The Mad Programmer .. The Mad Human

The net is full of free software that you may take decades trying. I gathered here some of the cool free software I found. The list is in no way complete of comprehensive. It's just some tools that I thought worthy of sharing with others. The software mentioned here are not in one category. That is, some are system tools, some are fun stuff and some are scientific tools. Hope you find it useful. If you have any suggestions on a free software that you tried and found useful, please post a comment with the link to the download page. Thanks.

System Tools: Antivirus:

AntiVir By Avira is one of the best antiviruses I found for free that do not crash your computer, cause some programs not to work or anything like that. The program integerates well and peacefully with windows and has a very small foot print that you won't feel it is running. Good protection although many reviews say the program could not catch some of the old macro viruses, but at least it is good protection at no cost (not only financially but also resource wise!)

Windows Defender By Microsoft is a good tool to protect yourself against spyware and it is working fine with AntiVir so, together, along with the Windows ICF (Internet Connection Firewall), You may get yourself a fine level of protection. It also has small foot print (Until now at least!)

Web Developer Tools: XML And Web Pages Editors:

XML Editors:

• XML Notepad 2007 By Microsoft
• MoreMotion XML Editor 2.0 By Mor Yazilim
• Notepad++ An Open Source Project At SourceForge.Net
• TheKBase Desktop An Open Source Project At SourceForge.Net

Free WYSIWYG Editors:

MoreMotion Web Express 3 By Mor Yazilim is a very good web page editor for those who don't want to bother learn HTML. To use some of the advanced features, you will need to learn some GUI concepts however! Great Tool!

Fun/Game Stuff:

Jigs@w Puzzle Promo Creator by Tibo Soft is a very nice free tool that enables you to create your own Jigsaw puzzle and distribute it as an executable. Very nice for small businesses wanting to promote themselves in a nice fun way. It is also great to actually play puzzles. In their site you will also find a free limited verion of their Jigs@w Puzzle 2 Program which is nice!

EclipseCrossword by Green Eclipse is a crossword creation program that is easy to use, funny and useful in creating your own crosswords puzzle. You can send the puzzle to friends, post it in your website, play challenges with your friends, etc.

Science/Math:

Graph by padowan is a function grapher. It displays a certain function along a coordinates system. Good tool for all of you math wizs.

Desktop/User Interface:

ObjectDock By Stardock is a dockable toolbar that floats over your desktop providing tools to launch programs and more. The interface is excellent, it is customizable, it looks very nice and the magnification effect is way cool. Stardock also has the following products which you can download limited functionality versions of (one thing i liked about them is that they don't kill you with all those nag screens and ads. They just remove a feature or two from the demo version!): WindowBlinds, DesktopX, IconPackager

Desktop/Toolbars:

A-ToolBar By metaEUREKA is a magic toolbox full of features that i can not begin to count. Although the interface is not the best in twon (it looks a little bit old-style-windows now), but the tools are great especially to be packaged in one compact toolbar like this. Great app.

I'll be back with more free stuff i find once i find them. However, this initial list should be fine. I'm actually thinking of creating some custom lists in this space for the free software and i might just do that soon. What do you think?!

Enjoy!

abumarsa

With the new products coming soon to the software market, I'm one of those who think that programmers all over the world must do something quick or they are facing extinction by giant corporations.

I remember not long ago, when programming a software that could detect printers installed in your computer and manging thier print queue was a "job"!

I mean this used to take long time between core code, interface code and bringing the two together. This was an empressive work that everybody would look at and say "Waw, how did you do that?!". Well, I've got some good news and some bad news, and I'll start with the bad one: any real programmer nowadays will not say "waw", not even "mew" to this. The good news is, normal people and a great portion of intermediate to beginning programmers will at least be empressed nowadays, but be cautioned, this is not gunna last for so long. Actually, nothing lasts for LONG in the software world, but we're talking "our long", the definition of "long" in the mind of a programmer!

Software nowadays can do much more than it could do two or three years ago. People's demands are becoming higher in terms of expectations, lower in terms of time and much lower in terms of money!

Are we an endangered specieces or what? Who will continue this software mania if we go extinct. Well, I say maybe it will be an "elite" category of programmers, who could "merge" in a large corporation without falling to the temptation of having their own business!

Last I'd like to say I'm not afraid for myself! NO NO NO ... I'm not one of the elites (Unfortunatly)!! It's just that I've got my plan B and C (plan B actually did start!): "Network Administration", and "Public Relations"

I hope this is just an unjustified worry!

abumarsa

This entry is targeted to new and moderate network administrators, especially those working with Microsoft products (Windows 2000, 2003 Servers. ISA Server 2000, 2004. Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005 in particular)

I write these entries when I face something and find some solution to it, so that maybe other poor guys like myself can make use of it directly instead of going through the tedious routine tasks of searching google for some words, visiting 20-40 sites, searching wikipedia ... etc and then figuring out how to make use of the bits and pieces of information they found during that journey!

The problem i'm trying to address is this: I'm a network administrator who wants to block sites that can be harmeful for surfers in his network. I use ISA 2004 along with an Exchange server (for internal email. The external email is managed by another Exchange server that is out of my control)

Now, I searched for "phishing", "spamming", "internet fraud" and found one interesting site (actually what IS interesting about it is it IS free!):

SURBL - Spam URI Realtime Blocklists

Now, What's good about the lists page is that it includes links to useful sources of spammers lists. One of which was the great one by William Stearns at his website. The lists at Stearns site can be used directly with many proxy and mail servers. In the site, the list is provided in many formats so that it can directly by used without any further processing with unix main mail and proxy servers such as qmail, sendmail, appache and privoxy servers. He also states that if your proxy/mail server uses another format that can be described, he will include the format in his script that generates the lists!

For those interested in the list alone, without any formatting, the site provides one: sa-blacklist.current.domain which is a text file including all domain names and ip addresses that are on the black list without any further formats.

The easy way to make use of this list is to download the file, open it (this will take a long time so you might want to break it into smaller parts), copy the lines and add them to url set in you ISA server, deny access to that url set. I may write another entry about how to make use of the list later, but right now, this is a good start!

Hope This Helped!

Abumarsa

For those interested in regular expressions, here is a jump-start set of links that you may find useful. I tried not to tie to a certain level of programmers and users, so whether you are an experienced programmer or a new one, I hope one of the links will help you out:

Regular-Expressions.info

This is so far the best place to start if you want to learn about Regular Expressions. It contains introductory and intermediate information about the language, it is rech with simple yet to the point examples. Great place to start!

Regular Expression Library

This site includes about 1400 contributed regular expressions patterns for you to use! The site is a good start for the lazy programmer/web developer, a nice place for a pro!

RegexBuilder

RegexBuilder is an open source program developed using C# It is very useful for testing your regex patterns before you put them into code. Download the program and enjoy!

Regular Expressions Usage in C#

An article on how to use regular expressions in C#. A good jump-start for those who are new to using regex in C# (you should have a background in both however, the article only ties both technologies together!)

Programmer's Guide to Regular Expressions (Javascript)

A small guide to using regexes in javascript. It includes a trivial explanation of regex and how to use it in your client side scripts. Good place for j-scripters

If you are interested in RegEx and other PLs, use one of the following links or just google for: Regular Expressions PL_NAME, Where PL_NAME is the name of your programming language:

• Regular Expression HOWTO In Python
• Learning to Use Regular Expressions (Python)
• Perl Regular Expressions
• Cameron Laird's personal notes on "Regular Expressions"
• Regular Expressions PHP Tutorial
• Regular Expressions - User guide

Hope this helped!

Abumarsa