BasementJack

Jack's basement and some other stuff…

Archive for March, 2009

Free Images

Mar 30

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Websites are pretty booring without images of some sort. Professionals pay big money for world-class photos and illustrations. For the rest of us, searching google images is often the first place we look – however there is little guarantee that the images we find are ok to use.

Here are some links to various sites I’ve found that promise free photos, and by free, I mean free to download + Free to use*

* = within the intended use – for example, many pictures are free if you intend to put them on your website, so long as you credit the author, while almost no images are free if you intend to pack up a bunch of images and sell an image collection…

Sites that offer some free images:
Some of these grabbed from the awesome book: “How to Cheat in PhotoShop CS4″
Stockxchng (http://www.sxc.hu)
MorgueFile (http://www.morguefile.com)
Mayang textures (http://www.mayang.com/textures)

US Government public domain images:
Space images  (http://www.nasa.gov)
Skies and Nature: (http://www.photolib.noaa.gov)
Military (http://www.defenselink.mil/photos/)

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Awesome Book: How to Cheat in PhotoShop CS4

Mar 30

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I picked up this amazing book called “How to Cheat in PhotoShop CS4″.

Over 400 high quality full color pages, plus a great DVD filled with videos on many of the techniques, as well as starting files if you wish to follow along.

Best thing is, unlike your typical $60 programming book, this one is $45 list, I bought mine at a Borders near my house for under $30 with one of those coupons they email out all the time.

Highly recommended!

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Free FTP software

Mar 30

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I use Filezilla – seems to do everything I need

http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla

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WordPress Resources

Mar 20

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WordPress is a pretty common app for publishing websites and blogs.

Theres an article on nettuts that lists 50 wordpress tutorials:
http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/top-50-wordpress-tutorials/

There are also several WordPress books out there:

  • WordPress for dummies
  • Rockstar wordpress theme design

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Free background patters

Mar 20

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Most websites benefit from some form of background – either behind the page, or as the basis of some call tag or title image.

There’s plenty to be had out there including patterns.ava7.com

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Javascript code highlighter

Mar 20

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http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter:Brushes

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Learning jQuery 15 part lesson

Mar 20

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nice video tutorial on jQuery

http://nettuts.com/articles/web-roundups/jquery-for-absolute-beginners-video-series/

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Trade your old Video Games

Mar 20

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Those old video games have plenty of value – to someone.

Here are some options for getting rid of them:

Ebay
Amazon
Craigslist
Gamestop

Another option is to use a game swap site – you list your available games, and someone tells you to send it to them, you then send it away for no money, but get ‘credits’ you can use at the swap site to use to ask someone to send you thier games. A friend of mine told me about Goozex.com

Personally, I prefer my the US Dollar as a currency over swap credits, but I’m sure each method has it’s benefits.

Ebay is your best bet for newer games -you can often get $45 for a used $60 game, so long as its pretty new.

Gamestop will rape you in all cases, but sometimes it’s such an easy option you just don’t care. Gamestop is great if you want to trade in 20 somewhat old games and get 1 somewhat new game.

When a used game is only worth a few dollars, goozex might make sense – it’s not worth selling a game for $ on ebay – there are too many fees. Gamestop will give you a quarter for it – which doesn’t cover your gas to get to the store. Goozex could be the ticket for swapping one old game for another.

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Debugging .NET code within a try/Catch

Mar 20

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In .net exceptions bubble up from the lowest source to the highest.

Often times the lower sourced error gets handled by a higher level try/catch, but thats not always what you want when you’re developing – here’s some info on how to deal with that.

http://blogs.msdn.com/kirillosenkov/archive/2008/12/07/how-to-debug-crashes-and-hangs.aspx

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Free Disk Defragmenters

Mar 20

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Hopefully one day soon, Solid state storage will make random access so fast that defragmenting won’t be necessary, but for now, here are a few free tools:

http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/

http://www.defraggler.com/

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SSQ rules to better…

Mar 20

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An interesting list of ‘rules’ from a consulting company out of Austrailia.

While you might not agree with every rule, there are a lot of good ones, and I admire them for writing it all down – very smart for a consulting organization to have all this documented, then ask that each consultant follow the guidelines.

http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/Standards/Default.aspx?

Debugging app crashes on windows

Mar 20

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At some point or another it happens: either windows blue screens, or an application locks up.
With a little effort, there’s no need to feel helpless nor to guess at what the problem might be,
debugging tools for windows can help.

below is a summary of some techniques – sorry that its not real descriptive. I’ll add to it one day – I promise..

In vista, you need to attach to the dying process.
Launch windebug and attach to the dying process.

Configure vista or 2008 to always generate a dump file (for application crashes)
Create key named:
Hklm\software\microsoft\windows\windows error reporting\localdumps

Dumps go to %localappdata%\crashdumps
Override with a Dumpfolder (string) value
Limit dump history with a dumpcount (dword) value

!analyze –v

If this doesn’t work –
Look at the thread stack for functions with ‘fault’ ‘exception’ or ‘error’
Open callstack window – the look at the threads looking for stacks

~0 kb (inspect call stack of CPU0)
~1 kb  (inspect call stack of CPU1)
Lm kvmvpn* (list driver version?)

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Cool jQuery Reference Site

Mar 20

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if you use jQuery, you need to have a look at this interactive reference!

http://visualjquery.com/

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ASP.NET ajax controls

Mar 20

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I personally like and use the obout.com suite of tools – for $200 (with 2 years of updates!) you can’t beat the price and you get a handful of very nice controls.

Another alternative is the Gaiaware.net suite which is $200 for a one time download, or $600 for a years worth of updates.

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Network Monitoring

Mar 20

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Network monitoring is critical if you want to know that your computer systems are working.

I looked into a few choices:
Free:
SmokePing: pings a bunch of addresses and graphs the response times http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/

Nagios: Nagios is a free, full blown network monitor for Linux. When I looked into it, it was a fair amount of work to set up – there are a few books available

Another app is Groudwork opensouce edition.
I am always leary of open source software that has a paid version. Seems like what could be a great free app usually ends up being little more than a demo for the companies paid version.

Another tool I found is ServerSentinel (http://www.jam-software.com/serversentinel/index.shtml) Server Sentinel isn’t free, but it’s not pricey either $65. Has a nice variety of sensors (you can do a lot more than just ping an address)

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Cool animation program for making cartoons

Mar 20

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I was at a store the other day and noticed a program called Anime Studio for about $50.
Downloaded the demo and it looked pretty cool. I did a small amount of animation for an art class in College – they didn’t have anything like this at the time.
Very neat

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ASP.NET image navigation control

Mar 20

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http://www.imagenav.com

A nice looking control, a bit wierd, cause the website is pretty nicely done, yet has no pricing information

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Network Storage

Mar 20

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There’s a number of Free open source network storage OS’s or applications layered on linux.

http://www.openfiler.com looks to have done a nice job

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Free OCR software

Mar 20

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TopOCR

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Version Control with Subversion

Mar 20

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I use Subversion at home to keep my projects in order.
Subversion, being free, and lacking a marketing team, can be a real pain to get into -there are different versions of it out there, built by different groups etc…

The combination I’ve settled on so far is:

Server: I use the free VisualSVN server at www.visualsvn.com
VisualSVN server basically takes Subversion and turns it into a nicely packaged windows service and MMC management plug in. It takes 2 minutes to install, 1 minute to configure.

Client: For the client, I use 2 pieces: TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/) Tortoise adds shell integration to windows to support subversion – what this means is that any folder on your system can be added to version control. There are a few commands that took some getting used to, but overall a very nice experience.

Visual Studio integration: the VisualSVN folks make a nice Visual Studio add on, but unfortunately they charge money for it – a lot of money – $50. Now $50 isn’t bad if you’re just buying one copy, but one of the benefits of knowing and using open source free software is that moment at work when you give your boss a nice alternative to sourcesafe that won’t cost the company a penny. That whole sales pitch goes out the window if they need to buy 50 copies of an add in for $50 a piece.  So I use AnkhSVN. (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/)  When I started with it, it was a bit rough going, the official release didn’t work for me, but the latest nightly build at the time did. I’m sure by now the current release works just fine, but if you have problems, don’t give up, try a nightly build.

If all the nice gui stuff isn’t for you, Coding horror has a nice article on setting up basic subversion server usng text commands:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001093.html

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Gizmos freeware

Mar 20

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this is a pretty big site with lots of links to free stuff.
Some good finds out there!

http://www.techsupportalert.com/

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Free Accounting software

Mar 20

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http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-personal-finance-software.htm

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Free Backup Software for Vista

Mar 20

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Windows Vista Backup Sucks.
A co-worker told me about Cobian backup, I’ve been using it for a few months now and I liked it enough to send the author a donation (the software is free)

http://www.cobiansoft.com/

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Looking for a hottub?

Mar 20

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There’s a website called spasearch.org that might also be of interest

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Cover Commander

Mar 20

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an interesting little program I found from the makers of AWIcons.

Cover Commander makes fake pictures that look like books, boxes, CDs etc..

you design a layout in your favorate paint program, then Cover commander warps it in 3d and add’s it to some of it’s pre-defined layouts to make an image that looks like a cartoony rendering of the real thing.

You see this all the time on shareware and software sites – programs that you know don’t really come in boxes – but they have a picture of the program in a box anyways – cover commander does that for about $70. So does Photoshop, but not for $70.

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Icon editor

Mar 20

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I’m not sure why this is, but the icon file format seems to alude popular programs like photoshop, paint.net and others.  If you’re writing software of any kind, you’re likely to need a custom icon at some point or another.

I found awicons lite to be a nice free tool (http://www.awicond.com)

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Test your memory

Mar 20

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For years I’ve relied on Memtest after building a new PC.

the results: I’ve had stable PC’s that have gone for long periods of time without crashing.

Testing is critical when you’re using multiple sticks of memory. It seems there are a number of issues that show up with 4 sticks that get by just fine when only 2 are used.

here are a few links:

Memtest86+ is found at memtest.org – it’s free. Download an iso, burn to CD and  boot it in your pc – wait 24 hours and see if your screen shows any errors – easy easy easy…

http://www.memtest.org

Memtest86.com is by the guy who originally wrote memtest. It wasn’t updated for a few years, so memtest.org sort of took over, but I see he had an update in Jan 09 so it may be worth a look. Free – he also sells a CD for $11.

http://www.memtest86.com

Microsoft has a tool, which is a nice start, except one tiny problem: it won’t test more than 4 gig of ram.

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

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Online backup

Mar 20

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Mozy offers an online backup tool with 2gb of free storage. ‘unlimited’ is $5 a month.

http://mozy.ccom/home

Here’s an interesting idea:
Google provides a good chunk of free storage with each gmail account – someone wrote a utility to turn that into a drive: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

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Convert video and Audio files for free with MediaCoder or Handbreak

Mar 20

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I’ve used mediacoder – it’s a nice free tool to convert video files from one format to another.

Example uses would be converting a divx file so it plays on an ipod or zune.

http://mediacoder.sourceforge.com

another is handbreak:

http://handbrake.fr/

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Using JQuery to call ASP.NET page methods

Mar 20

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http://www.dexign.net/post/2008/07/16/jQuery-To-Call-ASPNET-Page-Methods-and-Web-Services.aspx

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