14 Windows Live WriterMicrosoft has just released a nifty little blogging tool as beta: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/ I'm using it here for the first time, so I can't report much, but the download, installation and configuration experience was pleasant, as was composing this post. I'm using it here with my Spaces account, but I could have used it with any of my numerous Blogger.com accounts, as well. In fact, I can wire it up to *all* of my blogs. Very cool! March 15 VB.NET MDI version of NotepadSome of my fellow MCTs were discussing this application and I decided to check it out. For those times when you wish Notepad had the ability to create multiple documents from the same window - it's even got the source code included. December 08 Passwords, Folders and Tools (oh my)"NirSoft web site provides a unique collection of small and useful freeware utilities, all of them developed by Nir Sofer."
The coolest things (IMHO) on NirSoft are the password recovery utilities that allow you to get at all those pesky asterisk-masked passwords you've stored in Outlook, IE, FTP clients, etc.
He also includes some code samples so you can see how the magic is accomplished. October 02 Free Opera!No, I'm not talking about "Kill the Wabbit" (although I do have that in mpg version :-D). The other browser besides Firefox and IE - the one that used to cost money - is now free!
CNET.com reviewed it and gave it high praise:" There's a ton of great technology in Opera, and it's free to compete with Mozilla Firefox." September 17 Omea Reader 2.0: Free RSS Reader and Newsgroup AggregatorThe private MCT newsgroups are hosted on an NNTP server and unless one wants to fight the Web interface, one needs a good newsreader. The same would apply for the public Microsoft newsgroups. Over the years I have tried many different NNTP clients and none of them really gave me exactly what I wanted, although I was able to read and post news with all of them, which is arguably the most important aspect.
Many months ago one of my fellow MCTs posted about a free client called Omea Reader. Always up for something free I decided to check it out. While it was buggy at the time I immediately fell in love with its ability to group information into views and categories. For instance, I could see all of the posts for today or this week from all the newsgroups I subscribed to. Omea also has an RSS aggregator/reader plugin but since I use Bloglines that wasn't a selling point (can there be a selling point for a free item? hmmm...) for me. I've barely scratched the surface of what this tool can do. And it's written in .NET!
With the release of 2.0 I'm completely committed to this product as it has proved very stable. The one thing it doesn't do that I really miss (from Gravity) was the ability to put clever intros at the top - I used to have "It was a dark and stormy night. [person I'm responding to] turned to us and said...". Maybe their next release can incorporate that. September 05 Gaim: A Global IM Client"Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks."
Although I don't have as many IM identities as I have email addresses (the stuffed animals don't IM ;-), I do have a few scattered through various services. It's a pain to run all the clients separately, and I was unable to run my two MSN identities concurrently. I had tried Trillian but the siren lure of MSN Messenger 7 (my main source of IM buddies) pulled me back. For various reasons I ended up abandoning my Yahoo, ICQ and AIM identities so Trillian became non-useful anyhow.
Then, this weekend, I was reading one of the myriad e-newsletters I subscribe to and saw something called Gaim mentioned. I can't resist freeware. To make a long story short (yeah, I know - it's me :-D), I have switched over to Gaim for my IMing needs. Not only would it allow me to use multiple services, but I can run concurrent MSN identities! It seems to have all the features I liked about MSN Messenger 7 (well, except for that "what's playing now" tagline thing, but I'm sure someone will do a Gaim plugin for MSN someday - there is one for AIM already). It's got the "Buddy Pounce" (alerts you with a loud sound when someone comes online and optionally allows you to set a come back message for that person - great for slippery clients ;-) functionality that the Patchou plugin for MSN provides. And it runs with a smaller memory footprint, which is always a bonus. PDFCreator"PDFCreator is a free tool to create PDFs easily from nearly any application. With the PDFCreator Printer driver you turn any program into a PDF-machine" ZipGeniusBesides being free, ZipGenius handles many different forms of compression, including the 7-zip compression format: "The 7-zip compression format, conceived by Igor Pavlov (http://www.7-zip.org), can surely be considered as the best successor to ZIP format, which is getting older day by day. 7-zip is really powerful and it is suggested when you have to compress multimedia files, such as videos and MP3s."
I can't say enough nice things about this product! August 06 Better Than A MomMay 22 At last, a use for all those extra GMail invites...Another MCT (the same one who posted on the 802.11 stuff) discovered this cool and free (free is important) Windows shell extension that allows you to send and store files to/in your GMail account. It has the 10MB limitation per file and the 2GB limitation overall, but, hey, I'm guessing most of you all have more than a few GMail invites hanging around out there. Nothing says you can't use a few of them for storage purposes (as long as you don't use them to store porpoises - that might irritate the porpoises and we'd hate to see that happen...) You are just now figuring out that I'm just a little, ok, quite a bit, on the strange side? ;-) May 13 PageMethods: "well-defined URLs for your ASP.NET sites"OK, to be fair, I'm posting this after having had a beer, so while I think I'm contributing something seriously profound, I might be just babbling. (Don't ask why I'm blogging to my work blog after having had a beer - it has to do with my RSS addiction. I can stop reading feeds anytime I want. Really. No, seriously.) PageMethods provides a structured and consistent way of calling pages with parameters. It's free, works with the current version of Visual Studio.NET (2003) and with both VB.NET and C#. It's free. From reading the documentation it makes sense. I will download it and play with it. Did I mention that it's free? |
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