The Program

It’s been a while since I’ve done an application review.. so here is one! Songbird.. it’s more or less just an itunes clone, so what’s the big deal?  It’s Open Source! What’s that mean?  Anyone can improve it, write extensions for it, and change its theme.  This leads things open to numerous possibilities.

There are already extensions to make songbird communicate with your ipod, download song lyrics, cover art, make mash up disks, and fancy visualization effects. Oh, and did I mention it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux?  Why not just download it and give it a try?  It’s free.

So, what’s the downside?  From what I can tell the program is currently very CPU and memory intensive.  I’ve looked at some of their bug reports and this is a problem they know about and are looking into.. so hopefully it will be fixed by version 1.1.

Overall, I think it’s a great program with a lot of features.  Tune it up a little bit and it will be perfect.  Give it a shot, you might like it!

And currently wordpress isn’t allowing me to upload images for some reason, so I’ll get a screenshot on here later.

Miro is an video feed aggregator.  It’s main function is to take many RSS feeds, parse then, and extract any videos they might link to.  This provides sort of a pseudo internet “TV”.

When I first downloaded it, I noticed it had hundreds of built in RSS feeds ready to use.  It also had the ability to search for videos in all the feeds.  So, I set it up to downloaded new movie trailers, some AdultSwim stuff (cartoons, such as Robot Chicken), and Linux.com video feeds.

So far I’m impressed with its design and its ease of use.  There really is no downside to the program itself, I’m just not sure how useful it would be to me.  I like the whole idea of automatically downloading new videos from the sources I specify, though, I’m not sure if this is a program I would use on a day to day basis.

The other downside, from a programming aspect, is I’ve found it has a tendency to crash from time to time, though it isn’t enough to convince me to stop using it for that single reason.  It also gets clogged up during a massive video search sucking up CPU time to do the search.

So, if you are into a program to take all the videos in RSS feeds, download them, and then view them, then this program is for you.  If you just watch some youtube videos from time to time, then check out the program, you may like it, or you may find that just hopping on youtube in firefox is easier than starting up this program.

Sumatra pdf is a free, open source, pdf viewer for windows.  I suppose one of a common users first question is why use this over adobe’s pdf viewer?  Simple: It’s fast.  There is no loading time what so ever.  You open the pdf file, and there it is, time to read it.  Why waste your time staring an Adobe loading screen when you can load a pdf instantly?

It supports all common pdf features that are needed by the average user.  Give it a try, you’ll be glad you did!

Well, the program we all know and love, Thunderbird, is making AOTD on my page.  I found it almost too popular to consider to make AOTD, as I find it better to make more unique programs AOTD.

For those of you who don’t know what thunderbird is, it is an email client (such as Microsoft Outlook, or Evolution in Gnome suite).  It’s another production of the Mozilla company, which means it’s just as good and as stable as their famous Firefox.

One of the best features for thunderbird is its ability to have plugins and themes (just like firefox).  So, make it look how you want, and have it function how you want.  One of its best plugins that I’ve found so far is called “Lightning”, that is a plugin to add calendar functionality to Thunderbird.  So, now, I use thunderbird for all my email accounts (both IMAP and POP3), as well as a calendar to keep track of important dates and times.

If you need a program to consolidate emails, RSS feeds, newsgroups, and other method of information, then consider checking out thunderbird.  I use it on both my Linux and Windows systems.

I’ve only used this program once, but I think it must be the best most featured torrent client for windows.  It has all the standard features you would expect in a torrent client.  What makes this program worth while is how easy and intuitive it is to use while keeping it feature rich.

The only downside I could find (Comparing it to the linux Deluge Program is it can’t block any IP’s.  There may be some patches or plugins to fix this issue, however.  Another alternative is to use PeerGuardian for windows if you’re really worried.

Overall, this is the perfect windows torrent client, and is worth trying if you’re a frequent (or even minimal) torrent user.

ffmpeg is probably one of the most useful programs for audio/video conversion and minor linear editing.  Most people doesn’t realize it exists because it only has command line functionality.  Today, I watched a video on Linux Journal that introduced me to new features that I didn’t even realize ffmpeg had.  It showed the user how to overlay images, do animation just using simple pictures, and other cool stuff.

You can find the video here at Video Editing with ffmpeg by Linux Journal.

Unfortunately, ffmpeg just updated itself massively, which broke some common applications including [what I thought to be unbreakable] VideoLAN.  I’m hoping the software is fixed in the near future – it’s tough living without VLC.

Overall, though, ffmpeg is one program the open source community could not live without.  It helps the majority of the linux user group with video viewing and editing.  Ever watch a WMV file on linux?  Then you probably used a version of ffmpeg to view it.

So, ya, watch the video by Linux Journal, and learn about ffmpeg! It has more functionality than I thought it did.

MonoDevelop is an IDE which is used primarily for developing C# programs on the Mono framework.  It also has abilities to write cross platform applications using the .NET framework in Windows.

I’m a somewhat experienced developer, and I found this IDE very intuitive.  I had never programmed in C# before, and never used GTK# as well.  I programmed a text editor in roughly 15 minutes.

Overall, MonoDevelop is the only C# IDE I’d ever use for linux.  The one thing I find about the combination of C#/GTK#/MonoDevelop is the ease to make GUI applications.  For anyone looking to rapidly make a GUI application for multiple platforms, this is what you need.

The only downside to the applications is that it has a tendency to crash once in a while for me.  This could just be a side effect of using the unstable Debian version, however.  I still suggest it regardless of the random application crashes.

Today, I’m featuring gnuPlot.  gnuPlot is a windows and Linux application to make 2D and 3D graphs of different styles.  It’s a great application.  The only downside is the non graphical user interface (except for the actual display of the graph).  This means you have to learn how to use it’s feature rich language.  This isn’t a big deal as most of it is common sense (i.e: f(x)=2*x; plot f(x);).  Some of it, however, can be a bit more complex.  Of course, if you want to do more complex things, you have to learn how to use more complex parts of the program.

Overall, it’s a very good and well written program, and I suggest it to anyone looking to make advanced graphs.

One of my projects a month ago was to use gnuPlot to create a 3D representation of the perlin noise function.  A few hours later, and after learning how to use many of the more advanced mathematical routines in it’s built in function base, I accomplished this. Below, you can find the graph and the functions I used to display it.

Perlin Program

The application of the day today is a proprietary p2p VPN program.  Hamachi (by LogMeIn) is a program where users across the globe can connect to each other through a private, encrypted, VPN network.  VPN’s allow users in remote locations to be connected as if they were connected through a local area network.  This opens up many possibilities for playing games and connecting to other computers without going through the annoyance of properly setting up firewalls and routers.  It enables nearly all applications that can be run in a LAN environment to be run over the internet.

What limited use I’ve had with it, it’s worked perfectly.  I prefer OpenVPN (See previous article), but in situations where my non-computer-savvy friends need to be on a LAN with me, this program is better in that situation.

My current experience with the program is file sharing (which works perfectly) and only one game.  The game I tried to play with a friend – Company of Heroes – unfortunately didn’t work.  After doing some research online it appears that the game has trouble when the computer has multiple network interfaces.  Coming from a programming perspective this makes since (though it is poor programming on their part).

So, I would recommend Hamachi for all your simple VPN needs.

Well, as you probably know, Google Earth is a program by Google to view the Earth as a sphere.  It can show lines of lat/lng, along with roads, earth view, 3D buildings and other structures, pictures of nearby places, weather, cloud cover, etc, etc.  With it’s many and numerous plugins it can display just about anything that has to do with the Earth.

As for it’s platforms, it comes for Windows and Linux.  It works almost perfectly on Windows, but on Linux I’ve discovered a weird bug that resizing the window causes X to crash (which is a huge issue).  Just taking the screenshot of the program required me to restart linux (keyboard froze up, so I couldn’t just restart X).

So, ya.  It’s a great program.  Can satisfy boredom, or can be used to get point to point direction.  Have fun with it!