Being annoyed by creating a cursor script in SQL and having to define tons of variables manually I wondered if there was any tool to aid in this process. I quick google did not yield promising results. So spend the weekend conjuring up an application that eases the script creation by providing specialized generators to create scripts automatically from a given SELECT statement. It works pretty well and will be tested further in the next week until I’ll release it here under some opensource license.

Putting this app together thought me some new things about the settings and localization concepts of .NET 2.0. Two articles that got me introduced to the concept are the tutorial Localization in ASP .NET 2.0 on ondotnet.com and the detailed article
Localization Practices for .NET 2.0 on theserverside.net.

Anyway, I have about 1-2GB of data, most of which doesn’t change a lot, but it should be stored daily. I’am looking for some kind of network backup solution for storing backups on my workstation or friends’ servers on a VPN. While searching, I came across DIBS: Distributed Internet Backup System which uses a peer to peer approach to store recovery data on serveral distributed servers. From the manual it looks promising and quite mature but I’m not sure if I’ll find enough reliable servers with a decent internet connection to use it.

Bacula looks really interessting but might be overkill in my situation. I like the fact that it provides clients for different OSes so that you can use it as a single backup solution even for the windows clients in your network. It is mainly built for larger networks with distributed backup and storage servers for a large number of clients. I don’t think I’ll invest the time to set up the different server components for this one, though.

Possibly I’ll end up with a tar, scp or rsync solution that copies backups to my windows workstation or other peers in my VPN. linux-backup.net and this IBM article of automation of backups on linux give some useful example for such a do-it-yourself backup solution.

Update: I found one more popular opensource backup application which is called Amanda which provides a similar feature set like Bacula.

• Mozilla Firefox
• Opera
• HTTrack Website Copier downloads websites recursively for offline browsing

• NOTEPAD++
• PSPad

• Sysinternals Freeware Utilities (espacially usefull are Process Explorer, RegMon, FileMon)
• CCleaner – Crap Cleaner removes all kinds of temporary files, cache files and privacy data from windows and several other applications.
• Handy Recovery 1.0 recovers deleted files from NTFS partitions
• Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP
• Ditto, Clipboard Extension extends your clipboard with a history functionality

• FreeCommander Windows filemanager similar to Total Commander
• XPlorer basically a windows explorer with tabs

• PuTTY a free telnet and ssh client
• RealVNC – VNC Free Edition 4.1

• Subversion version control system, sucessor to CVS
• TortoiseSVN windows client for subversion as explorer integration

• GIMP for Windows
• Paint.NET
• MyViewPad (only slightly better than Windows’ internal image viewer, the really good image viewers FastStone, XnView and IrfanView are for personal use only!)

• OpenOffice.org Home OpenSource Office Suite
• AbiWord OpenSource Word Processor
• PDFCreator OpenSource PDF Printer to create PDF files from any application

• Visual Studio Express Express Editions of MS Visual C++, C#, VB and SQL Server
• PHP Designer 2006 PHP Development Environment (eula says personal use, but several forum posts say commercial use granted)

• good image viewer with thumbnail view
• a complete burning appliction (like Nero or K3B)