The FreshDevices.com has some interesting freeware:

• Download: manager like FlashGet
• Diagnose: PC problems
• UI: tweaks like TweakUI
• View: media accessor (“It gives you the ability to watch movies, listen to music, and view graphics in a slide show”)
• HTML: wysiwig editor
• FTP: client

So far only Diagnose tried out and very much like SIW: extensive system information, but doesn’t seem to have batch mode.

TMAC: http://tmac.technitium.com/tmac/index.html

SMAC: http://www.klcconsulting.net/smac/

I have been looking for something more than a wiki lately: something that would allow me to have menus for pages created, to have a blog integrated, to have API documentation pages that could be edited by me (ease of use) and others (community input), and that would support polls and other such things. This crosses the line from wiki to CMS (content management system). Some notable CMS are:

1. joomla:
   1. probably most popular, but apparently its permission system is very basic,
   2. it doesn’t support wiki-type community contributions, and
   3. doesn’t support versioning (a must for me)
2. drupal: very popular, seems to have good permissions system, supports wiki etc.
   1. Uses a module system for extensions, it looked like there were 100’s of modules. This is both a pro and con as it can make it time-consuming to add a capability (first need to find if some modules support it, then see which one supports best, not always easy to find those modules).
   2. But can’t tell from docs if supports versioning of articles, will have to try it I guess. Demo on opensourcecms.com didn’t work well in Firefox but ok in IE.
   3. Extensive online docs and simpler UI seems to make it more approachable than the more sophisticated typo3
3. cmsms (CMS Made Simple): seems nice and minimal which keeps it simple. Unfortunately, version only scheduled for version 2, and no wiki support mentioned (the cmsms site is powered by itself, but the wiki is by mediawiki).
4. tiki CMS: like drupal/joomla but uses the tiki wiki for all features (blogging, polling etc). I think it looks too much like a wiki and not enough like a portal.
5. typo3: very advanced, perhaps a better architecture than drupal,
   1. but steeper learning curve, not obvious what process to follow
   2. online help available but tends to be rather terse; no tutorials found

Could ToonTalk, from http://www.toontalk.com/English/toontalk.htm, be a good tool to teach my kids some of the basics of programming? It costs only $15. Add it to list of things to investigate.

Sometimes I think of a web application that would involve “Travel through geolocated IP web”. MaxMind offers an open-source geo-locator with bindings in several languages such as C, Python (requires the C dll), Apache (uses the C dll), PHP (pure) and javascript (uses the maxmind host service).

• Dimdim is an interesting web-based desktop sharing (web meeting) application. It comes in both an Open-Source and Commercial version. Support for OS version is through forum/community. Help forum has about 1-5 posts/week, with over half unanswered. Can use dimdim server, or a dimdim server can be installed on your Intranet. However, there is no installation guide (unless one is available after installation). Last version was from June 2007.
• Even more interesting is Zoho Meeting. This uses the zoho server to create a meeting environment in which one “presenter” can share her desktop and any number of viewers can see, do text chatting, and take control if allowed by presenter. Note however that this is not very different from having one VNC server and many VNC viewers, but with the disadvantage of having to pipe all data through a server. Zoho claim to encrypt comms but who can verify that they aren’t decrypting stuff while it is going through the zono servers? (it’s fairly easy to verify that data leaving your desktop is encrypted but the encryption might be trivial). I’ve had mixed results with VNC when it comes to openGL, but Zoho Meeting was able to handle it even including GLSL shader effects. Given that Zoho involves an activex control downloaded from server, plus a server connection, it seems crazy that VNC wouldn’t be able to do an even better job with openGL.

Mental note that FireBug appears to be a powerful and popular tool to debug JavaScript.

xmloperator: an XML editor that can use any Relax NG schema to guide editing

Note that many tools exist to convert from Relax NG compact notation to standard notation, see http://relaxng.org.

The wiki-selection engine: http://www.wikimatrix.org/ is a great tool to get which of 100’s of wiki engines satisfy certain criteria. Preferred selection of wikis:

• twiki: it uses Perl (it’s the only one of the list), which could be an issue: how easy is it to setup? could be used on SF.net?
• phpwiki: similar to twiki capability-wise, but written in PHP; doesn’t support SVG editing like twiki does, but supports MySQL and SQLite in addition to file-based repository, whereas twiki is limited to files
• pmwiki: only one to support SVG editing (together with twiki), but a lot of capabilities are from plugins, which can mean a lot of searching and installing
• tikiwiki: comparable to twiki in many ways but written in PHP; doesn’t support SVG editing or complex tables but has other features that twiki doesn’t (more stats pages and database types, e.g.). Note that Tikiwiki is also a CMS: has modules to support blogs, trackers, etc.
• docuwiki: doesn’t support PDF export, but othewise comparable to others
• moinmoin: uses files rather than DB
• wikkawiki: doesn’t support PDF export, but othewise comparable to others

Wikkawiki was preferred choice for wiki that support code highlighting and MySQL and could be set up on SourceForge. I remember trying either phpwiki or pmwiki (believe the latter one) on SF.net and couldn’t get it setup (was easy to screw up setup).

There are many free VNC client/server bundles available (see wikipedia for a discussion). The three that stand out are:

1. TightVNC: like RealVNC, but adds filetransfer and more
2. TurboVNC: built upon TightVNC, adds faster OpenGL rendering
3. UltraVNC: alternative to TightVNC, provides encryption and audio

The only advantage of UltraVNC over TightVNC is that former supports audio chat, and natively secure data transfer via a plugin system. However I have not been able to use encryption feature in many-to-many configurations, ie to have N clients connectable to M servers running UltraVNC with encryption: they must all use the same key!!! Looks like there might be a way when used from command line (http://msrc4plugin.home.comcast.net/~msrc4plugin/faq.html#shortcut) but it seems a bit convoluted and requires too much “memory” and “thinking” (not integrated in GUI).

Secure connection via encryption is likely best achieved via tunnelling. This involves an ssh server on a host that forwards requests to other programs, and an ssh client that forwards communication from other programs. E.g. telnet localhost, and ssh client listening on telnet port, sending over port 22; ssh server listening on port 22, forwarding all other ports; telnet server listening on telnet port. The following link gives a good summary: http://members.shaw.ca/nicholas.fong/vnc/.

On MS Windows the ssh tunneling can be done via Putty or stunnel or Zebedee, though the latter hasn’t been updated since 2005.

Kaboodle may also be useful but remains in need of further investigation. It integrates zebedee and VNC (any of the clients) to find devices on a network (using WinPCAP) and run VNC on them (assumes each one has a VNC services installed of course).