Productivity tools suite

This post would be periodically updated and contain list of best tools for personal use. (Updated: 23/12/2009) Blogging w.bloggar - free blog editor; integrates with most of blogging platforms. Windows Live Writer – same… slim UI. Productivity Office: Copernic Search Desktop - Index and search your e-mails (in non-commercial version indexes mails only). Interface is outlook-oriented and it's easier to use then Google Desktop. Google Calendar Sync - automatically synchronize Outlook and Google Calendar. Health: Workrave - assist healthy work organization by reminding to make exercises and mini-breaks Aire Freshener - Nature sounds player - good for relaxation (see why). Security Antivirus: Avira Antivir - Free Edition - great for home use Firewalls: PC Tools Firewall Plus - easy to use personal firewall - the only one which is free for personal use and works with Windows 2003 Agnitum Outpost Free Edition - great for home use File system: Eraser - secure data removal tool. True Crypt - open-source virtual encrypted disk Security Scanners: Secunia PSI - check whether any installed software requires upgrades. Download and install update patches automatically. Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer - check missing security updates and detect some security breaches. May scan range of PC's in a network. Passwords Management: KeePass - Manage all your password in encrypted container. Freeware; support search, groups, expiration control, language packs. Sound, Music, Video, Images MP3: MP3 Split - Open-source & freeware application to split MP3 & OGG files by size, duration etc (without decoding). I using it really heavily to split audiobooks into chunks of 15-20 minutes and listen them while driving to work. It has command line and UI version (GTK). If you use it to split audiobook - select "auto-adjust mode" in Preferences to automatically split around silence zones. Video: Media Player Classic - looks like old-style Windows Media Player but provides major features and supports many video formats. VLC Media Player - open-source media player, support virtually every format... XP Codec Pack - codecs for majority of video formats. Image editors & viewers: Paint.NET - opensource image editor. FastStone Image Viewer - free image browser, converter and editor. System Sniffers: Ethereal - comprehensive network sniffer - Windows + #nux. Free. Web Sniffers: Fiddler - free web (HTTP/HTTPS) sniffer & debugger. HttpWatch - web sniffer & debugger with programmatic (C#, Javascript & Ruby) automation interface. Free in basic edition. TracePlus & Web Detective - bundle of regular & web sniffer - no free edition. System Tools Download Managers: Free Download Manager - free, GNU license Flashget - Free, built-in ads Miscellaneous: Process Tamer - monitor and dynamically adjust CPU usage of running processes. Shadow Copy - Copy files (including locked files!) or entire drives. Unlocker - check which process locks your file and unlock it. VirtuaWin - virtual desktop manager. Windows Installer CleanUp Utility - Uninstall any component installed on your system. Usefull to resolve installation problems. WinUpdatesList - list all windows updates on the system and provide extensive information on each (install date, install user, list of files) + show uninstall command for the update (properties window).

Rally toward the multiprocessors and cloud computing

The rally to multiprocessor/grid/cloud computing begins. I think technology starting gradually to approach maturity point, when it's possible to crop money from the technological break. It is especially important, since mentioned areas are essential for the next economy boom/bubble cycle, which seems to ride on energy consumption: Interesting development in this field is NVIDIA's CUDA technology which evolved from their developments done for the high-performance gaming video cards.Basically CUDA is a set of processors embedded in a GPU card, that are clustered in a blocks. Amount ranges from few hundreds in low-budget cards and up to thounsands in GPU-dedicated cards line (Tesla). There is a ready API enabling to utilize this enormous (and enormously cheap) computing power in software applications. (It integrates with VS 2005 / 2008 and from development point of view - the parallel code should be placed in a separate files [.cu], developed in plain C extended with some parallel notions. - You kind of specifying (by using special registers) which MP cluster and which processor inside of cluster is used for the specific code route.) For a now such integration is not really smooth and requires development effort, but by no doubts NVIDIA would extend it for C++ and .NET. There are some 3rd party SDK's already to integrate it with .NET actually: http://www.gass-ltd.co.il/en/products/cuda.net/Releases.aspx

Notes about future developments in multiprocessign computing

Below are engrossing notes from Intel Developers Conference by my collegue Adam Shaked Gish about future of computing, as Intel sees it. There will be no more performance improvements for the single core - it is as fast it may be, as physics prohibits silicon from getting any faster. Performance will be achieved by properly utilizing multiple cores. Intel is committed to this visions they already see a future in which a desktop has 100 cores inside. As opposed to single core where apps gained performance when installed on new hardware for free, there is no free lunch in multi core. Engineers must be properly trained, and code properly written to utilize the cores in a scalable manner, and to write correct code (multithreading bugs can be very difficult to discover and fix). In order to utilize the MP power you will need two things: A high level library you can use to parallelize tasks, without directly using OS primitives like threads and locks. The low level code is just too complicated to understand or maintain. A set of tools to help you analyze your performance, and find bugs and bottlenecks whithout these there is no way to achieve maximum performance. As for C++ libraries they discussed: OpenMP as the C style API to parallelize loops. Its advantage is that it is easier to introduce into existing code. Old standard supported by most modern C++ compilers. TBB - a set of templates that allows to think about multi tasking in an object oriented way - you define a task objects and have them run in parallel. It is open source (a set of templates) and has ports to most major OS'es. It is also benchmarked to be faster than OpenMP. However it is more difficult to introduce into existing code and usually requires some amount of redesign. An additional new technology is being researched and it will allow a user to prove the correctness of code written with it. It is still in research stages. As for tools - Intel just released a new suite of tools named "Intel Parallel Studio". It is aimed at making parallel computing available to the mainstream developer. All tools are addins into Visual Studio: Intel Parallel Composer - a compiler, and a set of libraries and compiler extensions aimed at making development of multithreaded code easier. Intel Parallel Inspector - a bug finder focuses on finding memory bugs (like tools we try to use today) and threading bugs. Intel Parallel Amplifier- a performance analysis tool, focused on finding threading bottlenecks and optimizing the use of multi cores. The suite's retail price is 800$ per license (25% off till end of summer).

Comprehensive list of Debugger Visualizers for Visual Studio

Here is a comprehensive list of Debugger Visualizers for Visual Studio. It's based on (sorted and merged) info from here, here and here and my own additions. Here you go: ASP, WEB: ASP.NET control graph visualizer - http://odetocode.com/Blogs/scott/archive/2006/01/12/2726.aspx ASP.NET Cache Visualizer - http://blog.bretts.net/PermaLink,guid,07cd8437-862e-45c6-b24e-3a286fce1b66.aspx ASP.NET Control Visualizer - http://blog.bretts.net/PermaLink,guid,87d735a0-1592-4711-860f-8a1d29c9630f.aspx ASP.NET Visualizers - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/01/12/435236.aspx WebVisualizers - http://webvisualizers.codeplex.com/ Graphics & UI: Bitmap Debugger Visualizer - http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/archive/2006/08/06/bitmapvisualizer.aspx Graphics Debugger Visualizer - http://www.codeproject.com/KB/macros/GraphicDebuggerVisualizer.aspx ControlTree visualizer - http://odetocode.com/Blogs/scott/archive/2006/01/12/2726.aspx DataSource & Data: Data Debugger Visualizer - http://www.codeproject.com/KB/grid/datadebuggervisualizer.aspx Debugger Visualizer for Visual Studio - http://coding-time.blogspot.com/2009/03/debugger-visualizer-for-visual-studio.html Mole Visualizer For All Project Types - http://www.codeproject.com/KB/macros/MoleForVisualStudio.aspx http://www.moleproject.com/ http://joshsmithonwpf.wordpress.com/mole/ Righthand Dataset Debugger Visualizer - http://cs.rthand.com/blogs/blog_with_righthand/pages/Righthand-Dataset-Debugger-Visualizer.aspx XML Visualizer - http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen/archive/2005/11/24/2424.aspx IEnumerable Visualizer - http://rapiddevbookcode.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=EnumerableDebugVisualizer LINQ, DB: DB Connection Visualizer - http://dbvisualizer.codeplex.com/ LINQ Expressions DebuggerVisualizer - http://www.manuelabadia.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,9160035f-490f-46bd-ab55-516b5c7545af.aspx LINQ Expression Tree Visualizer- Look in VS 2008 Samples LINQ to SQL Debug Visualizer - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/07/31/linq-to-sql-debug-visualizer.aspx LINQ Query Visualizer - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb629285.aspx LINQ to SQL Visualizer - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/07/31/linq-to-sql-debug-visualizer.aspx LINQ to Entity Visualizer - http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/99468ece-689b-481c-868c-19e00e0a4e69 System & miscellanea: CAB Visualization - http://www.codeplex.com/WorkItemVisualizer GUID Debugger Visualizer - http://devmatter.blogspot.com/2006/04/guid-debugger-visualizer-for-visual.html IL Visualizer - http://blogs.msdn.com/haibo_luo/archive/2006/11/16/take-two-il-visualizer.aspx Improving Visual C++ Debugging - http://www.codeguru.com/columns/kate/article.php/c15291 PowerShell Debug Visualizer - http://poshdebugvisualizer.codeplex.com/ Regular Expression Visualizers - http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2005/11/26/AnnoucingRegexKit10.aspx Sharepoint debug visualizer - http://spdv.codeplex.com/ WindowsIdentity Debugger Visualizer - http://geekswithblogs.net/khanna/archive/2006/01/05/64903.aspx WCF: WCF Visualizers Tool - http://wcfvisualizer.codeplex.com/ WPF: WPF Tree Debugger Visualizer - http://wpftreevisualizer.codeplex.com/ DepO WPF Dependency Object Visualizer - http://www.codeplex.com/dathanliblikdepo WPF Debugger Visualizer - http://blogs.oosterkamp.nl/blogs/thomas/archive/2009/03/11/wpf-debugger-visualizer.aspx XAML Debugger Visualizer for WPF - http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/XamlVisualizer.aspx Snoop - a WPF Utility - http://blois.us/Snoop/ XML: Xml Visualizer v.2 - http://www.codeplex.com/XmlVisualizer Lithium XML Debugger Visualizer - http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen/archive/2005/04/11/1267.aspx

Symantic Search Engine - Wolfram Alpha

Symantic search engine - Wolfram Alfa: http://www.wolframalpha.com/ Space Station Info: Comparison of Google and Microsoft stocks: Taylor series:

Information Arbitrage with SkyGrid

Link to the invitations (around 70 left right now) to join SkyGrid: http://www.parkparadigm.com/2009/05/24/welcome-to-skygrid/ "SkyGrid filters the real-time web with high quality financial content from trusted sources. Founded in 2005, SkyGrid creates innovative technology that lets people have a simple way to see what information is having the most impact on the financial world at every moment of every day. " P.S. Post-mortem written by the Roger Ehrenberg - co-founder of Monitor110 - company that was developing similar product. Really worth reading. Look for 7 anti-amendments: http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/7/monitor110-a-post-mortem/

Bear market durations

Bear market durations (from the stock market peak to the lowest point): Period From Till Duration (months) Great Depression August 1929 June 1932 35 Dot Com Bubble March 2000 October 2002 32 Financial Meltdown September 2007 Now is May 2009... 22 months and rolling down...