GGrep, Windows Text Search, Replace Software

GGrep is a text search and replace software for the Windows operating system that is based on the original Grep tool of Unix based machines. The portable Windows software comes with a user interface that displays the majority of features right on the start screen. A basic search requires a search term and the selection of a root folder on a connected hard drive. A click on Search parses all files and displays all files containing the search term in the results listing.

The files are displayed with their name, the row and column the phrase was found and the phrase surrounded by words before and after. One of the issues that I found was that it was not possible to scroll horizontally. The only option to display all text was to increase the window size significantly.

Filters are available to narrow down the search results. It is for instance possible to search only specific file types or folders, or to exclude files and folders from the search.

Other filters include making the search case sensitive or to limit the results to full word matches. GGrep supports regular expressions just like the original grep application. This opens up several interesting options for more powerful search and replace operations. You could for instance search for euro|dollar to find documents containing either the phrase euro or dollar.

Another interesting feature of GGrep is the option to replace text. While it is possible to use simple text to text replacements, one could use regular expressions for better text matching.

Please note that the program is not displaying a list of possible matches first. When you click Replace the replacing of text happens instantly and without option to undo the changes (other than reversing search and replace strings).

The results of a search or replace can be exported into a csv file which can then be imported into programs like Excel. Windows users who are looking for a powerful search and replace tool should take a closer look at GGrep. The software is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the operating system.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Mozilla Rushes Out Firefox 7.0.1 Update

If you follow this tech blog closely you know already that the latest release of Firefox, which would be Firefox 7.0, contained a bug that hid away some or even all add-ons of a user who updated a version of the browser to the latest stable iteration. Mozilla after noticing the problem stopped the distribution of automatic updates to users running the stable version of the browser on their computer.

The company was quick enough to provide a temporary solution for the bug that brought back all the add-ons for affected users. We covered the issue and workaround here in detail.

Firefox 7.01, the update that fixed the hidden add-on issue is now available for all users. It can be downloaded from the official website or via the web browser’s internal updating. To do that one would have to click on Firefox > Help > About Firefox to trigger the check for a new version of the Internet browser (assuming that the one button Firefox menu is the preferred layout).

This new Firefox release fixes only this single issue. Some users have questioned why Mozilla did not catch the bug in the Nightly or Aurora phase of development. While it is probably to easy to link the bug to the rapid release cycle, one has to consider the fact that the accelerated release process could have something to do with it.

Taking into consideration that this is the first major bug, and that the last two releases did not contain serious bugs that required an emergency patch, it is to early to tell if the rapid release process had any influence here.

Tech interested users and websites like mine will however look closely at the coming releases to see if history repeats itself, so to speak. I give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and assume that a bug like this could have been missed before the rapid release cycle as well.

Please let me know what you make of it.

Update: Mozilla Thunderbird, the email client, has also been updated to version 7.0.1.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: Firefox, firefox 7, firefox bug, firefox-update, mozilla

SurfControl, Time Track Web Usage In Firefox

If you had to write down how much time you spend on the Internet in the past week, could you do that? And would you also be able to list the top 5 sites that you’d consider productive, and the top 5 time wasters in that time? To top that, would you be able to come up with a ratio of productive and unproductive sites that you visited in the past week or even in the past 30 days?

While most users would probably be able to name the top sites that they’d consider most productive and time wasting, only a handful would surely be able to come up with exact figures for the last 30 days.

That’s where the Firefox add-on Surf Control steps in. The add-on tracks web usage over time and displays information about a user’s Internet usage in a dashboard in the browser. To add to that, it also allows the user to define sites as productive or time wasting, and to block sites completely or after a certain allowed usage period.

The tracking happens automatically. When you open the dashboard of the application, you will see the top productive and time wasting site, the productivity over time, browsing habits of current week and the top sites of the week.

Productive sites are marked in blue, unproductive sites in read and sites that have not been marked by the user as productive or unproductive.

A click on Details lists the top productive and time wasting sites of the week, and how time has been wasted in the last 30 days of Internet surfing (provided that the add-on had been installed for that time).

But the add-on is not only about tracking a user’s web usage over time. It can furthermore be used to limit or entirely block access to selected web sites or services.

Blocking a site outright blocks site access whenever the site is opened in the web browser. You can alternatively limit site usage per day to a specific amount of minutes per day. The very same blocked page message appears when you try to open the web page after the time runs out for the day.

This is obviously not a protection but more of a self-control feature. You can easily adjust the time or unblock sites any time in the dashboard.

When you first install SurfControl you need to add the add-on’s buttons to one of Firefox’s toolbars. This is done by selecting Firefox > Options > Toolbar Layout and by dragging and dropping the extension’s icons to the desired location.

Firefox users can download and install SurfControl from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: Firefox, internet-explorer, surfcontrol, time tracking, tracking

Microsoft drops to 3rd Place biggest Tech company, behind IBM

It’s not been a good year for Microsoft when it comes to their overall standing in the technology business space.  A couple of months ago Apple overtook the company as the number 1 international technology company in terms of value because of the frankly amazing work done by Steve Jobs and his team over the last decade in capturing technology markets and calling them their own.  Now the less surprising has happened in that IBM has overtaken Microsoft in value to force the Redmond giant down to the number 3 slot.

Bloomberg have reported that IBM’s value yesterday reached $214 billion while Microsoft’s fell slightly to $213.2 billion.  IBM has been steadily gaining on Microsoft in the last year by adding 22% to its overall value, while Microsoft’s value has seen a drop of 8.8% in the same period.

This isn’t at all surprising given the drive towards the cloud now for all technology companies and the servers required to get their presences there being supplied predominantly by only a few major firms, of which IBM has always been a leader.  We could probably see Fujitsu, HP and others significantly climb in value too in the next couple of years, again off the back of the move to the cloud.

Microsoft’s business focuses predominantly on Windows, Windows Server and Office with other aspects of the company’s products, namely their Bing search engine and their Xbox gaming division being propped up by revenue from the company’s traditionally strong products.  With very few exceptions Microsoft have never made hardware and certainly haven’t got into the server market.

This is the first time that IBM has topped Microsoft in value since 1996 and is now the fourth-largest company in the world by market value.  IBM sold their own PC division to a Chinese company in 2005 and HP also now look set to sell their own PC division to concentrate on the prospering server market.  IBM could clearly see which way the wind was blowing.  While the rest of the world believed that processing was coming down from servers onto the desktop, they stuck to their ground and were soon proved correct that processing would continue to be done on servers and, indeed this market would grow significantly.  In an interview with Bloomberg, Ted Schadler, an analyst with Forrester Research siad “They were early to recognize that computing was moving way beyond these boxes on our desks.”

Microsoft are still the world’s largest software company but in 2000 were worth three times the value of IBM.  This shows just how much IBM’s business has grown in that time, and the company has announced plans to grow their business even further by 2015.  Back in the summer of 2000, Microsoft was valued at $430 billion but dropped to $135 billion in 2009 at the height of the economic downturn.

Microsoft will continue to be a dominant player in the market but the rise of alternative operating systems from Google and Apple have proven that it’s no longer all about the operating system you run, as I point out in an article today on our sister site Windows8News.  This move then does not mean that Microsoft won’t still be a technology giant ten years from now.  They may still see this dominant place slip however and could be number five by the end of next year.

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© Mike Halsey (MVP) for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: ibm, microsoft, value

SFV Ninja, Simple File Verification Software

Many download portals and websites display file checksums on their download pages. The idea behind this is to give users the chance to calculate the checksum of the downloaded file to compare it with the checksum on the website. If the values are identical, then the file has not been tampered with (unless a hacker managed to alter the checksum on the page as well).

SFV Ninja is a portable software for Windows that can be used to calculate and display checksums of files that are accessible on the system. When you first start the program you have options to load individual files or files of a folder into the application. Users who have already worked with the program before can alternatively load a single checksum file or make the application crawl a folder for multiple checksum files to re-verify the data.

You can verify all files right away with a click on the Verify all files button. You may alternatively switch from the default CRC32 mode to MD5 or Sha-1 mode if those are preferred.

It may take some time to verify all files. The program managed to test 10 to 20 files per second on my test system. Each checksum is then displayed next to the program’s name and size in the interface. The information can be saved in sfv files which can be loaded again into the software to verify that the files have not been modified in the meantime.

Information that get saved include the file name and path, size and the checksum that has been calculated. When you load the sfv file into the application, you can re-verify all files again and compare the old and new checksum of each file with each other.

This can be handy to make sure that files in a specific directory have not been modified in the meantime, or to get a list of modified files in a directory. You can for instance use it to verify all files on a USB key, in a development directory or a shared network drive.

SFV Ninja is a portable software that is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Yo can download the latest version from the developer’s website.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: donation-coder, file verification, portable software, sfv, sfv ninja, windows software

Google Adds Site Health To Webmaster Tools

I have only a good dozen websites listed under my Google account in Webmaster Tools. In case you do not know what that is, it is a service for webmaster to verify domain ownership to get additional information about the status of each website added in the Google search engine. You can manage crawl rates, see errors, get suggestions and can look at the latest important issues that Google identified while crawling the site.

Those information previously were only available after clicking on a site in Google Webmaster Tools which was not a issue for webmasters with one or two domains listed there, but could very well have been a deal-breaker for webmasters with dozens or even hundreds of verified domains. Imagine having to click on each domain to check their health status.

Google yesterday made the announcement that they have redesigned the Webmaster Tools start page. Instead of just displaying a list of domains there, the page is now showing site health for every domain right on the homepage.

Webmasters now see on first glance if something’s wrong with one of their websites. Sites with health problems are listed at the top of the list. Warnings may include that malware has been detected on the site, that important pages have been removed or that the robots.txt file is blocking important pages.

Each site is displayed with a thumbnail screenshot and link to manage the site in Webmaster Tools. A click on a problem opens additional information about the problem detected on the site.

Susan Moskwa, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, notes that Google is using the display currently only for accounts with less than 100 sites listed. Webmasters with more than 100 sites will see site health at the top of the Dashboard for each site. While I’m not 100% certain it seems to suggest that accounts with more than 100 domains still have to use the old way of verifying that everything’s all right with their websites.

Google plans to expand the site health notifications in the future to include additional issues (currently only malware, removed urls, blocked urls are reported).

I personally like the new layout, as it speeds up the process of making sure that no potential issues are missed when using Webmaster Tools.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Tools to Tweak Windows 7 and Make it Like Windows 8

Windows 8 will be released soon, perhaps not soon enough. No big news there except that if you are a Windows fan, you probably want Windows 8 now. Windows 7 is fantastic and you may not want to let go. What do you do? It is time to tweak your Windows 7 operating system to give it features similar to Windows 8. This sounds fun, does it not? Windows 8 is tile-based and for those who like tiles, this is a beautiful thing. This article details some tools to give the tile format to Windows 7. Set a restore point and get ready to start tweaking.

Aero Tile

To add the glassy aeroful tiles to your PC desktop, the portable utility Aero Tile delivers this distinctive glamour. It offers you several options and choices for My Computer, My Documents, Control Panel, Fonts and other such Windows dimensions. Aero Tile is simple to use. There is no need for extensive technical knowledge or added code.

Download Aero Tile from the following link and get started. It will arrive in a .zip file. Extract the application from the zipped file and launch. The options window opens immediately. Check the boxes next to the tiles you want to display. You have to arrange the tiles by dragging them and placing them in the appropriate area of the desktop.

Omnimo 4

This is an application based on Rainmeter. It is a multi-function desktop center. It is interactive and versatile once you get a feel for it. The tiles are easily customized and any information is accessible from an aesthetically pleasing layout. You will need to install Rainmeter 2.0 or higher, as Omnimo 4 requires Rainmeter. Download here. Now you can install and start using Omnimo 4.

It will open from a .zip file. The installation is simple. When complete, Omnimo starts right up and you can begin configuration.

Zetro

Another Windows 8 metro UI theme for Windows 7 is Zetro. It yields the stylish tiles of 8 to Windows 7. You will have to go through several steps to prepare the proper format to work in Windows 7 and produce tiles that are active and functional. The instructions can be found in the Readme file located in the extracted .zip folder for Zetro. The interesting thing about this tweak is that it is a theme pack that enables you to alternate between tiles and Aeros easily. This versatility is well worth the setup procedure and will produce a genuine Windows 8 format for the Windows 7 desktop. Download Zetro from this link.

The screenshot above shows the Zetro theme files after being transferred to the Windows Themes file, as described in the instructional Readme file. After this is done, choose the theme you want. Try all of them to see which suites you. You can switch back to Aeros by returning to the Windows Themes folder (C:/Windows/Resources/Themes) and selecting Aeros. This will set things back to Windows 7 appearance.

Each of these different tweaks offers a different appearance and functionality. Experiment with it and see which works best for you. After all, you can always uninstall it if you don’t like it.

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© Melanie Gross for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: rainmeter, windows 7, windows 8, windows 8 theme, windows aero