• Google Calendar support
• Allow for normal GMail and Google Apps GMail support at once

Second one won’t be as hard as it sounds, I did most of the work already.  Just need to redo the options page which will be most of the work.

I am quite elated to have the #24 most popular Google Chrome extension, edging out StumbleUpon and a really cool dev tool by Google!  Thanks!

Changelog after the break, and lots more releases, though none Google Chrome related…

Changelog:

1.2 R3

• Fixed small bug in googlewave.js parser.
• Work around a bug in chrome.tabs.onUpdated never sending the url of the tab to callback.

1.2 R2

• Moved the changelog and bugs into background.html, my description was getting too long on chrome.google.com/extensions.
• Turned off console logging.  Might help memory “leak”?

1.2

• Rewote classes to better use .prototype
• Counts will no longer be updated each time you navigate in a supported service, only when you navigate away or close the tab.
• Updated permissions, Google Wave Apps Domain and “Check all items” should really work now, if they didn’t before.
• Uses proper APIs for opening tabs now.  Extenions should work in pages now and tabs will not be under the One Number process and will be properly sandboxed against crashing from each other as designed by the Chrome team.
• Added compose link for GMail.
• Now when you choose to show all unread messages, not just those in the inbox, opening the service will also show all messages.
• Option added to make clicking on the toolbar button open services with unread items immediately, at the cost of not having a popup when there are unread items.
• You can open just the services shown, or also services you’ve hidden from the toolbar button.
• Option added to use HTTP instead of HTTPS.
• Option added to open services in a new window.
• Options added to reuse existing tabs when opening service, as well as a level of agressiveness (by default it won’t reuse a tab when it doesn’t know what you’re doing with it, such as composing a new e-mail).
• Tweaked options page so clicking anywhere on a header expands/collapses a section.
• Fixed bug with garbage in color strings.
• Options added to control whether or not error or logged out status is reflected in the toolbar button.
• If XMLHTTPRequest returns a HTTP status of 0 it is now treated as an error.  Previously the unread count would simply not be changed.

Couple new known bugs come with all this, unfortunately:

Once I got some sleep, today I finished updating EasyScreenshot.NET to 2.0 and in celebration I also released a bunch of other apps in my “release queue”, also known as the “Dan is lazy queue” but I don’t like to call it that personally.  Download here.

ES.NET 2.0 changelog:

• - Fixed copyright year
• - Fixed bug in PortableApps mode
• + When setting the image to the clipboard, “PNG” data type will be set if the image format used for saving/uploading is PNG.
• - Fixed bug where successful FTP upload would ont show a balloon tip.
• + Added timeout to FTP uploads
• + Added plugin support for saving/uploading images and moved Saving, FTP, and Clipboard support into plugins.
• - Fixed a bug where multiple hotkeys could fire at once causing various race condition problems.
• - Made the PrintScreen code more robust.
• - Fixed bug where selection was incorrectly drawn on overlay when you held the mouse button down before it appeared.
• + Added SFTP/SCP support using hacked up SharpSSH 1.1.1.13
  • + Hacked in support for uploading a MemorySteam to a remote file.
• + Added autoupdate feature.  Can be triggered from About, and will also run automatically 15 seconds after startup if you don’t do anything.
• + Added date/time templates to options dialog.
• - Fixed bug where the progress bar and button on the notification may not be erased properly in all cases (RichTextBox doesn’t redraw properly on resize!).
• - Fixed overlay crash bug.
• - Removed alpha channel support from PrintWindow since it doesn’t seem to allow for alpha channel…
• + Added more debug information to crash dialogs so you have more information to report, making it easier for me to fix the crash!
• + Right click on the overlay cancels the capture.
• + Number of screenshots taken appears on about screen.  Removed the ability to change this number from the UI.
• + Settings are now stored in your user profile directory when not running from a portable device.
• - Fixed crash if a misbehaving application is preventing the clipboard from working. In this case now the error is ignored.
• - Removed ability to close balloon tooltip to cancel upload, doesn’t work as I expected.
• + Notifications will now respect system settings by default for sliding and fading.
• - PrintScreen will now disable hotkeys while it presses the key to prevent accidental hotkey triggers.
• - You may no longer use PrintWindow with the desktop window.  It’s funky and doesn’t work.
• + Added Capture Application mode to capture all windows belonging to one application at once.
• + Data is stored in AppData instead of LocalAppData for roaming profiles.
• + A window is now focused when captured.
• + Installer!

And a new glitch to go with all of this:

• The SFTP/SCP plugin cannot remove partially uploaded files when cancelled due to limitations of the SharpSSH library I am using.  If you know of a better SFTP/SCP library please let me know!

Also I’ve had AppCompactor 1.2 sitting on the back burner for a while, time for release!

• - Fixed version number… forgot to update it since 0.9.2… oops.
• - Closing the window or cancelling now prompts for confirmation if compacting is in progress.
• - Cancel button now properly disabled when compacting is finished.
• - Added possible protection against crash if files are deleted while AppCompactor is working with them.
• + Added parameters: -start and -close.  Causes AppCompactor to automatically start compacting or close when done without user input.
• + Added parameter: -details, shows details view during compacting by default.
• + Tweaked appearance of Details view seen during compacting.
  • + Details view will autoscroll.
  • + Details view can be hidden.
  • + Item/Subitem columns are merged
• + Added close when finished checkbox to the progress page which causes the program to automatically clean up temporary files and close when finished.
• - Added handler to display more error information on a fatal error.
• + Redid compacting backend to use BackgroundWorker API.
  • + More granularity for progress bar… is updated per-directory now instead of per-item.
• + Added “Only use UPX on Windows binaries” option to keep from trying UPX on every file.
• + Added tooltip text to ListViews with paths so you can see the entire path even when the ListView isn’t wide enough.
• + Made the window resizable.

I also made a small bug fix change to SVNExplorer, though I totally forget what it was.

Also I released a few apps into a semi-pubic beta a while back.  I figure I might as well finally post the download links publicly… check the Projects page link at the top of this blog, I also posted some stuff I never linked to on my downloads subdomain, such as Dark Frontend, an old frontend I made for Dark Forces.

I also made a fix to WiimoteScript, one of the semi-public betas.  Again, no clue what I fixed!

So yeah go check out my Projects page, lots of new additions today.

I’ve been working on other stuff too, really!  Just trying to get the bugs that people report to me out of the way…

Biggest change is the Portable Passwords feature.  It’s opt-in so you’ll need to use the INI to enable it since it creates a bit of a hassle (you need to enter a master password on startup, to keep your passwords safe).

More details in help.html.

• Stable (3.0.195.33)
• Beta (4.0.223.16)
• Dev (4.0.249.11)

Downloads:

• Stable (3.0.195.32)
• Beta (4.0.223.16)
• Dev (4.0.237.0)

Oh yeah, I am now featured on PortableApps.com!  Hooray!

Here’s the main changes for this version:

• Updated Stable to 3.0.195.32, Beta to 4.0.223.16, Dev to 4.0.237.0
• Using new versions based on launcher versions rather than Google Chrome versions.
• Default locations for Beta and Dev builds changed to “GoogleChromePortableTest” and “GoogleChromePortableDev” to fit with PAF.
• Fixed bug where themes would stop working when GCP’s path or drive letter changed.
• Added support for PortableApps.com Menu language selection. Set UsePAMLanguage to false in the INI to use the user-selected language in Chrome instead.
• On request of PA community, did more agressive cleanup of registry keys and directories left behind after quitting.
• Backup and restore local Chrome’s unique identifier information used for collecting usage data.
• Updated launcher crash cleanup guide.

Downloads: Stable/Beta | Dev

Fixed a particularly nasty bug where RunLocally and CacheInTemp were always forced on.  Also themes now work properly between sessions.

[Edit: Updated Dev download with the latest Chrome Dev build released today.]

[Edit: Update downloads to remove nsexec which some av products falsely label as malware.]

[Edit: Updated Dev build to *.223.11 which fixes a crash bug with RSS feed extensions.]

Downloads: Stable, Beta, Dev.

First let’s start with the updated programs:

EasyScreenshot.NET has been updated to 1.6.

Changes since 1.5:

• EasyScreenshot.NET can now only have one instance running at once.
• EasyScreenshot.NET now properly loads/saves options and screenshots regardless of the wrong working directory it is run from.
• “Capture Clipboard After Timer” is a bit pointless and so was removed.
• “Capture Clipboard Now” will be unavailable if there is no image data on the clipboard that ES.NET understands.
• When uploading an image, the image and url is available on the clipboard immediately for pasting before the upload completes.
• Hotkeys work now.
• If an upload fails it will be reattempted up to 3 times.
• Overlay has been replaced with a much simpler, static overlay.  This should fix most problems people have with it.  The new overlay has a new option: by default, when you select an area or window, that area will be cut from the static overlay as-is.  If you want to capture the area/window at the moment of time when you click it (old behavior), there’s a new toggle in the options dialog.
• Notification boxes are now clickable.  URLs now show up as clickable links.
• You can now cancel uploads by clicking a Cancel button in the notification box or closing the balloon tip.

AppCompactor has been updated to version 1.1:

Changes since 1.0:

• Tweaks to the interface for adding/removing files and folders.
• More silk icon goodness!
• Workaround for .NET semi-bug which could occur if you use search indexing or real-time malware monitoring software and it tries to access temporary files as AppCompactor is trying to delete them.
• Fixed temporary directory not being completely cleaned up when it could be.

Google Chrome Portable has been updated to use PortableApps.com Format.  In accordance with PortableApps.com guidelines I am making “Development Test” versions available for testing prior to a final release of this version.  Previews of releases 2.0.172.33 and 3.0.190.4 are available.

Changelog for this release as well as release notes etc is available here.  One important note is that the installer will delete plugins and dictionaries, so if you want to keep them back them up first.

Now a new release!

(Click any images for unsquished versions.)

Main SVN Explorer window

SVN Explorer is a program I made for browsing SVN repositories that do not have a web-based interface for browsing.  Or even those that do.  This program uses Cygwin svn.exe (or compatible) as a helper process to actually do all the dirty work that I don’t know how to do.  I could have used a library or something but I really wanted to hone my skills with using helper processes like this.

SVN Explorer only implements read-only operations, and only operations that don’t don’t involve mass-downloading (no checkout or update, sorry).  What you CAN do is browse the tree at any revision number/date, download individual files, view files in an internal or external viewer, view properties for any file or folder including revision log info, repository information, file data, and misc properties on a file or folder.

Note that this program is probably a bit rougher around the edges than most of my programs.  This was sorta intended to be a proof-of-concept thing and sorta ballooned.

You must have svn.exe in your system path or in the working directory of this program in order to use it.  The version of svn.exe I used can be installed with Cygwin, and there are also probably compatible native ports too.

Now for the sneak previews of programs that are almost done.

Main WiimoteScript window

WiimoteScript with helper panes open

A few of my programs have been attempts to copy programs that are good ideas but that are broken, buggy, or just no longer updated.  GlovePIE sadly feel into this category… it seems very picky about which bluetooth stacks it works with, and when I reinstalled XP once it stopped working entirely.  I felt the need to make a replacement program that would be more compatible.  When I found WiiDeviceLibrary, a .NET library that boasted compatibility with the Microsoft bluetooth stack, I knew I had my opportunity.

WiimoteScript is my attempt to create a GlovePIE clone that focuses on Wii devices while building on the base of WiiDeviceLibrary.  Leveraging the .NET framework’s built-in compilers, I was able to implement a scripting language.  You can read and simulate input on the Mouse and Keyboard, as well as simulate input on PPJoy joysticks.  But mostly you will want to read data from Wii devices connected to your system and then simulate input on those other devices, which games and other programs can read as real input.

I tried to keep things simple whenever possible.  Any time while the program is running, you can pair your Wiimote (press 1+2) or other Wii device and it will automatically be detected and connected.  You then load a script and run it.  If you make your own scripts, there is a quick reference feature to get you started, although knowledge about the .NET framework, at least language syntax, is considered a prerequesite.

Note that I also support C# in addition to VB.NET, don’t worry.

I also included a thorough Wii device testing tool that you can use to verify if there’s a bug in your script, my code, WiiDeviceLibrary, or if your Wii device is just acting wonky.

All I have left to do is really get a good collection of simple scripts together to make it easy to use (just load a script and go) as well as provide samples for the basis of user-made scripts.

Although I won’t do it for this release, I could use some help making the code completion not suck (you can turn it off if you find it sucks bad enough, press Ctrl+E and click on the button enough).  Anyone who has any experience with SharpDevelop’s source code, especially the editor and code completion portions, please drop me an e-mail (resume has my address) or tweet (@mzzt) and let me know.

Taskbar and Start Menu, browsing a place.

Taskbar with All Programs. No Icons because I'm not testing from my portable drive.

Options menu

Portable Taskbar was the result of my looking at PortableApps.com Menu and realizing it would be so much more awesome with some more customization ability and a taskbar.  Unfortunately it seemed noone made anything like that, so again, I stepped in!

First, I based the concepts all around the built-in Vista/7 Start Menu.  We have built-in searching of programs, and it can even show folder contents if you give it an absolute path.  Places on the right can be used to navigate common folders and it defaults to PortableApps.com’s own directory structure on your drive.  Internet and E-mail can optionally be pinned to the Start Menu (no others, sorry…) and recent programs appear too (not shown).  Then we have integration with USB Disk Ejector to power the eject button.

In All Programs, you can quickly add a bunch of programs at once, rename them, change their icons and paths, add parameters, reorder them, whatever!

Any program windows run from your portable drive appear in your portable taskbar, so it is the central hub for your portable drive.  If you don’t like the taskbar you can turn it off and be left with a tray icon, a la PortableApps.com Menu.  The taskbar also allows programs to be pinned to it, and has a nice “always on top” orb.

I’m hoping to get some “Windows 7″-like taskbar effects in, such as mixing quick launch and process buttons, task grouping, large icons…  However these are not implemented yet.

Lastly I implemented some flexible themeing.  Themes are defined via XML files and image files and I tried to make images work closely to how I know Windows themeing works.  Unfortunately I could not get native themeing in thanks to the fact that applications can’t use taskbar themeing in XP, just Vista and above.

The obvious choice for a default theme was my inspiration, PortableApps.com.  I still have to get permission though before I release I suppose… >_>

Bonus for reading all of this:

Once I saw this a friend of mine commented that it should be the intro movie to TF2.  I made that a reality.  Go here and download both files (they are different files, stupid thing just hides the extensions) and extract the larger one to get both files out of it.  Put them in Steam\SteamApps\<username>\Team Fortress 2\tf\media and you’re good to go.

Had to transcode it TWICE because RADTools and possibly DirectShow hate me so I had to transcode it to XViD and then use RADTools to make a usable BNK file but the quality is OK except in a couple of frames where the names appear on the screen but I blame the Bink codec for that.

It was worse than I had feared.

First of all the install process has a progress bar that doesn’t actually measure anything meaninful since it just resets once it gets to the end and you have no clue how many times it has to fill before it’s done.  I hate installers that do that.  But I can’t fault Apple for this since it’s a universal sort of flaw you see everywhere.

The installer was actually sort of pleasent, well except that it steals all your file associations by default but if you’re the sort of person who reads all the checkboxes instead of just clicking Next until the installer is done it’s not a big problem.  Again this is a universal thing that happens in many installers, even Firefox.

Of course it installs no less than 3 different services in order to work properly.  I didn’t even check application drivers!  At most only one service should be needed for User mode compatibility… and even then I hate when apps need to install services that run all the time even when the app isn’t running.

Let’s see what we have here:

1. “Apple Mobile Device: Provides the interface to Apple mobile devices.” I don’t even HAVE an iPod!
2. “Bonjour Service: Bonjour allows applications like iTunes and Safari to advertise and discover services on the local network.”  I’m not big on Mac stuff but I guess this is the Mac equivilent of an SMB client.  This really isn’t needed as a service, user mode apps SHOULD be able to use networking just fine without it, and it’s not like you can do much with these services without an Apple User mode app runnning, right?
3. “iPod Service: iPod hardware management services” Wait, didn’t we already get this in #1?  I’m confused.
4. Oh yeah, Apple’s Update thing goes into Scheduled Tasks if you don’t uncheck the box for it.  Not a service but still annoying.  I don’t really need to update your apps if I’m not running them, just check on app startup!

Ok now the install is finished.  I get an error message indicating some Windows system components I need are missing.  Not a big surprise since I’m running a stripped-down XP VM… oh wait these components are only needed for iPod/iPhone communications.  But if we can’t do it anyway, why are the two services still running?  Oh well.

EULA, agree…

Welcome to iTunes wizard, next, uncheck scan my music folder, next, keep my iTunes music organized, next, it tells me about album artwork for some reason, finish.

The interface is actually quite nice, but this is where everything gets SLOW so it’s not really worth it to me.  The integrated IE browser is missing vital things like text selection, context menu, and address bar (it can only navigate iTunes store, which is OK I guess).  In place of an address bar you get a nifty breadcrumb bar that shows you where in the Apple Store heiarchy you are.

So I go to redeem my free songs first… oh wait I need an account.  So I use my AIM account to log in.  Oh wait, I need to set up an Apple account first… this was NOT on the 1 2 3 4 easy steps on the gift card!

So I set it up and eventually reach the credit card page.  This doesn’t qualify as “free” for me, but fortunately there is a convenient “No credit card” option that I select.  It still wants my address though.  Yeah, no.

When I try to skip that, it complains and sends me back to the page.  I go to fill it out… but the “No credit card” option is gone.  So now I HAVE to give them a credit card number which they will keep indefinitely and automatically charge me if any music is bought on my account.  Yeah, that’s not free, and definitely also not risky.

I try to restart the sign up process, but the “No credit card” option does not appear.  I almost give up and wipe iTunes right there, but then I figure out what Apple is up to here… so I decide to try my redeem code again.  I am told again I need to sign up, and I go to the sign up page… and the “No credit card” option is back.  Sneaky of them.

I do not appreciate trying to be railroaded into giving up my credit card information just because I make one little mistake.  The “No credit card” option is also intentionally hidden from new users who haven’t specifically tried to redeem free content.  That’s shady if you ask me.

So I put my address down as 555 5th Street and continue on.  Hooray, it’s redeemed my songs for me now!

So the download starts.  It seems nice, everything is happening automatically.

Then it finishes the first three songs and begins “processing file” on all of them.  What’s there to process?  DRM?  Just give me my music, you finished downloading it!  I’ve never seen a file downloader take so long to do… well… nothing I care about.  This is where the UI becomes so slow that it’s completely unresponsive while it downloads your music.  There’s really no point to the pause buttons on the music since they don’t respond to clicks.

Eventually I’m convinced iTunes has hung since the UI is unresponsive and nothing seems to happen for a period of time.  I kill it.  A reasonable thing to do and a regular Windows  practice.

Start it back up annnd… where did my music go?  I have 19 tracks queued for download, but the other three I downloaded are gone!  This doesn’t happen in Songbird, or any other program that downloads files, and is completely unintuitive and definitely undesired application behavior.

Next three downloaded, and it hangs again.  I have to restart it again and I’m down to 16 free songs from the original 22.

This time I decide to wait it out, maybe it wasn’t really hung.  Maybe it’s just slow from bring in a VM (but the rest of the VM’s apps are quite responsive). This time it finishes all the songs (eventually) and I look in the Library for the other 6.  They are gone.

I check the iTunes Library folder and find them in a temporary directory with temporary file names.  After some searching on Apple Support I direct iTunes to import music to the Library FROM the iTunes Library.  It imports the music!

… Except all the tracks are called “download” and are untagged.  Are you kidding me?!?!  All the other tracks were tagged, why does it wait until AFTER all the songs are downloaded to tag them?!?!

Of course there must be an easy way to get iTunes to redownload music you purchased (or redeemed) that failed to download, right?  Wrong.

My Purchased list in iTunes only shows the 16 songs, which is utterly rediculous, it should have a record of my proper purchases (redeems)!

I find an in-browser list of my purchases and it properly shows the 22 tracks.  Why then does iTunes only show 16?

I am then forced to write down every track in the list of 22, compare it to the 16 list by hand (I can’t have them both on the screen at once!), and then manually write down the names of the tracks that are untagged.  Then I have to listen to each track to figure out which is which (thankfully they were imported in alphabetical order) and tag them BY HAND, using Wikipedia and Google to fill in the blanks in the tags that iTunes didn’t list on the purchase order like Album, Track Number, etc.

Now I’m ready to give up iTunes and just enjoy my new music in Winamp, but I’m afraid I might have to battle with stripping off the DRM first.  Thankfully Apple did remove DRM from their music a while ago so when I exported my music to the host OS, it played just fine in Winamp to my delight.  Well except that my manually tagged music had on album art.  I was able to use Winamp to automatically get the album art for 4 of the 6 tracks easily enough.  But two were still missing, and I wanted proper tags for all 6.

So I decided to see if Apple Support would help.  Considering how much iTunes sucks they must be good at helping users by now.

When I indicated my problems in an e-mail, the tech that responded completely misunderstood my problem.  I thought I had made it quite clear but apparently he thought iTunes couldn’t read any music tags, when I had indicated that it could on all but 6 songs that lacked tags.  So I once again iterated that I had imported those 6 songs manually but they weren’t being tagged, so I wished to download them again.  I attached two screenshots of the 22-song purchase history and the 16-song iTunes purchases lists to indicate my problem more clearly.

Solution: Try it again!  Well to be fair he indicated I should clear my profile first and reinstall iTunes, and though he didn’t explain this point to me at the time he also reenabled the file downloads on my account.  Guess Apple doesn’t trust users to be able to download their files multiple time.  Bbut they can copy them as many times as they want, thanks to the lack of DRM!  Double standards are fun!

To ease the process of cleaning up iTunes I roll back the virtual machine and install it again.  Hangs after downloading 6 songs.  I wait a long time but it has definitely died.

I try to roll back and install again and here is where I discover that a tech support person has to manually authorize a redownload of songs.  I’m still trying to figure out how you authorize multiple computers to play your DRM’d songs when you can only download them once… it doesn’t make sense, it’s like users HAVE to figure out how to copy and distribute music to others in order to get their own music to play on their other computers…

So I e-mail the tech again and explain my problem.  All he can suggest is to try it yet again, which is where I am now.

Up to 6 songs again and I’m not very optimistic.  I guess I can settle for my 6 partially tagged songs.  But I’m not even going to TRY using that $15 gift card, as far as I’m concerned it’s worth far less than the plastic it’s printed on.

[Edit: It finished!  Only took 4 hours to download 1.4 hours of music, that's progress for you!]

Edit: Windows Live Writer totally broke all the HTML in my post. So yeah I think I’m done with that.

First a small change to Software Picks from now on… I will first explain the type of software this is and what it does, then pick out some good examples (all free software, and usually all for Windows), and then explain why I like my favorite choice over those. Feel free to scroll past parts you don’t care about.

I am talking about virtualization software here. This is the idea of speeding up emulation of one type of hardware running on the same type of hardware, but abstracted away, so you can have your main OS running, but then have another OS (a “guest”) running in a sandbox where it can’t affect the “host”. Virtualization is faster than emulation (where the emulated hardware could be different from the host hardware) since you can make assumptions and optimizations based on similarities between host and guest.

I would also group virtualization software with PC emulators since that’s mostly what’s being emulated/virtualized.

In layman’s terms, you can run Linux or Windows or DOS or any other PC OS without having to format your hard drive or reboot or in any way affect your computer other than being just another piece of software. Cool, right?

First example of virtualization software is Virtual PC, Microsoft’s offering. Like much Microsoft software (Internet Explorer, MS-DOS), they bought it off of another company and continue to improve it.

It was my choice for a while, but it lacks some of the flexibility of guest hardware choices that other programs offer. It also is optimized for Windows, meaning Linux will run horribly on it, and some distros like Ubuntu require special boot strings to boot correctly. However I still use it to run Windows 3.11 occasionally (last I checked VirtualBox had a bad freeze bug with it).

From VMware there are two free products of interest to the desktop user… Player and Server. Both are free. Server is the more full-featured of the two but it puts more hooks into Windows and installs more services which are always running… I don’t like that kind of thing. Player on the other hand is lighter but also limited as it cannot create new virtual machines, which would be an instant deal-breaker if not for the resourcefulness of the Internet. Unfortunately even with that you’ll still have to break out Notepad to tweak Virtual Machine configurations… not too fun. On the bright side we get USB device support and more hardware tools.

Next we have QEMU, the only emulator on my list. What this means is though QEMU is slower (you can download a kernel driver to help speed it up) it will run on a wider variety of computer architectures.

Only problem is, it’s a command line interface, and I usually have to consult the docs to figure out what I need to type. But it is chock full of features if you are comfortable with the command line.

The main problem is that there is no official Windows binaries, so when trying to use the KQEMU accelerator kernel driver, it can be difficult to find a version that matches up. It is also the slowest solution still, being an emulator. The built-in interface for changing virtual discs and so forth is ALSO a console interface, making it tough to use again. I also find myself constantly going back and forth between doc files trying to remember where I saw that command I was looking for.

Basically if you’re not comfortable with using the command line… don’t consider QEMU by itself. There are several GUI frontends available which probably make things a lot easier (Google around for them). I was actually making one once, but I lost interest and unfortunately for that project I have moved on to VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is my pick. It has a decent array of hardware options, it runs Linux about 5 times as fast as Virtual PC, it has Guest Additions (drivers for a guest OS which integrate it with the host OS) for Windows and Linux, multiple networking options, USB devices in guest OSs… and some cool stuff like “seamless modequot; (just try it!) It also runs on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux (as Host OSs, now) which is great because now I can use the same VMs when I boot into Linux.

The virtual disk manager is a bit annoying at first and seems to be in the way, but once you add all your disks to it it becomes quite useful as it aggregates them all in one place so you don’t have to browse all over to find the CD ISO./p pAn update today replaces the TAP driver used for Host Interface networking (used to make the virtual machine appear on your network just like any physical machine) with a network filter… much “cleaner” which I like, and has the advantage of allowing multiple VMs to use the same network adapter.

More interesting is the new OpenGL 3D acceleration. I did some benchmarks on my Host OS as well as a Windows 2000 Guest OS using a 7-year old benchmarking program I found. The results are here. Don’t view the source of that page… I didn’t write it, and it’s quite ugly.

It’s not a perfect benchmark (I couldn’t turn VSync off in the VM) but it looks good enough to run Half-Life or even Quake 3-engine games at full speed.

In this case, I see lots of people using trial versions of WinZip or WinRAR. Why? It doesn’t make sense, not when there are good, free products out there that don’t have nag screens or trial periods.

My archive tool of choice is 7-Zip. It has a GUI tool, a command line interface, and a shell extension, so you can right click archives to extract them, or right click a bunch of files to archive them. All these are musts for me, and 7-Zip does a good job in all of them. It can also create self-extracting archives which is a plus if you want to compress in .7z format but aren’t sure if your friend has a tool that can open them.

The most interesting feature 7-Zip brings to the table is the 7-Zip file format. It boasts higher compression rates than ZIP. AFAIK, ZIP was originally intended for use with text files, so you get best compression rates with them. I don’t know much about .7z but it was probably designed for modern uses that ZIP is currently used for. At any rate, except for very small files or text files, .7z has always won out for compression ratio in my little tests.

It also supports extracting a number of archives. Unfortunately it can only create a small subset of these, including .7z, ZIP, .tar, .gz, and .bz2, which is still a useful enough assortment.

The only thing it really can’t do is generate RAR files, but fortunately there really is no reason to have to make them anymore… I’m not sure why you still see some around. I can only assume they get better compression ratios in some places than ZIP. However I haven’t needed to make any RAR files for as long as I’ve been using 7-Zip. Considering 7-Zip is a free tool and IIRC RAR creation support requires a paid license I can understand why there is no support.

I would recommend 7-Zip to anyone who is looking for a good desktop tool for extracting or creating archive files, or a good command line tool for the same.