Utilities Updates

IrfanView has hit version 4.10. Yeah, old news, you might say, but I just noticed it myself! Download the entire plugins setup package.


Programmer's Notepad 2 has hit v2.0.7.706-devel.



The best parts:

• It has PyPN which allows users to write their own extensions in Python.
• It finally supports Bash syntax highlighting!

Python 2.5.1 has been released. Python 3000 alpha 2 is also ready for download and evaluation.

OpenOffice has reached 2.3.1.


This is JUST-IN! XAMPP has reached version 1.6.5 on 24 December 2007.

Attachment Extractor

I was looking for a way to store all the attachments from an email onto disk in Thunderbird, without any success. Normal programs like Outlook (Express) shows you a list of attached files that you can select and drag-drop to the desktop, but this was plain missing in Thunderbird. Hmm, interesting.

Anyway, I decided to do a quick search and found the following right away.

Extracts all attachments from selected messages and then can delete, detach or mark-read.

Just select the messages containing the attachments you want to extract and select 'Extract Attachments' and this extension does the rest. No more having to go through each message to extract the attachments!
Check out the settings dialog for the different options.

by Andrew Williamson (eviljeff)

Interesting Snippets

Ruckus Wireless Technology Review

Ruckus Wireless Technology Review at Gadget Center talks about new wireless access point and wireless client products from Singaporean company Ruckus Wireless which promises to solve the problem of low quality IPTV over wireless transmission with a combination of technologies called BeamFlex and SmartCast.

Joel Spolsky's Talk at Yale

Joel has published three articles - transcripts of a speech he gave at at the Yale Computer Science department - describing his experiences as a Computer Science student, his various job stints, right up to starting his own business.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Software Gems

I feel tempted to update this Comsul blog today because I made some discoveries this week while at work.

... darn ... now I have forgotten what they are... alright, let me try to refresh my memory ...

Safari 3 Public Beta (now available for Windows) I like the default font, though it doesn't looked like the Times New Roman that the settings page seems to say. Guess this is why it is still a beta?

The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2.

Well of course this is what is found on Apple's website. Look at what ArsTechnica has to say about it.

A friend recommended me PHP on Trax when I asked about a PHP framework with object persistence. My first experience with object persistence was with SQLObject in Python.

Well, I just came back from a search which lead me to Wikipedia page that contains a list of object-relational mappers for PHP and various other languages. There is a whole lot of choices!

Microsoft Internet Explorer Inline Search from IEforge

is an extremely useful free add-on for Internet Explorer that mimics Firefox's search behavior. It turns searching in a web page into a non-modal research experience coupled with a find as you type facility.

I've just installed WINE on the development servers for generating software release packages that require some processing in Windows. Since all our servers are Linux based, using WINE allows us to add functionality for Windows-based software without having to bear the extra cost of installing extra Windows servers. Even though there are still fatal bugs, especially with running Cygwin applications (you might be thinking who would want to run Cygwin on WINE/Linux!!!) and it doesn't run well with older libraries, when it works, it is a gem to have. For those who have sneered with disdain at WINE in the past, now is probably the time to start looking at it.

Update: I have been running Wine with varies success on various systems. Sometimes, even running "wine cmd" would cause Wine to crash and throw exceptions, specifically with libpthread. Anyone has any idea why this is?