yowkee essential

10 Favourite Open Source Windows Application

It isn’t easy when one has promised himself that he got to blog at least once a day. Most of the time, waking up early and sit in front of my laptop — brain isn’t juicy. At night, a tiring body (after full day working) is trying to get its control center into one ship. So I stare at computer monitor, only feel blank.

The intuitive blog experience often comes when I am going to blog about me, me and me. It’s always the easiest thing to talk about yourself since you are the one most familiar with it. Ok, let’s go with it this round.

10 seem to be the magic eye-catching number, many people use to blog about 10 best movies, 10 best novels, 10 best applications.….all the 10-things stuff, and especially during the year end. We are approaching 2006 now, so I’d just follow the main stream, but as I am no any authority, I’d only talk about my favourite Open Source Windows application (well, for 2005 I guess).

These are the 10 most frequently used Open Source Windows applications of mine. I have them open daily in my desktop at least over a year now:

1. Firefox: No doubt, as the other millions users, Firefox is my main web browser. IE would be only occasionally used when there’s testing need to be done. Somehow I didn’t have the need to go to any IE-only websites.
2. Vim: Yes, to me, Vim is the most powerful text editor in the world. For office document usage, I am still using Microsoft Office as I don’t treat OpenOffice as an better alternative. But many times I’d draft my words in Vim first before I copy-n-paste to Word. Yeah, I am vi guy, so please don’t come to telling me how good Emacs is, and I could truly understand how you feel about UltraEdit in Windows and BBEdit in Mac. Vi is just the perfect match for me. The only disadvantage is when I got to use other editor like Word or even the editor in Visual Studio or Eclipse, my left hand is typing Escape key unconsciously. :(
3. putty: This is a tool one couldn’t live without if his/her main works are performed in a Unix environment and his/her desktop is a Windows machine! The best ssh and telnet clients in Windows world.
4. Thunderbird: hmm…I knew Thunderbird isn’t the best choice out there. But it’s the best alternative than Outlook which I could get in Windows world. It performs the job well, and more importantly, the improvement is progressing, non-stop.
5. GTD TiddyWiki and Instiki: GTD TiddyWiki is a single HTML page for all your personal recording/notes need, it’s a well implemented single page Wiki and designed to adapt David Allen’s Getting Things Done style. It serve some of my need since I could put this single file in a USB flash drive, bring along it any place. And at desktop Instiki could be the simplest ever Wiki installation — all you have to do is the grab the Ruby Windows installer, install Ruby, get the instiki zip, un-compress it and run “ruby instiki.rb”. Then point your browser to http://localhost:2500 and you have a Wiki well setup. Again, this is good for personal info management although it doesn’t sounds that obvious for Windows environment.
6. Filezilla: Filezilla is my choice of FTP/SFTP client on Windows. It has the speed transfering with multiple connections running simultenously. I choose it mainly because it’s Open Source.
7. 7-zip: Ok 7-zip, if you have never heard about 7-zip, then most probably you are using Winzip and still not paying for it. I don’t know how widely of its supported compression format, not sure if it’s more than Winzip. Because ever since I’ve started using it, there’s no turning back.
8. Media Classic Player: for multimedia entertainment, get rid of bloated and heavy Windows media player, use the light weight media classic player (it’d surprise you if you are using a Pentium III level PC). I use the alternative real and quicktime with it too.
9. Eclipse and GCC: I am still speaking C or C++ or gcc is every where for me (Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X...etc). I have to admit I didn’t use Eclipse that much (instead, use Vim). It’s still the best and keep improving IDE.
10. cvs: May be it should be the time to switch to subversion. CVS is the version control system good for your any plain text files — yeah I do try the best keeping everything in text files.

Vim, putty, Eclipse/gcc or cvs are probably too geeky stuff, but others are pretty a choice even for novice users. Give it a try and you won’t be regret.

Symantec

Reading 2 news regarding Symantec:

1. If you use Symantec (Norton) AntiVirus, beware that it was found having buffer overflow while decomposing RAR file. A properly drafted rar file could attack your antivirus and open your machine for remote access. What’s the work around right now? Avoid it, filtering out rar files for scanning, until they have the fix.
2. Symantec wouldn’t sell or support its product LC5 (a.k.a L0phtCrack, a NT password hash cracker — well, in security point of view, it was named password auditing and recovery tool) outside of US, due to US Government export policy . It’s been years I have never heard news of security-related algorithm export regulartion of US. Wow, it ain’t disappear yet!

New kind of spam

I was getting a new kind of “spam” into my previous entry (note: spam comments have been deleted). The spam comments are kind of comments none of program would filter it out, as it is posted by a real person.

Imagine this, somebody with some strong political opinions/views to express and he has the spare time to go all the related blogs to copy and paste his views on the comments. This is what happenning, though the comments made sense and do express certain views, they are un-related to the blog entry at all. I am not sure if all Malaysian blogs are flooded with this spam, guess one wouldn’t have so much spare time to go around and doing typing works.

The spam do have a pattern though: it doesn’t care what are you blogging about, it use different user name and email, but with the same source IP :); worse then, he tried to post 10 comments within 1 or 2 minutes.

Gus Mueller, Goes Indie in just 1068 days

Gus Mueller, who is famous for the Mac app VoodooPad, talked about his route on how to become an independent programmer in just 1068 days .

Lots of people out there are doing it: either as an independent programmer, or a small group of people forming a micro ISV. It ain’t easy. David St Lawrence has a series of posts of Don’t give up your day job (part 2, part 3).

Speaking of multi-sources income, should you keep your day job to pay the daily expense, and digging the other income in the rest of the day? Many people are doing it this way to head for financial literacy or just wanted to become richer. In general you could do that with some jobs which doesn’t really required plenty focus and time. If you have gotten some connection and certain trading could be done via your connection, that’s fine and that type of jobs help growing your income. The other scenario is if you already having certain skill which could open the other channel to earn money, e.g. singing in a pub/cafe, teaching/tutors…etc. But if you gonna develop some products out of the rest of the days isn’t that optimistic as it seem. For tasks required highly concentration and long hours of pondering (including the time to prepare to move into the zone), like coding for your own product, or writing a book, it’d be tough if you are going to dig as much time as you can out of your office hours. It’s still a good start from the hobby and part time anyway. It’s the reason some go straight to full time for him/herself though.

Chris Campbell wrote about how to start your own business. 37Signal has a series of Small Biz 101 - how to get started, cash flow. An indie game developer’s experience on Forming an LLC in Illinois. Well, if you imagine it’d be cool and having plenty of freedom when you are working from home, read Working at Home Isn’t The Day at the Beach Office Mates Imagine. That’s it for now.

ISV Thought

I have tried once to be self-employed and running software business a few years ago. The planned product isn’t out to the market at planned period of time and then I quited of some personal reason. I treated it as a failure in my mind, but this failed experience has been getting me back to think about working as a ISV (Independent Software Vendor) time by time.

Since then I have been following some ISV or MicroISV’s blog on and off. Some people’s success story really inspiring me but I have never taken any actions at all. What are those obstacles stopping me to go further? I have been pondering about it these few days, and here are my analysis of my own fear:

• I have no confidence to start a software business on my own. Ever since I started playing managing roles and act as a manager, I have less and less time putting my hand on any coding. Time flies and I do enjoy the manager role with its challenge and working with group of smart people. But to think about my own capability to start a MicroISV (one or two person ISV), I am hesistate. Despite, age of 33 has gotten me the fear to compete to young people. It looks like full of young and brilliant software people out there, and most of new pattern of success seem coming from young people. So, is it too late to start?
• Lacking of ideas: the question of “what to develop” has been sticking in my mind for months and I couldn’t get myself an answer. Lots of smart people’s blog suggested ideas aren’t the key thing to your product — you tend to find out what’s your strength, do the marketing analysis and following instinct. Well, I am not there yet.
• Security. Still, I have myself and my family to feed. There should have a stably cash flow plan if one got to sustain his/her startup business.

Finally, I have started to do some analysis on my own thought and reason of my procrastination. Feeling good to putting down the words. And from now on it should be the time to target to remove the obstacles one by one.

Fresh Air

I need some fresh air. I am in a bad shape now after 2 weeks of busy working. This is not right, one shouldn’t over work for more than consecutive 7 days. The consequence is: you lose the usual cool, creativity, ability to create, and worse, you can’t remember what have you done the previous day!

It means I am disorganized, although I do think the project’s work load is a little too extreme on the current manpower. Lesson to learn, a project signed and started too late is always a bomb.

I hope to back to normal blogging as I did in November. That’s good, no matter if anyone read it or not. Writing itself gave me some satisfaction. The blog entry of half a million ringgit race 2 bring some traffic lately, surprising even bring over one of my ex-colleague. People are still used to emailing good web URL nowadays.

Firefox Tab Tip

Just learn a new Firefox tab tip: double click at the empty space of tab bar call out a new tab! Great! With that I don’t have to always drag the “New Tab” icon to place at my personal toolbar — been used to click the icon to create new tab.

Yahoo's delicious

No doubt it’s the news of the day: Yahoo! bought over del.icio.us. With buying over Flickr and del.icio.us, the two most used photo sharing and bookmarking web service, Yahoo! seem to pretty agressive in getting the best web service in the fields. Technically they could all categorized as Web 2.0 (including the coming revamping Yahoo! Mail). But it would only make sense to the users come to Yahoo if it’s really integrated into its various services. Take Yahoo! photo as an example, it isn’t replaced by Flickr yet — though I think Flickr is much more friendly and fun to play with. And then where Yahoo is going to place del.icio.us?

On the other hand, it should really go out to get some better blogging service to replace its Yahoo 360.

In Memory of John Lennon

Imagine

Imagine there’s no heaven,
It’s easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries,
It isnt hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace…

Imagine no possesions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say Im a dreamer,
but Im not the only one,
I hope some day you’ll join us,
And the world will live as one.

John Lennon

Douban

Douban now has an English version. Douban is a Chinese website/webservices let users sharing their views or opinions on books, movie or musics, as well as what they are reading, watching and listening now (and what going to read/watch/listen to). Its path of being famous and having groups of supporters on China is quite similar to Craigslist — starting small, gathering more and more users by mouth to mouth.

You tends to share your activities and your opinion of something you like with the people having more-or-less the same feel. And what’s mostly our people doing in this civilized society, despite all kind of physical social activities with human being? We read, we watch, and we listen —- the great art beautify our life. Thus it indeed is one very potential social-web service to be created. I am not sure why there isn’t anything similar (excluding those specific forums) created in English world. But Douban English version would be a good observation.

Captcha in comment

I activated the SCode plugin in the comment in this blog. SCode is Captcha kind of test given to verify whether it’s a human whom’s the website interact with, or is it just some machine program trying to access this website. In short, it either scrambled a text or display some numeric number in graphics format. So those bustard spammer can’t simply get through with their programs or scripts.

Nevertheless, Captcha is effective to filter out the spams. But it violates website’s accessibility. Rules No. 1: you always provide some alternative access to disabled users to your website. But nope, they can’t view your scrambled images or the number on the icons…there’s no other way a blind person would be able to comment on this site.

I am feeling bad with this even though I don’t think there’s any disbaled people would access to this blog. But I am tired to check out the comment list or reading emails for the approval of comments. Here’s the sacrifice.

Weekend Tech-and-reading activities

I was so stressed out in works lately. Get some software to play around and surfing for good reading is my usual style of releasing stress — it’s just too easy to dive into the web over too many hours…

Over weekend I found some goodies for my Mac experience and some URL/text for reading:

• Mac OS X
  
  • GrApple : this theme extension made Firefox for Mac OS X looks more Mac-like, just like a Safari without brushed metal.
    
  • Firefoxy : Firefoxy is an application instructing Firefox how it should draw those graphical widgets (text input area, radio buttons, submit buttons…etc). Now my Firefox on Mac looks brilliant. Those buttons and text boxes not feeling a bit too big now.
    
  • RubyOnRails on Mac OS X : Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger by Dan Benjamin. It get all the source code and built up from scratch. Check out RailsOnOSX on rails wiki too. And Locomotive, a one-click solution to get you a Ruby On Rails development platform on Tiger, its default database binding is SQLite. But MySQL and PostgreSQL is ready too.
    
• Palm : I dig out a old Palm m505 from store room, and thinking of a good use of it. At least for light e-books reading.
  
  • Plucker : an offline website reader, used to be famous in the old days. Not sure has it catched up with the RSS reading?
    
  • Speaking of RSS reader on Palm, Quick News looks pretty good. AvantGo used to be the first choice when it come to channel subscribing, headline news reading or offline web reading. But I don’t like its server site channel subscribing kind of setting. I’d like all my RSS list and offline reading all happen just between my desktop environment and the Palm.
    
  • Of course, all the basic and fun Palm app I could recall: SilverScreen, iSilo, Palm Reader, Adobe Reader. There’s no mp3 playing capability in m505, what a waste. May be I should consider the upgrading if PDA is once again get me good life experience.
• Links
  
  • Collection of Lisp Books
    
  • CxxTest User Guide : CxxTest is a JUnit/xUnit/CppUnit like C++ Unit Test framework
    
  • A List Apart, 208, published 28/Nov/05
    
  • Mark Cuban wrote a series of posts of his story: Success & Motivation - Redux
    
  • Jeff Ooi - Screenshooter : The path of Jeff Ooi as the most prominent news blogger in Malaysia. It’s understandable that Jeff is disappointed with Malaysian blogland — where his effort didn’t inspire more bloggers as his kind, where ideally we have Internet as the alternative media — to free more thought, to get government or authorities be accountable. That isn’t what’s happening now, as some M’sian bloggers are either used to treat blogging as their opened diary, or don’t own good writing skills, or simply don’t care too much on news. But that’s why Jeff is so unique, none of others could have his consitency, coverage to achieve what he’s doing in his blog.

Well, enough. I should back to work.