The follow up;

ghisler.com

Great little application primarly for FTP, but also great for copying across network drivers or locally.

WinDirStat

windirstat.info

Alongside of wondering where all the time went is wondering where all the space went on my hard drives. This little application shows what is taking up all the space and displays it all nice and pretty.

Johns Background Changer

johnsadventures.com/software/backgroundswitcher

I’m one of these people who needs things to change and change regularly otherwise I get bored. The fact that this program switches over your background wallpaper is nothing new, even Windows 7 has that standard now, it’s that it will pull in images from just about anywhere. Your local hard drives, Flickr, Facebook etc.

VLC

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/http://www.apple.com/safari/

The video player of video players, yet to find a video that it won’t play.

Chrome, Firefox and Safari

In order of preference, an alternative browser is not only for web dev stuff but Google Chrome is easily my default browser of choice.

Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome/

Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/new/

Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/

WinRar

www.rarlab.com

Alternative for zipping files, the rar format kicks butt over zip! This program will handle both among others.

Speedfan

almico.com/speedfan.php

Heat is one of the biggest causes of PC damage and often contributes to poor performance, so running without Speedfan is like driving without a speedo. Gives you the temperature of your core components.

Sizer

brianapps.net/sizer

Resizes any window to set sizes, great for large screens. Right click on the max/min/close buttons and select a size.

IETester

www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

This one is just for the web dev, cross browser testing for multiple IE version.

Rainmeter

rainmeter.net/RainCMS/

The ultimate in desktop customising, I love this program. It doesn’t have much of a UI and to be honest I prefer to edit the ini files directly as it is intended, but it certainly makes your desktop look like a masterpiece.

Simply shot and nicely edited. Looks great!

Being a programmer makes this extra frustrating because it really quite a simple thing to build if you have the content. The content is easy to, that’s just however many hours for a temp to plug it all in.

Then you come across a site like lenshero.com. Ahhh, now THAT’s how you do it! Easy.

If you want to buy a lens, tell the site what camera you have, what lens you want, or what you already own, and they show you the results. Simple. Love it!

Ken Block once again shows how to produce a viral video. Awesome.

I would really love this to have worked but unfortunately it just isn’t quite there. There is actually nothing wrong with the hardware, well mostly anyway. OK, so there is a major issue with the hardware.

First issue is it uses an FM signal to pick up the traffic information which of course is digital and when digital reception is bad, it’s useless. So the problem I have living 38.9kms from the CBD is it won’t pickup any traffic until I’m almost 1/3 of the way in, by then I’m already stuck in traffic.

According to Suna who provide the traffic signal to the Navman and the RTA, who in NSW provide the traffic information data to Suna, there is never ever any traffic on the M2. Which of course the M2 is always a $5 carpark.

Problem is if you follow it around it’s suggested new route, you never going to know if there was any traffic there any way. Therein lies the second issue, the data it self is where it all falls over. Because it never picks up traffic on the M2 you then start to doubt the system and start ignoring it because you can never gauge it’s success, you can only gauge it’s failures.

So basically I still use it all the time as a gauge, but you just can’t rely on it. Having said that, a better FM signal and more accurate traffic data and it would be defiantly worth it.

Imagine you have a web site with two pages, both pages containing text and 3 images.

If someone comes opens the home page, clicks to the second page and then leaves you will have;

1. 1 visit
2. 2 page views
3. 8 Hits

They have visited the website and no matter how many pages they look at, it is one visit until the session is closed. Sessions are usually ended by the user closing the browser or clicking through to another website.

During that visit they viewed two pages, the home page as one and then the second page.

Each page records 4 hits, the 3 images plus the HTML page containing the images and text. The server has produced 4 files in total for the home page, but because they opened the second page that also contains 3 images and another HTML page, that adds another 4 hits.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could walk into a dealer, say I want a Chevy Camaro, let’s make it black, the bonnet to have two nostrils, no make it one. Spoiler to look like…etc. The dealer gives the specs to a CGI guy, he produces this video;

And then the dealer laser cuts the body components to the CGI references.

It’s doable!!

The title comes from the <title>This is my Link</title> tag.

The description similarly comes from the META tag <meta name=”description” content=”The Description” />

The image basically looks at all the images on the page over 100 px, and then sorts it by the largest image first, and then position. The image can also have a style display of none so that it is hidden from the browser, but visible to FB.