Myzips.com Software Blog

LinkFixerPlus is a simple application that automatically fixes broken embedded file links.

This is useful for IT professionals that are doing data migrations, server consolidations, virtualization, or just a plain old clean up (data reorganization). LinkFixerPlus allows run reports on your files, then you use a different process to tag the links in the files with a unique identifier, then after you have completed your project you run another process that automatically fixes any links that were broken during your project. It works with lots of file types (we used it for Office, Adobe PDFs, and CAD files: AutoCAD and MicroStation specifically) and our company decided to use it to help us with consolidating 4 Window servers to a single NetApp filer. LinkFixerPlus ran through a few hundred gigs of files in a few hours, and with their reports it was simple to find any links that it didn’t fix. Admittedly, there were more than we would have liked, but we understand that it isn’t an “Easy Button”, and in my estimation, LinkFixerPlus saved our company thousands of dollars in man hours.

COBOL, or the Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages that are still in use.

It certainly is not as flashy as Sun Microsystem’s Java, and the language is not useful for the development of Internet applications. However, the programming language has quite a few uses left. Though it was once criticized for its use of what some programmers saw as an overcomplicated text, the language actually tries to exhibit an element of humanism in its construction. The text is actually designed to be human readable, even though COBOL is not necessarily an interpreted language. COBOL received a major facelift in 2002, and it is this added object-oriented style that has given the programming language a second chance at life. Support for Bit, Boolean, Floating Point, user defined functions, and portable arithmetic calculations was added into the language. Perhaps, in the future, some applications will once more flock to the 1959 stand by for computer programming.

Although the broadband network over electrical cable concept and solution has exsisted for years, believe it or not, an official international standard in this field does not exist. This is probably the reason we still connect over Ethernet and telephone cables.

However, this could all be coming to an end. A group working within the IEEE’s finally has given a final draft standard for broadband networking over electric power lines network. Before the standard would be accepted, there is a long process of making it finalized, but it is already known that the basic features offered are: speeds of 100 Mb/s, and that electric companies would very quickly accept it , and join the market as Internet service providers.

Most of us must have had this problem of unable to delete some files in windows and windows shows an error message that the file is being used.

Most of the time we will end up rebooting the system to delete the file, even then some files may not get deleted. Unlocker is a free tool to delete such files which are possessed by a application process in Windows XP or Vista. Whenever we try to delete a file which we don’t want and windows pops-up a message that the file cannot be deleted, Unlocker will immediately come up from the system tray and provides the list of all the processes which are locking the file. You can choose to kill the Process which is locking the file, Unlock the file without killing the process. You can also rename or copy the file. If no processes are holding the file, we can select to close the processes running and let Unlocker delete the file for us.

TexShop is a Mac OS text editor with a primary focus on Latex typesetting. Researchers and scientists all over the world use Latex to write research papers, proposals, review and project documentation.

TexShop has a nice user-friendly menu driven interface that simplifies regular editing and typesetting operations to regular users. When installed, TexShop integrates itself with the available Latex compiler, and allows users to compile their latex code into PDF documents with a professional format. TexShop also has built-in macros that automate the creation of bibliographical sections that contain citations to projects and research papers related to the document being edited by the user. TexShop has a powerful and fast spell checker with automatic correction. Best of all, TexShop is a freeware distributed under GPL public license. The current release of TexShop works best with Mac OS 10.5 (the Leopard version). It also works with Mac Od 10.4 (the Tiger version). After using TexShop for about six months, I found it quite handy and robust. I can easily typeset project documentation, research papers, and reviews into PDF documents with a professional look with no great effort.

I’m a pretty busy guy. I’m a full time student, so my day is pretty much completely filled with homework, quizzes and tests to study for and other appointments. I used to have a lot of trouble staying organized, I’d forget about papers until the day they were due, and I once missed a midterm.

Then I found the application MiniTask. It’s based on Adobe Air, which lets developers create easy to use, internet based applications (though this one doesn’t use the internet. It’s a breeze to use, just right click to add tasks, separators (I use one for each day of the week) and even alarms so you don’t forget to do something important. It’s even customizable so you can change the colors to fit your desktop. I wouldn’t be able to survive without this app, it was the first application I downloaded when I switched computers and its sitting in my tray right now. If you have organization issues download this. You won’t regret it.