TrueCrypt

Do you wonder if your spouse, kids, or network administrator is rifling through your, um, sensitive files on your hard drive? Wouldn't it be nice to know that you could store your pr0n, proprietary source code, or top secret spreadsheets in a place that only you could access? Well that's where TrueCrypt comes in.

TrueCrypt creates an encrypted file on your hard drive that you can mount as a regular Windows or Linux drive. Once mounted, this virtual drive reads and writes just like a normal drive, except that the contents are encrypted and decrypted on the fly. Encryption is 256-bit, so it's very unlikely that anyone is going to be breaking into it anytime soon.

Another cool feature of TrueCrypt is inner and outer passwords. Let's say you're a spy carrying top-secret info, such as naked pictures of Hillary Clinton. Well if Hillary's goons get hold of you, they might try to strong-arm you into giving them the pics. With TrueCrypt, you can store a few files that look secret in the outer vault, but the really good stuff is in the inner vault. If you feel like you're in danger, you give them the outer vault password to get them off your back and hopefully spare your fingers from getting broken. Obviously they don't see the inner vault stuff, so you can rush it to the Enquirer after you've been let go.

To anyone accessing your drive, the TrueCrypt file is just a mass of unreadable garbage, and you can rest assured that no one will be accessing your files. When you are through reading and writing to your encrypted drive, simply unmount it and everything is safe and sound. TrueCrypt is free, has Windows and Linux versions, and also can be used on USB drives. Go get it before your wife finds all of your pr0n...

Miranda Instant Messenger

I originally picked Trillian as my instant messenger client of choice because it supported multiple protocols and had a skinnable interface. I maintained my allegiance to Trillian until a co-worker pestered me to try Miranda. The only thing that intrigued me about Miranda was that it supported Jabber, and the only way to get Jabber support in Trillian was to pay $25. I have no problem buying software if it warrants it, but in this case it didn't. So I installed Miranda, along with the Miranda IM Pack, and was instantly hooked.

Beside the fact that it is free, supports just about every protocol under the sun, and is skinnable, Miranda does just about anything you'd want an IM client to do. You can customize every aspect of your contact list, and their plugin architecture has yielded a lot of support. RSS feeds and letting the world know what Winamp tune you're currently listening to are just a few of the plugins that are included in the Miranda pack, and there are a lot more out there.

Miranda is definitely my current choice for an IM client because of its cost (free), protocol support, plugins, and customization options. The only complaint about Miranda is that it is almost too configurable, and finding the location of an option to change is sometimes difficult. Other than that, it's awesome.

jEdit

If you're in need of a very good text editor, look no farther than jEdit, the self-proclaimed programmer's text editor. It handles any kind of editing task you can throw at it, and I've been very happy with it since I switched from TextPad.

I'll start with my only real complaint -- since jEdit is written in Java, it takes longer to load than native Windows applications. But the fact that it is written in Java is also its strength because it runs on just about any platform. Once loaded, jEdit is a snappy performer and shows none of the lag that I've experienced in other Java desktop applications.

Since it is designed to be a programmer's editor, it handles the normal programmer's editing tasks such as syntax highlighting, auto brace indentation, and auto tag closing (in HTML and XML). It also allows you to write scripts in BeanShell, which is very powerful and something that TextPad lacked -- the easiest way to learn BeanShell is to record a macro and see what code it produced.

jEdit also has a number of plugins and I use several of them -- XML indenter, XPath Tool, XSLT Tool, and the Text tool that supplies text manipulation (such as sorting) that I'm surprised did not come with jEdit out of the box. The Plugin Manager is great -- you find, download, and install the plugins from within jEdit so there's no searching around for plugins.

jEdit also supports code folding (collapsing and expanding blocks of code such as classes, functions, loops, and try/exception), which is very handy for keeping your place in larger chunks of code (the ones you wrote when you were younger and less experienced).

I know that editors are very sacred to programmers, but if you're the slightest bit unhappy with your current editor, I suggest giving jEdit a try. And it's free, so you don't have anything to lose but a little bit of time.

Firefox

You've probably heard all of the hubbub about Firefox during the last year or so, and guess what? It's all well-founded hubbub. So go get Firefox now. I'll wait. OK, good. Now you've got the best web browsing experience there is. The biggest advantages of Firefox are increased speed, tabbed browsing, web standards compliance, extensions, and themes.

Tabbed browsing allows you to have several websites open in one browser window, so you don't have to keep switching between browser copies to get back to another website.

Web standards compliance simply means that Firefox adheres to the W3C (the people that write the web standards) standards for rendering web pages. Not all browsers follow the standards (uh...Internet Explorer comes to mind), so web designers must work around their limitations. Since Firefox follows the rules, you see web pages the way the W3C meant them to be seen.

Extensions are small add-ons that add functionality to the browser. There are already so many extensions, it wouldn't make any sense to list them all here. In the near future, I'll be suggesting extensions that I regularly use -- in the meantime, go visit the Firefox extensions page to see everything that's available.

Themes allow you to change the look and feel of the browser to your liking. You can create your own, or go to the Firefox themes page to choose one of the many themes that have already been created by the Firefox community.