Favourite Software Tools

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)

Dungarvan Follow-up

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.

Bloglines vs FeedonFeeds

So I've been using an RSS Aggregator called FeedonFeeds for a long time now. The reason I've always liked it is that it is server based and caches the data in a MySQL DB. I have it installed on the Fedora box at home and can connect to it via the DSL connection from anywhere. So I have one centralised location for all my feeds. The caching is also handy as I found a lot of the older aggregators would only cache the titles and not any of the content, and for sites that turnover their RSS links quickly, a lot of the items used to be gone by the time I'd try to read them. But it ain't very pretty and as I've added a lot of feeds recently, the lack of grouping is killing me.

I searched around a bit and found Bloglines. Did a quick export-import of the OPML file and was up and running in no time. After a few days use, I'm nearly a convert. Groupings work brilliantly and I have now discovered the joy of a ClipBlog (always wondered what the hell Scoble was talking about). Mine is here. I think it also lists all of my feeds. Obviously it doesn't include links to Iguana Fetish Monthly but everything else should be there. Gosh this WorldWideInterWeb thingy is jolly useful isn't it?

Now what I would like is a free RSS Aggregator that uses the Web-Services provided by Bloglines so I have a nice client side tool accessing the server-side data. I know FeedDemon does it but that costs. Anyone?

Funniest Damn thing I've read in a long time

From the Onion: Irish-Heritage Timeline

Sample: "1487 - In a decision still regretted today, Irish let a few British friends stay in Belfast".

This must have been written by a Paddy. Makes me proud to be Irish.

Unfortunately, as I spent 8 years in the Scouts as a kid and had to march in the pissing rain every March 17th in the Paddy's Day Parade in Kilkenny, I now have a pathological loathing of the whole day. Saluting a buch of no-name County Councillors who were happily sitting in the dry in an open-sided Smithwicks truck trailer has made me a bitter man. Snakes, schmakes.

Saturday in Dungarvan

We spent Saturday in and around Dungarvan visiting Catherines cousin Maria. They live near Clonea Strand which is a fantastic beach. Myself and the boys whiled away an hour or two digging holes and filling them with stones. We stayed in the Clonea Strand Hotel - a good mid-market place with some fantastic (non-ironic) 70's interiors. Big high ceilings and open stairs. Beds could do with replacing but a top spot with great kids facilities. The three monsters loved the new Kids Loft with climbing frames, slides, tons of plastic balls etc. Good pool too. Shockingly Oscar thought it was better than Disney Paris. Mentalist.

We had dinner in the Tannery. Knew it was going to be good but it was fabulous. Very friendly staff, interesting but not ridiculous food (e.g. Creme Brulee of Crab) and a wonderful building. I had a duck ravioli on puy lentils and chuocroute to start. Nearly licked the plate. Of course I had confused charcuterie and choucroute yet again and was expecting pig parts, not sauerkraut but it was delish anyway. Two itsy bitsy teeny weeny quail for main were literally finger-licking good and the semi-freddo with pineapple was just the right mix of sweet and tart. Catherines Crabby thing looked fab, her monkfish was the size of a small child and she rated her chocolate fondant thingy as the best desert she has had in a long long time. The only tiny glitch was a poor young-fella thinking that 1 D espresso on an order was decaffeinated espresso rather than a double. Ok so I laughed. Meal was very good value too. Run, don't walk, run to this restaurant as soon as you can.

50 Gmail Accounts to give away

I now have 50 Gmail invites available. So if you want one, mail me at cwjoneill at gmail dot com nad I'll dish em out on a first come first served basis. I can't recommend Gmail highly enough.

High-5!! 

I'm pretty sure that's an arm....... 

4-2 to the Boys

Well the wee fetus has turned out to be a boy. We had the 21-week scan yesterday and even I could tell it was a bloke! He is slightly above average weight and all looks perfect. A couple of scans will be posted soon (including a High-5 which is pretty neat). Ois and Osc are thrilled "So that'll be 4 boys and only 2 girls in the house. Brilliant!". Names we have come up with so far to annoy my mother include Cavan, Mossie, Moses and Cruz.