I use about 2 dozen applications on a daily basis that aid in everything from domain purchasing to web design, but these are 4 I couldn’t live without regardless of what I was doing.
TaskSwitchXP
By itself, TaskSwitchXP is a replacement for the Alt+Tab task switcher built into Windows XP (I refuse to Vista, so this one is for XP folks only). If you have a Logitech G5 /G7 – or any other mouse with programmable buttons – you can assign the thumb button to Alt+Tab and any time you press it, this task switcher will pop up, using the scroll wheel to cycle through your applications. Release the thumb button to select that app. This makes switching your applications amazingly fast. There’s an even better application called TopDesk, but I chose to give up awesomeness for speed. It’s basically Expose` for Windows.
Vista Users: You can get this effect for free
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I don’t know how long I’ve wanted to associate files that have no extension with notepad (or any other text editor) and have never taken the time to look into it, but I wish I would have done it sooner.
- Open Explorer
- Go to Tools -> Folder Options…
- Select the File Types tab
- Select New
- Enter a single . (period) into the File Extension field and click OK
- With your new file extension selected click Change…
- Scroll down to notepad (or whatever text editor you prefer), select it and choose OK
- Click OK again and you’re done
I’m a bit embarrassed I didn’t think of this sooner, but better late than never right?
About once a year I’ll spend a day – sometimes two – evaluating IDE’s. I’ve been using Dream Weaver for the longest time, but for me it’s basically a glorified text editor with half decent code completion and syntax highlighting I’ve grown accustom to. It has almost no features I would like and my main complaint is it completely taxes one of my cores. I didn’t buy a quad core processor so a text editor could use 25% of my available horsepower even when it’s sitting idle.
Earlier this year I found the new – and always free – Aptana. Overall it’s good software. I wouldn’t say great, but it’s good. The problem with it also lies in its strength: It’s written in Java. It can be used on any platform, but it can be painfully slow when double clicking on files in the file browser and that’s a deal-breaker for me. It has some interesting features (like built-in FireFox preview) and for those looking to save their pennies, it’s by far your best option. I spent a few days here and there with it, but it never stuck. I spent a lot of time trying to configure it, but it just never felt comfortable.
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If you’ve ever tried to download a file larger than 2GB you quickly learned that on the vast majority of Linux servers, you can’t. This has to do with a limitation imposed by having a 32-bit files system interface which you likely have. Even if you have a 64-bit processor. So for all intensive purposes: If you have a site that is larger than 2GB tarred/zipped/whatevered you can’t move it in on big chunk. This article will explain how you can, and then some. Skip the steps you already know as I’m going to try to make this easy enough to explain for someone who has never used any of these commands before.
In order for this article to make sense to you, you really ought to have some experience with SSH and in order to actually do this, you’re going to need shell access to both the server you’re moving your site from and the server you’re moving your site to.
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