10 Open Source Desktop Softwares I Use Everyday On My Windows Machine

I am a big fan of open source and free softwares. Here is the list of open source desktop software I use every single day on my windows machine.

Google Chrome

Free Download Manager

uTorrent

Notepad++

Console

7zip

Mozilla Firefox

VLC Media player

OpenOffice

Cygwin

xkcd comic derivative.

One of my favorite xkcd comic is this one.
http://xkcd.com/149



Few days back our product manager made this:


Inspired by that I made one more:
for the phd students:

Trainspotting: A movie with great soundtrack

Few days back I had a small debate with my teammates on which movie has the best soundtrack. My teammate George said one of the top three has to be Trainspotting. I never heard of this name before. Being a movie buff, I had to watch this movie. And George was right, the movie might not be great but the soundtrack is awesome. It might not be the within top three but definitely in top 10. I googled for the list of best soundtrack movies. And crap! there are lots of movies in the list I haven't watched yet.

This one is my favorite in the movie: Underworld - Bornslippy


If you are more interested you can visit these sites:
http://www.filmsite.org/100soundtracks.html
http://bestuff.com/category/movie-soundtrack

if you want to kill more time :D, here is a good way to do so:
YouTube

Fuzzy System Restore

This is a really big problem. System restore(SR) seems to eat up a lot of disk space. I don't want to turn this feature off. It helped me recover from few crashes earlier, but I don't want to waste that much space also. I will give you an idea how much space it took. My disk is 232 GB with 8% set to SR. My data is about 59GB. It turns out that despite of limiting the SR to 8% (roughly 18GB) it took up 55GB of my hard disk. What the hell, this is pure junk. Over time SR should delete the older restore points, I mean it should never exceed its cap limit.

I need to find out whats going on.

[Update]
Ended up reading the following articles after a quick googling on system restore.

1. zdnet blog: A smarter way to manage System Restore space on Vista
2. Lifehacker article: Vista Tip - Reduce System Restore disk usage
3. MS Help and Support: Description of the Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows XP
4. MS Help and Support: How to Automate the Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows XP

Related Articles:

5. MS Help and Support: The Registry Keys and Values for the System Restore Utility
6. MS Technet: Windows XP System Restore from microsoft technet
7. MS Help and Support: How the System Restore Tool Handles Hard-Disk Space Usage
8. MS Help and Support: Windows XP System Restore Is Easy to Use

So it turns out that you can automatically clean up system restore files (read 3 & 4) or even do it manually. I suggest not to switch on/off SR to delete old restore points. Instead clean up the old system restore points from diskcleanup 'more options'.

My Good Old web portal.. :D

I almost forgot about this site. This was my personal website 4 years ago. Then I just learned few tricks about html, css and other stuff. I am surprized that the hosting company has not deleted it yet.

This is where you can see the old site. http://arif-pasha.netfirms.com/

Just remember it was almost 4 years back. enjoy!

Regualr Expression Quick Reference Guide

Here are some handy files I found over net on regular expression matching.

[download] RE quick ref guide
[download] RE Cheat Sheet


This website is for the javascript coders:
http://www.visibone.com/regular-expressions/

One minute cheer up..

Sad? Frustrated? Just watch this video. I bet you will be thanking me.

Billy Joel - We Didn't Start the Fire

A very well compilation of all the events mentioned in the song. Just awesome.
[wiki about this song]
[lyrics]