Can I feed on this page?

In an earlier article, we discussed one way to tell if a web page has a corresponding newsfeed. Namely, look for a RSS/atom/XML icon to appear on the web page.

If Firefox is your browser, then there is an additional way. A lightning icon will appear in the status bar at the lower right corner if the web page has a RSS or atom feed. Clicking the icon will automatically add this web page to the news aggregator that comes with Firefox. Incidentally, I do not use the Firefox news aggregator(but from what I gather from others' comments, it is a good, basic tool). So, I don't click the lightning icon. What I do is copy the URL of the web page, and paste it into the aggregator that I do use: bottomfeeder. Bottomfeeder is smart enough to automagically discover the URL of any news feeds associated with the page.

If you want to try out the default Firefox news aggregator, see this article for some tips and instructions.

Keeping up ...

As I am using more and more open source software, I found it harder and harder to keep up-to-date with each project. How do I efficiently find out if a package has a newer release? I have been trying to visit the project web sites once in a while. This method is neither systematic nor labour saving.

The job of keeping up has been made easier for many software packages by the use of feeds. Most of the open-source packages I use are hosted on sourceforge. For instance, windirstat, the software we looked at yesterday. Sourceforge projects have project update feeds. I found that these feeds are generally of low-volume. Why not give it a try? Use RSS to get the updates.

To find out the feed URL, you must go to the project's Project Summary Page. For windirstat, it is http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/.
You should find a link labeled View list of RSS feeds available for this project. Click on the RSS feeds link. Then, click the XML icon for Project news releases (including full text if you wish). Copy and paste the URL into a news aggregator (such as bottomfeeder).

The tasks of identifying and feeding the URLs into bottomfeeder are not that painful, and the payoff is very good. You will no longer need to visit each web site to find out if there is a newer release. And you will never miss the next super-duper release of your favourite software. Welcome to the quick(er) pace of open source software development, and many happy returns.

Do you know what is on your hard drive?

Up till now, Windows Explorer was my main (and only) tool for finding information about the contents of a hard drive. It served me reasonably well except in a few situations.

One situation is tallying the total size of a folder. The Windows Explorer on Win 2000 can quite handily tell you the size of a partition, and of an individual file. However, when it comes to folders, the size that it reports only includes the files that are immediately in that folder. If the folder has subfolders, you need to bring up the Properties of the parent folder, and then it will slowly tally up the total size. I don't use Win XP. So, I can't say if the Explorer on Win XP was any improvement.

Another situation is when your disk is filling up, and you need to search and destroy the big files that are eating up disk space. If Explorer is all you have, you have a lot of work to do.

A great complement to Windows Explorer is windirstat. windirstat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Windows.

When you fire up windirstat, it prompts you for the drive or folder that you want analyzed. The results are displayed in 3 views: the Explorer-like view, the extension view which summarizes the data by the file extensions, and the treemap view where each file is graphically depicted as a block in a color-coded map.

Using the color-coded treemap, you can quickly and visually pick out the biggest files. Because the views are linked, you can click on a block in the treemap, and the corresponding file will be highlighted in the Explorer view. This is a quick way to identify the biggest files on your hard drive. Now, you can choose to delete the file from the Explorer view.

Another example of how the views are linked is that you can click on an extension in the extension view, and all blocks in the treemap with that file extension will be highlighted.

I was happy to know that windirstat supports not only ASCII but also Unicode filenames. That is a big plus for those who use non-English languages.

For tools that can potentially traverse your entire hard drive, one naturally is concerned about its stability and scalability.

Regarding stability, the project is classified as Production/Stable in the SourceForge system. From the web comments, and our own experience (albeit short), there is nothing that suggests to me otherwise.

Regarding scalability, I ran windirstat against all my partitiions (37G of actual data). It took about 3 minutes on a slow Duron (800MHz, 256M) machine to analyze all 120,000 files. The TreeMap was amazingly usable, even with that many files, to give a visual representation of the disk space allocation.

I like the tool, not only because it does what it is supposed to do, but also it was fun while I was doing it.

A Listing of Open Source (Linux) Software

Recently, I came across a web page that lists the Linux equivalents of various Windows software. It caught my eye because the web master had taken the time to categorize the software, such as Networking, Desktop. Better, the list seemed to be maintained over time.

For those Linux users among us, you will find a source of open software. For Windows users, you may find that some of the Linux software have Windows ports as well.

For those who are into security, thanks to Clara Y, you may want to see this page for a list/commentary on free security software.

First Attempt at Organizing Digital Picture Files

I managed to upload all my digital photographs from my digital camera to my PC. So, all 200+ photos (jpg files) are now sitting in some folder somewhere. So, what next?

The first thing I wanted to do was to look at each picture, and then decide what to do with it.

As a Windows user, I just double clicked the first image file. Depending on what program the jpg file extension was associated with, either a browser window or a graphics program would fire up with the selected picture open. In my case, it was Firefox browser.

That was all fine. Next, I wanted to take a look at the next picture. So, I fiddled my way through all the open windows to find the next file, and repeated the above procedure. The result was another new window open for that file. Pretty soon, I was spending more time finding the right window (and killing the old ones) than looking at and admiring the pictures themselves!

Luckily, Derek P., a friend of this blog, pointed me to this software: irfanview.

irfanview (version 3.97, Windows-only) is described as a image viewer on its website. That is a little too modest because it can also do some simple editing tasks, e.g, converting from 1 format to another, convert from color to greyscale, cropping/rotating the image, etc. For a fancier feature set, you need to move up to something like a Gimp2 which we featured earlier in this blog.

To move through a directory, open any image file in that directory in irfanview. After you have it open, you may want to click View/Display Options, and choose Fit Images to Desktop. Depending on your picture and your screen's resolution, the default Fit Window to Image may require you to scroll to see the whole picture. Then click the left or right arrow to go back or forward 1 image file at a time.

Although you can do the navigating in Windows Explorer, you need to manage all the open windows, and keep track of what files you have visited and yet to visit. The advantage of irfanview is that it will do that for you and you don't need to do any prior preparation.

Besides just viewing the pictures, irfanview can also automatically create a slide show for you. You don't need to import the files into Powerpoint or OpenOffice Presentation. It is really handy.

irfanview amounts to my first attempt to organize my digital photos. It worked quite well for the simple objective of just going over the pictures one by one. Soon after, I wanted to further organize my pictures into a more structured photo album or gallery. I will go over the software I now use for that purpose in a later blog entry.

Feed or NO Feed?

How do I know if a web site has a feed or not that my news aggregator (BottomFeeder) can use?

Usually, the web page that has a feed available will have an small icon labeled with one of RSS/RSS 1/RSS 2/Atom/XML. RSS and Atom are 2 different XML-based newsfeed formats. Alternatively, you may just see a link labeled something like Feed/Newsfeed/Sitefeed (this blog has a sitefeed link).

If you click on the icon or link, you will see some XML code in your browser. That is NOT what you are interested in. What you want is the URL. So, copy the URL from the browser and paste it into BottomFeeder.