All That I Know

I have shifted my blog to http://jkpathan.blogspot.com/.

Every once a year I tend to return to see whats going on in the world of Windows GUI customization. This week when that time came I was surprised to see all the free tools and applications now available which were previously only available commercially. I also saw the evolution of all the free software that has been around for a while.

One new tool on the market is RocketDock. In the words of their developers “RocketDock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization.“.

The litestep project has also come a long way. The new themes people have created are awesome and the number of themes available is huge. I am having a hard time deciding on what to install and use.

I have been working with text editors since the days of DOS. When I was introduced to UNIX and later Linux, text editors was the choice of development especially for web development. Of course a lot has changed since then but for programmers for a lot of tasks using a heavy development IDE is not the first choice.

I have been using Scite for a while now on Windows. Once I showed it to a friend of mine and his words were “this is like a Notepad for geeks”. Today I came across a long list of powerful text editors available which I wanted to share with the rest of the world as well.

So why does a programmer use a text editor. A text editor is faster than an IDE, more responsive and the ones like Scite (window opens up within a second) are able to deal with multiple languages at the same time which is the norm in the world of web development. Of course its not able to give all the features that once gets in an IDE but then for tasks where only a small change is to be done in the code, waiting 20-30 seconds for the whole IDE to load can be cumbersome.

Scite has options for DOS batch files, ini files, conf files, Java, javascript, HTML, XML, C, C++, PHP, C#, vbscript, VB.NET, VB6 …. and the list goes on and on and on. The place I have found it to be the most handy is when I am parsing data or fixing data.

I have just read that Notepad++ also has a feature to save macros. Imagine a repetitive text editing routine all saved into a macro. So the next time you have to repeat that task, just run the macro.

OpenOffice.org is a free open source replacement for Microsoft Office. For companies paying thousands of dollars for MS Office licenses it can prove to be a huge cost saver. It has a replacement for Word (Writer), Excel (Calc), Powerpoint (Impress) and Access (Base). It also comes with a basic drawing application (Draw).

One problem I have faced since the beginning of Open Office was that it comes with very few templates, especially for presentations. So instead of downloading Open Office you can download OxygenOffice Professional which is free a beefed up version of Open Office. You can also find a repository of free Macros for it at OOoMacros.org. A very good article I found about making your Open Office installation even more powerful can be found here.

Various studies have been made by companies about the feasibility of shifting their workforce from MS Office to Open Office.
Results are mixed. No doubt it will be a relearning experience for the user which will require some training on the company’s part. Then there is also the fact that the 2 are not 100% the same in terms of usability or in the way they save data. Although Open Office can read and write MS Office files, from experience I know that this process is not 100%. For example, sometimes images would not show up correctly or some formatting will be lost. Open Office’s built in support for generating PDF files from any of its formats is a good workaround when you need to give a report to your client as there are no formatting issues there.

What it comes down to is to look at the company’s goals in the long run.

In December 2006 I went through training for Project Management Professional (PMP). It opened up my mind and made me see the possibilities of how a project should be managed. Now when I look back at the previous projects I have managed, I see how much better it would have been if I had known the techniques earlier. A couple of weeks ago I was doing some research on Project Management Software and came across a very good article on wikipedia. What I liked best was the section talking about the criticisms regarding using software for managing projects in certain scenerios where just a pen and paper would have sufficed.

I came across a very good open source ERP solution called OpenBravo. Its built using J2EE which is the same technology used by SAP, Oracle, IBM, BEA etc. The software seems to be mature and has all the features that are being currently provided by mySAP with the difference being that its free to use.

Of course once cannot claim that OpenBravo is a drop in replacement for mySAP. But then its also a fact that not all the features available in mySAP are used by all of SAP’s customers. OpenBravo could probably be sufficient for more than 40% of mySAP users.

The fact that it is open source also means that anyone can change its source code to better reflect how things work in their organization.

Came across this really awesome website today:
http://www.java-source.net/

It has categorized Open Source Java based frameworks and ready to use components like PDF libraries, Mail clients, XML GUI toolkits, blogs, network servers etc. What I like about this website is its ease of use, nice clean design and good categorization.

I came across a very interesting website today. It has a Java applet based emulator that shows you what your website will look like when seen on a mobile. It is no secret that more and more people are browsing the internet using mobiles. It is getting important that developers make sure that their website is properly viewable on a mobile. Check out the site here.

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I came across a very good article for Java developers targeting the enterprise highlighting ten open source projects. Here is the link.

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I had written a short blog about SIP earlier as to free software available for setting up SIP servers and free SIP clients for almost any internet connected device you can think of.

I came across 2 new things today. SJ Labs is the creator of a couple of free SIP based voice call programs for Windows, Linux, Mac and Windows CE.

I also came across the Free World Dialup website which gives access to free SIP servers. This means that you can connect to these servers using any SIP client program and can talk to other SIP clients online for free.

Some may ask “Why not just use Skype?“. I guess at the end of the day it all depends on is hoe many users will be using SIP and how many will end up using Skype. Since SIP is an open voice call format, there are far more programs available for it on almost any device you can think of than what Skype can ever dream of supporting.

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