Wireshark is a GUI version of tcpdump for windows.  Wireshark lets you look at what packets are going over your network.  It can also decode hundreds of different protocols and let you paw through what’s going on.  Very incredibly useful if you’re trying to debug why something’s not working.  This is a must-have for every network technician!

To use Wireshark effectively, you may need to find yourself an old ethernet hub that is not a switch.  An ethernet switch will hide traffic not destined for the computer with wireshark running on it.  What you need is an old hub that doesn’t do any sort of switching.  These sort of things seem to be getting harder to find these days.  If you have an old hub lying around, don’t through it away!

I keep trying different things to organize my photos.  Lately I have been using Picasa on my local machine.

+ Very easy to publish something on the web to the Picasa website
+ I like how it replaces the Windows Image&Fax viewer which I dislike
+ Picasa understands Canon Raw format!
+ Easily manage screen shots without having to paste them into something like Photoshop and save a jpeg

– I don’t particularly like the weird elevator scrollbars where you see the image thumbnails.  I find it hard and long to scroll through long lists of images to find things.

One thing I’ve not figured out how to do, albeit I’ve not searched very hard, is to integrate Picasa with WordPress such that Picasa uploads to my WordPress media.  I see there are some plugins in WordPress to get it to look for images in Picasa, but what I don’t see is a way to make Picasa push images to my blog which is not stored in google.  I guess it’s not in their interest to do that.

I use QuickBooks for my business.  It’s not a large business, really one person at the moment.  I played with earlier version of GnuCash but I can’t remember exactly why it didn’t suit me.

+ QuickBooks also allows automated downloading from banks like Quicken but I haven’t configured it like that.
+ Multi-currency support (it took years for them to implement this!)
+ Well accepted, my tax accountant knows it well and can ask me for information and tell me how to get it to her
+ Support via forums is ok

– This is not inexpensive software, I paid several hundred dollars for this and I update it every few years (like every 4-5 years).
– Even though I bought the software, they still charge for support (better to use their forums)
– They put out a new update each year which you have to pay to upgrade to, very few new features, mostly just a UI work over each year.
– They implement new features at a glacial pace.  It took them like 10 years to add the multi-currency support to the US version where the other versions (like UK and Canadian) had it.
– Probably the biggest negative for me is that QuickBooks is not really suited for a web hosting business or any business where you track customers with a monthly (or some periodic) payment like rental income.  It’s more suited for businesses selling parts.

A friend of mine suggested FreshBooks.  I have not yet tried it though.  It does not look like a replacement for QuickBooks, it seems like it would handle only the client billing part, something would still have to enter the bill into FreshBooks.

I use Quicken for my personal finances, its not free, there are other free options out there like GnuCash but I always seem to return to Quicken.

+ Quicken allows you to download directly from many different banks, so you don’t have to type in all those entries by hand
+ Links up with TurboTax (which I don’t use), but it’s easy for me to print out what I need for my taxes
+ Multiple accounts, many different types of accounts
+ Multi-currency support sort of.  Quicken will download stock prices but not currency prices.

– They come out with a new version each year which seems to include a UI work over and not much else
– They are glacially slow at implementing new feature requests in their support forum
– If you need support, you’ll be paying for it, even though you’ve paid for the software!
– Only downloads from US accounts (or the country where you bought it).
– No way to import an account other than typing in all those statements.  They used to allow importing QIF files but they say on their website that they changed their politique about this.

Miranda IM is an excellent all-in-one multi-protocol chat utility.

Protocol Support

• AIM (AOL Instant Messenger)
• Facebook
• Gadu-Gadu
• IAX (Inter-Asterisk Exchange)
• ICQ
• IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
• Jabber
• MSN
• Netsend
• Tlen
• Yahoo
• And more…

DVD Shrink allows you to copy many DVDs onto another DVD and at the same time, shrink it so it fits.  It’s biggest use is taking a double-sided DVD and shrinking it onto a single-sided DVD.  You loose some quality but it’s usually unnoticeable.  At the same time, this little utility can also remove some of the annoying restrictions on a DVD like the region code.  I often use this program in conjunction with DVD Decrypter.  First I run DVD Decrypter and have it dump all the VOB files into a folder and then use DVD Shrink to shrink them appropriately onto a single sided DVD.

DVD Decrypter is a free utility to rip a DVD to your computer.  I have often used this tool to make a copy of one of my DVDs to get rid of the ridiculous restrictions which prohibit me from doing things like going to the menu or turning on/off subtitles or getting rid of the region code.  I often use this program in conjunction with dvdshrink which will compress a double sided DVD to a single sided one.

7-zip is an excellent all purpose compression/decompression utility.  Amongst the usual zip compression, some of it’s more useful formats it understands are (not an exhaustive list):

• tar.gz
• tar.bz2
• rar
• iso (and several other file systems!)

Putty is a free Windows SSH client.  Beyond offering a secure tty terminal to get into a server, it will also:

• tunnel X11 connections so you can display X windows that are remote
• dynamic tunnels for use with SOCKS proxies
• tunnel virtually any TCP port locally or remotely