Software, Technologies and Gadgets

Winmerge, my favourite diff tool

wpadmin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:16:29 +0000

I found an error in a script and now I have to modify hundreds of php or javascript files. Or some identification data of our organization has changed and I have to change tens of templates. These are situation where you need a tool to find differences and automate operations, as doing it manually would cost a lot of time.

Developers and power users need a tool for identifying differences quickly and easily so that they can focus on more productive tasks. So everybody has a diff tool in his toolkit to find differences between file or folders, merge file or do the same (like modify or delete) on text or data in a large number of files.

My choice is WinMerge, a pretty good freeware. Not best usability I would say, but very good performance, enough for me not to spend money on some professional tools like DiffDog from Altova. And one of best things I like about it is the Windows Explorer Context Menu integration, allowing to compare files without opening the application.

Winmerge also has plugin support, so you can enhance it’s functionality. xdoc Diff is a must imo, it lets you compare Microsoft Office and OpenOffice file formats without having the office suites installed (not the case with the built-in plugins for Word and Excel)

Windows Phone 7 Series, what to expect?

wpadmin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:45:12 +0000

Windows Phone 7 is also something completely new for Microsoft: A total break from the past. It’s based on the Windows CE 6 kernel, like the Zune HD, while current versions of Windows Mobile are based on Windows CE 5. Microsoft announced the new OS at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona. Microsoft hasn’t directly addressed the issue of backward compatibility with old Windows Mobile applications, but based on rumors and chatter we’ve heard, it’s looking like this is a clean break, or at least it would require significant tweaks to get old software up and running on the new platform.
Microsoft wants themselves revolutionary and brings Xbox on Windows Phone 7 as Xbox Live. Gamers have talked about a portable Xbox for years—this is the most logical way to do it. The N-Gage was ahead of its time, PSP is the past. The iPhone showed us that the future of mobile gaming was going to be on your phone
Windows Phone 7 is connected in the same sense as Palm’s webOS and Android, with live, real-time data seamlessly integrated, though it’s even smoother and more natural. Live tiles on the Start screen, which you can totally customize, are updated dynamically with fresh content.
How exactly is Windows Phone 7 Series different than previous versions of Windows Mobile? The question is probably better phrased as “how isn’t Windows Phone 7 Series different than previous versions of Windows Mobile. There’s no longer a Start menu, drop downs, check boxes, radio buttons, windows, lists of icons… we could go on and on, but suffice to say this thing is just a totally different beast altogether. Microsoft clearly worked long and hard developing new ways to navigate a phone, and this doesn’t even bear a resemblance to other phones currently on the market. There are no icon grids, no pull down menus, no card view, and no task manager. Microsoft says it’s drawn on its Zune and Windows Media Center UI concepts and come up with something it calls “Metro.” A typographic and motion heavy interface based on primary colors and lots of minimal, negative space.
Windows Phone 7 Series brings together a bunch of different Microsoft services—Zune, Xbox, Bing—in a way that actually makes sense and just works. But there’s a real, lingering question: Are they too late? The first Windows Phone 7 Series (Microsoft has so lack of fantasy in naming their products!) won’t hit until the end of this year. That’s more than three years after the iPhone, two years after Android, even a year after Palm (yes, still there in the industry).

Read more and see some pictures on engadget.com

Google Adsense Preview Tool for Firefox

wpadmin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:09:34 +0000

Didn’t had to much to do with Adsense until I started this blog. Now, because I have a “adsense optimized” theme I decided to play around with some ads and experiment how the content influence them. Soon I felt the need to preview offline kind of ads I would get displayed. Google has some tool, but works only with IE and Windows. Not that tasty for me, as I like my web development environment on Ubuntu too much.
Fortunately I found a Firefox plug-in here. It installs straight forward as a Mozilla extension and works on every OS where Firefox can run. After installation it adds a new Menu to the Firefox menu bar.

One can preview 8 different types of ads:

* Leaderboard (728×90)
* Banner (468×60)
* Button (125×125)
* Skyscraper (120×600)
* Wide Skyscraper (160×600)
* Square (250×250)
* Medium Rectangle (300×250)
* Large Rectangle (336×280)

Ads in preview won’t be exactly the same as on the online site, as it uses test ads, so it won’t harm the Adwords owners, but it will give you a pretty good idea of what kind of ads you will receive. Please also note that in case you use a cms system, the difference may be slightly greater.

Mouse with 18 Buttons from OpenOffice

wpadmin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:00:20 +0000

When I first saw images of this mouse I thought it’s a joke, but then found a press release announced it’s official release on November 6 and a retail price of 74.99 USD.
Main features are:
# 18 programmable mouse buttons with double-click functionality
# Three different button modes: Key, Keypress, and Macro
# Analog Xbox 360-style joystick with optional 4, 8, and 16-key command modes
# Clickable scroll wheel
# 512k of flash memory
# 63 on-mouse application profiles with hardware, software, and autoswitching capability
# 1024-character macro support.
# Open source support software for creating, managing, and customizing application profiles
# Import and export of custom profiles in XML format
# Optional audio notification of profile switching with customizable wave files
# PDF export of profile button assignments
# Adjustable resolution from 400 to 1,600 CPI
# 20 default profiles for popular games and applications, including OpenOffice.org 3.1, Adobe Photoshop, the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, World of Warcraft, and the Call of Duty series.

And here some images:

Microsoft Visual Studio Beta 2 Public on October 21, Official Launch March 22 2010

wpadmin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:09:26 +0000

Visual Studio 2010 beta and .NET Framework 4 beta two have been released to MSDN subscribers with everyone else getting code on October 21.

Also, Microsoft will announce Visual Studio 2010 will officially launch on March 22, 2010.

There will be four Visual Studio SKUs: Development Edition, Database Edition, Architect Edition and Test Edition.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional minus the MSDN subscription will feature core developer features, the integrated development environment, platform support and parallel debugging. With the MSDN sub, you’ll actually get the current and previous client and server operating system runtimes.
Premium will include code analysis, database deployment, user interface testing and test impact analysis. The addition of the MSDN sub will give you the server platforms for Dynamics, SharePoint and Exchange, plus Office, Expression and some Team Foundation Server features.
Ultimate will include all these features, plus UML tools, historical debugging, manual testing products and load testing along with the full Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server.

Source: The Register

Update: Microsoft also published a Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit – October Preview which you can download here
A training kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize a variety of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 technologies.

The Beta 2 release of the Training Kit contains 15 presentations, 19 hands-on labs, and 13 demos. Many technologies are covered in this release, including: C# 4, VB 10, F#, Parallel Extensions, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow, Windows Presentation Foundation, ASP.NET 4, Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services, Managed Extensibility Framework, and Visual Studio Ultimate.
Here you can see the list of presentations, labs and demos.

One click anonymous surfing

wpadmin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:18:14 +0000

Some year ago I was searching for a technology to hide my IP, because some ’smart’ site admins decided to prevent parsing information from a public governamental site. That’s how I found Project Tor , which can be described as an ‘internet anononymizer’, in fact a tunneling technology which makes the original IP very hard to trace back. How and what for others are using it you can read here.

Short time ago one of my partners asked if it’s posibble to have that too, but with the option to switch between real and and anonymus IP. As each application needs to be manually configured to work with Tor a good solution seemed to configure a Linux distribution inside a virtual machine and switch between that machine and the host. But a little search on the web revealed others already did this. It’s called JanusVM.

JanusVM is powered by VMware, built on the Linux 2.6.14 kernel, and brings together openVPN, Squid, Privoxy, and Tor.

Using it is straightforward: download and install VMWare Player, plug in this appliance, connect through openVPN to the virtual machine and all traffic is tunneled through Tor. Thanks to squid and privoxy you also get rid of a lot of unwanted internet junk.

Hearing about this, a friend told me it would be nice if he could get anonymous even from internet cafe’s (well I knew he was thinking how he could bypass his companies proxy without having rights to install programms). That’s easy, you get the link from the Tor Project page: Incognito LiveCD. It’s a Gentoo Linux live distribution containing several Internet applications (Web browser, IRC client, Mail client, Instant messenger, etc.) pre-configured for Tor. Just burn it on a CD or USB stick. You don’t even have to restart Windows, just insert the media and you’ll be presented a menu and can start using it.

If you have used this tools, please tell us about your experience with them.