A long standing condition of Microsoft operating systems is the loose control of memory for applications.

Use of a third party application to reduce memory use or reclaim unused yet unavailable memory is fairly commonplace. One such program is Minimem, a freeware memory optimizer developed by Kerkia. Originally, the program was developed to help deal with memory issues related to Firefox. Later it was expanded to optimize unlimited system processes with full user control. Minimem runs in the background and uses pooling to keep CPU use at a bare minimum. Users running multiple applications or programs with large memory footprints will definitely see an improvement in their system resources. It is also really handy to tame programs with memory leaks. The interface is very easy to use and requires no advance level of technical knowledge to choose processes. Specify an amount of memory to filter out smaller processes and decide which ones you want to optimize. A threshold of minimum available memory can be set before Minimem will even take effect. You can also set it to ignore processes that are in the foreground to limit any possible performance issues.

I do photography as a hobby and wanted a good software program for editing my photos.

I had tried many free programs from the internet that in the end didn’t offer everything I was looking for. In my search for a comparative program I read many featured software programs that you could try for a free trial and purchase after the trial if suited to your needs. One such software program I found was Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI.

This program had many features that would help me to produce fabulous photos. One such feature of this program is the “skin smoothing” effect. Many people will tell you that the most thing they dislike about their photos is the complexion of their skin. In this mode to different degrees you can actually smooth out the skin of the face, arms, hands, or other parts of an exposed body that you focus in on. Another tool is the blemish tool. The blemish tool is a nice tool to use before your skin smoothing tool. This tool can be small or enlarged depending on your work area. The tool takes and blends the surrounding colors to hide the flaw. Whether it is a pimple on a face/forehead, or a scar that your trying to minimize. Another feature of this software is the variations to take your color photo and make it black & white, sepia, black & white with some color, variations in the degree of black and white compensation. These features work out nicely for those pictures that look great in color but look better plain. One other feature I really like about this software is the lasso. This feature allows you to actually remove a section of one picture and paste it to another picture. You can really make goofy pictures with this feature. You can also copy and paste certain parts of your pictures in itself making for a very interesting collage.

When looking for a software program for photography don’t just grab up the first one you see. Don’t always rely on the “free” programs if this hobby is something your going to be working at for a long time. If your truly going to have an interest in editing your photos take the time to find the right software that WILL match your needs. If its an expense to you then it is well worth it in the end. Most of your software you buy will have a site you can visit to see if there are any upgrades to your software. At times there may be upgrades and also new improved software for you to try. I hope this helps in your quest to “snap” up the right software for your needs.

Have you ever wondered how embedding those Flash widgets work on the web?

For example, you get some magic code from YouTube that makes a video show up on your website. If you actually look at the code, something really clever is going on there. In the src parameter, you normally include the path to a .swf file for embedding Flash content. In there is something that looks like a url to a page or folder like: http://www.youtube.com/v/123456

What’s pretty neat is that behind the scenes, a request to youtube gets made to that url. They have a rule setup (using apache mod_rewrite I would guess) that takes any request to the /v/ folder, and converts that request to something such as youtube.com/videos.php?id=123456. A script then runs, which talks to the database which has information about a video with that id number, and returns a url back with all of the appended information that the .swf could then read. Something like http://www.youtube.com/v/video.swf?title=great%20video&path=pathtovideo.flv etc.

All that happens in a few split seconds when the page embedding the video gets loaded. For an example check out what happens when you paste the path from the src parameter into your browser. Or check this link out and watch what happens in your browser url path: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A11aqEKmTU

Would you like to use free GNU software utilities, languages, and compilers, but in a Windows environment instead of Unix or Linux?

If so you should visit and download DJGPP and the other 32 bit DOS ported GNU freeware utilities. You can use the GCC compiler, emacs, and many other tools to do true portable to windows and unix C++ programming on your PC, without special emulators, disk partitions, or virtual machines. You never thought you could use emacs or GCC in a windows environment? Yes, you can. This site contains good instructions in Docs and FAQs, which allows you to get set up in no time at all. By getting these GNU utilities, you could also further enhance them, perhaps for more modern windows environments. Let us not forget that the modern Macintosh operating system is a Linux kernel.

Dropbox is a new way to sync your files across multiple computers.

A YCombinator startup, Dropbox has been around since 2005, but just recently came out of private beta for all to use. After a simple installation, Dropbox allows you to sync folders privately among your own computers (and the web) or share folders with friends. They also have tools for sharing and viewing photos. Dropbox is cross-platform (OSX, Win and *nix), and works through firewalls. I’ve been using dropbox for over a year both at home and work, with no problems.

Hulu.com is a website for watching full length TV shows legally online.

It is a joint venture between NBC and News Corp. (Fox) which is very well implemented. It has a great deal of content, including full episodes of current hit TV shows such as The Simpsons, Family Guy, 30 Rock, The Office and many more. The speed at which the video starts is astounding. There is almost no pause between clicking on a video and when it starts. It is ad supported, but the ads are never more than 30 seconds long and often a show will play all the way through with only an initial ad. In some cases there are full episodes for an entire season of a show. This is a great addition to the series of programs that are available for watching television on the internet such as Joost, Sopcast, and TVUplayer. The vast amount of content is a large draw for this service. Another great feature is the collections that they have gathered. The Saturday Night Live digital shorts collection, SNL parody commercials and an impressively quick loading HD gallery of movie previews. There is also a section for last years Fiesta Bowl. This in itself is not new or innovative, but there is the option to watch a 3 hour video of the entire game OR to watch a 34 minute video of all the plays, but spliced into a fast paced interesting game.