AverageCoder.Net - Programming - Software - Techie Stuffs

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

Posted by Daniel - 2,277 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 - 3,373 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 - 2,401 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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SmartImageResizer Plugin, WordPress plugin based on Joe Lencioni’s Smart Image Resizer

Posted by Daniel - 4,988 Views

This is the next part of my previous post about Smart Image Resizer. I described there how to create a new resized or cropped image but I forgot to mention how to implement the functionality into your WordPress theme. To ease the implementaion, I had created a simple plugin as an interface to Joe Lencioni’s Smart Image Resizer. This post will show you how to use the plugin. This plugin requires you to install/setup the Smart Image Resizer first. If you haven’t done it, please read my previous post to get the steps on how to install Smart Image Resizer - it’s quite easy.

OK let’s get started. In order to generate a new image you need to know where to get the source of the image, as we all know that WordPress has the ability to attach files into a single post, including images. On the previous version of WordPress it can be done by adding a custom field to hold the attached files, but on the newer version it can be done by clicking the add media button on your post editor panel. Behind the screen, both has the same method, a database record that linked into a particular post-id on the wp_posts table. I am not going to explain the WordPress database design, I just want to show you how to get the attached image, resize or crop it with Smart Image Resizer and then display it as a thumbnail for your post as shown on this image.

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Resize Image or Crop Image with Joe Lencioni’s Smart Image Resizer, WordPress Setup

Posted by Daniel - 6,248 Views

UPDATE: I just created a WordPress plugin called smartimageresizer to get an easy use of this Smart Image Resizer functionality into your WordPress post. Click here to check it.

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If you use WordPress and you are blogging about something which requires a personalized image for every post such as Gadget blogs or you want to use different images for every post you have for illustration purpose only like what we commonly found on the newspaper blogs, I think it’s a good idea to list the link to each post with an image attached to a particular post displayed along with the postname and if necessary with the excerpt on it.

Oh man, it’s hard to describe it with words but what I am trying to say is displaying the link to a post with a layout format as shown on the image at the leftside.

Okay, there is a problem displaying that kind of layout on your page if you don’t have images with the same size attached to each post you have. It won’t be big problem if you have the same ratio dimension on all of your images, resizing it with your CSS code will give the intended layout - it’s acceptable, even sometimes the hardcoded-resized image will get a little bit jagged, but if you have an image which has a different ratio dimension, the story will be different.

There is only one solution to solve the issue if you’re not intended to upload images with the same ratio dimension. The solution is to generate a new image with the new size. The logic is simple, resize it and if necessary, crop it.

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