Enso is a desktop application for Windows XP that enables fast and easy access to a wide variety of functionality, making computing both more efficient and more fun.

In its simplest form, Enso is a very handy program launcher/switcher that lets you manage large numbers of programs without breaking a sweat. The user interface is simple: the CAPS LOCK button, bane of typists everywhere, is disabled, and when pressed instead calls up an unobtrusive command interface to the top of the screen. Here, you can type a command like ‘open …’, where the ellipses would be the name of a program in your Start menu that you wanted to run. No more digging through several layers of menus for that application you constantly use!

Another helpful command for those of us (I know I’m guilty) who keep huge numbers of windows open while we work is ‘go …’. The Go command works like a simpler ALT+TAB keypress, letting you pick exactly which of the 15 windows open you want to go to. This command even works in your web browser on the tabs in each window! Not everyone will appreciate the value of this one immediately, but when you are working quickly with a lot of different things, it can be a life-saver. These options are extremely useful, and would be reason enough to use Enso on their own, but there are many more!

There are more options included in the basic package, but you can download more to plug into Enso. Enso Words provides you with a spellchecker, dictionary, and thesaurus via the Enso interface, shattering the old limitations of many programs that don’t have these tools built-in. There are even Beta versions of packages to control your media, search the web, and translate text from one language to another, all at the touch of a few buttons. Enso may sound hard to use or learn, but once you see it in action and start getting used to using it in, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.

I ran into a problem recently when trying to play some of my old games on my new Vista PC. Luckily, I was able to find a fantastic solution which I thought I would pass along to you guys.

The game is Medal of Honor Allied Assault (MOHAA). The problem was not with the main game, which worked fine. The problem was with the two expansion packs that were sold and manufactured afterwards, Breakthrough and Spearhead. For some reason there was a problem with the way the code was written on these two expansion pack games. They would not run correctly in Vista with a new video card. There were actually two problems, the new video cards couldn’t handle the old code without a forced command line, and there were not any old video drivers that worked with the new OS – Vista. In addition Vista required you to run the game as an administrator, which was not the normally accepted instance when running the game under normal circumstances.

To correct the problem I found a program called Nhancer. The program runs with Nvidia but is not an Nvidia application. The program is essentially an interface that streamlines the Nvidia controls that are available to all users, but tucked so far into the registry files and command files that any normal person would not have the technical skills to process the commands needed to make any corrections. Nhancer worked wonders, all you had to do was run the application, select the game that you wanted to force a code for, and enter the code. To my delight, MOHAA – Breakthrough and Spearhead, must have had so many problems that the code was already hard coded when I selected the games. So all I had to do was select my games, select allow changes, and then save the changes. After that the administrator portion was an easy fix. You do a right click on the icon for the game, and select “run as administrator”, and it worked fine, no problems. It is nice to know that there is software out there that works for the end users and further simplifies the already complex enough technology world. One would think that when you’re paying top dollar for a system they would work out all the problems for you before selling it to you. Instead we have to rely on people that offer freeware to fix the problems of “expensiveware”.

In today’s knowledge driven economy, information is a key to the success of any business.

For example, the patents owned by a telecom company drive its growth. If this information were available freely, anyone would be able to duplicate that technology and compete with the creator. Imagine what it would do the business of Microsoft if its Vista source code were available in public domain. Since information is so critical, its security becomes an important concern for any business or organization. Information Security is the process of protecting data from unauthorized access.

It is based on the following four pillars:
1. Confidentiality – Privacy of information must be maintained
2. Integrity – Information available should be updated and correct. Any modifications to the information must be recorded.
3. Accessibility – Information should be easily available to people who are supposed to have access to it.
4. Authenticity – Information should be reliable and its source identifiable.

There are many standards available to implement information security in an organization These include: BS7799, ISO, etc. An organization wanting to have a proper information security process can get certified for any of these. Once certified, a customized security policy is put in place, which goes a long way in guaranteeing information security technologies like data encryption, digital signatures, biometric identification, vulnerability analysis, etc are being used to protect information. Software tools like scanners, firewalls, packet snuffers, encryption programs, anti-virus programs, are becoming very popular and go a long way in defending against unauthorized access to information.

Winmerge is a visual difference application that runs under Windows and that can be a real lifesaver in a great number of situations.

For example, if you are in a programming team and want to synchronize with other members that work on the same source files, you can easily spot the differences and merge your work, and that of the others, in a snap. The interface is very user friendly and very graphical, but after some time everyone should discover that the shortcut keys can speed even more of the workflow.

With the alt+cursor keys you can navigate and merge the differences quickly. The software supports the difference of full trees of directories and you can define filters to visualize only the files that you are interested in. For example, you can exclude the .class files if you are a java developer.

Finally, you can select the “smartness” of the difference display. For example, choosing to ignore the empty lines. On the down side WinMerge has some quirks that can be annoying. The directory difference window is a bit confused, and the version that I have tried had some problems comparing directories over a Samba connection from a Windows PC to a Sun Workstation (nothing serious fortunately). All considered, however, Winmerge is the only windows application that goes near the quality of “Meld” (Unix), and can be recommended without hesitation.

When setting up an MS Excel spreadsheet try naming ranges or cells instead of manually entering complicated labels like A1:E10.

Let’s say you are setting up a spreadsheet to track your finances. If you are like me this spreadsheet has information like passwords and account numbers that for security reasons, I don’t generally want to print. So let’s name a range “quick_print.” Here’s how.

1. Start by selecting the range you want to name with your mouse.
2. From the Insert menu select Name and then Define.
3. Enter the name “quick_print” in the top box and hit OK.

Now any time you want to select this range you can simply use the pull down box at the top that has cell addresses in it or, alternatively, select Edit and then Go To and select the range. You can also use this technique to name a cell using common labels. For example when you enter the balance for your bank account you might want to name this cell “bank”. You can then use the term “bank” in MS Excel formulas like =”bank”+”stocks” instead of complicated formulas using cell addresses.

Lucene is the tool used in advanced matching/filtering of services.

It is an open source project hosted by Apache and provides a Java based high-performance, full-featured text search engine library. To search large amounts of text quickly, one must first index the text and convert it into a format that can be searched rapidly, eliminating the slow sequential scanning of each file for the given word or phrase. This conversion process is called indexing, and its output is called an index. Searching is the process of looking up words in an index to find documents where they appear.

Lucene allows to add indexing and searching capabilities to user applications, and can index and make search-able any data that can be converted to a textual format. This means Lucene can be used to search and index information kept in torrents, files, web pages on remote web servers, documents stored in local file systems, simple text files, Microsoft Word documents, HTML files or PDF documents, or any other format from which textual information can be extracted. The product is being used by many well known websites like Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, as well as in many Java applications. To build an Index Lucene uses different types of analyzers like StandardAnalyzer, WhitespaceAnalyzer, StopAnalyzer, SnowballAnalyzer etc. The analyzer breaks text fields up into index-able tokens and it is the core part of the Lucene. For example; StandardAnalyzer is a sophisticated general-purpose analyzer. WhitespaceAnalyzer is a very simple analyzer which just separates tokens using white space while StopAnalyzer removes common English words which are not usually useful for indexing.