Wireshark, Numbers, Image Tools

The wonderful open source packet capture program Ethereal is now Wireshark.

AnalogX has a great collection of freeware applications for networks, music, programming and systems--including PacketMon. A really small but useful packet capturing application. Fits on a USB stick great!

Don't pass up a look at Foundstone's free security tools. Heavier duty fare here. Network security applications, forensic tools,

Symantec figured out the source of those wierd spam messages with funky number combos in the message body are actually the result of what is named the W32.Beagle.FC trojan.

Quoting from Symantec's description, once a pc is infected, the trojan "...steals email addresses from the compromised computer and sends the information via HTTP to the rodolfomejia.com domain. The threat sends spam emails with random text in order to verify if the gathered email addresses are live to build a validated email list for sending malicious code or spam in the future."

Between Lavie and I, we have ton's of image software. Lots of complicated Photoshop and other similar image editing stuff. Dad recently asked about how to cut down the size of some digital camera images he had taken. They were so big, he was having trouble sending them out over his ISP email system.

I recommended he resize his massively large images down to a more palatable, email friendly size. Despite the number of applications at my disposal, I keep coming back to these:

FastStone Soft has a number of great freeware utilities that can get the job done:

FastStone Image Viewer - jam packed with all kinds of goodies. This is a flagship product. A great thumbnail browser as well. It's the image tool I go to first and most.
FastStone MaxView - mid-feature image viewer and manipulator.
FastStone Photo Resizer - purely designed to resize, rename, crop, convert and handle image conversions in batch mode.

PhotoFiltre is another heavy-duty I-can't-believe-it-is-free image editing program. The developer's site also has great tutorials, plug-ins and a gallery to really showcase what it can do.

ImageWalker is also a favorite of mine. I don't use it as much as I do FastStone Image Viewer, but I really love the "Filter Factory" plugin it comes with. Really fun way to manipulate images. It's still at version 2.20 after all this time, but I recently found the developer's ImageWalker Blog and he has version 2.30 Beta download from there!

Lastly, take a look at the Paint.NET application. It is now up to version 2.63 and looking really sharp. It's not a Photoshop killer, yet. But continued development looks very promising. Lavie's having fun playing with it.

Interesting Tidbits. I must say.
--Claus