Small Form Factor PCs

Computer Software

Copyright 2010 by Stephen Vermeulen
Last updated: 2010 Oct 20		Computer topics





1100 228 3000 47 adventure animation answer apr assemble bread cms connectedphotographer corrects death digitalphotography discussing downloader elecard encrypt enemy exposure flops illuminated ind january journals jxta layout licensed licenses maintaining mathematica modeling networkworld nothing nytimes omniorb opendocument openssh panoramic perl rdbms restructuredtext san simulated smartpix soup summon synchronize takenote taylor tex thomas usethesource webanno windowsgames winrar wp xdesksoftware 		A collection of information about various computer software packages that have come to my attention over the years. For computer software that addresses the needs of digital photography see my Digital Photography Software page.

The TinyIDEA program is an implementation of the IDEA encryption algorithm (see my computer security page for more information and other sources), it is a DOS mode program (and can only work data files with a three letter file extension). You need to put the idea3c.com file some where on your PATH (perhaps just drop it into the C:\WINDOWS directory), and rename it to idea.com. There are two other versions of the program in the zip file, but they are a bit less user-friendly. To use it to encrypt a file (called "filename.ext") just CD to where the file is and type: 

idea + filename.ext
it will then prompt you twice for the password, if you don't type the same thing twice it will not do anything, otherwise it will encrypt the file. To decrypt the file you do: 
idea - filename.ext
again you must type the password the same way twice for it to do its job. To use it to erase some file you can just run it as if you were trying to encrypt the file and then supply a long password and after it has encrypted the file you delete the file and forget the password.
  • 2010-Oct-20: The Sikuli project is a GUI automation tool which uses image recognition software to guide its mouse movements. It produces Python scripts to run a series of GUI tasks. Xpresser is another attempt to do something similar. Setting the turtle free with Sikuli uses Sikuli to drive a turtle across your desktop. [9124] [1]
  • 2010-Sep-24: Digital Video Primer for Geeks is an introduction to the bits and bytes involved with digital video. [9389] [1]
  • 2010-Sep-24: Yojimbo is a personal information organizer package - just put stuff in it, tag it, browse or search it and export it. [9386]
  • 2010-Aug-31: Photography Blog takes a look at Topaz DeNoise 5, the samples they provide look pretty impressive. Its a pity that this is not available as a standalone application. [9356] [1]
  • 2010-Jul-29: The XEmacs programmer's text editor. The Emacs Wiki. Ymacs is an Emacs-like editor that runs in a browser. [1026]
  • 2010-Jul-29: A recommendation for xmind, an outlining / idea-mapping tool. [9336]
  • 2010-Jul-27: Boilsoft makes a number of video tools, including a video splitter and joiner and VD creation software. [9328] [1]
  • 2010-Jul-22: The source code to MacPaint has been made available. [9317]
  • 2010-Jul-16: Slashdot discusses error-proofing data using Reed-Solomon Codes. ICE ECC is another implementation of this technique for files and directories. [6626]
  • 2010-Jul-09: Octave is a Gnu package (see here) like Matlab for working with mathematics. SciLab may be another. Maxima (a reimplementation of the old Macsyma)is another. Design Science makes MathType, which is an upgrade to Equation Editor component in Microsoft Word, and some other things, including the ability to create MathML.
    [1075]
  • 2010-May-06: The Guacamole is an effort to create a VNC client that runs in a canvas object within an HTML 5 web browser. [9105]
  • 2010-Apr-21: The Lightworks Video Editor will be moving to open source. [9080]
  • 2010-Apr-09: FreeMind is mind-mapping (thought organizing) software. Sort of a Pensive for Muggles. [9067]
  • 2010-Apr-01: VirtualBox is a machine virtualization package, which is free for personal use (and available for commercial use too). With it you can install multiple guest machines onto a host machine and run them at the same time. So if you are running Windows XP and want to play with Linux (or even Windows 3.1!) you can now have some fun. It gets some coverage here and here. Another short note from a satisfied user. [6925]
  • 2010-Mar-19: A retrospective on the life of ObjectStore. [9029]
  • 2010-Feb-10: Microsoft has made a few updates to the Sysinternals tools, including adding real-time TCP/UDP monitoring to ProcessMonitor and Desktops to allow for multiple desktops on Windows. Slashdot discusses some other tools that Sysinternals provides: disk2vhd, diskmon and a tool that lets you write ISO images to USB sticks and make them bootable. [6975]
  • 2010-Jan-27: An overview of virtualization software: VMware, Citrix XENServer and Windows Hyper-V. [8941]
  • 2010-Jan-27: CrystalDiskInfo is a S.M.A.R.T. disk monitoring utility which has support for SSD disks. [8938]
  • 2010-Jan-12: An interesting twist in the application of virtualization software: Iomega's v.Clone turns you computer into a portable, bootable virtual image, so you can take its spirit with you, use it on a foreign computer and then when you return synchronize the changes back. [8918]
  • 2010-Jan-10: The OpenShot non-Linear Video Editor for Linux made it to 1.0 by the end of 2009. [8908] [1]
  • 2010-Jan-09: Intelliremote looks like a good package to make remote control of a HTPC somewhat more comfortable. [8907]
  • 2010-Jan-08: 15 free and useful programs, includes a recommendation for Malwarebytes (a spyware removal tool), doPDF (a PDF file creator that installs as a printer) and xVideoServiceThief (a YouTube video downloader). [8901]
  • 2010-Jan-08: A look back at the Amiga along with some of the active projects for it in 2010. I still miss custom screens, SMART_REFRESH and windows that do not pop to the front as soon as you click in them. [8894]
  • 2009-Dec-24: Inpaint from Teorex is a tool for removing unwanted objects from photos and replacing them with background textures. [8865] [1]
  • 2009-Dec-16: A look at Reveal is video editing software that has support for up to 1080P video and has some Cuda GPU acceleration of preview and save functions. [8796] [1]
  • 2009-Nov-22: Slashdot discusses solutions for remote PC desktop access, including mentions of LogMeIn. [8782]
  • 2009-Nov-06: Firefox can be configured to allow multiple copies running at the same time (with different profiles) on the same account/machine. A good guide to doing this is here. [8722]
  • 2009-Oct-27: Microsoft is finally opening up the Outlook PST file format. [8679]
  • 2009-Oct-23: Slashdot discusses desktop search engines for use with network drives. [8649]
  • 2009-Oct-23: Lexar's Image Rescue 4 is software for recovering deleted photos from flash devices. [8648] [1]
  • 2009-Oct-21: The World of Goo is a remarkable dynamic puzzle game, somewhat like the classic Lemmings. In October'09 they did an experimental sales promotion, discussed here on Slashdot. [8637]
  • 2009-Oct-19: AmigaOS continues to struggle on, it looks like the last lawsuit over it may finally be put to rest. [8630]
  • 2009-Oct-09: A free alternative to Microsoft Visio. [8610]
  • 2009-Oct-09: PhotoSketch is a tool that will search for and combine elements from photographs in accordance with your hand drawn sketch instructions. Discussed here on Slashdot and mentioned here on Gizmodo. [8609] [1]
  • 2009-Oct-09: Photo Plus, a basic image editing package from FreeSerifSoftware is available for free (the older version 6) or as a low cost download (the new version 8). In Oct'09 version X3 got reviewed, this looks like it has a good extractor tool to allow for easy extraction of a portion of the image. [3923] [1]
  • 2009-Oct-02: OpenShot is a project to bring a non-linear video editor to Linux, it makes use of Python too. [8594] [1]
  • 2009-Sep-29: The seam carving technology that appeared in 2007 has been commercialized and should be available for purchase in early 2008. This is now (almost - April'08) available. The VSO Seam Carving software was released Oct'09. [4955] [1]
  • 2009-Sep-28: Photomizer is fully automated photo image enhancement software. [8570] [1]
  • 2009-Sep-22: POWDER is a Rogue-like game, built for the Gameboy DS and later ported to other platforms. [8546]
  • 2009-Sep-19: The Haiku Project has finally released its BeOS like operating system. [8533]
  • 2009-Sep-12: The Pro Tools Essential Bundles from Avid Technology combing music composition software with some hardware, one package includes a 49 note velocity-sensitive midi keyboard. [8512] [1]
  • 2009-Sep-10: vReveal is image processing software for video editing, it even makes use of CUDA to speed things up. [8500] [1]
  • 2009-Sep-05: TeamViewer (which is free for non-commercial, personal use) might be a useful tool when called on to assist a relative with their PC problems. [8479]
  • 2009-Sep-04: A lot of companies use the ffmpeg software as the brains behind their video conversion products, and a lot are violating the license terms. [8461]
  • 2009-Aug-28: Topaz Adjust is an image enhancement tool, for manipulation of exposure, detail and color balance. [8434] [1]
  • 2009-Aug-26: Virtual Bread Board is a simulation and modeling tool aimed at electronic and micro-controller experiments. [8421]
  • 2009-Aug-20: TinyCAD is a program for drawing circuit diagrams. [8410]
  • 2009-Aug-20: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a Rogue-like dungeon game. [8409]
  • 2009-Jul-27: AKVIS Enhancer is an image correction and enhancement program. [8332] [1]
  • 2009-Jul-17: A web site that will convert a set of overlapping photographs into a 3D model has been launched. [8296] [1]
  • 2009-Jul-03: A Java x86 PC emulator has been extended to allow x86 code to be run in a web browser. [8225]
  • 2009-Jul-03: XeTeX is a TeX system that includes support for UNICODE (UTF-8) characters and modern font technologies like OpenType. It can be used with something like the Gentium typeface. LyX is another TeX/LaTeX system, this has support for a word-processor like display and you can even embed SVG graphics. [8217]
  • 2009-Jun-05: A discussion about the codec industry with Dan Marlin from the Matroska Foundation. [8089] [1]
  • 2009-Jun-02: Slashdot discusses data recovery software. Suggestions include: [8061] [1] [2]
  • 2009-May-19: Using Google Earth as an environment for a Ship Simulation game. Perhaps this will lead to a massively multi-player conquest game like RISK? [8000]
  • 2009-May-15: Snapter is an image processing package that provides some automatic de-warping, straightening and cropping functions to support digitizing of books by taking photographs of their pages. Google has recently patented a similar idea. [7984] [1]
  • 2009-May-13: Eight little free photo editing packages. [7969]
  • 2009-May-11: DOSBox a project to allow DOS games to run under newer operating systems. Even in 2009 this is very popular and will soon be getting an update. [1061]
  • 2009-Apr-22: disco is a framework for Map-Reduce distributed application processing written in Erlang, it has the ability to run jobs written in Python. [7898]
  • 2009-Mar-22: SUN's VirtualBox is an x86 virtual machine system capable of hosting 32 or 64 Linux, Windows XP, Vista, 98, OpenSolaris or even DOS. It gets discussed here on Slashdot. I ran into problems with installing Windows 2000 Pro in VirtualBox 2.1.4, what would happen is that the installation would work up to the point you are asked if the machine should be in a workgroup or domain, at this point pressing "Next" should take you to the setting up windows phase, instead the machine just rebooted and that part of the install would just repeat. After reading the manual (imagine that!) for a bit I found section "11.2.2 Windows 2000 installation failures", which suggests issuing the command: 
    VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/Config/IRQDelay" 1
    I shut down VirtualBox, opened a DOS window, changed directory to "C:\Program Files\Sun\xVM VirtualBox" and then issued the command replacing "VMNAME" with the name of my virtual machine. Then I restarted VirtualBox and continued the installation. This time the install completed properly. [6610]
  • 2009-Mar-19: FotoInsight Designer is a photo book application that integrates with Flickr, Facebook, Picassa and the geotagging site locr. [7745] [1]
  • 2009-Mar-12: OpenSSH is widely available (particularly in the UNIX world), an implementation of it for Windows which includes a server mode is copssh. [7719]
  • 2009-Mar-09: Virtualization software is even allowing IBM's mainframes to run Windows desktops. [7711]
  • 2009-Mar-09: The state of the homebrew gaming scene in 2009. Discussed here on Slashdot. [7707]
  • 2009-Mar-06: ScummVM is a virtual machine emulation system designed for running old graphic adventure computer games, discussed here on Slashdot. [7690]
  • 2009-Mar-03: VMware MVP brings virtualization to mobile devices like the N800. [7683]
  • 2009-Mar-01: Technology Review takes a look at the face recognition software that is now a part of iPhoto and Google's Picasa (online only). [7665] [1]
  • 2009-Feb-24: MayaVi a 3D data visualization package for Python, the second version adds support for numpy arrays. This is being included with the Enthought Python system. [172] [1] [2] [3]
  • 2009-Feb-23: The Xen virtual server platform (from Citrix) is now being made available in a free version. [7626]
  • 2009-Feb-20: Three web-accessible calendars you can install on your intranet. [7613]
  • 2009-Feb-18: How Virtualization Improves Software Development is a handy check list of reasons why you should consider using virtualization. [7605]
  • 2009-Feb-13: BoxeeBox is a netowrk video download and display system based on Linux. [7582] [1]
  • 2009-Feb-13: miro is an web TV application that is at least partially written in Python. In early 2009 Miro made it to version 2.0. [4153] [1]
  • 2009-Feb-02: The TeX Live distribution of TeX. [7521]
  • 2009-Jan-24: Photos on TV3 is a slide show creation package that will provide some support for Google Earth views. [7485] [1]
  • 2009-Jan-22: Why LaTeX is still being used by some authors. This note looks at using reStructuredText. [7478]
  • 2009-Jan-21: Bart PE can be used to make custom Windows boot CDs and even a Windows Live CD. [7472]
  • 2009-Jan-17: NTFS Undelete is a package that can recover recently deleted files from an NTFS formatted partition. This appears to be written (source is available) in a mixture of Python and Delphi and the Python code appears to do the disk inspection. [7452]
  • 2008-Dec-25: Why the Emacs editor is still the favorite of many programmers. [7383]
  • 2008-Dec-16: Slashdot discusses great games to put on a free PC. One reader suggested looking at the Wikipedia List of freeware games. [7350]
  • 2008-Dec-16: Adventure game interfaces and puzzle theory. [7349]
  • 2008-Nov-24: Visual Similarity is software that finds photographs that have similar content. [7252] [1]
  • 2008-Nov-21: EtherPad and SubEthaEdit are web-based applications that allow several people to edit the same document at the same time. Discussed here on Slashdot. [7249]
  • 2008-Nov-18: I have seen Ontrack's EasyRecovery Pro software used to recover files from an NTFS partition that somehow went bad and that XP and Vista would only recognize as "RAW". [7231]
  • 2008-Nov-07: TakeNote is a cross-platform note taking and organizing system, also available here on PyPI. [7166]
  • 2008-Nov-05: AROS is an API-compatible reimplementation of the Amiga operating system. [7158]
  • 2008-Oct-31: Hugin is a free panoramic photo editor available on a number of platforms, it is reviewed here. [7128] [1]
  • 2008-Oct-29: XDepth 48 is an attempt at moving JPEGs to 16 bits per color (i.e. 48 bits per pixel). This would be a very good thing as it would allow camera manufacturers to build systems to capture a greater dynamic range (without having to resort to RAW formats). [7116] [1]
  • 2008-Oct-26: Slashdot discusses current choices in free anti-virus software. [7098] [1]
  • 2008-Oct-01: Microsoft's AutoCollage 2008 will take a bunch of your photos and build a collage of them. [6955] [1]
  • 2008-Oct-01: Microsoft's Pro Photo Tools 2 can view and convert RAW images and geotag photographs. [6954] [1]
  • 2008-Sep-24: Microsoft's Image Composite Editor can be used to quickly build panoramas from separate images. It appears to do a nice job, even on images that were taken hand-held and at odd angles and with foreground objects. [6911] [1]
  • 2008-Sep-11: Wuala is a store your data in the cloud type service that allows you to increase your space by trading some of your local hard drive's space for cloud space. Slashdot discusses some of the privacy and security implications of this here. [6836]
  • 2008-Sep-09: iLovePhotos is a Mac software package that uses facial recognition to manage your photo collection. [6820] [1]
  • 2008-Sep-04: Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a program to recover photos that have been lost, due to deletion or formatting. Might be worth remembering in case you format a flash card by accident. [6792] [1]
  • 2008-Sep-04: Google's Picassa photo sharing site now offers facial recognition. [6790] [1]
  • 2008-Aug-31: Tiled is a tile map editor that can be used with various tiled map style games. It is free software written in Java. [6768]
  • 2008-Aug-29: secovault is an off-site backup service that uses Amazon's S3 system for storage. [6758]
  • 2008-Aug-09: 7-Zip is a free zip archiver utility, it includes packing/unpacking of: ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR formats as well as unpacking of: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS formats. To use it to unpack a multi-part RAR archive set, just select the file that ends in ".rar" and then hit the extract button (the other parts should automatically be included). [4388]
  • 2008-Aug-08: Fantastic Contraption, an online physics puzzle game. [6652]
  • 2008-Jul-28: ComputerWorld takes a look at a number of backup packages. [6596]
  • 2008-Jul-25: A cry for a way of doing better backups that asks for a non-proprietary system that would use a NAS drive as the backup media and allow the user to browse back in time for earlier versions of files. This is something arcvback can do. [6580] [1]
  • 2008-Jul-22: The MKVToolnix package contains a number of command line and GUI tools for working with MKV files. [6559] [1]
  • 2008-Jul-22: The LightBox Advanced Digital Image Editor comes in two versions: a free one and a $19.95 plus version with more features. [6557] [1]
  • 2008-Jul-14: Adeona is an open source project (GPLv2 license) to develop a system for tracking the location of a lost or stolen laptop to assist in its return. This system uses a public distributed storage server to receive the location updates, but the location updates are encrypted so that only the true owner can access their contents (protecting his privacy). Discussed here on Slashdot. [6517] [1]
  • 2008-Jul-13: Graphviz is graph visualization software, if you have generate a files containing the elements of some graph (such as a flow chart or network diagram) it can produce a graphical version of it in a number of different ways (such as a PNG image, SVG or PostScript). A windows version of it is called WinGraphviz. XDot is an interactive viewer (written in Python) for graphs written in the Graphviz dot language. [6242]
  • 2008-Jul-03: PING is a live Linux ISO project that supports the Partimage backup utility. [6483]
  • 2008-Jun-26: TinEye searches the web for images of similar content. [6442] [1]
  • 2008-Jun-23: Numpty Physics, a simple graphical physics game. [6413]
  • 2008-Jun-20: FireFox version 3 added colour management for photos with embedded ICC profiles, here is how to enable it. [6384] [1]
  • 2008-Jun-20: RansenScan is a package that allows multiple photos to be placed and scanned at the same time, it then auto-detects and extracts the individual photos to separate files. [6383] [1]
  • 2008-Jun-16: Dia is a free diagram tool for Gnome that would be a good alternative to Visio, it can also be run under Windows using the GTK+ environment.. [6353]
  • 2008-Jun-15: Nasty tricks with complex email (including remote images, javascript etc.) allows for automatic notification of receipt. [6349]
  • 2008-Jun-15: In June'08 Intel showed a real-time ray-traced version of Enemy Territory on a 4 processor (each processor a 4-core chip) system. So real-time ray-tracing will be a reality for practical systems within the next three years (of course if NVidia started to set its GPUs onto this task it would probably be a reality today). [6348]
  • 2008-Jun-13: The digitalFAQ.com site has a number of guides to digital video, I used this one to convert VCD to DVD. In my case I was able to take a simpler approach, all the necessary data was in the first track, so I just used the Windows File Explorer to copy the *.DAT files from the CD's MPEGAV directory to my hard disk. Then I renamed them to *.MPG and verified that they really were MPEG-1 video files. Then made a regular DVD out of them using Nero 8 to build a simple DVD table of contents, transcode the MPEG-1 files and finally burn them to a DVD. I did this so I could play an old VCD in a current DVD player as the only device I have left that can play VCDs is an old Commodore CD32 game console. [6332] [1]
  • 2008-Jun-09: A discussion of Photoshop's blending math can be found here with more details here. [6307] [1] [2]
  • 2008-Jun-06: The top five antivirus applications for the PC. [6295] [1]
  • 2008-May-27: How to get multiple installations of Firefox and Thunderbird (and probably Mozilla/Seamonkey too) to share the same configuration and data files. The need to do this can happen if you have multiple boot environments on a single computer and you want to be able to get at all your email information from any of the different environments. This might also work on network drives, but then you also have the potential problem of what happens if you run several copies of Thunderbird at the same time on different machines. [6240]
  • 2008-May-21: fotox is a free, open-source, photo retouching application for Linux. It includes panoramic stitching and high dynamic range functions as well as general exposure and colour correction tools. [6206] [1]
  • 2008-May-15: ViewGenie Photo Explorer can build a map from photos of a scene using AI processing to match up elements. [6164] [1]
  • 2008-May-13: The next computer clock related bug is the Year 2038 Bug. [6153]
  • 2008-May-10: Oolite is a implementation of the old Elite space game for Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux. [6091]
  • 2008-May-08: Adobe has submitted their DNG file format as a possible ISO standard. Lets hope they have sorted out any patent issues with it. [6070] [1]
  • 2008-May-05: Thunderbird can be configured to automatically add custom headers to the email you send, this can be useful for spam avoidance. [6048]
  • 2008-May-03: XBMC is an open-source media-player package that originated with the XBox, now it is being ported to run under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. [6035] [1]
  • 2008-May-02: Where does Microsoft Outlook keep its data files? Something you need to know if configuring a backup system or if you are moving from one computer to another and want to move your email collection too. [6028]
  • 2008-May-01: Adobe is opening up the SWF and FLV file formats. [6015]
  • 2008-Apr-30: EverNote is thought tracking and organization software with both a desktop and a web component to allow you to get at your "extra brain" from anywhere. Here is a review of it. It has a rather neat feature of being able to scan your photographs for included text and then being able to search on this text. [6009]
  • 2008-Apr-18: nLite is a slipstreaming tool for Windows XP. This is very useful for producing a customized version of your Windows XP installation disk so that it contains the XP service pack and machine specific drivers of your choice. You can also use it to preload the fields in some of the installation dialogs with settings appropriate to your needs. [5847] [1]
  • 2008-Apr-15: BullZeye 3 is a standalone image colour corrector package, it also supports batch processing. It is based on technology from PictoColor Corporation who make a standalone package called iCorrect EditLab Pro, which looks very similar to the BullZeye 3 package, yet sells for half the price. There is a demo version (fully functional but puts watermarks into the saved output) of EditLab that you can download to test, I played with this a bit and found that it worked quite well, as long as there was something white or grey in the frame to base the colour cast correction on. In Apr'08 PictoColor started to beta test an online version of iCorrect, it's not clear at this point if they intend to charge for this service. [2509] [1]
  • 2008-Apr-07: Adobe has put a free version of Photoshop Express on the web. This allows you to do some photo editing and sharing through your browser and get enticed into buying more from Adobe. It's probably also a way for Adobe to test the waters of software rentals and see what features are really used. The first version of the license agreement for this granted Adobe rights to your photos, because of complaints this may be revised. The license agreement has been revised, the new terms start 10-April-2008. [5342] [1]
  • 2008-Apr-01: Ethereal, a network protocl analyzer that uses WinPcap. In June'06 this changed its name to WireShark. Slashdot discusses the release of WireShark 1.0. [1138]
  • 2008-Mar-26: ImageMagick, is a free image manipulation program it is described in: The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick, by Michael Still, ISBN 1590595904. Some resources related to ImageMagick: [1143]
  • 2008-Mar-21: Ovolab's Geophoto 2 is a photo-geotagging application. [5317] [1]
  • 2008-Mar-18: bitvise has a number of SSH products for Windows, including Tunnelier. [5301] [1]
  • 2008-Mar-11: The TeX Users Group has lots of information about TeX, LaTeX and related type setting packages. There has even been an attempt to make TeX usable from within a Python program: PyTex. [5256]
  • 2008-Mar-03: Microsoft's StartKey (which might appear in late 2008) is an attempt to allow users to carry their Windows environment with them from computer to computer on a flash device. Perhaps a better approach would be to boot and run the whole thing from the flash device? [5209] [1]
  • 2008-Feb-25: Phun is a 2D physics simulator, it gets some mention here including some YouTube references. [5153] [1]
  • 2008-Feb-24: Microsoft has announced a new strategy to embrace the open source world - and smother it to death under 30000 pages of useful documentation! Plus they are going to let people use their patents for reasonable fees (or even nil if its being used in a non-commercial way). One response to this calls it: don't compete and Microsoft won't sue and points out that it is unclear what is meant by "non-commercial distribution". [5130] [1]
  • 2008-Feb-20: Microsoft has released documentation on their binary file formats for Office. Joel On Software has a good discussion of how the complexity of these formats developed and what one might do to work around it. [5124]
  • 2008-Feb-15: Blender is a 3D rendering package, now with raytracing. There's even access to it through Python. A tutorial on character animation with Blender. [1068]
  • 2008-Feb-05: Phatch is a photo batch processor (home page) with a wxPython frontend, useful for resizing, rotating, applying watermarks... [5051] [1] [2]
  • 2008-Jan-28: Stanford has a 3-d modeling system that builds 3-d models from regular photographs. [5007] [1]
  • 2008-Jan-18: CorrectPhoto 3.0 from PictoColor is a colour correction package, a free trial version is available. [4954] [1]
  • 2008-Jan-18: The possibility of using ray tracing for interactive game graphics is discussed here. This is something I have been expecting for some time, it appears that once computer speeds get to the 100G flops point this should be achievable (for scenes of some degree of complexity). [4953]
  • 2008-Jan-17: WindowsGames has a number of games (simple arcade style and board type), including versions that run on various hand held devices. [4719]
  • 2008-Jan-15: The first Y2K38 bugs may show up January 19th 2008 (30 years before the actual drop dead date for the classic C-library time() function). [4707]
  • 2008-Jan-13: The source code for SimCity has been released under GPLv3 - the open version will be called Micropolis. It has been partially rewritten so that its now a mix of C++ and Python. This will be part of the OLPC project too. [4665] [1]
  • 2008-Jan-12: A comparison of various panoramic photo stitching packages. [4663] [1] [2]
  • 2008-Jan-10: VideoSpin is a free video editing application from Pinnacle that is supposed to be faster and easier to use than normal editing applications. [4632] [1]
  • 2008-Jan-08: Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 will disable support for many older file formats. It looks like this mainly affects the ability to open Lotus and Quattro files, plus PowerPoint files before PowerPoint97, which does not sound like too much of a problem. However, there is also some restriction (see KB938810) on opening older Word files which appears to be to prevent opening of files created by Word 5 and older, as Word 6, 95, and 97 should still open this is probably not too important - Word really did not displace WordPerfect until about Word 6. In a follow up on this, Microsoft has corrected its reason for doing this, and they now say that its not the file formats that are insecure, rather its the code that reads them. [4573]
  • 2008-Jan-06: NewTech Infosystems makes CD burner and backup software (including drive imaging and shadow backup) [1007]
  • 2008-Jan-01: SftpDrive allows you to drive map an SSH server as a Windows drive to allow applications within Windows to use files on the SSH server as if they were just on simple network shared drives. [4567] [1]
  • 2007-Dec-31: SportTracks is a replacement for Garmin's TrainingCenter software, it is thought by some to be much better (and after playing with it a bit, I would have to agree). It includes a view of your workout routes superimposed over Google street maps or satellite images and it has easy to use integration with Google Earth. [4542] [1]
  • 2007-Dec-29: Could MP3 encoding be causing a significant loss in audio quality after all? [4537] [1]
  • 2007-Dec-29: Asymptote is a vector graphics language for technical drawings. [4536]
  • 2007-Dec-23: GNU's Octave version 3.0 has been released. Octave is a numerical computing environment that seeks to be MATLAB compatible. [4512] [1]
  • 2007-Dec-19: PhotoPerfect is image editing software that can handle 16bit TIFF and RAW files. [4468] [1]
  • 2007-Dec-15: DBAN - Darik's Boot and Nuke is a standalone boot disk tool that allows you to wipe the drive in a computer. This is also useful when you are cleaning a drive before adding it into a Linux software RAID array. [4433] [1]
  • 2007-Dec-15: paint.net is a free image and photo editing package, originally designed as a replacement for the old Microsoft Paint. [4432] [1]
  • 2007-Dec-04: photology, is software that looks at the contents of your photographs to identify real world shapes in them (including faces) to allow you to search a collection of photographs by content. [4391] [1]
  • 2007-Nov-19: PCMag reviews the Epson Perfection V500 Photo, this is an LED illuminated flatbed with film and negative scanning capability. This can scan 4 slides at a time and includes the Digital ICE dust and scratch removal system. A slide scan takes about 77 seconds, but with ICE enabled this rises to 150 seconds. [4173] [1]
  • 2007-Nov-14: picnik is a web-based photo editing package, [4149] [1]
  • 2007-Nov-13: MIT has released the source code to the old MULTICS operating system. As an undergraduate student at the University of Calgary I used one of these in the early to mid-80s, then as a graduate student enjoyed the privilege of moving to UNIX on SUN and VAX systems (which were so much faster). Still, there were some things MULTICS could do better at the time (like have really, really, really long device names). I can't see why someone won't be able to brew up a hardware emulator for the old MULTICS CPU and disk system that will allow you to run it on a modern PC. [4143]
  • 2007-Nov-12: SAGE is open source software for mathematics. It offers functions similar to those found in Magma, Maple, Mathematica and MATLAB. [4068] [1]
  • 2007-Nov-08: A free game called Ping Ball [4056]
  • 2007-Nov-07: Chris Lomont has a number of nice looking screen savers (lots of variations on the Mandelbrot curve) and games (particularly puzzle type ones) here. [4044]
  • 2007-Nov-04: FreeSerifSoftware has a number of packages, including image editing, desktop publishing and vector drawing. They offer the current version at a low price and an older earlier version for free. [3924]
  • 2007-Nov-02: Vegas Pro video editing suite makes good use of dual and quad core CPUs. [3759] [1]
  • 2007-Nov-01: EXIF Pilot is software that allows you to view and edit EXIF data. [3909] [1]
  • 2007-Oct-29: VirtualDubMpg2 adds MPEG2 support to VirtualDub. [3761] [1]
  • 2007-Oct-29: VirtualDub is a free video capture and processing utility. [3760] [1]
  • 2007-Oct-29: HandBrake is open-sourced DVD to MPEG4 video conversion software. It is capable of exploiting dual and quad core CPUs (see this article where it is used to benchmark the QX9650 Penryn CPU). [3758] [1]
  • 2007-Oct-26: Humanized has some interesting applications, including an application to allow embedding of LaTeX generated equations in other documents (including email) and Map Anywhere which allows you to embed Google maps in things. [3514]
  • 2007-Oct-22: Soundsnap.com is a site dedicated to sound samples, animals, birds, noises, instruments and even button clicks. [3498] [1]
  • 2007-Oct-06: Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 gets more features, but still could be made more user-friendly. This version added panorama image assembly (which compares well with Ulead PhotoImpact) and the new Group Shot feature is designed to allow one to make a single photo containing the best elements out of several group poses. This version also has support for producing photo books, which need to be uploaded to Kodak for printing. There are some other places that do photo books: Picaboo and ShutterFly. [2600] [1]
  • 2007-Oct-04: Photo Story 3, is an add-on download for Windows XP, with some photo album and DVD burning capabilities. [2537] [1]
  • 2007-Oct-04: ACDSee 10 Photo Manager has some new image processing tools, including shadow detail enhancement. [2530] [1]
  • 2007-Oct-01: Microsoft is going to allow PC makers to offer downgrades to Windows XP for those clients who don't want to switch to Vista, a similar program was in effect for a while during the transition from Windows 2K to XP. The OEM licenses for XP are still supposed to run out at the end of January 2008, and it looks like they will be extended as well. [2239]
  • 2007-Sep-26: The VICE emulator, this is an emulator for the old C64, C120, VIC20 and PET computers allowing you to run old code from those on just about any modern machine. Now, if only you could read those old 5.25 inch 170K floppies! [2256]
  • 2007-Sep-26: Excel 2007 has a strange multiplication bug, try multiplying 850 by 77.1 (the correct answer should be 65355) and see if you get the incorrect answer of 100000. It's almost like someone went out of their way to plant this in Excel (especially as older versions do not have the same problem). [2255]
  • 2007-Sep-19: PuTTY is a free Telnet/SSH client, useful for remotely maintaining systems over the internet, it also has the ability to route connections on behalf of other applications such as Firefox and Thunderbird. Another short tutorial is here. [2146]
  • 2007-Sep-19: Mozilla is creating a new Internet Mail company, and the have hired David Ascher to head it up. [2220]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Bookworm, sort of a solitaire version of scrabble [1176]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A discussion of the Microsoft Office 2007 .bin file format
     [1175]
  • 2007-Aug-30: SnapSync from FutureDial will synchronize data between your cell phone and computer [1174]
  • 2007-Aug-30: BitPim is a program that allows you to view and manipulate data on many CDMA phones [1173]
  • 2007-Aug-30: LyX, a GUI frontend to TeX [1172]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Tuning your Firefox with the about:config system [1171]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Should software for work take design cues from video games? Discussed here on Slashdot. [1170]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Slashdot discusses speach recognition packages [1169]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Slashdot reviews: Windows PowerShell in Action, by Bruce Payette, ISBN 1932394907. [1168]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Mathematica version 6 was released in May'07, this is a remarkable piece of software for those who are doing mathematical or numerical research. Discussed here on Slashdot. The Wolfram Demonstrations project is and interesting place to look for examples of its use. [1167]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Mixing the Lightning calendaring extension for Thunderbird with the Google Calendar [1166]
  • 2007-Aug-30: VioLet Composer, open-source music composition software, this works with both PCM and wavelet sound processing. Discussed here on Slashdot. Another similar thing is modplug. [1165]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Docvert, a web service that converts MSWord format doc files into Oasis OpenDocument and HTML, behind the scenes it is using OpenOffice and Abiword to do the conversions. [1164]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Why upgrading to Office 2007 might be a bad idea [1163]
  • 2007-Aug-30: OpenDocument is now (Dec'06) an official standard [1162]
  • 2007-Aug-30: CoolUtils.com makes Total Image Converter and a host of other file conversion and manipulation utilities (video, audio, office documents, PDF, ...) [1161]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Google's "Slack" is a software distribution system that they use to distribute software across their servers [1160]
  • 2007-Aug-30: matroska.org, the home of the open standard audio/video container called Matroska - usually files of this type are given an .mkv extension. [1159]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows 2003 Server, the html version from Google's cache. This talks a bit about additional registry settings that might need applying to Windows to make a gigabit LAN really perform well. This sort of tuning is also discussed here. [1158]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Test TCP (pcattcp.exe) is another port to Windows of the ttcp UNIX application (Microsoft uses its own version called NTttcp for a lot of network performance benchmarking), its useful for doing quick sanity tests on network performance issues (such as figuring out if your switch and NIC are agreeing on full versus half duplex), its very easy to set up (no install appart from copying a couple of files to the machines under test is needed) and quick to run. [1157]
  • 2007-Aug-30: IsoBuster, is a utility that will allow you to extract files from within CD and DVD ISO image files, among other things. [1156]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Xara Xtreme is a vector drawing package (for graphic artists) that is available in a low-cost ($79) Windows version and a open-sourced Linux version [1155]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Momento, is a package for making DVD movies out of still photographs, it includes the ability to add audio tracks, transitions between slides and simulate motion effects. [1154]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Mozilla's Thunderbird Mail FAQ answers some questions about backing up and migrating email files between versions. The format of the actual mail files and folders has not changed in a long time, so you can quite easily bring in files from previous versions (even old versions of Netscape) for use. Moving address books between profiles is discussed here. Backing up and restoring a Thunderbird profile (which contains all the settings and data for a user) is pretty stright forward, and is discussed here. the idea is to find the user's profile directory and copy it (when Thunderbird is not running) then to restore it one just needs to put it on a convenient drive and change the profiles.ini file to point to the restored directory.
     [1153]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Inkscape, an open-source, SVG-based, vector graphics editor, runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux [1152]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A listing of a number of free disk erasure tools (and links to some of the commerical packages) [1151]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Eraser, is a secure file, directory, free space and entire disk erasing (wiping) package. [1150]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Engadget examines the best videoconferencing software. [1149]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A Slashdot artical discussing free virus scanners. [1148]
  • 2007-Aug-30: SketchUp, in Apr'06 was bought by Google and a free personal version has been released. This is a 3D model design package that offers integration with GoogleEarth. [1147]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The Freenet project has introduced (Apr'06) a new version that includes a more stealthy approach to setting up peers. [1146]
  • 2007-Aug-30: AjaxWrite, a word processor delivered over the web and run in your web browser using Ajax, discussed here on Slashdot
    [1145]
  • 2007-Aug-30: CutePDF is a free PDF writer. Pdf995 offers a fairly low cost solution for PDF creation. [1144]
  • 2007-Aug-30: SCTP is a new transport layer protocol (like UDP and TCP) but with advantages over both (including support for multi-homed devices and redundancy and failover), discussed here on Slashdot. [1142]
  • 2007-Aug-30: XDesk is a multiple virtual destop for Windows, allowing you to have several different workspaces, each with its own set of windows open at the same time. Even works with multiple monitor PCs, for those who really like to work on a lot of things at once. This Slashdot artical discusses some other alternatives.
     [1141]
  • 2007-Aug-30: XULRunner, this is a runtime package that can host XUL+XPCOM applications. There is a tutorial here. [1140]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Slashdot discusses ways to set up SSH tunnels [1139]
  • 2007-Aug-30: www.winpcap.org the home for WinPcap, the Windows Packet Capture Library [1137]
  • 2007-Aug-30: AVSMedia sells video format conversion software, as well as a pretty decent video editing package (which includes the ability to include still images and do simulated pans and zooms within them). They have a fully functional try-before-buy version that just puts a logo in the middle of the output, so its easy to test to see if it will work for you.
     [1136]
  • 2007-Aug-30: DivX Codec's for Windows and MAC are available here [1135]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Avast! makes a number of anti-virus products that get good reviews, including a free for home non-commercial use package.
    [1134]
  • 2007-Aug-30: CNet suggests dumping Norton and moving to Trend PC-cillin for virus scanning and protection [1133]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Microsoft has a list of all the companies that partner with it in the area of Virus control. [1132]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Rounding algorithms, boring but surprisingly diverse [1131]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Portable OpenOffice is an installation of OpenOffice on a USB drive that allows you to run the software from the USB drive without having to install anything (discussed here on Slashdot). [1130]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A Slashdot review of The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference, by Charles Kozierok, ISBN 159327047X. [1129]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The Glide file sharing service went live 1-Dec-05 [1128]
  • 2007-Aug-30: How-to: Stream almost anything using VLC, from Engadget. VLC is a cross-platform media player and streaming server [1127]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Text-only gaming is still alive and kicking [1126]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The Zimbra Collaboration Suite, is an Exchange replacement [1125]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A Slashdot review of: Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition, Debra Cameron, James Elliott, Marc Loy, Eric Raymond & Bill Rosenblatt, ISBN 0596006489. [1124]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A good collection of links to useful software and documentation from MrBass [1123]
  • 2007-Aug-30: SeaMonkey, a project to continue the development of the Mozilla browser [1122]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Anvil Studio, is a music editing package that has a free core and a number of commercial add on modules [1121]
  • 2007-Aug-30: DAZ Studio, free 3D animation software from DAZ [1119]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Slashdot discusses the email infrastructure for 1 Million accounts (that's going to be a lot of spam!) [1118]
  • 2007-Aug-30: WinRAR is another file archiver and compressor program, similar in function to WinZIP [1117]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The state of Massachusetts is mandating that all file formats be open [1116]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A review of 29 structured drawing programs [1115]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Online Pokerbots may take over the game [1114]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A list of programs that can be run directly from a USB drive. [1113]
  • 2007-Aug-30: ABC Amber Conversion & Merging Software makes a large variety of file format conversion programs, including some quite specialized ones (such as PDF to image file conversion). [1112]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Jecology, a simple ecology simulator somewhat reminiscent of the original game of life [1111]
  • 2007-Aug-30: VirtualDub is a free video editing package [1110]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Trolltech releases QT 4.0, a cross-platform GUI development toolkit, discussed here on Slashdot. [1109]
  • 2007-Aug-30: DocuDesk makes a low-cost PDF writer [1108]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Gnumeric a free spreadsheet for UNIX and Windows [1107]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Mar'05: BitTorrent version 4 has been released [1106]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Exeem, a P2P system based on BitTorrent has gone into public beta test (Jan'05), see BitTorrent.net for more links. Based on this artical one probably would be advised to try eXeem Lite instead. [1105]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A review of Microsoft's first anti-spyware tool [1104]
  • 2007-Aug-30: ZoneMinder is a security camera monitoring application for Linux [1103]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Google launches their desktop search engine, great news, but what is Google's business plan here? Are they going to supply Google Adds to your desktop? Or is it to get you used to running Google software so that you're ready to buy their next big thing when it comes out? It also seems unlikely to me that this implements all the algorithms of the full web searcher, otherwise its just a matter of time before its disassembled and Google's secrets are known to all. One possible issue with this is that it subverts windows security.
    [1102]
  • 2007-Aug-30: NASA's WorldWind a viewer that allows you to zoom into anywhere in the world from outerspace, discussed here [1101]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The VOIP Insurrection another VOIP artical is discussed here [1100]
  • 2007-Aug-30: You Don't Know Jack About VOIP is discussed here [1099]
  • 2007-Aug-30: IrrLicht is an open, free, platform independent high performance 3D rendering system, discussed here on Slashdot [1098]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Sybase is releasing a free version of their database software [1097]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Using a Gmail account to host a blog site [1096]
  • 2007-Aug-30: AbiWord versus MS Word a detailled comparision [1095]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Liberated Games is a site that is dedicated to games that used to be commercial but have since been released for public distribution [1094]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Coral P2P cache [1093]
  • 2007-Aug-30: 321 the makers of CVD copying software have been wiped out. But DVD Shrink are following on in their footsteps. [1092]
  • 2007-Aug-30: What online software replacements for desktop APPS exist now? [1091]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The BBC's open source video streaming software called DIRAC [1090]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Software to extract short sequences from long MP3 recordings [1089]
  • 2007-Aug-30: PaintShop Pro v8 is a good image editing package [1088]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Apple's Rendevous technology allows devices to autoconfigure over a TCP/IP network using standard basic protocols. [1087]
  • 2007-Aug-30: PC Demo creation software [1086]
  • 2007-Aug-30: PolyBytes makes various things including an imageviewer called PolyView, as well as a programmer's library for reading and writing graphics files. [1085]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Entering accented characters (for foreign languages)
    [1084]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The OpenCD is a set of prebuilt open source software for windows. [1083]
  • 2007-Aug-30: WordPress is a web publishing system, here is an overview of some of the other systems
    [1082]
  • 2007-Aug-30: FreeCache is a website caching system (aimed at large files - greater than 5MB) intended to help reduce the load on small capacity sites [1081]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The BBC has started an open source project to develop a better-than-MPEG2 video codec called Dirac, here is an update on Slashdot.
     [1080]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Pump modeling software [1079]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Sonic makes DVD authoring software [1078]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A history of all the GUIs that have been developed for various platforms [1077]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The GIMP now has a version for Windows as well as Linux [1076]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Building a virtual office with open source software [1074]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The FireBird relational database project [1073]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Two new approaches to spam filtering, Markovan and Dobly (a noise reduction type) algortihms [1072]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A large collection of links about C++ from Robert Davies [1071]
  • 2007-Aug-30: GCC the GNU C++ compiler, the C++ FAQ Lite, the C FAQ, Boost a site for C++ libraries, Standard C Library documentation, The GNU C Library documentation, strmode(3) returns archive flag state, see also chflags. Real Quick C++ guide. C++ in Action, a book by Bartosz Milewski is available on-line at Reliable Software, along with a tutorial on Win32 programming
    [1070]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Cygwin a development environment for Windows [1069]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Could Rodi replace BitTorrent?
    [1067]
  • 2007-Aug-30: BitTorrent a distributed file transmission system. Some more information about this. In May'05 BitTorrent started to introduce a new version that is trackerless. Distributed bittorrent. [1066]
  • 2007-Aug-30: XviD, a free implementation of an MPEG-4 codec (a free version of DivX) [1065]
  • 2007-Aug-30: EMule has the ability to download a single file from multiple sources, thus distributing the load [1064]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Paragon Partition Manager is a disk partitioning tool (resizing, conversion...) [1063]
  • 2007-Aug-30: wayV is a gesture based GUI system for Linux, and the author is porting it to Windows too [1062]
  • 2007-Aug-30: the PC Phone Home tracking software for lost or stolen computers [1060]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The Boa web server, a newish light weight server [1059]
  • 2007-Aug-30: pdfFactory from FinePrint.com is an alternative tool to create PDFs that could be used instead of Adobe's much more expensive Acrobat. [1058]
  • 2007-Aug-30: distcc is a program to allow one to distribute c/c++ compiles over several machines [1057]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Ability Office is another suite of office products, Slashdot covered it here [1056]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Here is a Slashdot article on what good open source Windows software is available [1055]
  • 2007-Aug-30: fyuse is not like reptile, rather its a roll-your-own portal system [1054]
  • 2007-Aug-30: reptile, perhaps the next step in peer-to-peer file sharing? [1053]
  • 2007-Aug-30: gaming gets interactive with this fight pad from Thrustmaster [1052]
  • 2007-Aug-30: how does the Windows XP activation stuff work? [1051]
  • 2007-Aug-30: and there is also the Tight VNC project which is attempting to make a VNC that uses less bandwidth [1050]
  • 2007-Aug-30: and speaking of VNC this site has a VNC on a floppy project, though its not been updated for some time [1049]
  • 2007-Aug-30: there is now a free CORBA ORB , from the guys you brought you VNC [1048]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Nero cd burner software from Ahead Software [1047]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Screen savers and pets and computer catnip [1046]
  • 2007-Aug-30: FreeGIS mapping software and data [1045]
  • 2007-Aug-30: the Doomsday algorithm for calculating days of the week [1044]
  • 2007-Aug-30: NewOS , yet another free OS [1043]
  • 2007-Aug-30: JPEG 2000 image compression is starting to show up (in mid-2001!) [1042]
  • 2007-Aug-30: the Mozilla project [1041]
  • 2007-Aug-30: the new windows XP hash system to reduce piracy [1040]
  • 2007-Aug-30: JXTA, a peer-to-peer (P2P) framework for JAVA [1039]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Freeware database systems, including SleepyCat , PostGres , MySQL. And then there's the open source to the SAP database engine [1038]
  • 2007-Aug-30: tomcat and java servlets on Apache [1037]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Dungeon Master returns in Java! Now I can loose another month of my life... And now there is FreeCiv too, an implementation of Civilization II. [1036]
  • 2007-Aug-30: OpenAdapter is a project to supply free database interconnection technology [1035]
  • 2007-Aug-30: LinuxDisk technology, coming soon. More from Mountain View Data. [1034]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The POV-Ray raytracer program [1033]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The Cygwin project brings a UNIX API to Windows, which allows easy porting of UNIX tools [1032]
  • 2007-Aug-30: An XWindows server for Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP using Cygwin [1031]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Eclipse is a generic Integrated Development Environment (IDE) [1030]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Spheres of Chaos and Streamer from Iain McLeod [1029]
  • 2007-Aug-30: MAME the arcade game emulator project [1028]
  • 2007-Aug-30: DMS - a Dead Man's Switch for your PC [1027]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Free Byte has a convenient list of the various free paint programs that are available currently. [1025]
  • 2007-Aug-30: CD Anywhere, from VCOM, allows one to load CDROM images onto a hard drive and then run them as if the CDROM was inserted into a drive. [1024]
  • 2007-Aug-30: GNU Radio, implements tuning and decoding of signals in software [1023]
  • 2007-Aug-30: BZFlag is an open sourced, free, multi-player tank shoot-em-up game [1022]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Netswitcher is a handy tool for laptops (low cost too) that will reconfigure the network settings for you when you move a laptop from one network to another. [1021]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Geodesic makes some software development support tools (like Great Circle) that look for memory leaks and such. We recently had very good success with this package at work, in fact we turned to it when Purify consistently failed to work. If you are writing complex software that is programmed in multiple languages (ours uses C++, FORTRAN and JAVA) and interacts with an object database (such as ObjectStore) this might be worth a try. I have used a similar tool from Rational Software called Purify, though over the years this has got harder and harder to run (probably because the program we are running it on has got bigger and bigger). GlowCode also makes a package for code profiling and leak detection that sounds promising, and it is a lot more reasonably priced than Purify and GreatCircle. If you are doing development with Java, then OptimizeIt is an excellent tool to have. This was written by VMGear and later picked up by Borland. This Slashdot article also includes some freeware memory leak references, such as this page which has further references. [1020]
  • 2007-Aug-30: AbiWord is a free word processor with more of what Word or WordPerfect have to offer [1019]
  • 2007-Aug-30: And OpenOffice is reviewed here [1018]
  • 2007-Aug-30: And Star Office has just reached 6.0 [1017]
  • 2007-Aug-30: SOT Office 2002 is another alternative to Microsoft Office [1016]
  • 2007-Aug-30: ThinkFree Office is another low-cost alternative to Microsoft Office. [1015]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Globe Productive is a office productivity suite that started on BeOS and is now being ported to Windows, hopefully it can free us from Microsoft's incredible bloat-wear. Its reviewed here by Ars Technica, and has been Slashdotted here. It has a very attractive "family license" which lets you install it on all your computers at home and even on you machine at work! According to this Slashdot article it is going to be GPL licensed. [1014]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Wolfram Research the authors of Mathematica, its not cheap but may save you a big head ache. I wonder if they wouldn't sell a lot more of these if they had a more "normal" price for the software? [1013]
  • 2007-Aug-30: TinyApps.org trys to publicise small (i.e. floppy disk sized) apps for the PC [1012]
  • 2007-Aug-30: WinImage is a disk imager for floppies (and other disks) rather like the old DMS from Amiga days [1011]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Arkeia has network backup software for mixed Unix/Windows networks [1010]
  • 2007-Aug-30: The Watcomm C++ and FORTRAN compilers are going open source [1009]
  • 2007-Aug-30: FAX software from SmithMicro [1008]
  • 2007-Aug-30: a comparision of some RDBMS products [1006]
  • 2007-Aug-30: A book called Thinking In Python is online [1005]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Python for the Palm Pilot [1004]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Cross Platform Packaging software [1003]
  • 2007-Aug-30: CD Recordable FAQ [1002]
  • 2007-Aug-30: Easy CD Creator 5 burner software from Roxio [1001]
  • 2007-Aug-30: WinOnCD CD burner now owned by Roxio [1000]
  • 2007-Aug-30: RecordNow MAX CD burning software that includes DVD capability [999]
  • 2007-Aug-30: CD-R IsoBuster freeware [998]
  • More on statistical approaches to the SPAM filtering problem. [5919]
  • bayespam, a spam filter written in Perl for Qmail. This is an implementation of this algorithm that was cited in this Slashdot article. Here's another implementation of this idea. And another follow up on this on Slashdot. And now is has been added to Mozilla's mail tool. [5918]
  • From Steve Mann, digital image processing to assemble higher resolution photos out of a set of low resolution images. [5902] [1]
  • The SAP-DB is a free SQL database available under GPL/LGPL license terms, it gets discussed on Slashdot. [5876]
  • Source code to the Java version of Dungeon Master has been released [5875]
  • Computer math packages visited by Slashdot [5874]
  • Hyperionics makes some handy addons for Windows desktops. They have a nice demo-maker called HyperCam that captures what you are doing on your screen and saves it as an AVI file, I tried their demo and it worked first time on both Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 (which is more than I can say for the other three competing packages I tried - two of which did not even install successfully). Their FileBox Extender adds a cute push-pin control to your Windows which allows you to make a window always stay on top. [5873]
  • AmigaXL another way to run your Amiga on a PC [5872]
  • Freeciv is a multiplayer strategy game, released under the GNU General Public License [5871]
  • GIS mapping software from Geodyssey [5870]
  • VLC media player [3542] [1]
  • Amigoshare.com makes some video manipulation tools (a splitter, a joiner, a DVD maker and a format converter). I have used their Easy Video Converter to convert MKV (Matroska) format video files to MPEG for transfer to DVD, it does a good job and runs quite quickly. [3541] [1]
  • AVSMedia sells video format conversion software, as well as a pretty decent video editing package (which includes the ability to include still images and do simulated pans and zooms within them). They have a fully functional try-before-buy version that just puts a logo in the middle of the output, so its easy to test to see if it will work for you. You can use this to create DVDs from source material that is in 16x9 aspect ratio, the trick with this is once you have placed the clip on the time line, right click to summon the properties menu and then from the properties dialogue select the "aspect" tab and set 4:3 as the "video proportion" (which seems counter intuitive). When you setup the initial project you should also set it to 4:3 aspect ratio, even though what you are trying to do is to make a 16:9 letter boxed DVD. [3540] [1]
  • VideoReDo is a pretty powerful tool for extracting and deleting scenes from MPEG1 and MPEG2 files. This has a pretty convenient batch edit function that can also be used to split a single file into a number of smaller files (perhaps you have a few hours of vacation tape to edit, and you want to start by extracting the dozen or so interesting scenes into separate files so they are easier to work with). What you do is explained on their FAQ (its not immediatly obvious from the help file or program's controls that you can do this). Since the FAQ is a little vague, here's a recap:
    • You will probably need to set some program options first, in the "General Parameters" select "Queue to batch clears cut list" and set the "Editing Mode" to "Scene Mode".
    • enter the Batch Manager, and select a destination folder, then enter a "_" (underscore) into the "destination modifier" field, finally hit the "Done" button
    • now pick the scenes you want in each separate file (you can select several per file if you want), by finding the start of the scene, clicking on the "Sel. End" button, then finding the scene's end and clicking on the "Sel. End" button and at last clicking on the "Add Selection" button. Repeat as needed.
    • once your list of scenes is complete you hit the CTRL+B key (or use the File / Add Edits to Batch Queue... menu item)
    • a dialogue will appear that shows you the file name it will save those scenes to, this should be in the destination directory you selected, the file name should start with the original file's name and then have an "_nnn" extension, where "nnn" is a number that starts with 001 and automatically increases each time you hit CTRL+B. Answer "OK" to the dialogue if the name is correct.
    • once you have finished your selections you select the Tools / Start Batch Manager menu item again, check the "Run Silently" check box (this doesn't seem to do much) and then press the "Save and Execute" button and it will build the new set of scene files without needing further user interaction.
    [3539] [1]
  • How to convert a DVD for viewing on an iPod, this article uses DVDx, also has some other suggestions for similar software. [3538] [1]
  • Pegasys makes the TMPGEnc DVD Author package. [3537] [1]
  • Moonlight makes the Elecard MPEG2 capable player for PCs that has clip trimming functions. [3536] [1]
  • MAGIX movies on CD and DVD, is reviewed here [3535] [1]
  • Corel's Painter Essentials 4, another package to help you turn photos into art. [2529] [1]
  • Qimage 2008 now supports printing stitched panoramas and super high resolution scans. [2528] [1]
  • Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 gets reviewed here. An here too from PC Mag. [2527] [1]
  • BenVista's PhotoArtist 2, is a package for creating artwork based on digital photos. [2526] [1]
  • Corel's MediaOne Plus is a digital photo enhancement and DVD creation package. [2525] [1]
  • The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects, by Michael J. Hammel, ISBN: 978-1593271213. [2524] [1]
  • PixelDragons.com makes a number of photo-oriented software packages, including Just Resize My Photos (which is specialized to the task of batch resizing) and Image Genius (which is a general purpose batch image processor) [2523] [1]
  • PortraitProfessional is a semi-automatic face retouching software package for photo portrait work, it also has the ability to do some facial reshaping. [2522] [1]
  • MediaPro from iView is image management software for annotating, organizing and distributing digital files. [2521] [1]
  • GREYCstoration is an open source tool that can be used for noise removal and image resizing, discussed here on Slashdot. This is a command line tool, which might be a good thing as that allows you to use it from a batch file for bulk processing tasks. [2520] [1]
  • Lightroom versus Aperture, a comparitive review. [2519] [1]
  • NaturalGrafiX, makes ImageIron, a program for correcting lens distortion. This program allows you to develop your own callibration profiles using your own camera and lens sets. [2518] [1]
  • Searching photo archives for patterns [2517] [1]
  • ProFotoSoftware, makes PFS Image Darkroom, a photo manipulation package with integrated RAW format support [2516] [1]
  • PhotoStudio Darkroom, by ArcSoft. [2515] [1]
  • Mitsubishi's flutter-shutter approach to deblurring pictures. [2514] [1]
  • A new algorithm to reduce camera motion blur [2513] [1]
  • REALVIZ combining photographs with Google Earth [2512] [1]
  • STOIK makes a number of image processing tools, including PictureMan and Noise Autofix. [2511] [1]
  • LightZone, a retouching package based on Ansel Adam's Zone System [2510] [1]
  • The PictSync group is trying to standardize photo sharing. [2508] [1]
  • Using fractals to enlarge images, Connected Photographer reviews, Enlarger Pro and declares that it does a better job than the much more expensive Genuine Fractals program. [2507] [1]
  • Recover lost photos from flash media [2506] [1]
  • PhotoFiltre is an image processing/manipulation program that is available in a reduced feature free version and a commercial version. It is reviewed here. [2505] [1]
  • dcraw is a tool for decoding RAW format photographs from many cameras [2504] [1]
  • Poster printing software is available from Softpedia and Softizer [2503] [1]
  • Microsoft's guide to configuring a Windows XP box for best pixel processing performance [2502] [1]
  • O'Reilly's digital media site, for books and more [2501] [1]
  • Power Retouche makes photo editing pluging for Photoshop [2500] [1]
  • The GIMP is a free photo editing package, an extended manual is available called Grokking the GIMP [2499] [1]
  • A review of noise filtering tools [2498] [1]
  • A new tool for noise removal that also has the potential for use as an automatic obstruction removal tool (removing the bars from a zoo cage for example) [2497] [1]
  • CameraBits has Photo Mechanic and Quantum Mechanic and Band Aide, photo viewing and noise clean up tools [2496] [1]
  • imgSeek allows you to search photos by looking for ones with similar appearance (done via a wavelet transform) [2495] [1]
  • RawPhotoDesk is a RAW editing and conversion program, currently in beta [2494] [1]
  • xatshow, slide show making software [2493] [1]
  • Exifer is a program to examine the EXIF (including maker notes section) of digital images. [2492] [1]
  • Noiseware, from Imagenomic, looks like a good noise reduction package for high ISO shooting. This is quite impressive at what it can do with ISO 800 shots from a Minolta A2 (which are quite noisy). Have a look at this gallery for some examples that have been processed by it. Also have a look at these images I processed with it. It gets reviewed here. [2491] [1]
  • PostScript RIP software for use with large format Epson printers [2489] [1]
  • Interpolation software useful for upscaling phtotos for large prints [2488] [1]
  • A depth of field calculator on the web [2487] [1]
  • FxFoto is an image manipulation, cataloging and slide show creation package [2486] [1]
  • Dalibor RAW is a utility for conversion of Minolta MRW raw format files. Dalifer is another utility to allow access to all the information in the EXIF header and maker notes for files created by Minolta cameras. [2485] [1]
  • PhotoMovieMaker, from Preclick, is another DVD slide show maker. [2484] [1]
  • ProShow from Photodex can make DVD slide shows [2483] [1]
  • ImageShifter is a freeware program that converts Minolta DiMAGE 7/A1/A2 RAW files to TIFF [2482] [1]
  • Digital Light & Colour makes PictureWindow Pro, which does 16 bit image processing, for way less than PhotoShop CS [2481] [1]
  • BreezeBrowser also does RAW format conversion for most cameras from Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Pentax and Olympus. [2480] [1]
  • FocusMagic is a product for correcting focus and motion blur problems in photos [2479] [1]
  • Video resolution test patterns you can download, print and do your own pixel peeping [2478] [1]
  • IFranView is a freeware image viewer, with some manipulation capabilities. Through a set of plugins it has support for loading RAW format files for a number of cameras, including the Minolta A1/A2. It is reviewed here, apparently it now has the ability to create panoramic photos. [2477] [1]
  • NoiseNinja2 gets reviewed here. [2476] [1]
  • Helicon makes NoiseFilter, a image noise filtering program that is available in free and professional versions. [2475] [1]
  • DXO makes DXO Optics Pro, (reviewed here) an image enhancement program that corrects for lens distortion and blur. This is also being extended (Aug'04) to include support for the Minolta A2 and the Sony DSC828. [2474] [1]
  • ImageAlign from Grasshopper is a program for correcting lens distortion effects [2473] [1]
  • exifdump.py is a Python script program to dump the EXIF information, this would be of use if you were writing some (python) scripts to manipulate a number of photographs, perhaps you wanted to extract this information and place it in a database... [2472] [1]
  • ViewEXIF is a Windows Explorer plugin that lets you right click on a file to see its EXIF information. [2471] [1]
  • Exif Reader is (free) software that allows you to browse the EXIF information embedded within your photographs. Works well with my Canon G1. [2470] [1]
  • ImageStacker is a program for combining a number of images to improve light sensitivity [2469] [1]
  • YarcPlus is a utility for conversion and viewing of Canon RAW mode photographs [2468] [1]
  • VCom's DVD PhotoPlay simplifies the process of building CDs that run as slide shows in DVD players and PCs [2467] [1]
  • TVwriter will add EXIF header information to regular JPEG files so that they can be loaded into a digital camera, this allows you to use the camera to display these on a TV, along with other regular images you have taken with the camera. [2466] [1]
  • Breeze Systems makes the BreezeBrowser and RemoteCapture tools for the Canon G1, G2 and other cameras [2465] [1]
  • Profile Prism a combination of colour target and software to generate custom ICC colour profiles for your scanner, camera and printer [2464] [1]
  • ColorFix, a colour space conversion tool [2463] [1]
  • Stair Interpolation, an alternative to Lanczos and Genuine Fractals. [2462] [1]
  • a review of Breezebrowser, a browser for Canon RAW format files [2461] [1]
  • Retinex Image Processing from NASA may be coming soon to digicam software [2460] [1]
  • Digital Video FAQ [2459] [1]
  • Adobe Premiere 6.0 video editing software [2458] [1]
  • Reviews of Studio DV from Pinnacle Systems here and here and here and here and a page of tips. [2457] [1]
  • Sonic Foundry makes video edit software [2456] [1]
  • PixVue a picture viewing shell extension for MicroSoft systems, includes EXIF info capability [2455] [1]
  • PhotoGenics (not to be confused with PhotoGenetics) is a photoshop like thing [2454] [1]
  • Automatic Panoramic Image Merging, by Paul Haeberli and Eyal Ofek discusses some of the algorithms behind the automatic stitching of images. [2453] [1]
  • An article on making panoramas [2452] [1]
  • Panorama Factory looks like being a nice piece of software, it gets reviewed here by OutBackPhoto.com, and used in this article Go Wide with Digital Panoramas [2451] [1]
  • PanoGuide.com has reviews of PTGui a gui front end for PanoTools a free panoramic program plugin suite along with articles on making panoramic photographs. [2450] [1]
  • LView photo manager [2449] [1]
  • SmartPix photo manager [2448] [1]
  • LucisART for image manipulation [2447] [1]
  • Aunt Abigail's Photo Album layout program [2446] [1]
  • Reading EXIF header information, more information is on TsuruZoh's page. [2445] [1]
  • Reader - freeware EXIF reader [2444] [1]
  • QImagePro [2443] [1]
  • PixAround [2442] [1]
  • VuePrint a nice picture display and conversion utility, fast zooming and conversion functions, VueScan is a nice scanner utility from the same author. [2441] [1]
  • PhotoGenetics [2440] [1]
  • ThumbsPlus [2439] [1]
  • Thumber [2438] [1]
  • PIE - Picture Information Extractor [2437] [1]
  • PictaTrove is the small photo-sharing web server that I have written. [2436] [1]


              back to vermeulen.ca home