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Monthly Archive: February 2009

Software Reviews

White Spaces Internet

White Spaces internet is one of the latest and perhaps most promising and close to reality internet technologies. It is supported by many of the biggest industry leaders such Microsoft and Google through alliances such as White Spaces Coalition and Wireless Innovation Alliance but also grassroots and non-profit groups that are closer to the consumer’s need such as Free Press that campaigned for it when the FCC was considering White Spaces.

White Spaces refers to the use of an empty part of the broadcast spectrum that can be made available for other use. This year in the United States and

Software Reviews

Internet2, The Next Generation Internet

Internet2 is a concept born in 1996 as the needs of some universities and institutions where not being served by the traditional internet. Some universities met and decided to implement a non-profit internet that would provide high speed and high performance links for their use. The possible start back then was a 2.5Gbps network but that has since been upgraded to 100Gbps links.

One high profile usage is the CERN Large Hadron Collider coming fully online this year. Using this network scientists can work with what they expect to be 15 million GB of data generated annually by the LHC.

Software Reviews

Text File Stats & Watermark Images

Two GNU licensed freeware courtesy of Lune Rouge offer easy and lighweight means of achieving sometimes useful tasks.

Firs off line TextStat described simply as

Create statistics on a text file

Using it is as simple as browsing for a file and then clicking the “TS” icon. Using TextStat it is possible to analyze any text or HTML file and generate wide ranging info. Among others TextStat produces stats on the number of words and paragraphs to such things as number of carriage returns, number of occurances of every word and an estimate on the number of syllables. TextStat supports

Software Reviews

Enware Freeware & Dirhtml Index.html Generator II

Shortly after I wrote about the dirhtml index.html generator I received an email from its developer. In part due to my confusion about the way the sorting options were presented and how the output listing was actually sorted Eric, the enware developer, had released a new, then beta, version. It has since gone out of beta and v4.833 presents a more intuitive sorting menu (see images below).

In my opinion it is now easier to visualize the output because the ‘Unsorted’ option is now in a column with all the primary choices that determine the shape of the output.

Two

Software Reviews

MP3 Creation, The Long Way

There are plenty of strictly speaking illegal means of finding and saving media. From the earlier methods of checking P2P sites and software to using places like rapidshare and torrents. The history of the internet is filled with smart and plain illegal means just to get one’s hands on music, video and software.

Of course plenty of websites exist that allow streaming of music but make it difficult or impossible to save the file. Sometimes listening to places that stream music it is even possible to find a link to a working, downloadable MP3. Search for song on playlist.com for

Software Reviews

Tools To View And Analyze Disk Usage

As a followup to my post on TreeSize here are some other downloads I have come across that let the user view or visualize space usage on a disk.

For this article I chose to analyze a folder that is approximately 945MB and has 28 subfolders and 170 files. Using a not so new Windows XP machine.

Free Disk Analyzer is described by its author as

The easiest tool for quickly finding large files and optimizing disk usage.

Free Disk Analyzer comes in at 11.1MB, much larger than the others looked at in this article, and while having the most

Software Reviews

Safely Transfer Files Using WinSCP

WinSCP is described by its author as

WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Legacy SCP protocol is also supported. Its main function is safe copying of files between a local and a remote computer.

It is a very robust and feature rich FTP client that supports secure file transfer using SSH over FTP. It has many of the usual and expected features like integration into Windows for such operations as drag and drop and insertion into the Send To context menu. Additionally in can be used via the command line to perform many

Software Reviews

Encrypt And Hide Files With TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt is described by its author as

Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux

TrueCrypt is a feature rich, powerful and reliable software to secure any number of files, folders or even entire drives. It achieves this by creating a ‘virtual encrypted disk’. It is possible to hide most any thing in one ‘file’ that is only accessible with TrueCrypt and via password and/or keyfiles. It is also possible to encrypt an entire partition or a USB key or flash drive. TrueCrypt supports three main methods of encryption, AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish, and depending