When I wrote up Microsoft's free tool to copy downloaded Windows 7 images to USB flash drives or burn then to DVD, I thought the app seemed like a great idea. After all, it provided student downloaders an easy way to get their cheapo upgrades copied onto install media.

Rafael Rivera was doing his usual Columbo routine on the MS tool's source when he found something in the code which struck him. A section relating to UDF handling appears to have been "borrowed" from ImageMaster - an open source project hosted on Microsoft's own CodePlex service. An by "appears" I mean Rivera's checks with the Reflector .Net code inspector set off the alarms.

As Rivera points out, it's not just the use of the code that is the issue here. It's also the fact that Microsoft has added their own licensing terms.

I'm sure there's some kind of saying about not doing something where you eat, and it certainly sounds like that's what Microsoft has done in this case. Innocent until proven guilty, of course - so we'll wait to see what Microsoft has to say in response in the coming days. For now, they've removed all links to the download tool.

If you're not too concerned with the hullabaloo over the code, you might still be able to find the download on some other sites. A little birdy told me MajorGeeks still has a copy...

Mac users that have been spoiled by text editors like TextMate often find themselves frustrated when moving to a Windows machine. While there are lots of text editors for the Windows platform, it's hard to find one with the clean design sensibilities that TextMate offers.

Well, there's a new editor in town, and its name is Sublime Text. I don't mean to equate it too much to TextMate since they are very definitely different products; it's more the feel of using the products that drives the comparison.

Sublime Text prioritizes a slick user interface and features under the hood that make it a power-user's tool. For example, it sports the ability to give you a Minimap, which for developers gives you a 10,000 foot view of your code.

The best text editing tools seem to be powerful enough for programmers to use, yet incredibly useful for writers of prose. Sublime Text is no exception.

Unfortunately, Sublime Text is a commercial app - you have to pay for the quality, and it doesn't come cheap. A single user license will run you $59US. An evaluation version is also available.

Snippet is an OS X app that gives you quick access to snippets of code you want to reuse in your projects. it sits in your menubar, and its most important functions are accessible without using a mouse. You can add new snippets and search your saved ones using hotkeys, so you don't break up your workflow. Once you grab a snippet, it'll send the focus back to the window you were coding in, no clicking necessary.

You can keep track of your snippets by tagging them with keywords for better searching, and labeling each one with the appropriate language. Snippet also syncs over MobileMe, so you can access your code on multiple Macs (which is great if you have separate work and home machines). The downside to Snippet is the $12.95 pricetag, but it's the kind of app you'll use for work every day if you end up liking it, so the price is definitely not unreasonable.

Microsoft's Popfly, a place to create games and game mashups, closed down on August 24. Although all the site's users lost their accounts, Popfly is far from completely dead. Microsoft has open-sourced the code and put it up on CodePlex, free to be used by any aspiring game makers out there.

Of course, features that depend on the now-defunct site, like high scores, aren't included, but someone ambitious could host them in the future. On the Popfly page at CodePlex, the developers have left some suggestions for directions people could take with the code:

• *Example code for a simple, general purpose Silverlight game engine
• Create a Silverlight 3 scene / actor / behavior editor for the data format and make new games
• Porting the engine to run your games on other platforms, like XBox 360 or Zune via XNA Game Studio or client PC via WPF
• Building a copy of the game engine to use with your game data to post on your website.
• Fix multi-actor collision resolution and make Lots O' Peas go faster!
• Add new features like grid-based terrain, dialog trees, etc
  

I'm not sure how likely it is that any of this will actually get done, but there have to be some coders out there with time on their hands.


[via OStatic]

Google's blogging about making the web faster, and they're backing it up with Page Speed, a Firefox add-on that makes sure your webpages use best practices to load as quickly as possible. Page Speed was quietly launched earlier this month on the Google Code blog, but now it's mentioned on The Official Google Blog, in a post that lays out some factors that slow down the web, and how Google thinks they can be fixed.

The Google plan for a faster web includes stuff like HTML5 support, more performance diagnostic tools like Page Speed and Yahoo's YSlow, and greater adoption of broadband. So, what are some of the best practices that Page Speed might suggest? Mostly, minor code tweaks like cleaning up your CSS so you only use each declaration once, or removing unnecessary tags from your HTML. There's some more advanced stuff that gets into PHP and JavaScript as well.

One note: Page Speed also requires the Firebug add-on for Firefox, which is very useful in its own right.

For the longest time, I thought I needed to use Dreamweaver to edit my web code. That bothered me. I didn't like the way it handled saving files to my remote server, and it was just too damn bulky for my taste. And there's the price tag. I wasn't really a fan of that either.

Fortunately, I discovered Notepad++. It's totally free, extremely powerful, and does everything I need an editor to do (and a whole lot more). It's based on Scintilla, which is a fantastic foundation for source code editing.

What makes it so great? For starters, it's portable, it supports tabs, syntax highlighting,drag and drop, macro recording, regular expression search and replace, and auto-completion. That's barely the tip of the iceberg.

Multiview editing lets you two documents at once - or two views of the same document. Collapse regions of your code that you don't need visible while editing. Zooming makes code easy to read even on small screens (like my MSI Wind). Bookmarking important or troublesome locations in your files makes navigating them snap.

Plugins add another dimension to N++, and I've got a few favorites. Light explorer adds a small but very useful file browser pane, FTP Synchronize automatically updates your server with changes saved to a local copy, Quick Text offers powerful snippet management, and Secure Pad adds encrypt/decrypt functions.

There are several other great add-ons, and Notepad++ has an enthusiastic, supportive community. They have also contributed tons of autocompletes, translations, themes, and language additions - everything from Smarty to UnrealScript.

Notepad++ is simply a great application.

Seriously guys, we love you. Okay, fine, maybe not in the way your mom loves you, or your dog loves you, or your significant other loves you. But we definitely love you in that totally uncomfortable, care-free, "Hey, let us buy you a Red Bull and Pop Rocks next time we're at the convenience store" sort of way.

We don't just love you for your looks, or your superior intelligence, or because you can totally creep out little kids with that thing you do with your left eye. We will even go so far as to say the fact that you use Linux doesn't play into it one bit.

We love you because your suggestions rock. We scour the web ourselves daily, but you know, it's a big place, and we just can't know every single bit of software or tech goodness out there. We think it's way cool when we get suggestions from readers about applications for Linux (or Windows, or Mac, or Palm...) because you aren't only cluing us in on applications we may not be familiar with, but a lot of you are avid users, and can vouch that the application you are suggesting really works for every day use.

This week, we think it's only appropriate to wrap up the editors section of our Linux web tools discussion with a couple of reader suggested gems. So a big thanks to Tim for suggesting we look at Komodo Edit and kingkool68 for pointing us towards Aptana.

An XHTML editor is a lot like a teacup dog breed or a designer pig. Okay, so they don't tremble incessantly or have the tendency to pee in the corner of your living room. They are really just highly specialized, souped-up versions of something else. Chihuahuas are pack animals, just like wolves. Potbellied pigs know instinctively how to root around for tasty things, as do wild boars. And XHTML editors edit text.

They have many tools to make editing XHTML (and other bits of code geared specifically for web use) faster and easier, but there's nothing says you need to use an XHTML editor for web coding. Text editors can do the job as well. If Kate, gedit, or Cream do the job for you, either on their own or with a few plugins, that's got you ahead of the game.

But there are some XHTML editors that manage to bundle the basic functions and a whole slew of handy extras into a nicely finished package. There are quite a few of them, and we'll be touching on more of them next week.

This week we'll take a peek at Bluefish and Quanta Plus. Why? Because they are the two most often included in Linux as the sort of "came with the distro" web development applications. Even if they aren't installed by default, many people try them first.

htmlPlayground is a helpful reference for web developers of any skill level. It provides an easy way to generate, test, and learn about HTML and CSS syntax. Simply select your reference (HTML tags, attributes, or CSS properties), and then select an item like "blockquote."

htmlPlayground will then display a description of the item (to explain what it's used for), an example code snippet that is editable, and a rendered preview of the code snippet. The snippet is color coded: green for tags, red for attributes, and black for regular text.

If you click on a green tag in the snippet, you can edit the tag's attributes easily via another pane. When you're happy with your finalized code, you can of course copy/paste it to an HTML file to use on your website.

[Via garyll]

Brad Fitzpatrick, the developer responsible for Livejournal and OpenID is up to it again. This time, he let us know on the Google Code blog, that the API for Social Graph is now available.

Social Graph is an API that functions like a Pagerank for social relationships. The idea is that when you join a new social network you don't have to manually add previous relationships because it can populate your list based on your connections from other networks, your blog, or the web.

Social Graph works by indexing sites that use the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) open standards in order to gauge relationships between people.

Schnippselchen is a source code management app that lets software developers manage multiple types of code that may need to be reused. The program has a sidebar with a "Categories" section (helpful for separating code by language) and a "Snippets" section for the actual titles of your code snippets. So you could have a PHP category with five snippets of PHP code that run your LOLcats social-network site.

Syntax highlighting is supported for many languages and code types including CSS, Perl, Python, XML, Applescript, and SQL. There is also a "Go to Line" feature and the ability to comment on your snippets (so you can remind yourself what those C functions do).

Schnippselchen can run from a thumbdrive (or iDisk) because your snippets are stored in the .app package; keep this in mind if you remove or update the program.

[Via i use this]

Google has quietly announced some new features for Analytics, its web tracking tool. They seem small, but these additional tracking features will provide much greater insight into what is going on your website since you can't always peer over visitors' shoulders to watch.

The updates include:

• Site Search Tracking - Users will now be able to tell exactly what keywords visitors searched for on your site, and where these searches end up.
• Event Tracking - Currently in a limited beta test, these website reports will show how users interact with various multimedia aspects on your site, including flash and Ajax without messing with pageview metrics.
• Outbound link Tracking - Also in a limited beta test rolling out in the next few weeks, reports will show what links website visitors click on that direct them to an outside site.

If you have a website, and don't already have the free Google Analytics code installed, you are missing out on understanding how your visitors move around, how they interact with your content and how they got there in the first place. Google Analytics not only provides insight on how people navigate, but it also aids in targeting site content towards what people enjoy. It's easy to set up, free and Analytics reports are super simple to understand.

Yahoo! owned RightMedia has been serving ads to popular networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Photobucket that could wreak havoc on visitors' machines.

The Trojan which was reported to have been inserted by a third party ad server, was tracked down to RightMedia. The infected banner ad supposedly ran several million times over a three week period after it was first spotted on August 8th by a web security company before it was removed.

The ads used Flash to load an invisible iFrame which in turn would load content in from another website. RightMedia has said that it has systems in place to test and determine whether ads contain malicious code, and will flag them appropriately. Upon further investigation of the ad, code inserted was actually designed to tell the difference between RightMedia's protection systems and not display the Trojan when the company ran the testing process.

All we can say is, "Hello Firefox with AdBlock!"

Some Google Blogger users have been stung with attacks over the past little while, causing disturbing infections. Or is it just a case of the splogs.

Malicious hackers have supposedly been successful in gaining access to some blogs and posting fake entries with weblinks that lead to infectious downloads on Windows PC's. A security researcher started noticing the corrupt links turning up in Blogger accounts on August 27th. Since then hundreds of blogs have been reported to contain the malicious links. The researcher could not tell how the links were posted. They could have been posted through a Blogger exploit, through a feature that lets users email an entry, or the blogs could have been also set up solely to host spam and no hacking could have occurred at all.

So far the links appear to pose as YouTube links, others are looking for software testers, and others are links to supposed digital greeting cards. No word from Google on the matter.

Have you ever wanted to create a nice little Web 2.0 mashup, but just didn't know where to turn to for an API that could grab the information you are looking to incorporate?

API's, application programming interface, are the source code that computer program libraries provide in order to support service requests. API's are often part of a standard software development kit, commonly referred to as an SDK. Companies that offer APIs range widely from Sony for their Playstation, Microsoft for Windows software, and more recently popularized in the online environment with Google Maps and many other online based mashups. As more and more organizations open up API's for developers to tool around with, that includes many that you visit online every single day, it gets harder and harder to keep track of what's available, and what is possible with them.

ProgrammableWeb has done a great job of supplying a comprehensive listing of all Web 2.0 API's. Anything from Google Adwords, del.icio.us, 30 boxes, Feedgator, BBC, Twitter and Zoho are listed here. All categorized and waiting for you to click and download.

Check out some API mashups we have profiled.