Archive for the 'Software Tools' Category

From April 24, 2008 AVG is releasing a free version of the popular AVG Anti-Virus. This version (8.0) contains both anti virus and anti spyware and is the best free option available in the market. Unfortunately the free version lacks proactive scanning of browsing links to block malicious URLs (which contain spam/keyloggers).

AVG free offers fast scanning since spyware/antivirus engines are integrated. Another good thing is that it has a low load on the system.  It also comes with safe search - each time you search online, Safe Search checks the results on the fly to give you an immediate idea of which websites are safe to visit.

The limitations of the free version are,

• No real time link scanning.
• This cannot be installed on Windows server versions.
• No technical support

AVG anti-virus free 8.0 can be downloaded from here.

When Office 2007 was initially released it had builtin “Save as PDF” option. But later it was removed from Office 2007 due to legal objection from Adobe. This is strange since other office products such as StarOffice and OpenOffice do have an “export to PDF” option.

Does this mean you have to buy Adobe Acrobat just to convert your office documents to PDF? Acrobat is much more than a document to PDF converter and it costs about $449 for a single user license. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t pay that much money just to convert my document to PDF!

Luckily Microsoft provides “Save as PDF” as a separate download. Download this addon (about 934KB) now as it may not be available in future. Note that like other products, you need to do a “genuine office” validation before download.

Another option to convert your word documents is to use online PDF conversion tools. PDF Online is one such tool which supports formats such as DOC, RTF, PPT, XLS etc. Remember, it is never a good idea to use this for confidential documents!

I recently came across NanoScan, an online antivirus by Panda Software. What makes this different from other online virus scanners is the ease of use and the speed with which scanning is completed. On my system it took about 10 seconds to download the scanning engine (an activex control) and another 40 seconds to scan the system.

According to their blog, the scanning software is merely 400K and can detect over 800,000 known malware samples! Now that would make it the fastest and smallest antivirus out there. Do give it a try, you have nothing to loose if it doesn’t find any virus!

Please note that NanoScan is only a detection tool, it cannot remove viruses. For that you will have to use other online antivirus tools such as ActiveScan or TrendMicro . Following diagram shows the NanoScan capabilities.

JBuilder from Borland is a complete suite of tools for enterprise Java development. JBuilder 2007 was released this week by Borland. As promised earlier this is based on Eclipse platform and can be extended by open source plugins and tools. Also included is a migration wizard which can port earlier JBuilder projects to new Eclipse platform. JBuilder 2007 is available in 3 flavors namely Developer,Professional and Enterprise. Professional contains optimizeIT for profiling and debugging, while Enterprise is for distributed teams and complex projects across multiple locations.

Key new features of JBuilder 2007

• Java EE 5 compliance and supports EJB3.0 specification. Also contains a new visual EJB editor.
• LiveSource support from together suite. This technology keeps models, design and code in sync. This is now extended to Web services as well.
• Team collaboration tools such as Team Insight and Project Insight.
• OptimizeIT profiler for memory profiling and debugging.

JBuilder 2007 Enterprise Edition is priced $2000 per user, down from $3,500. A developer version priced around $500 per user.

RSS Aggregators are used to collect multiple RSS feeds from web sites and then publish it as a logical group. Check out LinuxChix for a sample use.

Are you looking for a good RSS aggregator which can handle a large number of RSS feeds? The best aggregator I have come across is the Planet Planet Feed Reader. It is fast and has a good template system as well.

Planet uses a config.ini file for the list of feeds and various aggregation options. The actual output can be configured using *.tmpl files provided. Templates provide simple conditional statements also (TMPL_IF for example).

For this to work as an offline feed aggregator you need to be able to put the aggregator in the web server cron job. Unfortunately most of the hosting providers don’t give such a facility. If your site has fairly good traffic, an alternative is to use Pseudocron.

Note that planet aggregator requires python 2.2 or above installed on the web server. In my case I tried installing it on my server hosted by globat. I got the following error (The BSD module is broken?)

ImportError: No module named _bsddb…..