dserban

I forgot to mention cygwin - it's a set of Windows compatible command line shells and small utilities which enable you to pretend you're in Unix, writing shell scripts.

I'm a little surprised that some people don't view governments as being in the money making business.Any government in any country consists of 2 components:- One that aims to confiscate as much money from its citizens as possible, via taxes, fines etc. This component is a very efficient, well-financed, well-oiled machine. I would venture to argue that this component of the Indonesian government can very well afford to purchase legal copies of Windows, even at $400 a piece.- The second component is the one in charge of pretending to provide services to the citizens to justify the existence of the first component. This component is chronically under-financed and extremely inefficient. I predict that this component of the Indonesian government will go back to using pirated copies of Windows as soon as they are forced to upgrade.

Sometimes when you try to connect to an FTP server using various types of FTP clients, some of these clients will work, while others won't. In order to understand why, you need to know a little bit more about the internal workings of the FTP protocol. The FTP handshake can work in two very different manners: 1. active mode 2. passive mode A fairly technical explanation can be found here: http://slacksite.com/other/ftp.html Basically, the difference is that in active mode, both the server as well as the client will be required to open up ports to listen for incoming traffic. This will cause problems if you are behind a firewall / NAT router. The most visible symptom is that your FTP client will cause the bult-in Windows XP SP2 firewall to pop up a dilog box informing you that the client is trying to open an inbound connection and asking you whether you want to unblock or keep blocking. Some of the smarter FTP clients have a checkmark option or command line switch to enable passive mode for all FTP transfers. In passive mode, only the server is required to open up ports for incoming traffic. All browsers are by default configured to work in passive mode when used as FTP clients. If you are behind a firewall / NAT router, passive mode gives you a better chance of connecting to an external FTP server.

What is your favorite piece of free software? Mine is VMWare Player http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I also like PrimoPDF - it lets me convert anything that can be sent to a printer into the PDF format http://www.primopdf.com/ And VLC for streaming video from your PC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/streaming.html

Try radioblogclub.com

I happen to have strong opinions about what constitutes fair use for ads integrated into pages. The way I see it, there are three models for making money from a free website, two of which encourage the site owner to continue providing great services to you, the visitor. - Sites which offer both free and premium services. These sites should be allowed to show integrated ads that promote their own premium services when you browse their free services section. Blocking these ads is unfair because it will destroy a legitimate business model. - Sites with no ads where they show a "donate via Paypal" button. These "donate" buttons should not be blocked by any ad blocking software - and they usually aren't. - Sites that make money by promoting premium services other than their own. Example: Some hobbyist has written free, open-source CD burning software and published the beta version on his site. Google AdSense gains insight into the contents of the page and will show an ad promoting overpriced, overmarketed CD burning software written by underpaid developers in a cheap country. Those developers get 1 cent for every sold copy of the software and the site owner gets 1 cent for every click-through. If you are like me, you begin to wonder where the rest of the money goes. In conclusion, blocking ads is a matter of personal preference, and in the long run will destroy business models which are not based on creating real value. In the long run, it will ensure that consumers get fair value for their money, and that service providers receive fair payment for their work.

In this tutorial I will show you how to use wget in Windows. wget is a very handy utility, I would call it "the Swiss army knife of the savvy Internet user". Its main purpose is for mirroring HTTP and FTP sites, but you can get very creative with it and save a lot of browser navigation clicks if you have many repetitive tasks. wget originated in the UNIX / Linux world and has been ported to Windows. There are lots of places where you can go to download wget for Windows, just Google "wget for Windows" or "wget for Windows easy steps". How-to #1 - Discover the REAL location of the file you're about to download Many times a web server will attempt to obscure the location of the files it is serving. Example from art.gnome.org While browsing for a set of wallpaper jpeg files, I ran across this site and clicked my way to the page where you are supposed to right-click on the link and select "Save As ...", but instead of "Save As ..." I selected "Copy shortcut" ("Copy link location" in FireFox). Then I passed the link location as the argument to wget, like this: C:\>wget [url="http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/-- [url="http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; => `NATURE-SadTree_1024x768.jpg'Resolving art.gnome.org... 209.132.176.176Connecting to art.gnome.org[209.132.176.176]:80... connected.HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 FoundLocation: [url="http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/404.png; [following]--13:47:58-- [url="http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/404.png; => `NATURE-SadTree_1024x768.jpg'Resolving ftp.gnome.org... 130.239.18.137Connecting to ftp.gnome.org[130.239.18.137]:80... connected.HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OKLength: 628,569 [image/jpeg]100%[====================================>] 628,569 120.84K/s ETA 00:0013:48:03 (118.68 KB/s) - `NATURE-SadTree_1024x768.jpg' saved [628569/628569] This made it possible for me to use an FTP client log into the ftp.gnome.org machine, cd into the /pub/GNOME/teams/art.gnome.org/backgrounds directory and do a mass download of the pictures I was interested in, using the ftp commands: prompt offmget *1024x768.jpg which saved me a lot of clicks. How-to #2 - Parallel downloads (poor man's download manager) Supposing you have a long list of hot links to picture files, movie files, PDFs or other types of files. (By the way, megaupload, rapidshare, etc. links do not qualify as hot links since they require captchas) <link #1> <link #2> ... <link #n> you simply place the string 'start wget ' in front of each one of them, like this: start wget <link #1>start wget <link #2>...start wget <link #n> and paste the resulting script into an empty .bat file. You then run the .bat file in a command prompt window, from within the directory where you want your files to go. Note: this has the potential to max out your bandwidth, so be careful. I hope you find it helpful. -Dan

An alternative to No-IP is to configure your home wireless router (should you have one) for dynamic DNS.You would then most likely have to do the account setup over at dyndns.com - from personal experience I know that Netgear and Belkin routers are pre-configured with the capability to use this particular service.

In order to be able to suspend a process running under Windows, we need a utility called Process Explorer which can be downloaded free of charge from the Microsoft website at: http://www.microsoft.com/err/technet/ Once you have started Process Explorer, locate the application you want to suspend, right-click on it and choose "Suspend". The same logic applies for "Resume". I hope you find it helpful, it has helped me bring rogue, CPU-hungry applications quickly under control. -Dan