It's amazing how many free tools there are available on the Web these days, that are as good as, or often better than their commercial rivals. Some of the most useful ones I've found to date are as follows :
Development
Not everyone needs the full version of Visual Studio professional, particularly if you are a sole developer or part of a small team. Microsoft make a Visual Studio Express version, which has everything in Visual Studio Professional minus a few enterprise features. Available languages are vb.net, c#, c++ and j# as well as a web development edition.
If you dont like the Microsoft way of the world, or fancy developing for multiple platforms, have a look at Eclipse, which is a free development environment which has been created by giants such as Borland, IBM and Red Hat to challenge Microsofts dominance. It's completely free, and supports a huge list of languages including Java, C, C++ and PHP.
Finally, for hobbyists there is the excellent phrogram, which is one of the quickest languages to develop in on the market, as well as being great for beginners to learn. Soon to be updated and rebranded as phrogram.
Database tools
Microsoft now make a free edition of it's popular database available, called SQL Server Express edition, and it's not badly restricted unlike previous freebies. It is limited to 1Gb of RAM and a 4Gb database size, which is plenty for small developers. Reporting Services, which is an excellent report generator is included.
MySQL has made great progress over the last few years, and is even producing the database for many SAP implementations, so is becoming pretty mainstream. With good SQL support, and being totally free its as good as it gets!
Troubleshooting
Got programs that wont work, and you cant figure out what the problem is? Turn to the excellent sysinternals site and download regmon and filemon. When you run them, they record everything that is happening in the registry and filesystem in real time, which is really useful to find out what is really happening.
Other great tools on sysinternals include PSTOOLS, which allow you to do all sorts of cool things like shut computers down remotely, or manage individual processes.
Graphics Tools
The GIMP is a free graphical tool that runs on Windows and Linux that is a bit like Photoshop, but totally free. Also worth looking at in the Windows world is Paint.NET which is a powerful image editor based on the dotnet framework being developed by Washington State University. Finally for simple image viewing and simple photo touchups (like redeye removal), IrfanView cannot be beaten.
Security
Last, but certainly not least, there are a huge number of security tools out there. For keeping multiple Windows computers up to date with the latest patches I recommend looking at WSUS from Microsoft, which is a central management console for patching.
Nessus is a security scanner, often used by hackers. Run it yourself to check your own network for vunrabilities, and I guarentee you will get some surprises. Now available for Windows, as well as the original Linux version.
For intrusion detection, take a look at Snort and probably run Base as well to report on the Snort logs. This keeps a record of suspicious activity on your network which you can use to track down intruders. Also available on Windows and Linux.
These are just a few of my favorites, there are many 1000's more out there. Let me know if you have any favorites you think should be on the list.
Monday, September 04, 2006
Saturday, September 02, 2006
May the force be with you
Slightly off topic, but the US Government's Star Wars defense programme makes Microsoft's lack of progress in the last 5 years look pretty good. I came across an interesting article about the latest development in the programme.
Now, call me old fashioned, but $100 billion and 23 years work is quite a lot of time and money to spend on something that has only worked once in testing, and they are not sure if it will work in practice!
If you are wondering what happened to all that money, and where the 'space laser defence' system went to, have a look at the Wikipedia Strategic Defense Initiative article.
Do or do not... there is no try
Now, call me old fashioned, but $100 billion and 23 years work is quite a lot of time and money to spend on something that has only worked once in testing, and they are not sure if it will work in practice!
If you are wondering what happened to all that money, and where the 'space laser defence' system went to, have a look at the Wikipedia Strategic Defense Initiative article.
Do or do not... there is no try
Friday, September 01, 2006
Geospatial Information Systems
I was recently involved in a project where the contractor was to fly over an entire region taking aerial photos and then stitch them together, taking contours into effect, in a process known as ortho-rectified photography. Due to adverse weather conditions they were unable to complete the work during the summer, so suggested finishing the work off in the year following.
This concerned us on a number of fronts, and we have asked for a complete re-fly. Somewhere in Canada however, someone made a different call, and we ended up with something quite bizarre.
I'm presuming that the Northwest section of the photo is the more expensive part of town, and few people want to live in the cold 'South Side'. There's even a different climate on the East side of the city, so perhaps something for everyone in Edmonton!
For those of you running Google Earth, you can have a look yourself by downloading the location from here.
If you are not yet using Google Earth, I'd strongly advise you to check it out. Its basically an online globe, containing aerial photography of most of the planet, together with a community inputting to local content, so is a fascinating toy to play with. Best of all, its completely free. Get it here
Thanks to the excellent online publication The Register for pointing me in Edmunton's direction.
This concerned us on a number of fronts, and we have asked for a complete re-fly. Somewhere in Canada however, someone made a different call, and we ended up with something quite bizarre.
I'm presuming that the Northwest section of the photo is the more expensive part of town, and few people want to live in the cold 'South Side'. There's even a different climate on the East side of the city, so perhaps something for everyone in Edmonton!
For those of you running Google Earth, you can have a look yourself by downloading the location from here.
If you are not yet using Google Earth, I'd strongly advise you to check it out. Its basically an online globe, containing aerial photography of most of the planet, together with a community inputting to local content, so is a fascinating toy to play with. Best of all, its completely free. Get it here
Thanks to the excellent online publication The Register for pointing me in Edmunton's direction.
Is it getting hot in here?
Heat is probably the number one problem facing IT departments these days. Modern chips run at 3 Gigahertz or above, which means that electrical signals are being sent 3 billion times per second. That's a lot of signals, and although they are all tiny, when you put them together they generate a lot of heat.
In the old days, PC's had a heatsink (essentially a small radiator) on the CPU and a fan at the back to extract the hot air. These days, there are high speed fans on the CPU, Graphics Card, system case and even some high end RAM chips. For a home PC that adds up to a lot of noise, but imagine it in a room full of high end servers.
In a standard 42U cabinet (which is around the size of a single bedroom wardrobe) you can fit 250 blade servers, each with 2-4 high end processors, several hard drives and tens of gigabytes of RAM each. Open up a blade, and it looks like it has been designed by an aerodynamic engineer, with arrays of fans drawing the air through the entire server and radiator fans lined up in parallel with the airflow from all the major components. Fire up one of these beasts and its like a plane taking off - imagine the noise of a full rack, or an entire datacentre.
A blade enclosure with 10 nodes, each supporting 2 hard drives and 2 cpus.
I spent some time this week in a server room where we needed to turn the air conditioning off for a couple of hours. We monitored the temperature and shut down more and more servers as the heat kept rising. In the end, we had over 80% of our servers off, and were only just keeping the heat under control.
Many server rooms have no failsafe systems, and no monitoring of the temperature other than a thermometer in the room itself. If the air conditioning fails at night or over the weekend, then your servers are going to be toast when you come in on Monday morning. If you are lucky then they will keep running for a couple of weeks before they start failing. If you are unlucky then you've just wiped out your entire network.
If you havn't done so already, install environmental alerts that will let you know if the heat rises (as well as monitor humidity / smoke etc). Link them up to a pager or SMS gateway so you get alerted. Also have a system for rapidly shutting systems down when the alerts are reached. Keep your phone nearby, so you can respond rapidly if you need to. Or even better, link the environmental monitor to the shutdown system and the pager. A lot of modern servers have built in thermal shutdown features - just make sure you enable them, as they are often not enabled by default. Do all that, and you might just sleep that little bit better.
Server watch has an interesting article about environmental monitoring and Minicom make a remote power switch with environmental controls.
For fast manual shutdowns, you can download PsTools from the excellent Sysinternals site, and best of all it's completely free. Use PSSHUTDOWN in a batch file to shut down a whole bunch of servers at once from a remote location.
In the old days, PC's had a heatsink (essentially a small radiator) on the CPU and a fan at the back to extract the hot air. These days, there are high speed fans on the CPU, Graphics Card, system case and even some high end RAM chips. For a home PC that adds up to a lot of noise, but imagine it in a room full of high end servers.
In a standard 42U cabinet (which is around the size of a single bedroom wardrobe) you can fit 250 blade servers, each with 2-4 high end processors, several hard drives and tens of gigabytes of RAM each. Open up a blade, and it looks like it has been designed by an aerodynamic engineer, with arrays of fans drawing the air through the entire server and radiator fans lined up in parallel with the airflow from all the major components. Fire up one of these beasts and its like a plane taking off - imagine the noise of a full rack, or an entire datacentre.
A blade enclosure with 10 nodes, each supporting 2 hard drives and 2 cpus.
I spent some time this week in a server room where we needed to turn the air conditioning off for a couple of hours. We monitored the temperature and shut down more and more servers as the heat kept rising. In the end, we had over 80% of our servers off, and were only just keeping the heat under control.
Many server rooms have no failsafe systems, and no monitoring of the temperature other than a thermometer in the room itself. If the air conditioning fails at night or over the weekend, then your servers are going to be toast when you come in on Monday morning. If you are lucky then they will keep running for a couple of weeks before they start failing. If you are unlucky then you've just wiped out your entire network.
If you havn't done so already, install environmental alerts that will let you know if the heat rises (as well as monitor humidity / smoke etc). Link them up to a pager or SMS gateway so you get alerted. Also have a system for rapidly shutting systems down when the alerts are reached. Keep your phone nearby, so you can respond rapidly if you need to. Or even better, link the environmental monitor to the shutdown system and the pager. A lot of modern servers have built in thermal shutdown features - just make sure you enable them, as they are often not enabled by default. Do all that, and you might just sleep that little bit better.
Server watch has an interesting article about environmental monitoring and Minicom make a remote power switch with environmental controls.
For fast manual shutdowns, you can download PsTools from the excellent Sysinternals site, and best of all it's completely free. Use PSSHUTDOWN in a batch file to shut down a whole bunch of servers at once from a remote location.
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