Tagged by schwa242

[mmcirvin]

List 3 of your most favourite (and preferably obscure) software programs and why they're useful.

Some of these I've mentioned before. They are all free:


1. DDD, king of graphical debuggers. This is a front end that sits atop GDB and several other debuggers (including the standard ones for Java, Perl and Python), and gives you not just a pretty source-level look at the code, but also lovely graphical displays of linked data structures as networks of boxes. Truly superb for chasing after any malfunction in your code, and (in my opinion) far superior to the Windows Visual Studio-inspired interface that many debuggers seem to have converged on.


2. Celestia, a free interactive diagram of the universe that lets you fly around among the stars and planets. I'm not sure "useful" is the word here—you can use it as a sky map for amateur astronomy, but other tools are probably better for that—but it's free and beautiful, especially in conjunction with downloadable add-ons.


3. Hugin, an open-source panorama stitcher/perspective reprojector/distortion remover for your photos (essentially a unified GUI for Pano Tools and a suite of related utilities such as nona and enblend). It is scarily user-unfriendly and will eat all the CPU cycles you can throw at it, but once you take a week or two to figure out the controls, you can use it to perform miracles.

Comments

[jinni-x.livejournal.com]

Celestia sounds cool, I'm going to give it a try. I had to tag myself, thanks for the meme :)

I'm not tagged, but

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

utorrent (http://www.utorrent.com/), which is actually μtorrent, aka microtorrent. It's a teeny-weeny Bittorrent client that does all the stuff of the other great BT client, Azureus, which is huge and magnificent, but being java, it's also a resource hog. uTorrent is a kind of elegance that a user rarely sees. Goes well with VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.com/) that almost but didn't quite make this list.

Textpad (Http://www.textpad.com/) which is hand as hell for dropping text from the clipboard, for stripping the MS office meta-data from said clipboard, and for general light texting when I'm not enough of a great person to master emacs/vim.

TotalRecorder (http://www.totalrecorder.com), which I bought for about $13 a few years ago, and never looked back. A small but sophisticated sound-recorder for window, using either the soundboard or its own driver to steal sounds from any internal PC or internet source. If you can hear it, TR can record it, PC-speaker excepted. Acts smart, and lately has a buttload of added features for basic (very basic) editing.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

Hugin has only ever crashed for me, at various stages.

The furthest I got was for it agreeing with my waypoint thingies, then not being able to save the resultant file. I shall try again in a year or two.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've only run it on Mac OS X. I tried a very early version and it wasn't yet functional at all, then tried it again several months later and it was actually working, if very rough around the edges.

As I've said earlier, Hugin sometimes seems like almost a parody of the open-source movement: extremely powerful software loosely held together with spit and baling wire, with a clunky, counterintuitive UI including a jet plane's worth of controls, some of which have peculiar default settings. It's slowly, slowly getting better.