Application of the Day

The Regulator:  Great RegEx builder

Regulazy:  Further simplifies RegEx creation

Still going strong is the RegEx Coach (vintage but works like a champ)

Another nice option is Expresso 3.0

My favorite online tools are txt2re,  Rubular and this Online Regular Expression Builder (also offered as an Adobe Air app)

Also be sure to check out the RegExLib a great online resource.

Well if you really want the power of UNIX on Windows you should probably install cygwin but if you are just looking for a package with some native ports of popular GNU utilities (i.e. – grep, sed, tail, wget, etc…) then check out UnxUtils project on sourceforge or the GnuWin32 project on sourceforge.

For years capturing stdout in Windows has been a pain in the you know what.  Options I used were as follows:

• Redirect output (>) and stderr 2> to a file but this does not capture all of stdout
• What I have done for years is use use cygwin  and/or unxutils so you can leverage unix commands like script and tee
• Increase the buffer size in the cmd window to 9999 lines, run your command, select all and paste to notepad

Note:  the best option by far is to install cygwin and abandon the MS cmd shell altogether but when you work on other peoples systems (e.g. – customer) installing cygwin is not always an option or the best option from an efficiency perspective.

All of the above options seem like a lot of work for what should be base OS functionality.  Well Microshaft finally realized it as a missing component of the OS and incorporated the “clip” command into Windows Vista and newer.  Now any command line command can be piped to “clip” (|clip) and the output will be in the clipboard, it is about time.

Type “clip /?” and hit {enter} and the command syntax will be display as shown below.

CLIP

Description:
    Redirects output of command line tools to the Windows clipboard.
    This text output can then be pasted into other programs.

Parameter List:
    /?                  Displays this help message.

Examples:
    DIR | CLIP          Places a copy of the current directory listing into the Windows clipboard.

    CLIP < README.TXT   Places a copy of the text from readme.txt on to the Windows clipboard.

WinMerge is by far my favorite graphical diff utility for windows.

I also use CSDiff because I like some of the reporting features, this is good when you need to compare config files for change control purposes and want to store the differences as a report, perfect if you need to produce something as part of a larger report.

Both WinMerge and CSDIff support command line usage.  I prefer CSDiff’s command line capabilities from a compare and reporting perspective, CSDiff can easily be leverage to build a rudimentary change management system.

Of course if you read my previous post you can always use good old diff.  To get GNU diff on windows check out cygwin, UnxUtils project on sourceforge or GnuWin32 project on sourceforge.

Everyone knows that the native Windows WebDAV support is not very good.  I am using an app called DataFreeway by LukaSoft, seems to work pretty well, I primarily use it to access my KnowledgeTree document management system via WebDAV.  Check it out if you have been frustrated by native Windows WebDAV support.

I use Evernote for all a my not taking needs.  I prefer Evernote over OneNote because I use a number of different computers and I like the ability to easily sync my notebooks, access them via the web and my blackberry.  One issue that I have is when I copy and paste from the web, outlook, word, etc… Evernote does not do a great job with the formatting.  Problem solved, I now use PureText to paste content in plain text.  This allows me to format however I like.  Simple to use, just unzip, start the executable and Ctrl-C to copy and Win-V to paste plain text.  Great little app!

Give Songbird a try.  Built in SHOUTcast player, lots of audio codecs and

last.fm scobbler and SkreemR search makes this a great audio player.

I have been using Jinzora, previously know as Netjuke for years and I love it.  For anyone one with a large mp3 collection this is the app for you.

Carsten Schmidt has developed a suite of simple and useful network diagnostic tools which can be found here.