Web review

Let’s speak about EASEUS Partition Manager, a new product for Windows. The first element I noticed is… the price: the home edition is free for personal use, this is a good beginning Anyway the version I tested is the Server edition, that supports also Windows Server family operating sytems; in addiction of this, it is able to operate also on 64-bit editions and it offers the possibility to create bootable  CDs/DVDs to boot and operate on dead systems (these last two functions are included also in the Professional edition, as stated in this comparison table). leggi tutto »

Vista’s “3D Flip” effect is really nice. Honestly, the entire new graphic of Windows Vista is beautiful… even if the rest of the operating system is disappointing

Anyway, if you want to add this feature to your Windows XP… someone has done it: WinFlip is a little and free addon that is capable to re-create the same effect. Just download it and try!

http://winflip.stylekings.de/

I want to suggest a very good work from TredoSoft: Multiple IE Installer (aka MultipleIEs) is a free tool that installs all the previous versions of Internet Explorer (from 3.0 to 6.0) on a Windows PC, allowing Internet Explorer 7 users to use older versions of IE on the same computer.

It was very useful for me, because I have to test my sites on Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 but IE 6 is still popular, so I must test everything (at least) on these 3 browsers.

As a web developer I work everyday with FTP to transfer and update files on several web servers. The process is simple but boring: I’ve to download a page on my hard drive, edit it and then upload it back on the remote machine to test my modifications. These activities must be done with an FTP client like FileZilla, SmartFTP, WS_FTP…

Microsoft Windows can’t mount FTP servers on the local filesystem as network folders (you can do it only with computers that are connected in your local network), so it’s impossible to work with a local application (PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, Notepad++…) loading and saving documents directly on the remote server.

There is some software that is able to add this functionality to Microsoft Operating System, like the old Novell NetDrive, that is not freeware but is considered as abandonware by the same software house. Now Novell suggests to use a newer product like WebDrive, but it’s unfortunately a commercial software.

I Googled for a while and finally I found a solution.

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Auslogics Disk Defrag is a free defragmentation tool. It seems to work very well on Windows systems, and several forums on the Internet confirm its efficiency.

Its free version is the only available (this is not a “lite” implementation of a more featured application) and it offers a nice interface and great defragmentation speed, compared to the defrag tool that is provided with Windows XP.

It worths a try

http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag

When you take a picture of a group of persons, it’s hard to have everybody with open eyes, with a natural face expression, with nothing to be fixed.
Of course you can take some pics and then “merge” them with an application like Photoshop, but you have also a quicker alternative: MSR Group Shot, from Microsoft.

This is little and free software can import two or more pictures of a same subject, and then merge them using only the parts that the user prefers.

Let’s see a simple example. I have these two photos I took with my girlfriend:

… what about we want to wear same transparent glasses? Well, we import the two files in Group Shot and we select her eyes in the first pic and my eyes in the second:

The application understand that we want to “swap faces”, so after some seconds we can click on “View Composite” to get the final image:

http://research.microsoft.com/projects/GroupShot/