[@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.