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Cool Tech by Matthew Wilson

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Article from: CompAct July 2009 – Issue 32 Cool Tech By Matthew Wilson or this edition of Cool Tech I’m going to show Recently, I was playing around with StumbleUpon you more than 200 free applications that you (www.stumbleupon.com) and it served up a game that F can download and try out. They’re all free but sucked me in. StumbleUpon serves up pages that might not necessarily open source. interest you based on your viewing history. I start off with OpenDisc, which contains 40 free pro- The game, Hell of Sand, has several streams of sand grams. You download an ISO image then burn a CD dropping into an area where you can draw walls to Matthew Wilson, from the image. Making a CD from an ISO image is affect the flow. I probably spent 20 minutes drawing ASA, MAAA, slightly different than copying a file to CD. walls changing the sand flow. Ok, I know it sounds can be reached at stupid. I got sucked in. matt_wilson@ Next we go to PC Magazine’s list of 173 free programs farmersinsurance.com for you to try out. The programs range from application Hell of Sand: launchers, audio and backup all the way to networking and video applications. http://www.andyslife.org/games/sand.php Then there is BitNami. BitNami, or more correctly If you’re interested in games, then the BUSINESS BitNami stacks, makes “it incredibly easy to install WEEK Arcade has a cool set of independently pro- your favorite open source software,” according to their duced games on the Web. And the games are free. Web site. http://tinyurl.com/dhlszw About a month ago I tried an experiment to see if I could improve traffic to my blog. I show you what I Did you notice that I’m using “tinyurl.com” for the did and my results. URL. Check out http://tinyurl.com as a way to take those long URLs and shorten them for easy manual Finally, I briefly go over a Google custom search input. engine, a mail list manager, Feedblitz and a couple of Perl programs for scraping news articles off of your It turns out that tinyurl.com is on TIME magazine’s favorite news Web site. list of top 50 Web sites for 2008: http://tinyurl.com/ cc45dl. MY VIEW There are so many free applications available these TIME magazine doesn’t present the list in a convenient days. It really pays to do a little investigating before format, so I created my own list by using the advanced purchasing a program or writing it yourself. Many Web search features from Google: hosts install open source applications for free. http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en Here are a few Web sites worth checking out: I searched the TIME Web site (Time.Com) for “50 Best www.Koders.com—Code snippets. Websites 2008.” I included omitted results in order to www.Hotscripts.com, www.Sourceforge.net—Open get 144 links. I grabbed the HTML code and cleaned source software. it up in a text editor. Later I show you how to clean up www.Bitnami.com, www.Apachefriends.org/en/xampp. Google HTML using Regular Expressions (RegEx). html—Application packages. My results are here: http://tinyurl.com/cc45dl. www.Fantastico.com, www.Installatron.com—Typical Web host packages installed for free. Here’s the search text: “50 Best Websites 2008,” site www.Elance.com—Hire help. time.com CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 CompAct | JULY 2009 | 9 Cool Tech | FROM PAGE 9 Stratfor.com is an intelligence Web site that charges Internet (10 Programs) about $300 per year for a subscription. Since I don’t Azureus (bitTorrent Client), FileZilla (File Transfer), particularly want to spend that much for a subscription, Firefox (Browser), HTTrack (Offline Browsing), I do the next best thing. I use the advanced search fea- Pigdin (Instant Messaging), RSSOwl (RSS Reader), tures in Google to see what I can grab for free. SeaMonkey (Internet Suite), Thunderbird (E-Mail), TightVNC (PC Remote Control) and WinSCP (Secure Search the stratfor.com Web site and target filetype File Transfer). PDF. site: stratfor.com, filetype.pdf Multimedia (Six Programs) The search results turn up over 50 reports. Here is their Audacity (Audio), Celestia (Universe Simulation), annual intelligence forecast for 2009: Really Slick Screensavers, Stellarium (Planitarium), http://tinyurl.com/c75u49. Sumatra PDF (PDF Reader) and VLC (Media Player). Now you know how to use Google to grab interesting Productivity (Five Programs) material from a Web site. What about developing some GnuCash (Accounting), MoinMoinWiki (Wiki), spiders to grab more interesting items? At the end of Notepad2 (Replace Notepad), OpenOffice (Replace this article I share a couple of Perl programs on spider- Microsoft Office) and PDFCreator (Create PDF Files). ing. You can get more information on this topic by checking out these books: Utilities (Eight Programs) 7-Zip (Replace WinZip), Abakt (Backup Tool), Spidering Hacks—http://tinyurl.com/c2qvn3 Clamwin (Anti-Virius), GTK+ (Create Graphical User Interfaces), HealthMonitor (Windows Monitoring Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Tool), TrueCrypt, Encryption and Workrave (Prevent Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL—http:// Repetitive Strain Injury). tinyurl.com/dn4pck Burn a CD from an ISO image Spidering Hacks will introduce you to Perl and Regular If you want to burn a CD for the OpenDisc programs, Expressions for scraping purposes. then check out the following link for software capable of burning a CD from an ISO image: OpenDisc OpenDisc is literally a disk or ISO image that you can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_image_soft- download containing a lot of open source programs ware that work on Windows. I’ve summarized the list of programs below. You can get a better description of the The Best Free Software of 2009 programs on this page: PC Magazine’s mother load of free software list: http://www.theopendisc.com/programs/ http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2338803,00. asp Design (Seven Programs) Blender (3D graphics), Dia (Flow Charts), GIMP Here’s the print version of the article with everything (Image Manipulation), Inkscape (Vector Graphics on one page: Editor), Nvu (Web page Editor), Scribus (Desktop Publishing) and Tux Paint (Children’s Paint Program). http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a% 253D235942,00.asp Games (Four Programs) The Battle for Wesnoth, Enigma, Neverball and Neverputt. 10 | JULY 2009 | CompAct There are 173 software packages listed below. The - SugarCRM article contains links to each application. Also, some • ECM applications are classified as in the “Hall of Fame.” The - Alfresco and KnowledgeTree application categories: • Forum - phpBB App Launchers (four), Audio/Music (11), Backup (six), • Photo Sharing Blogs (eight), Browsers (nine), Calendar/PIMs (10), - Coppermine Photo Gallery Communication/E-Mail (10), Conferencing (four), File • Planning Transfer/Download (eight), File Viewers/Converters - Tracks (eight), Finance (four), Fun/Home (seven), Graphics • Poll Management (17), Ims (four), Interface Enhancers (13), Local - Opina Search (three), Office (19), Operating Systems (three), • Portal Server Networking (nine), RSS Readers (six), Synchronization - JasperServer and Liferay (five) and Video (five). • Version Control - Subversion BitNami • Wiki BitNami stacks make it “easy to install your favorite - DokuWiki and MediaWiki open source software.” A stack includes a primary • eLearning application plus all the dependencies necessary to run - Moodle it. The installation wizard makes it very easy to com- plete the installation process quickly. HOW TO INCREASE YOUR BLOG TRAFFIC BY 30 PERCENT IN ONE If you’ve ever tried to resolve dependency issues then MONTH you know that they can be a real black hole at times. I’ve been running a blog since 2006. I have now posted They can suck up huge amounts of time if you let them. thousands of articles. Recently, I started examining my Here’s the link: Google Analytics which show how many hits specific pages got in the last month. I noticed that some older http://bitnami.org articles are still continuing to get a decent amount of traffic. I wondered if it was possible to improve these Try to find the general category of software that inter- pages in order to get even more hits. ests you. Then go to the Bitnami Web site to find out a little more about a specific application: Google Analytics allows you to drill into the statistics • Infrastructure for a specific page. For example, you can find out - DjangoStack, JRubyStack, LAMPStack, which keywords people used to find that page. LAPPStack, MAMPStack, MAPPStack, RubyStack, SAMPStack, WAMPStack and Once I knew what people were looking for, I set out WAPPStack to improve specific pages. I added more content spe- • Blog cific to the top keywords for that page. For content I - Roller and WordPress added excerpts from more news articles, content from • Bug-Tracking Wikipedia and targeted videos from YouTube. - Mantis, Redmine and Trac • Business Intelligence One article that I posted awhile back is called “What is - JasperServer Suter?” Suter is the name of a system that Israel used • Content Management System (CMS) to hack into Syria’s attack air defense system as their - Alfresco, Drupal, Enano CMS, eZ Publish, Joomla jets were flying toward a secret Syrian nuclear facility. and KnowledgeTree I guess that’s literally hacking on-the-fly. I thought • Client Relations Management (CRM ) CONTINUED ON PAGE 12 CompAct | JULY 2009 | 11 Cool Tech | FROM PAGE 11 people would find this page by searching for Suter. It my readers more article choices. Unfortunately, I hate turns out that most people were finding the page while the HTML code that Goggle uses. So I need to spend a searching for “Big Safari.” Suter is a part of the Big few minutes cleaning up the code.
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