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[@967]
Erik's Pulse has been published. [@433]
New Year Cleansing I re-installed XP on my main desktop machine last weekend. It had become too unstable and painfully slow. It's been a year since I had to do this. I guess I can't complain too much. Anyway, I tried to be smart about it, and it worked… Before reformatting I used nLite to make an up-to-date WinXP SP2 CD. I backed up the drive to an image using Acronis True Image. I keep copies of all applications, so I didn't worry about that too much. I was back up and running in a couple hours. Not bad. I only re-installed the basics. I'll deal with the rest as needed. It's the best way to weed out the crap. Here's what I've installed so far:

Utilities

• AVG Anti Virus, a non-intrusive virus checker.
• Cygwin, mostly for ssh and cvs.
• Microsoft AntiSpyware which seems to do a decent job, so far.
• Nokia PC Suite to sync my phone.
• Password Manager to store my online passwords, etc.
• PowerToys for XP customization.
• PrintScreen to take screen shots.
• WinRAR for dealing with archives (zip, jar, etc.)
• ZoneAlarm, as my personal firewall.

Internet

• Azureus to download torrents.
• FileZilla for FTP sessions.
• FireFox as my browser.
• LimeWire for the occasional hard to find music.
• Thunderbird for mail.
• NewzCrawler as my RSS reader.
• SecureCRT for SSH/Telnet sessions.
• Trillian for instant messaging.

Editors/Viewers

• Adobe Reader to view PDFs.
• IrFanView to edit/view images.
• UltraEdit/UltraCompare for all of my text editing needs.
• OpenOffice to deal with MS Office documents.
• Picasa to manage photos.
• Dreamweaver to edit my web sites.
• Fireworks to manipulate images.

Development

• BeanShell to quickly execute/test Java code.
• Cavaj to decompile Java classes.
• IDEA as my Java IDE.
• JDK 5.0, as well the latest 1.4 JDK.
• JRC-Editor to view/edit Java properties.
• SmartCVS to access CVS servers.

Audio

• AudibleManager for managing eBooks.
• Doppler to download podcasts.
• Rio Music Manager for the Rio Carbon.
• WinAmp to listen to MP3s.

That's about 1/10th of the applications that were previously installed. Yet I'm able to do everything I was doing before. There's something to be said about being forced into doing some cleaning. I should do it more often. Well, maybe not.

[@695]
Podcasts Here are the Podcasts I regularly listen to:

Engadget Podcast
Adam Curry: Daily Source Code
Evil Genius Chronicles
The Laporte Report Audio Edition
Geek News Central
Steve Holden Tech Rag Tear Outs (TRTO)
Mobile Gadget News
The Wizards of Technology Weekly
WebTalk Radio
Tech Chick Weekly
Tech Shorts
KOMO News
Eric Rice Podcast
Future Tense
In Our Time
I Love Radio .org
Leo Laporte's KFI Airchecks
/Nerd: CBC Radio's Technology Column
open source sex ed
Really Learn Spanish
One Minute Tip
The Super Smart Radio Whore Sex Show
In the Trenches
Wi-Fi Networking News
Yeast Radio - The Life and Times of a Bloated Lesbian
The Chris Pirillo Show

The Carbon is getting plenty of use. Spooks? Did you watch the premieres of Alias and MI-5? We did. Bloody good times. To be fair. Any episode featuring Jennifer Gardner in skimpy lingerie will undoubtedly get my vote… Elektra is coming out next week.

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[@464]
Rumors Since everybody seems to think they know what Steve is going to announce at Macworld. I'll throw my hat in… Apple is going to announce a WiFi-enabled iPod. The AirPod.

There.

[@637]
CodeScanner Review A little while ago I wrote a review of Mobile Innovation's CodeScanner, a static source code analyzer for Symbian C++. It has just been published on All About Symbian — Thanks Ewan and co. A local copy can also be found in the Stories section.