There are many text and code editors available today. Many of them are free and many at low cost. For some years I used UltraEdit and found it to be very good. I was, however, using a pirated copy of it and I eventually decided that was not necessary and began a search to find an equally good editor that was free.
What I found was PSPad. The latest version which I have just now updated to is just great. I can’t think of any reason a coder would want to use any other editing tool. It has excellent built in FTP support which makes updating pages online a sinch.
If you are into coding or editing text files (.txt, .html, .php, .asp, etc) then check it out.
The home site for PSPad is www.pspad.com
I recommend to all my clients that they use Firefox as their number one web browsing software.
Firefox is free, relatively secure (compared to Internet Explorer), has hundreds of fantastic “extensions” (easily installable add-ons) which bring a wide variety of new features to it should you want any of them, great support for tabbed browsing, and much more.
Using Internet Explorer is in my experience a real chore now that I am used to using Firefox. If you make regular use of the internet then I recommend trying Firefox and the various extensions that suit your needs and wants.
The most generalised Extensions I recommend in list of importance (and generalised through to more specialised) are:
- Mr Tech Local Install
- Tab Mix Plus
- Spellbound (spell checker) — At this time (May 24th 2006) I recommend getting the development version
- PDF Download
- AdBlock — note: AdBlock Plus 0.7.0.1 causes memory leaks with Firefox 1.5.0.3 (and earlier 1.5 versions) so AdBlock (not PLUS) is recommended)
- Resize Search Box (a simple but useful tool that fills a gap in the Firefox feature set)
- Customize Google (if you are an avid Google user—this lets you customise that way Google behaves for you)
- Download Manager Tweak (some handy tweaks for the way FF handles download management)
- GoogleBar Lite (if you use Google a lot and want the Google bar I recommend getting this lite version rather than the full one)
- FlashGot (if you download things this tools makes it easier)
- XE Currency Converter (if you do currency conversions more than now and then. I am not sure where the development site is for this)
- FeedYourReader (if you use a news reader application like Feedburner)
- Gmail Manager (if you use Gmail)
- Send by email (a useful tool if you like to send pages or selected content by email. Presently FF does not have this feature by default. Odd, but true)
- JustBlogIt (if you write blogs but want to use the interface that comes with your blog)
- Scrapbook (for collecting information and organising it)
- Performancing (if you maintain one or more blogs this is a great firefox integrated desktop editor)
- Deepest Sender (as an alternative to Performancing — try them both and decide which you prefer)
- BlogJetThis (if you use the BlogJet desktop blogging program if comes with this nice extension)
- Paypal Send Payment (useful if you often make paypal payments to people.
Those are the extensions I find most useful. There are many others though—get them here.
You can get Firefox from http://getfirefox.com.
Happy Firefoxing…
Here’s a great list of free software for Windows.
Of course you could just switch to Linux where just about any app you might want is free, but for those of us that still like to use Windows it is also possible to do a lot of neat things at little or no cost.
Please be aware that quite a few free applications contain spyware, adware, or other forms of malware. I suggest checking into any program you decide to download (by searching for something like “spyware adware [app name]” on google). Therefore investigate each one with caution initially. Once you know its clean then go for it.
AVS Form - Free Apps list
Enjoy
Recently I had to deal with a Trojan that managed to infest various parts of my computer. Fortunately my firewall (Outpost) notified me of the activity of this trojan as it attempted to modify Firefox (my browser) whilst I was using it to browse the internet. It was trying to modify Firefox in memory so that it could then carry out its dirty work on the net whilst I was happily browsing. All its activity would have gone unnoticed and unchecked by the firewall because I grant Firefox access to the net and it would have all appeared to have been coming from Firefox (which the trojan had compromised).
Anyway…the firewall has a warning system for programs that are modified whilst running in memory so that was not a problem per say…removing the beast was, however, another matter entirely. Many hours later I pass on the following tips.
The first thing to do is take a read of the information at The Parasite Fight (at Aumha). You should be able to find out most of what you require here.
The tools I used were:
Trajan scanning / removal tools
Trojan prevention tools
- Many of the removal tools above also have prevention systems in them should you wish to implement them
- DiamondCS Process Guard - is a stand-along prevention application that I am running at present to test it out.
Resources
Other helpful sites include:
Advice
I advise reading the information at The Parasite Fight (at Aumha). Follow the directions there. The most useful applications I ran were Ewido Anti-Malware and HiJackThis (if you want to get a scan of your computer and then submit the results to Aumha forums or Geeks to Go! -> Malware Removal
I would suggest downloading Ewido first and following the instructions found at CastleCops CCSP Ewido Install and Scan Instructions
If you still appear to have an infection then go onto a more precision approached by using HiJackThis and getting someone at one of those forums to review your log file.
Happy hunting…
Spellbound is a great little extension for Firefox. It gives you spell checking support in any area you might type out text into a web page (such as this blog entry I am writing). I’ve been using it for a year or so now and find it to be an excellent solution for this requirement.
If you use Firefox and Spellbound you will have noticed that it was disabled when Firefox updated to 1.5.0.1 or 1.5.0.2 or (as of today) 1.5.0.3 — assuming you allow these auto updates to go ahead. If you would like to continue using Spellbound and Firefox then try out the development version of Spellbound. It seems to work just fine and it also has new features such as spell check as you type (it will underline misspelled words as you type, much like MS Word does).
Before installing this I suggest you first uninstall the existing version and restart Firefox. Not doing this may cause complications.
You can get it from this site http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=351130&start=0 and click on Install Spellbound Dev
Or just click this link to install it now http://exchangecode.com/spellbound/downloads/spellbound-dev_20060108.xpi
(this is current as of May 5th 2005 which is approximately when Firefox 1.5.0.3 came out)
You will need to tell Firefox to TRUST this download source. You’ll see a bar appear at the top of your browser window stating a download was blocked. Just click on OPTIONS and tell it to trust the source. Then click on the download/install link again.
With the check as you go feature, you can SHIFT-Left click on the misspelled word and it will show you the suggestions. Neat.
Happy Firefoxing…
Jonathan
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