Here’s a simple trick for any ColdFusion developers working on windows and running a development server on their machine to make your system run faster when you’re not developing.

If you are like me then you are running a webserver, an app server and a database on your laptop while you’re developing from an IDE. But this is only when you’re developing- at least 70% of the time you boot up your system, you’re not doing development work at all. The resources consumed by your app server, your web server, your database server and all the pre-requisite services on my machine for instance take up about 70MB of RAM. Since I currently only have 512MB to work with, that’s a significant chunk of my machine’s memory resources that 70% of the time is allocated to services that I’m not even using, making whatever else I’m doing (3d modeling, multimedia, browsing) 15% slower than it should be! Turn the developer-specific services to “manual” by default in your services control panel and then use these two simple batch scripts to start and stop all development-related services when you need to put on your developer hat:

And you can easily customize the scripts to add other services, just open up your services panel and get the name from there.
The ideal setup (and I’m moving to this method) is to add a crapload of memory and run something like virtual PC and have an entire environment that mimics your production server and do your development there. That way you can create a “throw-away” space to work with, break it all you want and then just copy the single file that contains the environment to clone it and start again. For the resource-thrifty developer on a budget though, this trick can greatly improve your system performance when you’re not developing.

On a completely unrelated note- big shoutout to Neil and Sara for their recently-released Technolawyer Blog. It’s actually more of a track-back since they were kind enough to publish my Sentinel Article that didn’t make Law Office Computing’s magazine. If you’re in the legal technology consulting industry, then you’re familiar with Technolawyer. It’s a top-notch newsletter aggregating peer-reviewed posts by experts on topics of technology for lawyers. .

Here’s a random smattering of cool tools I’ve recently run across. In no particular order…

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool that let’s people collectively share their bookmarks. It’s neat because it color codes by popularity and allows for categorization of the links through tagging so you can scroll through and discover the gems that everyone else knew about by sheer popularity of the link. I was using it today and it helped me discover…

Craig’s List meets Google Maps – someone built an interface to craig’s list postings by incorporating the google maps API. By grafting two great services together, you get a scatterplot of the locations of housing listings in an easy-to-navigate format. beautiful.

ZoomInfo – I’m not exactly sure how this service does it’s thing but it works like a search engine that will compile a dossier on anyone realtime by seemingly stitching together various search results and company names. It was surpisingly accurate with my bio though I’m not sure how it melds together the correct info. Seems like it could be useful for getting a background on a key higher-up before an important first-meeting.

DropLoad – that’s what I almost did when I saw this simple yet ingenious little app. It allows you to move large files that are too big for email to friends using a simple one step process of uploading. It generates a notification with instructions for the person on how to pickup their files and will notify you when they’ve downloaded them. Free service, simple and useful instead of doing the ftp dance for moving big files that aren’t super-sensitive.

Billboard Tour Finder – you can search a database of tours to see what bands are coming to town and where your favorite bands are currently touring. It’s not perfect and doesn’t have every band but it’s pretty neat and has quite a few. I can’t figure out why nobody has created an app that will let you register your favorite groups and notify you via email when they come to town. Does such a thing exist?

IT Conversations – I’ve listened to about 30 various interviews and speeches now and they’re great. It’s for us proletariat class folks that can’t afford to go to all the snazzy IT conferences. You can still hear the keynotes and audience questions and best of all, do it on your own schedule and be able to replay the talks that are chocked full of good info. It has great organization of content and has a personal queueing system so you can tag the talks that seem interesting and have it remember what you’ve already listened to. It’s not just IT-centric programming either, there are interesting biogenetic and psychology topics- the kind of stuff that Wired magazine covers. Definitely makes my 22mi commute a little more tolerable in the morning.

iPodder – despite its name this app is not directly related to the iPod but it facilitates podcasting which is like RSS for MP3’s. Basically a content provider can syndicate their talkshow or other audio content by exposing a special RSS feed enabled with enclosures. iPodder is a client you install that will poll these sites for new audio content and download the MP3’s when your not looking. Combine it with the sites like the one above and you can have ala carte radio programming you design!

RSSauction – you can save a set of search parameters for an item you’re looking for on ebay and have it deliver results to you via RSS. This is a beautiful use of this technology and it seems strange to me that ebay does not offer this feature itself. I’m using it now to hunt down my next laptop and I can see this being a very useful way to keep track of numerous searches for gear on ebay.

These are my picks for the most useful tools I’ve run across lately. The consistent theme they all share is simplicity, focused scope and elegance in design. If you have other gems worth sharing, post them here.

Here are two unrelated yet equally-cool freeware tools I recently discovered:

Xenu Link Sleuth is a small windows app that will spider your site and report any broken links or graphics it finds. Back in the day I used an online tool for this that would do the same thing called websitegarage.com. It was later acquired by Microsoft bCentral and now appears to be out of business. This little app is great at what it does though and it can even connect to your site via ftp and report orphaned files based on what it was able to spider. I just used it to check my company’s corporate site and it found a few links that were bad as well as one directory that had a permissions problem.

Sequoia View is freeware windows app developed by the CS department of some university in the Netherlands. I needed to do a little spring cleaning on my laptop to free up some hard drive space. When I used to have a Mac there was actually a freeware app called “Spring Cleaning” that was great for giving you a visual overview of how your hard drive space was consumed. It would walk the contents of your drive recursively and produce a bar chart that filled the screen where the left-most column represented the space consumed by your top-level directories, then to the right it drilled further and further until you had as many columns as you had subdirectories on your computer. This worked but produced a report that was VERY difficult to interpret with thin slivers representing each directory. Sequoia View has an ingenious interface that uses what are called “squarified treemaps” or cusion maps (because their shading makes it look like a quilt of cusions knitted together) to represent the contents of your hard drive. It gives a complete visual snapshot of how space is allocated color-coding on filetype and allowing you to see exactly where the problem files are drill down to the directories right from the snapshot view to get rid of them. I found out I had an 800MB pagefile and an 800MB hiberfil.sys which both could be deleted plus a bunch of temp directories that were out of control. Two great little apps I wanted to pass along – nice!