Counting Tools

At work, I employ a myriad of tools to get my job done, and I am always trying to add new goodies to my toolbox. Naturally some of the programs I try just don't prove useful enough to stay around for long. To keep my system tidy (mission impossible), occasionally I run MyUninstaller to remind myself what applications I have installed and eventually remove the ones that I will never use. Recently I noticed that there are 300 installed items (but excluding the security updates there are about 200 applications). Since those are only the tools that had been installed using MSI, I guess, that the actual app count is actually greater than 300 (most likely about 400).

But if this post can be useful for anybody, I better include links to some of my recent additions to my toolbox:

Today I liked a bunch of tiny useful apps from donationcoder (the list on the site is huge, but only a few apps have a chance to prove useful):

• CAPshift - Ever hit caps lock by accident and not found out until half a page later? CAPshift extends the Caps Lock key by slowing it down, and shows a menu to change the selected text to lowercase, UPPERCASE, TitleCase, iNVERTEDcASE, RaNDoMCaSE or to Replace user defined characters.
• StartClock - Shows the current time in the start button.
• OpeningHours - Runs a program when inside a certain time interval, and closes it when outside.
• LabelControl - Overlays buttons and other controls with a Number for direct access via Ctrl-Number.

 

Other great tools that deserve mentioning are:

• StExBar - The StExBar provides many useful commands for your everyday use of Windows explorer. The best feature is having Ctl+Shift+C for copying path of the selected file.
• WinDirStat - WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows. It is just the best free tool I have tried and it helped me make some space on my disk.

 

And let's throw in some good recent additions to my ever-growing list of killer Firefox extensions:

• ErrorZilla 0.2 - Implements useful error pages.
• Link Alert 0.6.2 - Changes the cursor to indicate the target of a link.
• Linkification 1.3.1 - Converts text links into genuine, clickable links.
• Disable Targets For Downloads 1.0.1 - Prevents download links opening a blank window.

Summary of the year 2006

It is already a tradition to do an opening post that sums up what I have been up to in my professional development in the past year.

It was a pretty interesting year! Finishing off my first project for my (not so new) company, completing another small one, and joining a long-term challenging project (the biggest one in my career). And some coding 4 fun :)

The biggest change for me this year was entering the world of web programming. ASP.NET made the transition from desktop to web programming pretty smooth, but still there is so much too learn. Using .NET 2.0 and VS.NET 2005 for nearly a full year was valuable experience as well and a pretty enjoyable one, as well.

My skill improvements program this year included learning touch typing. I think that the hours invested in it already paid off pretty well.

A couple of computer books that I read and found interesting were Working Effectively With Legacy Code and Balancing Agility And Discipline.

I also kept investing a lot of time to improve my tools at work (see here, here, here and here).

I have neglected blogging recently since I am prefer to focus on other activities, but this blog is by no means dead. Reducing the fluff and getting to the stuff. Still, I am still an avid blog reader.

I wish everyone a happy, fun, prosperous new year!