PodcastAlley.com -- The place to find Podcasts

PodcastAlley.com -- The place to find Podcasts


It was inevitable, I guess, that I would stumble upon podcasting. It was right under my nose all along, but I didn't pay it much attention until I was using NPR radio and found that old sessions of a local show were only available as "podcasts". Following the links that show provided for obtaining podcasting software I watched as the vista of sound and blogging copulated and gave birth before my very eyes.

Now there's an image. *wince*

Podcasting is basically audio blogs. With a twist, the twist being that you are creating blogs that are presented as MP3 files and intended to be placed upon your portable media player - most notably the IPOD - thus the name of this medium "podcasting".

So the way it is supposed to work is that you subscribe to a series of podcast "feeds" or "shows" that are interesting to you. Using one of several podcasting software packages you then set it up to download new installments from those feeds and automatically place it on your ipod.

Now myself, I don't bother with that last part. Instead, I use podcasting more like Tivo - i.e. I download them using the windows podcasting software and I listen to the sessions "on demand" as my whim takes me.

I would be surprised if this were not the main way this stuff is used. I find it hard to believe that more people bother to put this stuff on their IPOD every day when they can just listen to it on their PC and save themselves the trouble.

Programmer's Tools List

Here's a list of a few programmer tools, and some misc tools I find useful/fun/cool. I hope you find it useful too.

-Michael

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Programming:

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SourceInsight
http://www.sourceinsight.com

SourceInsight is an amazing code browser and all around great editor. Its killer feature is the call graph window that lets you interactively browse source code by examining function call chains.

Beyond Compare
http://www.scootersoftware.com

This is the best comparison tool I have found. It does side by side comparisons, and shows differences down to the character. It is great for doing diffs and merges, and I have it replacing the default perforce diff program. It is also great for diffing two folders, and can produce web-format difference reports that are useful for emailing around.


windbg
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx

This tool is a lightweight debugging tool that lets you debug on a machine that may not have dev studio installed. The debuggers provided also included a command line debugger and a kernel debugger. The debugging capabilities exceed those of dev studio in many cases, but the knowledge curve is steep and these debuggers cannot match the convenience and contextual info that dev studio provides. I only pull this out for on the spot debugging, when I need one of its advanced features, or when DevStudio isn't available.

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Dev Studio plugins:

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Workspace Whiz
http://www.workspacewhiz.com

This plugin provides a powerful file-open command, header flipper, and tag browsing. Lightweight and cheap.

Visual Assist
http://www.wholetomato.com

This is the uber, kitchen sink plugin. It is basically an improved version of intellisense with smart file-open command, header flipping, symbol browsing, code templates, and more.

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Other Tools:

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Directory Opus:
http://www.gpsoft.com.au/

This is the best of the explorer replacements. I use it for its dual-pane file browsing capabilities, and its integrated support for ftp. It has a file viewer built in and even shows me my msn messenger contacts list in a side pane. :)


Google Desktop
http://desktop.google.com

This program indexes all the files on your hard drive, including email, using the same engine that google uses. It integrates with google web searches and the indexers only run when the machine is idle. Nice way to find stuff on your machine that you may not know you even had.



Stroke It
http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/

This is a mouse gesture program that I find useful. Lets me use mouse gestures to close and invoke applications, perform browser operations like Back and Forward, etc... Once you get used to mouse gestures in firefox you need this tool to feel comfortable using the rest of your windows apps.



Picasa 2
http://www.picasa.com

This program is a great photo indexer. It is a free google software program that will index all of your photos and movies and let you view and organize them in creative ways. It is worth the install alone for its ability to produce a web site for a photo album. Provides standard features for edting like red-eye removal, cropping, scaling, color manipulation, and more. Export function makes it easy to resize a folder of images in one fell swoop, along with other fun stuff.



Firefox:
http://www.firefox.com/

This one is probably well known by all. I am using it for its tabbed browsing and extensive collection of extensions. My key reasons for using this are tabbed browsing, shared bookmark support, and mouse gestures.



Process Explorer
http://www.sysinternals.com

This site has a ton of useful tools. I point out the process explorer because it is a very useful tool for finding things like the command line that was used by a process, what open handles it has, and even goes so far as to provide you interactive callstack peeks at running processes. Useful also for its tree view where you can see the hierarchy of processes and thus understand which processes invoked what. Also check out: DbgView (see all debug output spewed on the system), FileMon (monitor all file access by all processes on the computer), and Regmon.

Speaking Seldom...

DiskState Info

The link above points to a brief review of the DiskState tool that I wrote up a while back. I wrote the article in response to a request from someone who was looking for a tool that could find duplicate files on their hard-drive. Finding duplicate files can save you a lot of disk space if you have multiple copies of your music and/or picture files on your hard drive.

There are, naturally, many other tools that can help you to find duplicate files on your computer. Programs like google's free Picasa 2 and Microsoft Office's Picture Manager are able to find duplicate photos for you, and there are countless little utilities devoted to finding duplicate mp3 and wma files on your computer.

The Code Project - Free Source Code and Tutorials

The Code Project - Free Source Code and Tutorials

This website is an absolutely amazing resource for programmers. I have found it to be useful for answering basic questions such as "just how does the foreach construct look in C#" to "Is there anything Office provides that will let me programmatically access an Excel spreadsheet file (i.e. a .xls file)"?

You can't always count on the code you find being correct or that what you are reading is necessarily the best answer to the issue. Sometimes clear amateurs are writing articles that would be best ignored. However, CodeProject articles are correct enough most of the time to be extremely useful as a resource. The wide range of topics covered is directly a result of the less-stringent filter they use when allowing an article to be posted on the site. One simply needs to be sure if you're going to count on something you read about within its pages that you have double-checked the validity of it.

Adventure - Gaming for Old Folks

>look

In A Valley
You are in a valley in the forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky bed.

>north

At End Of Road

>look

At End Of Road
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.


Back in the good old days there were countless hours wasted as people typed in quaint text commands to their computer. In this way, they played a game. Really, they were living a story. Making their way through a hand-crafted, fictional game universe designed by gamers for gamers. Imagination was key to these games, and they were the precursor to the MUD games that rules the online world of the eighties and early nineties.

There was something magical about typing text at your computer and having it seemingly understand you. The mini-game of just figuring out exaclty how you could convince the game to let you perform the action you had in mind was often a joy in and of itself. When you finally figured out a way to tell the game to let you take a drink from the stream in Adventure there was trickle of excitement that ran up your spine. That small thrill that worked its way to your cerebral cortex and convinced you that, somehow, this was more than just a game. You were having a conversation with your computer -- no... you were having an adventure with it. :)

Ah, the good old days.

Now you can't seem to have any fun unless the graphics on your screen are so realistic that you are dazzled. Even the more retro-games still require a graphical representation to give us the visual feedback our over-stimulated and under-nourished minds have come to expect to derive maximum enjoyment from our "games".


All the text adventure fun you can shake a stick at.

Then I wondered just hwat that xyzzy referred to... so here ya go:

http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/c_xyzzy.html

Everything you ever wanted to know about the magic word xyzzy... in the words of the author of the page.

its from the Adventure game... which I was referencing in an earlier blog.