New Programs and Websites

I found a new website I really like alternativeto.net. I often find programs I like, and want somethings similar on another platform. This website can help with that and it can also help you find other programs that may be cheaper too.

On another note, the SCplugin for Subversion for Mac is taking a while to be updated to support 10.6 and in the meantime, I found SmartSVN which is a full GUI for Subversion.

Creating a bootable USB Windows Installer

My CD drive on my laptop died and I needed to reinstall Windows XP but only have a CD. I found this article that was very helpful.

Windows Powertoys

I was looking for a desktop manager for windows so I could have different workspaces and came across the following site that Windows provides.  It has some cool applications that I didn't know about.  The three I plan to use are

• Tweak UI
• Virtual Desktop Manager
• Webcam Timershot
  

Subversion

A long time ago I heard about version control tracking, or software that can keep track of changes to documents so that you don't have to, and thought it sounded pretty cool, but until about a year ago, I had never used it.  Well, I love it.  It makes it so much easier to code when you know that every time you commit a change it will be saved and so if you make any undesirable changes you can always roll back to a version that works.  It has also made my programming much more focused because I work on fixing one bug at a time and after I fix that bug, I commit that change and work on the next.  It's much easier to isolate problems with the code and have confidence that I am keeping track of my past work.  My preferred software is Subversion or SVN and comes standard with most Linux packages.  I just recently discovered a port to Windows that I really like called TortoiseSVN which is implemented as a Windows shell extension, for seamless integration into Windows Explorer.  I really like it so far and even provides for tracking of other non-text file formats such as '.doc' and '.xls'.  I searched to see if there's something similar for OSX and found this post which refers to a plugin called SCPlugin.  Although I haven't used it yet, it appears to be integrated with Finder.  Anyways, I'm excited to try it out.