Tools

AVG Free AntiVirus 8.0

Kent J. Chen — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:25:51 GMT

AVG released a new version of their flag-ship security products and will discontinue the current 7.5 version by end of May 2008. Starting next month, computer that still has 7.5 version installed will not get updated anymore including the virus definition. So it's vital to get this one upgraded. Fortunately, AVG still offers the free edition for private use only, though it isn't that obvious to find out on its website. Here is the shortcut.

http://free.grisoft.com/ww.download?prd=afe

One nice feature in this new version is LinkScanner that scans all links on search engine results page and indicates which links are good and which are dangerous. A very nice way to protect your computer. It works with all major search engine providers on both IE and Firefox.

And yes, of course, this feature eats your bandwidth quite a bit. So to disable if you want to, you can simply check off the option "Enable AVG Search-Shield" on Advanced AVG Settings under LinkScanner tab.

7 Free Geek Tools

Kent J. Chen — Tue, 06 May 2008 06:27:18 GMT

Stole from PCWorld.ca's one of latest article. Check it out. The Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool from Microsoft and NirSoft's free WirelessKeyView are quite interesting.

The Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool only can be run in IE, as expected. You will have to download and install a special ActiveX before actually running it. I ran and tested my home router to see if it can find out Why can't get my wireless identified in Vista? Unfortunately, it passed all the tests, which at least should have failed in one or two. However, Microsoft provides you a list of Vista-compatible routers you can find on the market after the test was done.

WirelessKeyView is a free tool from NirSoft, that reveals all the WEP/WPA keys stored on the computer and save them to text/html/xml file. It should be quite handy for people like me who often brings my laptop to various places.

HDD docking station

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:58:53 GMT

This little guy, 2.5" and 3.5" SATA HDD Stage Rack, is very cool. It would make my life a lot easier. I just can't remember how many time I have to open the closure and slide in the hard drive just to check what's on it.

It costs only $42.27 each, but unfortunately, it charges another $42.27 to ship it to Canada. Errr..

What's your backup plan?

Kent J. Chen — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:52:14 GMT

"There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have experienced catastrophic hard drive failure, and those who *will* experience catastrophic hard drive failure."

Someone quoted this in Jeff Atwood's What's your backup strategy, which is so true. Sooner or later, you will be facing the disaster caused by fragile hard drive. Knocking on the wood if you are trying to say you haven't. So if you don't have any backup plan yet, it's time to think about it very seriously. Even though you already have one in place, it's time to review to see if it's still effective. Or unless you are "lucky" like Raelyn Campbell who filed $54m lawsuit against Best Buy for losing laptop, you would be screwed if one day you so rely-on hard drive fails on you.

So what choices out there are available for us as personal use? Well, basically it's all based on what you need and how much data you want to be backed up. Some cost might be necessary needed in some cases.

First of all, buy an external hard drive, pick as much space as you can afford or pick the one like WD Passport that doesn't require power supply if you want to carry it around.

Then, configure your sync tool and either manually run it once a week or so or schedule it to be run regularly if possible. There are many sync choices out there but I am using and quite happy with Microsoft's SyncToy which is free, easy to use. It never failed on me. The con, though, is that it doesn't come with the schedule feature so I have to run it manually.

However, if you prefer to use tool that is more like backup, you might end up having to buy a commercial copy as Windows built-in backup tool usually doesn't work too good. The one in XP is ok but Vista is much worse. And I wasn't so lucky to find any good free ones either. Jeff's choice on Acronis True Image looks pretty good, which backs up the system to a bootable mirror image of the hard drive, that can be booted up later on when the primary one fails.

Going one step further, if you want to have a backup stored offsite, rather than at home, MozeHome is definitely the number one choice. It's free for under 2G data which should cover most of the cases, and it lightly runs on your computer and backs up your data without your attention once it's configured.

If you have more than 2G data, the chances are you might have a lot of photos included that you also want to back up. If that's the case, then you have to consider Flickr or SmugMug as your plan. Both are really popular photo gallery sites that offers so much rich features for photos but be prepared to pay to get the full services that you can store the full original size of your photos over there.

Right, we have yet covered Video. YouTube or sites that office the similar service seems to be the only choices at the moment. Getting your Videos backed up offsite will be a really time consuming job though.

Overall, MozeHome rules all, it's the best and easiest choice to the backup problem that everyone faces. Oh, how about emails? I will be covering it in my next post...haha...it's too late now.

Lookout for Outlook 2007

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 09:30:19 GMT

I was a fan of Lookout and still is. It was a must have add-on that I can't live without when I was still using Outlook 2003 because of the way how fast is to search anything in your Outlook. I stopped using it once we had mail archive system installed because by utilizing both email retention and archive my Outlook doesn't have many emails at all. It is often quite easy to do a search over the archive system too. I stopped using it also because I don't use Outlook for my personal emails anymore. I am using Google Apps.

I also heard and was hoping that Microsoft would make the search better in Outlook 2007. But it's obviously not the case. At least, Joel Spolsky has a big complain about it.

The search feature in Microsoft Outlook 2007, frankly, sucks big time.
It's slow. Searches take about 30 seconds for me. (I have about 10 years of email).
The search quality is atrocious. I regularly get 50% garbage results mixed in that have nothing in common with my search terms, and the message I am looking for often doesn't come up.

Joel also missed Lookout very much but he was locked out by Microsoft in Outlook 2007.

The tiny company that made Lookout was bought by Microsoft. It must have been one of those HR acquisitions, because the Lookout technology was thrown away. Mike Belshe only spent a couple of years at Microsoft before moving on.
When Outlook 2007 came out, it disabled Lookout, and allegedly this wasn't supposed to be a big deal because Outlook 2007 has search "built in." But the built-in search is, as mentioned, ghastly.

Luckily, he finally found the original author, Mike Belshe, who has found a way around to make Lookout to work on Outlook 2007, which works like a charm. However, since Microsoft bought Outlook and made it disappear, it might not be easy to find the installation file. I, for example, didn't make a copy of it. I probably will shot either Mike or Joel an email asking for one copy if I find I will need it again one day.

The question also remaining in this case is why Microsoft didn't include this awesome tool in its latest Outlook!!

Update (Jan 24, 2008): Leon has a better solution in his blog, which works more compatible with original Outlook 2007. Thanks Leon. There are also some other folks who mentioned lightening searching in Cache Exchange Mode. I agree!!

Secunia Personal Software Inspector

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:40:35 GMT

Thanks to LifeHacker for discovering this nice little free tool that will keep all applications running on my computer up-to-date.

Freeware application Secunia Personal Software Inspector is sort of like Windows Update for your installed software, monitoring your installed apps and notifying you of available security updates. When you run your first scan after installing Secunia, you'll be presented with a list of insecure apps that have available updates, "end-of-life" apps that are no longer being supported by the developer, and patched apps that have the latest security updates. Keep in mind that Secunia is not an anti-virus software, but more of a preventative tool for ensuring that your software is secure as it can be.

I downloaded and installed on my computer right after I read its post. The first scan only tool a few minutes and discovered that I have 7 in-secure applications that need to be updated. Simply clicking the download solution icon will either direct you to the website that provides the patch or download the patch right away. Pretty neat.

Check and download Secunia PSI right here

Show picture in ASCII plain text

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 18:41:51 GMT

Lifehacker's Convert Pictures to Text Images with ASCGEN reveals a new way of displaying images. It's very interesting and fun to see what the picture looks like in ASCII plain text. A few comments of the post also mention a few websites that do the same thing. Here is what my daughter's picture looks like in ASCII. Pretty good in detail, I have to say.

Add Task Management System into Gmail

Kent J. Chen — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 10:44:58 GMT

Managing your tasks right in your Gmail sounds very cool...but since Gmail has no such thing how can we do it? RTM, aka Remember The Milk, recently Introduced Remember The Milk for Gmail which offers this feature. The Tasks panel in the right side of the window looks sweet.

It works beautifully in my regular Gmail account but I am using email with Google Apps most of the time which doesn't seem to work with RTM. So I emailed RTM asking if there is any way we can implement this into my Google Apps email. Their reply came back in such a surprisingly fast way. And yes, turning on the option "Turn on new application features to my domain before they are rolled out to all Google Apps customers" in Domain Settings in Domain Manager definitely did the trick. I will be enjoying it for sure.

WriteMaps - A tool to create site map

Kent J. Chen — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 11:13:01 GMT

A web-Ajax-based tool, WriteMaps, that you can use to create website site map online, such a brilliant idea and awesome web application.

WriteMaps is a free web-based tool that allows you to create, edit, and share sitemaps online. As a WriteMaps user, you and your team will be able to build and access your sitemaps from anywhere, without having to rely on proprietary desktop apps and static files.

I believe that it would be pretty useful to me who works as a solo web developer quite often. Time to put all my sitemaps on now.

A few Useful Tools

Kent J. Chen — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 05:08:08 GMT

Here are a few useful tools I dig recently, that are free and might be useful in the future when needed.

MouseTrax Downloads

Greg Chapman, developer, solution provider and system engineer, loves creating solutions that could easy a lot of IT Pro's work from time to time. Many of these very popular utilities are award winning tools that are all free for the downloading.

TreeSize Free

A nice freeware that tells you where precious space has gone to.

Pindom: Load Time Tester

Wondering how long your heavy programmed website takes to load in the user's browser? Give this load time tester a try.

How it works

The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars.

You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to in for example a CSS file.

Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.

JDoc - a place to search Java API documentation

Needless to say, a wonderful place where you can use as your JavaScript library. It's awesome.

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