Good enough software

There's so much software available these days, it's difficult to find which is the best without laboriously downloading, installing, configuring and testing, which I don't often have time for. Unfortunately a large proportion of software is simply not good enough, or its features are poorly described.

Here is some "good enough" software I've found for Windows:

• To diff directories, e.g. sync music or photos: FreeFileSync 6.3
• To diff the content of files, e.g. source code: WinMerge
• Windows Explorer alternative: xplorer 2
• To encode mp3s: LAME
• To see where your disk space is being used: Treesize
• To remove spyware: Spybot: Search & Destroy
• Torrents: qBittorrent
• N64 emulator: project64
• Programmer's text editor: Notepad++
• ebook management: Calibre
• Manage iPhone music outside iTunes: Media Monkey
• Graphics maniplation: GIMP
• Rename files: Bulk Rename Utility
• Macro recorder: Autohotkey
• Media player: VLC, or MPC-HC (not tried)
• Music player: Winamp
• Documents and spreadsheets: Microsoft Office
• (LibreOffice and OpenOffice are NOT good enough)

Code works on one environment but not another

What can differ between environments? Check the following:

* Your code (obviously)
* Versions of other dependent packages - both in-house and third-party
* Versions of other installed in-house modules
* Versions of other Perl CPAN modules
* Processes which didn't die when you restarted the app
* Data in the database
* Number of rows in tables, i.e. is some limit being hit?
* Schema of the database
* Browser cache
* Server side web cache
* Files on disk, e.g. cached print documents

(source: a decade's experience building software)

Mount a directory using Samba

mount -t smbfs //host/subdir hostname -o username=yourusername,fmask=555,dmask=555,ro 

Don't use Samba though, use SSHFS.

How big are my MySQL databases?


SELECT TABLE_SCHEMA AS 'Database', TABLE_NAME AS 'Table', CONCAT(ROUND(((DATA_LENGTH + INDEX_LENGTH - DATA_FREE) / 1024 / 1024),2)," MB") AS Size FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES


is reserved

While attempting to read the filehandle that you think points to a file, you get this error:

Modification of a read-only value attempted

Maybe this means the script is reading from the inline __DATA__ section, and you're trying to write to it?