Power archiving with 7-Zip

7-Zip is a free file archiver with high compression ratio distributed under the GNU LGPL license. It's native format is the new 7z format based on the LZMA compression algorithm. Some of it's important features are listed below:

• Supported formats: 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB
• For ZIP and GZIP formats 7-Zip provides compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Integration with Windows Shell
• Powerful command-line version
• Options to perform incremental archive updates

7-Zip's high compression ratio make it ideal for backing up things on your disk. With the incremental archive feature, you can update only the changed files in the archive providing a quick way to perform frequent backups. You can get more information here, along with the downloads. There is also a Unix port (which works under Mac OS X and Linux) called p7zip. However this is only a command-line version. You may run the full 7-Zip GUI under Linux using Wine.

Email notification at it's best - POP Peeper

For any person maintaining more than a couple of email accounts, this is an indispensible tool. It’s a notifier that sits in your Windows task bar and alerts you when you have new email. It works with POP3 accounts (including GMail) as well as web mail account like Hotmail, Yahoo, Rediffmail etc.

You can read mails (along with the attachments) and delete them from within the interface without having to open the browser or your mail client. It can even send email and it quite handy for sending quick replies.

It has a bunch of plugins, all of which are useful. The FAQ provides important information about setting up some of the accounts (especially GMail since it requires the SSL plugin). The developer is currently working on Bayesian spam filters for the mailboxes as well.

All this completely free of cost, so grab it!

Notepad2 - Yet another Notepad replacement...

This one is really quite neat. It’s a 540KB single executable with the following features:

• Syntax highlighting for most popular file formats
• Regular expression search and replace
• Handles Mac, Windows and Unix line endings.
• Plenty of other neat things for coders including bookmarks, bracket matching and code manipulation.

The real advantage is when you replace the original notepad.exe with this one. Replacing this executable is a bit tricky as Windows will restore the original exe as soon as you copy over the new one. The trick is to copy notepad2 to all the locations Windows can restore from! Here’s how you do this:

1. Download notepad2 from here.
2. Rename notepad2.exe to notepad.exe
3. Close all existing instances of notepad.exe
4. Copy it to %windir%\system32\dllcache\ overwriting the existing file
5. Also copy it to %windir%\ServicePackFiles\i386\
6. And to %windir%\system32\
7. And finally to %windir% itself

%windir% represents the Windows installation folder (typically C:\Windows).

You should now have successfully replaced notepad with notepad2. Notepad2 is also open source with the code available here for all those interested in tweaking it.

Enjoy your shiny new notepad!

Virtualization Technologies

Virtualization software fills the need to run any application binary on any hardware/OS combination. There are many different ways to achieve this including full virtualization, para-virtualization and co-operative interpretation.

Products like VMWare and Microsoft's Virtual PC provide full virtualization of the hardware and require installing a complete operating system running on top of the virtualization layer (Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) or the hypervisor).

Xen is an open source (GPL) hypervisor that provides para-virtualization. In para-virtualization, the guest OS is ported to an idealized hardware layer, which completely virtualizes all hardware interfaces. Read more about Xen here. Numerous companies have recently voiced Xen support such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Red Hat, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Voltaire and interestingly IBM which has it's own multi-platform, multi-purpose hypervisor called rHype.

coLinux (or Cooperative Linux) is a free and open source software (FOSS) that provides a method to run Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. It's a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine. Check out the getting started guide if this gets you excited.

Apple is bundling Rosetta with it's new Intel-Macs based on technology by Transitive. This allows users to be able to run applications targeting the PowerPC processors on Intel-Macs.

Microsoft has also recently released information about their upcoming hypervisor that will be built directly into Windows. It will be delivered in 2007, following the debut of Longhorn Server (possibly as a service pack) and will take advantage of upcoming virtualization technology built into processors from AMD and Intel. More on this here.