» 2008 » June TAGENIGMA LLC

[Firefox] – Be sure to get these add-ons: [Foxmarks] (bookmark synchronizer), [FireFTP] (ftp client), [ChatZilla] (icq client), and [Firebug] (web debugger)

[Thunderbird] – open source email client, [manually backup] or use [Mozbackup] to backup/restore Mozilla products

[Lightning] – integrated calendar for Mozilla Thunderbird

[TortoiseSvn] – an open source client tool for integrating with subversion source control

[WinMerge] – an open source diff tool excellent for quickly identifying revision changes and merging code quickly

[Cygwin] – UNIX command-line tools on Windows (grep, tar, tail, head, zip, unzip, ssh, scp)

[Textpad] – a text editing utility with built-in regular expression support

[Gimp] – a free image manipulation program

[WinRar] – there’s always some hoodlum in the online community using the rar format that contains a file that you need

[Skype] – online chat/voice communication

[MagicDisc] – allows you to mount ISO files on 32/64 bit Windows

[VMWare Player] – free virtual machine player

[Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008] – Microsoft development tools for doing anything .NET

Visual Studio 2005 Express Service Pack [xp] [vista] – Various bug fixes that fix known problems in Visual Studio

[Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite Service Pack] – fixes numerous bugs in the Team System edition of Visual Studio

[Visual Studio 2008 SP1] – ISO service pack

[Windows Platform SDK] – A development kit of tools, libraries, and source for developing on the Windows platform

[DirectX SDK] – the software development tools, includes and libraries for building DirectX applications [Setup.exe]

[Google C++ Style Guide] – coding standards attempt to keep programmers’ code easy to read and hopefully easy to understand

[Microsoft XNA Game Studio] – all the dependencies that you need to start developing for the XBox

[Quicktime] – for very basic video editing

[ITunes] – to synchronize with my IPod

[Sharepod] – a better way to manage music on your ipod

[Wireshark] – network packet level analysis

[Combined Community Codec Pack] – contains most of the codecs you need to play movies from the net

[Visual Assist] – the best enhancement for Visual Studio Professional or better that you can buy

[BitTorrent] – Popular download and distribution client

Permalink Comments off

Save as PDF

June 23, 2008 at 6:01 pm · Filed under Code Blog

There are times when you want to save a [MS Office 2007 file in Adobe PDF format].

Permalink Comments off

Best Steak Ever

June 23, 2008 at 4:31 pm · Filed under Code Blog

We had steaks so good that they didn’t need BBQ sauce; other steaks can’t even compete with. But now we are out and need to order again.

America’s Choice Entrees, LLC
dba Praire Gold Foods
Minneapolis, MN 55344

Permalink Comments off

Wine 1.0 Released

June 17, 2008 at 12:32 pm · Filed under Code Blog

[Wine 1.0] is an implementation of the Windows API for *unix. Written for X, I’ve followed the progress of this project for years. I first stumbled across Wine, which made it possible to use MS Office and StarCraft on Mandrake Linux.

Permalink Comments off

Firefox 3 Released

June 17, 2008 at 12:29 pm · Filed under Code Blog

[Mozilla Firefox 3] has released. Download your copy today. Mozilla is trying to set a world record for downloads in a single day. The release became available 10am PDT, but unfortunately, Mozilla servers have been experiencing intermittent down time.

Permalink Comments off

Spore Creature Creator

June 17, 2008 at 12:26 pm · Filed under Code Blog

The free evaluation version of [Spore Creature Creator] is now available for download. Any creature that you make will be able to work in the full version of Spore releasing September 5th.

Permalink Comments off

Multicore in Games

June 16, 2008 at 5:47 pm · Filed under Code Blog

Intel’s Paul Lindberg talks on [video] about challenges when developing games that utilize multiple cores. Brad Werth talks about the diminishing returns when focusing on performance and implores developers to focus on features to get a better return. Paul describes how decoupling subsystems allow asynchronous designs to be more resilient when more than the allocated frame time is taken.

[Intel Profilers]:

[Thread Checker] – checks whether your application is threaded correctly

[Thread Profiler] – checks whether your application is well balanced between threads

[Threading Building Blocks] – helps design your application for threading

More videos can be found on [Intel (r) Software Network Developer Zone]

Permalink Comments off