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Paul Bagwell – Just made a simple description of popular free…

This web page display in a very concise way an awesome collection of links covering all a Web-Developer need to work. There are listing for:

• Creativity
• CSS
• Color management
• Free Stock Photos
• Web_Design magazine
• Tools
• SEO
• Web 2.0

Marc Andreessen highlights in this post regarding Microsoft investment in Facebook that in the software industry, it is possible to say something at the beginning of the month and to act at the end of the month in contradiction with the previous statement:

October 2: Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, believes that the craze for individual social networks such as Facebook risks being exposed as a "fad"…

October 24: Microsoft Corp. agreed to invest $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook Inc. that values the social-networking site at $15 billion

Webware reviewed here  a handy utility called Foldr Monitr that uploads automatically photos to flickr. The description from downloads.com states:

Foldr Monitr is a free tool that runs in the background and watches a selected folder (and optionally subfolders) waiting for you to add photos to it. When photos appear in the folder, Foldr Monitr automatically uploads them to your Flickr account for you.

Set it to watch the location you transfer your photos to from your camera and they’ll be automatically sent to Flickr straight away. Photos can also be uploaded to a chosen set or to automatically generated sets based on the names of the subfolders in which they reside on your computer.

CNET published a very interesting review of all the available alternatives products (either free or paid) to Microsoft Office. The product reviewed are:

• Microsoft Office 2007
• Corel WordPerfect X3
• Sun StarOffice 8
• OpenOffice 2
• iWork ’08
• IBM Lotus Symphony
• ThinkFree Office 3
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets
• Zoho Office

The table available here summarize the CNET rating, price and features (included the supported Operating Systems). The 2 products gettings the best ratings after Microsoft are Google Docs & Spreadsheets  and  ThinkFree Office 3.

Web Conferencing applicatons starts to be very popular in big companies. They offer the ability to share presentations accross different locations. They also help support teams to interact with customers. For instance those software may be used to remotely control Customer’s PC to solve problems. All Conference Services published a review of 7 Web Conferencing services.  In this list I only used 2 of those products: WebEx and Microsoft LiveMeeting. None of these services are free.

And a few day ago, I discovered that ZOHO offers now a free Web Conferencing service. I didn’t try it yet but the demo looks really interesting. All the usual features seems to be available even the remote control capability.

On windows XP, the process SVCHOST.EXE is a mystery for most people. If you check your task manager, you may have several instances of this process running. On my XP home edition I have actually 7 of this processes. Microsoft describes SVCHOST.EXE on this document by the following sentences:

“At startup, Svchost.exe checks the services part of the registry to construct a list of services that it must load. Multiple instances of Svchost.exe can run at the same time. Each Svchost.exe session can contain a grouping of services. Therefore, separate services can run, depending on how and where Svchost.exe is started. This grouping of services permits better control and easier debugging. ”

In the document referenced above Microsoft show how to use the command TASKLIST /SVC in a command box to print information regarding the running SVCHOST.EXE. Fortunately, there are some other way to get information regarding SVCHOST.EXE. Langa Blog shows in this article, that we can use Windows Defender or process Explorer from sysinternals to displays information about SVCHOST.EXE. But the most complete software to display SVCHOST information is SVCHOST Informations. This freeware may be downloaded here. The author is called Pierre Torris. Actually only a French version is available. This application display each svchost process running then with a tree all the services attached to the process. You also have all the informations regarding the services: Library, account, start mode, etc. A screenshot is shown below:

Wink is an amazing tool to make tutorial. There are 2 tutorials provided with the software. They are useful to start using the software. So initially, you must spend about 1h to figure out how to use the tool properly. The purpose of this tutorial is not to replace those delivered with the product, but to provide a reminder to those who don’t use the tool very often (like me).

• Once we start wink the following window is displayed. We must start a new project to begin to use the software:

• Then we must choose what to capture: it can be the full screen, a window, etc. We will select the window option. Then we must click the choose button to select the window to capture. Once the window is choosen a green border is displayed around it as shown below:

• The next step is to minimize wink (click the button minimize to tray on shown on the picture below). The important information for capture is in this window. If we want to take a snapshot, we hit the pause key. And if we want to capture an input driven operation, we use alt-pause to start/stop the capture process :

• Once the application is minimized, the wink icon is shown in the tray:

• Use pause to take snapshot, or alt-pause to capture input-driven sequences
• Once finished select finish capture on the menu given by the wink menu on the tray:

• The wink interface is displayed with 3 area: screen area showing the capture screen, the thumbnail area at the bottom, and the tool area at the left that will be use to create the tutorial:

• Use the tool area to add textarea explanation and navigation arrow:

• Once finished, we must render the project, clicking on
• Then to complete our work and view the flash animation we click on