• 7-zip – This program will handle nearly any type of compressed file. Its pretty solid and supports drag and drop. – Replaces WinZip & WinRar
• Daemon Tools – Daemon tools is a CD emulator, needed if you want to mount CD or DVD images. This download is freeware, but it comes bundled with a spywareish toolbar which can be deselected from the install. – Replaces Alcohol 120%
• Filezilla – This is a great FTP program. It keeps getting better with every new release. – Replaces lots of less fun FTP applications
• PuTTY – a telnet/ssh client
• Songbird – With an interface like itunes, but a whole host of useful add-ons, songbird is my new choice for when I want to listen to music. It supports syncing with ipods as well (but not iphones yet)Replaces Windows Media Player, itunes
• VLC – VLC will play the media files that windows media player won’t touch. Its also very lightweight, although the interface is not as smooth. – Replaces Windows Media Player
• Keepass Password Safe – Got lots of passwords? Keepass will help you store them securely and also can generate pretty tricky passwords & help you sort them. – Replaces random text files or spreadsheets.
• Firefox – This is the web browser of choice. Add extensions to enable firefox to do all sorts of things. Recently, I started using chrome, another open source browser started by google – Replaces Internet Explorer
• PDFCreator – Make a pdf from printing any document – Replaces Adobe Acrobat
• TightVNC – Remotely control a computer
• uTorrent – a very lightweight and solid BitTorrent client
• InfraRecorder – Open source CD & DVD burning – Replaces Nero & Roxio
• Notepad++ – Text editor with everything you need – Replaces notepad
• Open Office – This is a full featured replacement for MS Office. There is little difference between the two except the price tag. – Replaces MS Office
• Multiple IEs – As a web developer, I need to test my sites in multiple and outdated browsers. Multiple IEs lets me have internet explorer 6 & 7 installed simultaneously. (Note, I use IE for testing purposes only)
• NetMeter – I used to use dumeter
• Twhirl – Twhirl is a great twitter client built on adobe air. It has support for friendfeed and other services as well.
• mint.com – I now use mint.com, a free online web application to track my personal finances – Replaces Quicken or MS Money
• Dropbox – Dropbox is a free web app with a cross platform desktop client for quickly sharing files between computers and other users. Instead of emailing files, using FTP or trying to network, dropbox has a streamlined interface that makes sharing or storing files online simple.
• uTorrent – uTorrent is my torrent program of choice

Commercial Software I still use:

• Adobe CS3 Suite – This is pretty key for a web developer. I use photoshop, illustrator & occasionally indesign.
• Quickbooks – This is the industry standard for small business accounting. I track our expenses and account balances with Quickbooks. I use the online web application Freshbooks for accounts receivable (That was a referral link). I would love to be able to replace Quickbooks with an online application, and it seems like Freshbooks might move this direction.

Thats pretty much everything on my computer at the moment. I only use google chat through my web browser, and I guess I don’t have any games.

I decided to take a last minute trip to Belize with Lisa to meet up with Jed who has been traveling around Mexico for the last few weeks. Lisa found a $360 ticket at 8 PM leaving at 12:30 AM so we packed, hit up a Taqueria for a goodbye burrito and beer and BARTed to SFO.

I had some last minute work I had to get done this morning, and a 3 hour layover at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. I haven’t jailbroken my old-school iphone since I upgraded the firmware, so I didn’t have a good way to tether it to my laptop, nor did I have an SSH application on my phone, so I had to buy the $7.95 airport wifi provided by Boingo.

I opened up firefox and after sitting through a flash intro on the boingo website, I entered my credit card info. After a confirmation screen, I was presented with the data I had entered and asked to download the GoBoingo Utility, an application that could run on my PC and notify me whenever I am within range of a Boingo hotspot. Clicking “Download and Install” was the only way to continue purchasing internet access.

Only after beginning the download was the page redirected to the page announcing that my credit card info was incorrect. I retyped my info and even tried a different credit card with no success. Noticing how quirky the website was, I decided to open Internet Explorer just to see if perhaps this form couldn’t be completed in Firefox.

After downloading the GoBoingo toolbar for the 6th time (this time in IE) I was given a page showing that my credit card details had worked.

Not only did they make me download unwanted software (note: you just had to download the .exe file, it is up to you to install it) but I had to use IE. What if I was using a mac? Would I have been locked out of wifi at George Bush Intercontinental?

I was able to complete the necessary work before getting on my plane to Belize. If you ever run across a boingo hotspot, make sure you are using IE.

1. Tab Mix Plus: Allows you to control how you browse by opening tabs for events you specify. This gives you full control over what happens when you browse, and when new windows get opened, recycled, or new tabs get opened.
2. IE View: This adds an item to your right click menu that opens the current page in Internet Explorer. Some poorly designed pages require the use of internet explorer, and as a web developer I am constantly checking my pages in both browsers.
3. del.icio.us extension: If you use del.icio.us to keep track of sites & bookmarks, you can replace your firefox bookmarks completely with this extension. Its also a great way to keep bookmarks synced between computers if you have more than one. It gives you the option of displaying del.icio.us bookmarks in a toolbar.
4. Web Developer Extension: If you don’t do web design, you don’t need this. However, if you do, you need this more than you can imagine. My favorite feature is the “edit CSS” which allows you to play with a page’s CSS in real time to see the changes. Other useful features are outlining block level elements, and turning off images.
5. DOM Inspector: This goes great with the web developer toolbar for anyone dealing with web design. It allows you to examine any element on a website and see what its parents are and all of its properties
6. Google Toolbar: This allows Easy searching of google news, froogle, google, images, and groups. It also has a very useful spell checker for web forms and displays search terms at the top of the page. You can click on them to jump to the point in the page where the term appears, which is useful for wordy pages.
7. BugMeNot: When you get to a site that requires free registration, you can right click on the login field and select bugmenot. This anonymously logs you in saving time and privacy.
8. Adsense Notifier: If you use google adsense to monetize your website, this statusbar extension will show you how much money you made today and the number of views and clicks.
9. FireGPG: This extension provides an interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG. This allows you to send emails securely.

I always knew that someone in my family had records going back pretty far, but geni provides a number of advantages:

Its efficient
Everyone who is invited (requires them to be alive and have the internet) can view the same tree. This means that when I make a change or upload a picture, everyone in my family (339 people) can now see and use that picture. Thats a lot more efficient than doing this on paper or even using a standalone genealogy application on my computer. At one point, I was adding people and families to a more distant branch and someone else logged in and corrected some of the tree which I had made mistakes on (sometimes divorces get confusing, especially if you have never met anyone involved).

Its easy to use
Because the people who know the most about family history tend to be the oldest, its key that any type of application like this be ridiculously easy to use. Geni is very easy to use and moreover its pretty obvious what to do within a few seconds of logging in. Its flash interface quickly allows users to add members to the tree using fairly obvious arrows.

Its viral (sort of)
Not only will you find out more about your direct ancestors, your tree spreads out laterally as distant family members log in and add their family and inlaws. In my case, the tree can only go so far back (there are no records beyond a certain point, and everyone is dead). But there is not really a limit to how broad the tree can get as my second cousins add their spouses family or my great aunt adds her branch of the tree. Already I’ve found relatives on both my mom and dads side who live in the bay area.

You don’t have to do that much work.
All in all, I spent less than a few hours on the site and I have a huge family tree including pictures and facts which would have taken me weeks of research to add myself if I was doing it in a non-social networking way.

Social networking
A relative of mine I’ve never met messaged me and called geni “facebook gone legit”. Its certainly not a facebook competitor but I am now connected to lots of people I’d never find on facebook. Geni has features that allow you to view a map of living (or dead) family members & inlaws to visualize your family geographically and it also makes a list of birthdays and anniversaries. Also, I was able to look up names of distant relatives who are on my generation of the tree and I found four people on facebook. Maybe at some point I will meet them. Geni would be a great tool to plan family reunions.

Learn what a second cousin twice removed is
Even with some relatives I’ve met I had no idea how they were related to me. Geni provides a very visual way to figure this out and when you view someone profile it tells you exactly how you are related.

I look forward to seeing what other features geni adds and hopefully watching my family tree grow.

1. istockphoto.com: A great source for really cheap stock photography. They have a huge selection of high resolution images sold for $1-$3. I’ve found this useful for all sorts of projects. Its an easy way to make your project or presentation look very professional.
2. addall.com: When purchasing a book online, you need to start here. It is a very comprehensive comparison engine that will find the best deal. It factors in shipping and can even search used books on half.com and amazon.com.
3. auctionsniper.com: Bid at the last second on your ebay auction and win. This allows you to specify a bid and have it placed with only a few Aseconds left of an ebay auction, leaving your competitors with no time to respond. Sniping is only effective because most ebay users do not fully understand how the ebay auction system works and thus underbid assuming they will have time to rebid should someone outbid them. Use ‘bikeperson’ as your reference when signing up and we both get free credits.
4. biddingfortravel.com: People who have recently bid and won hotels on priceline.com post their results on this forum. You can use this to pinpoint exactly what to bid and sometimes predict what hotel you will get. This site is essential for getting crazy deals on four star hotels.
5. housingmaps.com: a mash up between craigslist.com housing listings and google maps. This is very useful if you are looking for a place to live in a very specific neighborhood.

1. Google Documents – This is a google product which can replace Microsoft Word and Excel. It is perfect for storing notes and abstracts and allows two or more parties to edit at the same time. Also, it allows me to easily share some of my notes easily with other researchers as needed. Google documents currently does not support most advanced foramtting that word does, but it is great as far as collaborating on content. As far as spreadsheets, you can’t write macros or use some of the most advanced features that Excel offers, but you can easily edit and share basic spreadsheets with anyone. There is a bit of a lag when using it as it recalculates cells, but we have found it highly usable and much better than emailing spreadsheet versions back and forth.
2. Gliffy – This is a non-Google product which replaces Microsoft Visio. I’ve used it to collaborate on a few flow charts to explain the funding streams and the decision making processes. Gliffy won’t allow two people to edit the same page simultaneously, but it does have an interesting feature which allows you to post an image of your chart on a website which will be automatically updated each time the chart is updated.
3. Google Calendar – Google calendar is great for sharing a calendar and allowing multiple people to both update and access it from anywhere. I guess this replaces Microsoft Outlook’s calendar feature. Its also a good way to easily add a calendar to a website with an easy to update backend.
4. RememberTheMilk.com – This is a great way to share and collaborate on a to-do list. It has a great ajax interface and is very easy to use. They’ve implemented numerous ways to keep it updated too, including offline with google gears and via sms through twitter.
5. del.icio.us – I use this service for saving and tagging links, and sharing them with others. Every time I find something I think I might need later I tag it. Check out the del.icio.us firefox extension to make it even more useful.