AverageCoder.Net - Programming - Software - Techie Stuffs

Sweet Home 3D, a free home design software

Posted by Daniel - 327 Views

If you want to build a house I bet you want to have a plan on how you’re going to build it. Speaking about home design, would it be great if you can see the preview of your home in 3D view? Well I just recently found a good free software to do it, it is Sweet Home 3D.

If this is the first time you heard about it then I am telling you that in my opinion, it is a very good software considering that it’s free.

The interface is good and the 3D rendering is done in real time, so every time you put an object such as furniture, doors, wall colors, room size, and even the roof, the 3D window will update it immediately.

The standard furniture included in the Sweet Home 3D setup package are enough for you to design a good looking home but furniture and other objects can also be downloaded from the internet. It’s fun, you should try it :)

SmartFTP Client is no longer Free. What would be the best replacement for it?

Posted by Daniel - 2,272 Views

I had been using SmartFTP (Free Version) for about 3 years, but it was about a month ago when I checked their website they stated there that they can not give SmartFTP for free anymore. Yep, it’s hard to be forced to use the other FTP Clients when I already get used to it but there’s nothing I can do except to find a replacement since I have no plan to buy it. Well, SmartFTP is a good FTP Client especially with the look and the arrangement of the panels, even I just found out that it’s a little bit slow. Do they limit the speed on the free version? I am not going to speculate, I am leaving it anyway.

The painful part when finding a new FTP Client is when I need to test-run it on my machine to choose the most suitable one since I don’t fully rely on screenshots and online descriptions. My requirements are:

• It should give me an easy ways to browse both local files and remote files. It means that the local file browser and the remote file browser should be accessible on a single window (split arrangement is preferred) and it should be placed close to each other so I can easily drag files between them.
• It should have transfer queue feature, real time debug information to monitor each process, a reporting feature such as failed transfer report, a good account manager to save my existing accounts.
• and of course it have to be FREE :D

There are so many of them available on the net. Free FTP Client key phrase with your search engine will give you a list. I tested some of them including CoreFTP, GoFTP, WinSCP, FileZilla and FireFTP. All of them perform good with the basic function but the last two are my favourite since they met the requirements I need. Let’s talk a bit about them,

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Kantaris Media Player, The most suitable Free Media Player on my Audio Environment

Posted by Daniel - 3,364 Views

Kantaris is an all new media player based on code from Videolan client (VLC) and Bass audio library. Kantaris has a graphical user interface similar to that of Windows Media Player. The latest version works with Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

Kantaris can play almost anything you can throw at it: AVI, MPEG, MGEG-AVC, WMV, MOV, MKV, quicktime, matroska, divx, xvid, H264, MP3, WMA, OGG files and more.

Kantaris can also play DVDs and audio CDs. The player also displays some of the most beautiful music visualizations ever seen. All this is completely free.

I am not good in digital music requirements but I guess the quality of digital music depends on many factors such as the quality of source file, the soundcard, the speaker including the placement and the software player itself.

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TCPView for Windows, Tool to check TCP and UDP Connections on your system

Posted by Daniel - 2,392 Views

It was a suggestion from a good friend of mine who told me to try TCPView when I asked him about a tool to check SQLServer Connection instances created by my program.

All I need is to check whether my program is not forgetting to free any DB connection instances when it is terminated and this TCPView for windows give me what I need.

Using TCPView

When you start TCPView it will enumerate all active TCP and UDP endpoints, resolving all IP addresses to their domain name versions. You can use a toolbar button or menu item to toggle the display of resolved names. On Windows NT, 2000 and XP systems TCPView shows the name of the process that owns each endpoint.

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The Code Snippet Plugin, my favourite syntax highlighter plugin for WordPress

Posted by Daniel - 2,095 Views

There is no doubt that I need a WordPress plugin to highlight my code examples for this blog. It’s a requirement since I publish many programming code example within this blog. I had tried some of them, mostly from the WordPress plugin repository. All of them are relatively good but if I ask myself which one is my favorite I choose CodeSnippet Plugin. Why? Most of the syntax highlight plugins I had tested did not perfectly display their formatted code with my current theme, while CodeSnippet does, it’s perfectly blend with my theme. I guess the first good impression what makes me choose to use the CodeSnippet but please remember that this is my opinion only, some of you may think that my opinion is not correct.

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