Gantter

I have been really impressed by the quality of such a software program. It may need to get some interface polish for Opera users (I had a couple of little display bugs), but the operation is fully adequate for many projects.

• PDF-XChange (Windows, Basic: free, Pro: $34): loads real fast (much faster than the Adobe viewer), has all the basic options (annotations, graphic annotations, etc.) and the Pro version allows to reorganize the pages of a document or to extract text from it.
• Foxit (Windows/Linux, Basic: free, Pro Pack: $39.99): loads even faster, allows annotations (but only the Pro versio does it without watermark).
• Sumatra PDF (Windows, free): is even simple; everything is done for sheer speed.
• Apple PDF Preview (Mac, free): is very powerful (and it’s free, remember) and included in the MacOS offering; annotations, extraction, reorganization, all is available

I just took one part of the simplest category: Rain drops.

Rain drops (on Icons Etc.)

I’m sure that you will find whatever you need for your web site, for your Windows desktop or any other icon-based application.

YLovePhoto.com

Then, I checked for Roumazeilles.net itself, and I noticed the same situation:

Roumazeilles.net

It appears that Firefox is moving very fast. Who would have thought -a few years ago- that Microsoft’s world domination would be toppled like that?

A rather interesting article of DownloadSquad tells us about the trial version that Nero offers for its Nero 9. I had already mentioned that there are solutions to pay nothing in order to get Nero 8 in free download (see lower), but it goes quite far.

1. You must give them your email address to download the trial version for Nero 9 – What do they want it for? Some Spam database address?
2. The installation brings an Ask.com tool bar – Why do we want this?
3. At the end of the installation, you are requested to transmit (anonymously) some additional information – What data? Why?
4. At first launch, you are requested your email address again – Those guys have no memory, I guess…
5. The free version does only data discs (no audio discs) – This is nothing more than the really free software programs shown below
6. Knowing that, the splash screen start only use is to show you what you don’t have in the free trial version – Speak about teasing me!
7. Of course, the uninstall process does not fully clean your machine – They are not even able to do it, or not even polite enough to do it…
8. With 55MB to download, this is only 20 to 50 times bigger than the real free alternatives!

So, I suggest that you turn to other options that are really free and well-polished:

• Download free Nero 8 CD/DVD burner
• Download 5 free replacements for Nero

Just a short notice. I discovered a very simple and relatively powerful Internet privacy solution, Ultrasurf, for those of us who may be interested in browsing the Internet in near complete anonymity: hide IP addresses and locations, clean browsing history, cookies & more …

It may be the future of Internet privacy.

Found in an article of DownloadSquad:

• ImgBurn
• CDBurner XP which still is my prefered solution (by far) in the CD/DVD burning category
• InfraRecorder
• NCH ExpressBurn
• Burn CDCC

Windows 7 official wallpapers

Look at the full set of the Windows 7 wallpapers. This is the upcoming version of Windows (after Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft intends to switch back to a numbering scheme). Most of them may be colourful, but with very smooth surfaces where your icons will be appearing quite neatly and they offer a nice contrast.

Fresh Impact Crater Formed between February 2005 and July 2005
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

So, I was quite interested when I stumbled upon the collection of pictures taken by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera installed on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Shooting photos of Mars surface, this photo camera brings extraordinary color images that provide nice patterns to be used as background for your Windows desktop (or even Linux or Mac desktop) and can be renewed quite regularly: Their catalog is available on the University of Arizona web site.

Furthermore, they provide an enormous resolution for their images which is a very good way to extract any size you may need for your extra-high-resolution background or to cover your 2- or 3-LCD display. Or even more. If you feel that there own selection of wallpapers is not enough:

• 800×600
• 1024×768
• 1152×864
• 1280×960
• 1440×1080
• 1600×1200
• 1920×1440
• 2048×1536
• 2560×1600

You can still stick to the original size (JPEG-2000 format images range between 0.5GB and 3GB).

And the good news is that there is no copyright restrictions, so you could do pretty much what you want with them: Really free desktop wallpapers.

Knowledge is always free.

Point your browser to the Doom Triple Pack.

On-line Doom + Hexen + Heretic

Doom 1

Already, before the year 2000, PC games were expensive. But here comes the Internet and bands of Internet users now expect to find free things all around. Authors of such games (like Id Software) decided to follow this trend and offer some of these older games as ways to attract more customers for other games. These ones start by being free, and stay as being very pleasant to play.

Doom was put in the public domain a few years ago. Consequence: Here is somebody deciding to re-write it in Flash and you will be able to play Doom (more precisely, Doom 1). You will need Flash 10 and I’m told that PowerPC Macs are not compatible, but you’re going to tote a shotgun and the BFG mini-gun at outer-space monsters and without paying (free).

Doom is not enough? You want more, more quality, more guns, more speed? Why not Quake? Id Software just opened access to QuakeLive.com. For free, you’ll get to play Quake, right now, freely, for no money. It will be fun…

More precisely, here is Quake III Arena with free access to all. It will go fast. This is violent gaming. It will only stop when you’re dead.

This is not enough? Again? So, let me offer some video games with calmer settings, but still free. Even better, Linux games.

live.linuX-gamers.net succeeded at preparing Live-DVDs (DVD that are completely autonomous, you can boot on them without installing Linux).

live.linuX-gamers.net (DVD)

It’s new version, Safari 4, is just out. Faster, still as good and powerful, but Apple is now claiming the crown for the “fastest” web browser. It could well be possible when Snow Leopard OS-X becomes available later this year. Running natively as a 64-bit Mac application, it could gain 50% from today’s already powerful base of Safari 4.

Safari version 4

Safari 4 is available for Windows XP, Vista, or mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer.

Now, Opera is launching a beta test version 10 of the browser. And it has amazingly interesting new features.

• Fast browsing on slow connections
• Tab browsing enhanced and flexible
• Speed dial from the empty new page
• Web mail integration
• Re-sizable search field
• Much faster web engine and impressively standards-compliant
• In-line spell checker (I use it a lot to support my blogging habits)
• Auto-update (better than merely asking you to check for updates)
• Mouse control

Even better, after testing it in alpha, I can tell you that it is quite stable. The beta version should stay that way and that is a good thing too.

You can download it here.

As with many a BitTorrent client, µTorrent or uTorrent tends to have a relatively complex configuration. Many options, some of them utterly cryptic, a lot of them with a possible impact on performance. After months of tweaking, I think that I have obtained a configuration that is clearly optimized to download several giga-byte-sized packages (videos/movies, Linux distributions, full databases, etc.) on a fast ADSL connection (20Mbit/s, here).

So I was suggested to share it with all the ones who want to try and get quickly a BitTorrent connection working as fast as possible.

All the options

I don’t need to explain the choice of language (µTorrent has one great advantage of having such a large choice for localization).

I did not install IPv6 support (my ISP does not support it), but it is a very critical item to check because -as soon as it becomes readily available- it will bring a significant layer of compression and obfuscation to avoid your ISP throttling down your P2P traffic (as some US and Canada ISPs currently do; Shame on them!).

I don’t care receiving the beta upgrades (I’m all for the stability of software) and I favor browsing as anonymously as reasonably possible.

Since I am working at home, there is no need for the anti-boss key.

Download: I prefer to immediately pre-allocate file size (rather than seeing the software program stop later because it has been eating up all disk space), and I don’t want to the PC to shut itslef down while downloading. While it is generally good to reduce electricity consumption, stopping in mid-transfer is not good for the efficiency of the whole process.

We have to admit that display options are mostly a matter of taste. You can see mine, but feel free to choose others to your liking. These should not affect performance except if you decide to not start the downloads automatically (you still can start them manually, though).

If you download a lot of BitTorrent files, it may be worth organizing your downloads. I put everything in a common directory (C:\Download from Internet\ as you can see) and avoid moving them around (even when finished). However, I prefer to store the torrents themselves in a separate sub-directory (C:\Download from Internet\Torrents) for an easier management.

In order to make things easy, torrents that are downloaded in the download directory (C:\Download from Internet\) are first detected, then started, then moved into their own sub-directory (C:\Download from Internet\Torrents). This means that even if µTorrent is not started, I can download torrent files in the normal download directory, as anything else, but as soon as uTorrent starts, it will recognize the request.

One added little advantage is that if I put any torrent file in this directory (even from a remote machine) P2P download will start automatically. It is easy to setup a script in your email program to drop torrent files from email and thus to have your PC remotely starting downloads. Even from your iPhone, for example. This becomes Remote BitTorrent for iPhone.

The connexion port is allocated randomly in order to avoid issues with your ISP. Just make sure that this port is open in the firewall of your router. For your own computer, using UPnP and NAT-PMP to ensure that you optimize going through your local network and router.

Do not allow changing port at each startup. It would really mess with your router and other firewalls.

If possible, do not use any proxy (it would eat a significant performance and P2P-over-Proxy may not be acceptable by your ISP – read your contract).

This page is certainly the most important one (performance-wise). You may want to allow the automatic speed throttling, but I found that it was good to set it up manually. First, limit the upload to 80-90% of your upload stream capacity (check with your ISP). The little margin allows to have some capacity to do something else (like browsing Roumazeilles.net).

I admit that I limit a little more when I have no download to do, but this is not important here.

The number of connections should be high. Since I have 2GB (and now 4GB) of central memory on WinXP, there is no strict reason to limit myself, other than the fact that going over 1000 connections means that the computer spends more time handling connections than downloading. The ratio of 5:1 or 6:1 between connections and clients helps favor very efficient peers (those bringing most of the download rate).

On the other hand, I don’t want to spend all my bandwidth serving too many P2P clients. 6 is OK. If a couple of them are slow, it’s still possible to speed up on 4. That way, my computer sends data as fast as possible but does not negotiate a lot with others (essentially, it’s “let’s queue them rather than serving them all”).

DHT: You want DHT! This is one great way to find more clients, to keep them if the server is down, to grow the swarm for maximum speed.

Local search may be usable if there are other local users on your LAN (are you in a company? in a University?). It’s not critical for my own home LAN, though.

As far as possible, I want to encrypt my communications. It does not add a lot of invisibility, but it reduces the chances of seeing my ISP filter my traffic.

Here don’t let uTorrent add too many torrents at the same time. Downloading 3, 4, 5, 6 torrents is OK. This tends to max up the connection if they are active, but don’t set it up for more. I prefer to have my torrents arriving one after the other day after day, rather than all after a week of download.

Default values for sharing are OK, I guess.

I do not use planification. Let’s go fast. That’s all.
I do not use the WebUI.
The only Advanced features worth messing are:

Basic parameters for the cache are just that: Basic.

But the advanced parameters could be a little more important.

Growing the read cache size automatically could be an issue if you are near the disk space limit. So, I prefer not to allow this feature (which is only useful in extreme conditions, anyway).

While the Windows write cache seems useless or not efficient, the Windows read cache is important for some disk drives (especially if you are using external USB disk drives).

Those are the best links I found recently. I could not write a full post about them, but they are worth visiting:

• Box.net launches a web-based free word processor (via Download Squad)
• Histoface: How to hide an image in the histogram of another image
• Safer Code – Secure Coding In C \ C++ is a blog about such issues as writing clean C/C++ code.

Most-read articles

The news as you make it:

• Download free Nero 8
• Sharks and other sea jaws
• Art Nouveau Design

Most visited categories

Your attention does not stop to 1 post only:

• Gorilla in Wildlife (digital photography)
• Nikon D300 (SLR photo camera) that can be complemented with the YLovePhoto.com similar category about the Nikon SLR family

Thanks to the Canadians of the National Film Board of Canada. They give us feature-length movies, documentaries, animated short movies. Everything, of the best quality, at the best price: Free.

But, a found another option for free MS-Word: ABI Word is an open source word processor available for quite some time, but the latest version (v2.6.5) is now compatible with all the meaningful file formats like MS-Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org Writer. These XML-based file formats are usable in this freely downloadable word processor.

I do not use it by myself, but it looks good enough to check it if you want a pretty neat word processor solution to replace your MS-Word for free.