This site allows super easy searching thru apis for many of the major programming languagues.

http://www.gotapi.com/html

This is a small utility that solves a problem I’ve had for years. I can’t believe I never thought of this.

How many times a day do I go drilling down umpteen levels of folders. Literally hundreds. Sometimes, I totally forget where I was going or what I was doing and then go do something totally different - leaving a task totally unfinished.

So, this utility adds on to windows explorer. You double click anywhere in windows explorer and you get a list of folders that you manage. Then click on the folder and it immediately opens. No drilling, no fuss no muss.

Free for home use.  Cheap for office. See it here. http://www.codesector.com/directfolders.php

It continually amazes me how much brain damage can be incurred in updating ones system. And amazingly enough this time, I can’t blame the Coldfusion People!

So, I decided to do the Xampp thing. Xampp is a super easy installer for the lampp setup(I suppose its wampp for me as I’m talking about windows xp). Lampp is Linux, Apache, mySql, Php, and Perl. Probably the most common server software stack in the world.

Lets just get this out of the way : The Coldfusion part was pretty (more…)

I had a file that was indefinetly locked by a failed process. Just before I restarted, I found a utility by microsoft that is basically the task manager on steroids.  You can use it to determine which file or dll is locked by what process or user.

More info here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx

I recently ran across a couple of good links for open source software.

1. 30 essential pices of free and open source software - The simple dollar.
2. List of open source software packages - Wikipedia

Check them out. You never know what useful piece of software you will find there.

ps. useful for macs http://www.opensourcemac.org/.

Alpha XP is’nt quite as useful as launchy but is indeed high on the eye candy totem pole. Remember that first time you saw a program actually use transparency so that you could see what was under? I do. I think it was some text editor and I thought it was well, cool. I do think it is a bit distracting but none the less cool(Did I mention cool?). Well, the peeps at zeroherosoftware.com created Alpha XP which allows you to preset how dim you wish your task bar to be and allows you to setup some key combinations to make a window transparent.

A mac version at http://www.nullriver.com/index/products.

Like I said, not so much useful but definetly cool and never mind that this is theanticool.com. Not really sure what that means. . .

I just downloaded launchy from www.launchy.net. Hey, its pretty cool. I dont know if I’ve saved more than 10 minutes during the whole week but I do enjoy using it.

Basically, it indexes your start menu. Then when you wish to launch an app, instead of grabing your mouse and clicking on an icon, you hit alt-space. This pops open a little form that you type in. It guesses what software your trying to type and if it shows the right name, you hit enter and your app is launched. So, if you wished to launch Trillian, you would do alt+space then tr and enter. Thats it! No moving your fingers off your keyboard.

I’m pretty lame with my testing mac (hey, its only got 4 gigs of hard drive space on an absurdly slow machine! but it runs just fine. Actually, I’m amazed. Each version of osx works just fine on ancient hardware. HELLOOO MICROSOFT!!!!) but its similar to a program called Quicksilver for Macs. Actually, there are others but I figured to only list the free one.