Free web development information manager

Whether you're a pro, a hobbyist, or somewhere in between, if you manage the care and feeding of a couple of websites and a few blogs, then you know that life can get complicated. You've got servers to keep track of, domain names to manage, files to up- and download and all that. Each of these has a user name and a password to have to keep straight. After a while it becomes a question of who is running whom.

Serverskine is an app that can give you a hand in keeping track of these little—but important—pieces of information. It's got a simple interface that lets you easily enter all that information, and it's got a built-in search facility that lets you find things when you need to retrieve them. While you can save your information in a proprietary binary format, there are also options to save in SQLite and even XML, so that if for some reason the app goes south, you can still get your information back.

A free Mac application, Serverskine runs under OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later. It's a Universal Binary, so it's equally at home on both PowerPC and Intel machines.

Download Serverskine

Free web development information manager

Whether you're a pro, a hobbyist, or somewhere in between, if you manage the care and feeding of a couple of websites and a few blogs, then you know that life can get complicated. You've got servers to keep track of, domain names to manage, files to up- and download and all that. Each of these has a user name and a password to have to keep straight. After a while it becomes a question of who is running whom.

Serverskine is an app that can give you a hand in keeping track of these little—but important—pieces of information. It's got a simple interface that lets you easily enter all that information, and it's got a built-in search facility that lets you find things when you need to retrieve them. While you can save your information in a proprietary binary format, there are also options to save in SQLite and even XML, so that if for some reason the app goes south, you can still get your information back.

A free Mac application, Serverskine runs under OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later. It's a Universal Binary, so it's equally at home on both PowerPC and Intel machines.

Download Serverskine

Free hex editor

There are geeks, and then there are GEEKS. Being knowledgeable about the software and hardware you use every day buys you some street cred in the geek world, but if you really want to let your Geek Flag fly, you're going to need to do more than that. We used to know a guy who balanced his checkbook in hexadecimal. Now that's hard core!

HexEdit is a tool that lets you get in and get intimate with your files. Not just some text editor, this tool lets you get in and look at the individual bytes in your files. You may find some interesting stuff in there, or if you decide to make an edit or two while you're in the neighborhood, you may totally trash the file. This brings up two important rules for using hex editors: (1) always work with a copy, not the original file, and (2) have a clue about what you're doing. When you're working with files on this level, there are no safeguards to keep you from breaking those files and more. Be safe.

HexEdit is a free download. It's a Windows application. Thick glasses and propeller beanie not included.

Download HexEdit

Free Flash Effect Generator

Everywhere you go on the web today you run across sites that feature—or are built around—Flash movies. Have you ever built one? If you're curious to find out how to do that, well, the cost of entry just got a lot lower.

Effect Generator is a free online service that lets you build animated movies. While it doesn't exactly mimic the official tools used to create these guys, it's close enough to get the job done. Experienced users can build new movies from scratch, but if you prefer training wheels, they've got a bunch of examples you can remix and adapt to your purposes. All the goodies are drag and drop, so it shouldn't take too long to put your masterpiece—or at least you first attempt—together.

You'll need the Flash plugin installed your web browser to access this tool. And of course, a bit of artistic talent wouldn't hurt either.

Download Effect Generator

Drag and drop file format conversion

Did you ever get a file—probably an important one—in a format you couldn't open because you didn't have the right application? That FLAC audio file or RAR archive isn't going to do you any good if you can't open it. You need to be able to convert files from what you can't use into files you can use.

Dragoman is a Mac-based batch file conversion tool. It does the standard stuff—convert your images to PDFs or turn Word DOCs into text files—but also maybe some things you didn't expect, like converting between various archive formats. It's easy to use—the "drag" part of its name suggests the type of interface, although the Help file explains that the word is actually of Middle Eastern origin and means "translator".

Just drag your document or media file onto the app. It recognizes the type of file you've got and displays an appropriate list of file formats that you can choose from to do your conversion. It supports a pretty good sized list of archive, audio, image, and text file formats, and even though there are some popular formats it can't translate into, even some of those can serve as the source for translation into formats it can work with.

Dragoman is a free Mac application. It runs under OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) and later.

Download Dragoman

Clean your hard drive big-time

There comes a time in the life of every computer when it's time to be removed from service. Maybe it's because you just scored a hot new system and you're donating Old Reliable to a school or nonprofit, or maybe you're going to sell it on eBay to help pay for that fancy new machine. Either way, you need to get your stuff—programs and more importantly personal data—off the hard drive. A simple delete won't get the job done, so it's time to find a more industrial-strength tool to take care of business.

Darik's Boot And Nuke may be the answer you're looking for. Download this tool and install it on a floppy disk or CD, and you're all set for a high-powered hard disk-wiping machine. This guy takes out programs, data, even partition tables. While the best way to be absolutely sure that your data has been removed is to physically destroy your hard drive, you're going to have a hard time getting much for your system with no disk drive and all those metal shavings in there. Short of that, you can probably sleep pretty well at night after using this guy to clean out your machine.

There's no guarantee that this app will render all of your data unrecoverable forever, but for the price—did we mention it's free?—you probably can't do much better.

Download Darik's Boot And Nuke

Build your own fonts for free

How many different fonts do you suppose there are out there? Your system comes with a bunch. Many of your applications add more to the mix. You can find third-party after-market fonts all over the place, some even for free. But what if, even with all these choices, you still don't find the font you're really looking for? Maybe it's time to make your own.

FontStruct is a website with a purpose: they let you design and build your own fonts. It's not really as complicated as you might think. Their online tool is easy to use, and they've got a demo to show you how it's done. Once you're finished you can download your handiwork, or share it with the world if you like. You can also browse the creations of others.

You need to create an account and log in to use this free service. And of course, you'll need a web browser to access the site.

Download FontStruct

Batch image resize tool

Nothing's ever quite the way you want it. Just ask Goldilocks: chairs, breakfast, beds, nothing really worked for her. If you've got a pile of image files, you may be familiar with that concept. This picture is too big; this one is too small. Fire up Photoshop to fix them, and you're committing to a long, hard slog—as well as several bills—to get the job done. Faster and cheaper might be nice.

Pixer is a Mac tool that lets you tweak your graphics files. Choose an individual file or a whole folder full, drag them onto the app, and let go. Choose how you want them resized—you can specify a pixel number, percentage, or choose from presets for specific sizes, as well as being able to rotate and flip images, or crop and pad them. It supports most popular image formats, so you can probably use it for whatever you're working with.

Pixer is a free download for Mac users. You'll need to be running at least version 10.4 of OS X (10.5 for some advanced features) to use it.

Download Pixer

A different application launcher

Shortcuts can be quite useful. If the road from here to there takes a bunch of twists and turns before you arrive at your destination, it's going to take you longer to get there from here. But if you know the secret shortcut, you can potentially cut out a lot of hours and miles from your trip. Those smart people who work with software know all about this.

Whether you're looking at aliases, accelerator keys, or symbolic links, what you really have is a bunch of shortcuts. Rather than having to dig through the My Programs directory to find your app, you can click on a shortcut to start the program. Organize your shortcuts cleverly, maybe on your desktop, or in a menu, and you're going to get there even quicker. That's kind of the idea behind Windows' Start Menu and Quick Launch. That's also the idea behind Radian.

Radian is an application launcher that aims to help you get things done quicker. Now instead of having to dig through folders, or even click on menus, all you need to do is to right click on your screen. No matter where your mouse is on your screen, you've now got access to your Radian menu. Set it up with your most important or most used applications, and see whether your efficiency improves. It's designed in such a way that it shouldn't interfere with your other right-click commands, so you're not really sacrificing functionality that you're familiar with for this new tool.

A free download, Radian is a Windows application.

Download Radian

Turn mouse gestures into action

Everybody's got a different way they prefer to interact with their computer. Some folks swear by the command prompt. Others like WYSIWYG but don't want to take their hands off the keyboard. Then there are the mouse aficionados, who would rather double-click their way through life. The next group, those who would prefer to just wave their hand to make things happen, will be interested in MouseWrangler.

This tool lets you use gestures—movements of the mouse—to initiate system events. Once it's installed, you just hold down the right mouse button and then move your mouse around the desktop. You can associate movement in various directions—up, down, left, right, and even diagonally—with particular commands. Start or stop apps, enter chunks of text, or just about anything else you want to do. Couple with with your own keyboard macro tool, and you can drive the whole system with the wave of your hand. You'll feel like like a Big Deal as Windows quakes before your awesome might. Or at least you'll get more work done.

MouseWrangler is a free Windows application.

Download MouseWrangler

Convert text files between Unix, Mac, and Windows

Everything in the world is connected. This is especially true with computer stuff. There are servers talking to servers, and desktop machines, smart phones, and all manner of other electronic goodies that talk to one another. The wonder of it all is that for the most part, they each understand what the other is saying. There is one notable exception, of course: the lowly text file.

Even though the text file is arguably the least-complicated kind of file out there, they are not all created equally. Even though these files are just text, no pictures, no formatting, no fancy stuff, there are differences between text files, depending on where a given file was created. Those differences all come with the end-of-line character–the way that your computer knows that one line has ended and the next one begins.

In the Unix world, the end of a line in a text file is indicated by the LineFeed character (0×0A), in the world of the Mac (at least through OS 9) it's the Carriage Return character (0×0D), and in DOS and Windows, it's the combination of the two (0×0D and 0×0A). While some apps are tolerant of these differences, others aren't nearly so well behaved. Create some web server configuration file on your Mac and upload it to your Unix web server, and you'll see what a mess things can be.

The solution? It could be something as simple as Flip, a little utility app that you can download. It's just a console app–no fancy GUI here–that allows you to convert files from one format to another. You can use it on single files, or on a whole bunch of them. A command line argument tells it which flavor you want your resulting files to be.

Flip is available in versions for Linux, Mac, and Windows machines.

Download Flip

Check your mail without downloading it

You're out on the road, but you want to be in touch with what's going on back at home or in the office. You know the email is piling up, but you don't want to grab all those messages just yet, since you know a fair percentage of them will be from some Nigerian prince or some guy who's willing to let you in on the latest magical fruit juice drink that will make you healthy, wealthy, and wise (perhaps wise enough not to fall for their scam?). Basically you want to check the mail, but I don't want to read the mail.

Vallen POP3 Mail Checker is a tool that lets you preview email in your POP3 email accounts. It's probably going to be most useful in situations where you're stuck with a low-bandwidth connection—like visiting Mom, where you know there's no broadband—or where you want to see what's going on but don't want to take up the space required for downloading messages onto your laptop or phone. You can also use this tool to kill spam on the server, rather than waiting for it to download and go through your email client's filters.

A Windows application, Vallen POP3 Mail Checker should be happy as an electronic clam on systems running Win98 or later.

Download Vallen POP3 Mail Checker

Dynamic DNS service for websites without fixed addresses

The best website in the world doesn't do anybody any good if they can't find it. The ability to find a site—or anything else on the Internet—depends on the Domain Name System and its capability of taking human-readable addresses like "example.com" and translating them into addresses that computers can understand like "192.0.32.10". Most web sites have a fixed address; Google will always be at google.com, Twitter is at twitter.com, and so forth. So what about web sites that don't have a fixed address?

Suppose you want to host a site at home or at work. Now suppose you don't have a fixed address. Maybe you're on a dial-up connection—in which case you should seriously think about not hosting—or more likely you are on a broadband connection that doesn't include a fixed IP address. How will anybody find you if you're never in the same place twice?

DynDNS is a service for situations like that. You install a little app that lets their servers know what your current address is, and when people want to visit your site, they are directed through some back-end sleight-of-hand to your site, even though it's not located in the same place today that it was yesterday. They've got an update client for both Windows and Mac servers, and give some instructions for how to configure a Linux server as well. So now you can host a server at home (subject to your ISP's terms of service) and people can actually find you.

Download DynDNS

HTML editing is a breeze with PageBreeze

If you're really taking control of your website, you know there's no substitute for getting in there and getting your hands dirty editing your code directly. Sure, there are tools you can use that insulate you from the vagaries of HTML and stylesheet syntax, but that extra layer of separation between you and the code is going to inject assumptions about your page that may not be accurate. If you want anything done right, you've got to do it yourself.

PageBreeze is a free HTML editor. Along with the text editing functionality you need to get in there and work on your code, it also features a WYSIWYG mode, helpful for when you first rough-out your new page. It's also got a built-in preview mode, so you can see what your finished page is going to look like while you're working on it. This display is powered by Internet Explorer, so what you see is really what your visitors will see as well. It's got other handy built-in tools, like a form generator. If you've ever had to build a web form from scratch, you know that this can be a real time saver. And website templates: there's nothing like staring at the blank screen and trying to figure out how to start.

If you want to use PageBreeze for personal, non-profit, or educational purposes, you're in luck: it's free! If you want to use it in conjunction with your business, you need to upgrade to their Professional version for a few bucks. You'll need Windows 9x or later, as well as a copy of IE 4.0 or better to use this tool.

Download PageBreeze

Empty the Trash automatically with TrashTimer

Is "Move to Trash" your favorite command? As you work through your day, writing this and drawing that, you generate a bunch of junk—or at least "works in progress"—that you delete as you continue to fine-tune your work. Since you're getting better and better you know that you're not going to want to re-use this stuff; after all, you did throw it in the Trash. But as you know, just 'cause you threw it away doesn't mean that that file or document has really gone away. It just sits there waiting for you to decide what to do about it.

TrashTimer is an app for your Mac that automatically empties the Trash for you. You choose the frequency—maybe once an hour, maybe once a day—and all your junk will magically disappear. Once the Trash is emptied, you get that disk space back, so you can continue to create cool stuff. This tool is a preference panel instead of a "regular" app, so it's not going to take up any space on your Dock.

Since it's a Universal Binary, TrashTimer will run on your PowerPC or Intel-flavored Mac. It runs under OS X 10.3 and later.

Download TrashTimer

water marking

It's nice to share. When you were a kid, mom told you to share your toys. Helped things run more smoothly in the sandbox. As an adult, sharing is still a pretty good idea. Letting your lunch companion nibble on a couple of your fries is a good thing. So how far do you want the sharing thing to go? If you share your french fries, you have pretty good control over what happens to them once they leave your plate. Share your vacation photos on the Web and you don't have that type of control.

PhotoWham is a tool that lets you watermark your pictures. It's nothing fancy: just the ability to label those photos, drawings, or what-have-you so that folks know whence they came. Just enter your text—including a copyright symbol if you want, and press the magic button. You can do individual images, drag-and-drop a handful at a time, or browse to a directory and grab 'em all. In addition to branding those photos, you can do some image resizing and even rename files or move them into a new folder.

Available for free for home use, you should be able to use PhotoWham with Windows XP and later.

Download PhotoWham

High Quality Photo Resizer

The name pretty much says it all. If you've got a photo and need to resize it, High Quality Photo Resizer may be your ticket home. This tool is specifically designed for batch processing of image files, so if you download the latest photos from your digital camera, it should be a snap to resize them for use on the Web or as attachments to email.

It's easy to resize images, either as a percentage or their original size, or to specific dimensions. In addition, there are a bunch of effects you can add to your pictures, adding visual interest and cleaning things up. In addition to your camera's JPGs, this app can deal with a boatload of other image formats, making it a pretty handy all-around image processing tool.

High Quality Photo Resizer is a free Windows application. It should run on anything from Win2k up through Windows 7.

Download High Quality Photo Resizer

Free graph and chart editor

There's nothing like a pile of indecipherable data. Whether it's a log of visitors to your website, or fluctuations in the price of tea in China, just having a bunch of numbers doesn't really help you to analyze and understand the world around you—or at least it doesn't without giving it some serious thought. Sometimes it's a lot more helpful if you can look at things graphically as a flowchart, bargraph, or in some other right-brain-friendly medium. It's easier to spot trends, for example, if you see a line sloping upward (hooray!) or downward (oops!), than just a jumble of digits.

If you're tying to gain mastery of your data, a tool like yEd might be your ticket home. It supports oodles of different layouts and and symbols, so there's bound to be a way you can make your data talk to you. It's easy to work with, as you can rearrange all the tools and palettes to make sense for your work style. And you can export your results into a bunch of different bitmap and vector formats, suitable for including in reports or posting on the web.

yEd is a Java application. If you've got the right JRE on your machine, it'll run anywhere, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and more. For some of these, it'll work even if you don't have the right runtime, since it's included with the download. Sweet!

Download yEd

Convert Image to PDF

We all know that PDFs are handy things to have. You can use them to share information with others. They're cross-platform, so if you're on a Windows machine, you can still share with Mac and Linux users, or any other combination of those. And since Acrobat Reader and many other PDF reader apps are free, cost in no object there either.

There are a number of different ways to create PDFs, some involving expensive tools, and others for free. Among the free entries here are plugins and printer drivers for use with apps like Word and its ilk. But what if, instead of text, you need to create PDFs from images instead? Your options may be more limited.

i2pdf (Image to PDF) is a free tool you can use to convert your pictures into full-blown PDF files. It's got a simple drag-and-drop interface, so it's pretty easy to convert your JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, and GIF files. And you get to choose compression, thumbnail info and more.

A free download, i2pdf runs under Windows. There are 32- and 64-bit versions available.

Download i2pdf

Unblur your photos with Unshake

Have you ever taken a bad photo? We're not talking about pictures of questionable taste here; rather, those photos where you really can't tell what it's a picture of. There's the ever-popular demonic red eye shot that you can fix with Photoshop or GIMP, but what about those images you snapped just as you sneezed, or when the yellow-bellied sapsucker you were zeroing in on decided to fly off? That's not such an easy fix.

Unshake is a tool that can help you salvage those photos. While your results may vary, if you fiddle with it enough, you may get something useful out the other end. There's not tons of documentation, so you'll need to play with it a while to see which settings do what. And of course, it's never a bad idea to work on a copy rather than the only version of the image in question.

Unshake is a Java app, so you should be able to run it on any Linux, Mac, or Windows machine that has the appropriate Java runtime installed. It's free for personal use.

Download Unshake

Measure objects and distances with on-screen ruler

How far is it from here to there? In the real world, you'd answer this question with a ruler or yardstick. But what about on your computer display? How far is far? It kind of depends on the screen resolution and all that. You're probably going to have better luck measuring pixels than you are looking at inches or centimeters.

JR Screen Ruler is a tool that can help you check out sizes of objects and distances between objects on your screen. It defaults to pixels (although it can display other units as well), and can easily be dragged around the screen to position it. A quick click will rotate it from horizontal to vertical orientation, and a slide control lets you tweak the length of your on-screen ruler. You can also play with color, transparency, and more, so that the tool will be most helpful to you.

A free download, JR Screen Ruler is a Windows Application. It should be right at home on any Win32 platform, from Windows 95 on up.

Download JR Screen Ruler

Minimize almost any application to the System Tray

Gone but not forgotten. That seems to be the idea behind Windows' System Tray—little icons for apps that are running and available, but that you don't need cluttering up the landscape for you. The only problem is that not every app allows itself to be downsized to the Tray. For those apps, aftermarket tools like RBTray may be the answer.

RBTray will take just about any Windows app and let you squirrel it away in the System Tray. It performs this feat of magic by creating a new clickable area on a corner of the Minimize button in the Title Bar of your windows. Click here and your great big window will instantly transform into a little bitty icon. In addition to its main functionality, it also adds the ability to set a window to "always on top". Whee!

RBTray is a Windows application. You should be able to run it under XP and Vista.

Download RBTray

Top 10 Most Secure Operating Systems

1. OpenBSD: By default, this is the most secure general purpose operating system out there. The proof in the pudding? The fact that it suffered only two remote attack vulnerabilities in the last decade serves as solid evidence of its stringent security and strict auditing policy. Moreover, OpenBSD lacks a large enough attack surface (care of running numerous web applications) for hackers to exploit.

2. Linux: Linux is a superior operating system. When customized it can be set up to extremely secure. Linux has an impressive vulnerability patching policy.

3. Windows Server 2008: Say what you will about a Microsoft operating system's security; at the very least, they know how to improve and they've gone through the very worst security threats that the Internet can dish out. This iteration of Windows Server has improved backup and recovery, user account control, web server (IIS) role, and server role security configuration.

4. Windows Server 2000: This operating system is so secure that it took nearly a decade before Microsoft can come up with a better one. This OS for network servers, notebook computers, and corporate workstations continues to get monthly security patches even after nine years since its release.

5. Windows Vista: Microsoft attempted to fix the security issues that has plagued Windows 95, 98, ME, and XP, but they ended up alienating consumers instead. The main complaints that people aimed against the polarizing OS—confusing security policies and the lack of backward compatibility with older applications—were actually security measures that were supposed to make Vista a lot more protected from breaches and hacker penetrations.

6. Windows Server 2003: The good news is that Windows Server 2003 is still a more secure OS than Windows XP. The bad news is that, security-wise, it's even worse than its earlier prototype, Windows Server 2000. Nevertheless, it features competent security improvements like default disabling of vulnerable services and a built-in firewall.

7. Windows XP: It became one of Microsoft's greatest and most long-running releases (mostly because of Vista's failure to connect to the general Windows-using consumer base). Tragically, it's also one of the most non-secure operating systems of all time as well.Because this OS runs a lot of network services by default and allows users to access full privileges by default, it also gets hacked and breached on a nigh-daily basis by default as well.

8. HP-UX 11i: Even though it's not one of the most commercially successful operating systems in the market today, this Unix-based Hewlett-Packard OS has been included in this list because of its superior security policies to several more popular operating systems (namely, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Linux).

9. Solaris: This Sun Microsystems Unix-OS variant is on the lower notches of this article's security hierarchy because it's not inherently security-focused. Because of certain business-related circumstances as well, most of the Solaris source code has already been published via the OpenSolaris project.

10. Mac OS X: This Apple-made OS handles user permissions better than, say Windows XP, but it still contains an indecent number of vulnerabilities and remote exploits in its systems. That, coupled with Apple's slow response to many of its security issues, has landed this operating system at the bottom of this list.

Choose the Windows 7

Features		Windows 7 Home Premium	Windows 7 Professional	Windows 7 Ultimate

Estimated Retail Pricing (ERP) for upgrade license.		Buy now $119.99	Buy now $199.99	Buy now $219.99
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Make your web experience faster, easier and safer than ever with Internet Explorer 8. oo
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Connect to company networks easily and more securely with Domain Join. oo
In addition to full-system Backup and Restore found in all editions, you can back up to a home or business network.
Help protect data on your PC and portable storage devices against loss or theft with BitLocker. oo
Work in the language of your choice and switch between any of 35 languages. oo

Add a background image to Google

After finally implementing a tool to rename folders in Google Reader (what took them so long?!), Google has also introduced a new feature: the option to customize the background image in the Google homepage.

The feature is being slowly rolled out, so don’t worry if you don’t see it yet. For those who already have it enabled, you should see a Change background image link in the bottom left corner of Google’s homepage.

Clicking this link brings up Google’s background image menu, with four options: using an image saved on your computer, using an image from your Picasa Web Albums, selecting a wallpaper from public photos featured in Piacasa Web Albums or selecting it from a set of Google recommended wallpapers.

Images you use as Google background must be at least 800×600, preferably in landscape orientation - that is, wider than taller. Several formats are supported, including JPG, BMP, GIF, PSD and even some selected Raw Formats. Also, you’ll need one of the following browsers: Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 7 or later, Firefox 3.x and Safari 3 or later.When you want to change the image, or you feel like going back to Google’s original minimalist design, simply click the Remove background image link at the bottom of the page.

Need help Windows 7 system freezes after it sits inactive for a while?

Dear CNET members, Happy Friday, folks! Every week we get a great deal of answers from our members to help one another solve tech questions. However, I do have a favor to ask from those who submit questions to be included in each week's newsletter Q&A: We need details, and lot of it! If you are submitting a question, please provide as much detailed information about your situation, such as computer make, tech specs, operating system, technical abilities, etc. The more specific details you can provide, the easier it is for our members to help you out. And if you see your question being presented, jump in the discussion thread and be a part of the conversation--we won't bite and we'd all love to hear from you directly, especially to follow up on what worked or didn't work. Now let see if we can help Harry with his Windows 7 system that just frequently freezes after it sits inactive for a while. Well, Harry, a few details were left out in your question that could've come in handy for our members to help guide you in the right direction, but no worries, a whole lot of different recommendations were provided. After reading through the discussion thread, it seems that quite a few folks have run into this behavior as well, so you're not alone. As with this type of behavior, there can be a multitude of items that can cause this issue; it could stem from incompatible software, BIOS that need updating or setting change, a corrupt screensaver, or incorrect power management settings, just to name a few. We even got a few funny responses.