If you're like us, you certainly have to work on international projects, or projects involving foreign languages and character sets. Handling many of these can be quite a nightmare, if you don't have the right tools.

Benjamin Kalytta has released a nifty little free utility called Character Set Converter, and it does — perfectly — what's it's supposed to do: convert character sets. Many of them.

Character Set Converter will, as the name suggests, modify the character set in the text document of your choice. This can be a web page (.(x)htm(l), .php, .asp, .xml, .jsp, ...) or a more generic document (.txt, .csv, .ini, .bat, .c, .java, .sql, ...). If can also change the XML header or the META CHARSET tag if they're found, and it also lets you specify the document encoding (DOS, MAC or UNIX) which is useful if you share files between the three environments. Finally, the app can also be invoked from the command line, which is perfect for batch processing.

Character Set Converter supports the following sets: ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3, ISO-8859-4, ISO-8859-5, ISO-8859-6, ISO-8859-7, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-9, ISO-8859-10, ISO-8859-11, ISO-8859-12, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-14, ISO-8859-15, Windows-874, Windows-1250, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, Windows-1253, Windows-1254, Windows-1255, Windows-1256, Windows-1257, Windows-1258, DOS-437, DOS-737, DOS-775, DOS-850, DOS-852, DOS-855, DOS-857, DOS-860, DOS-861, DOS-862, DOS-863, DOS-864, DOS-865, DOS-866, DOS-869, DOS-874, MSMAC-CYRILLIC, MSMAC-GREEK, MSMAC-ICELAND, MSMAC-LATIN2, MSMAC-ROMAN, MSMAC-TURKISH, Apple-CENTEURO, Apple-Roman, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE.

» Download Character Set Convert (for Windows only)
» Browse through the other apps of the author

This morning, I was setting up a couple of new websites on my development server. The way I do this is very simple: since I use IIS7 on my development box, I change the default binding and map each new website to its new port — easy, quick and clean.

But today I encountered a small glitch: after I mapped port 87, I couldn't manage to access it from Firefox, no matter what I tried. Mozilla's browser wouldn't simply open the pages, and constantly kept to return the same error message:

After a bit of googling around the topic, I found out that Firefox blocks specific ports by default. And also, that it's possible to unblock those ports by changing some settings in the preferences. Unfortunately, you'll have to dig into the depths of your hard disk, since you can't tweak those specific settings from the about:config panel.

In order to unblock the ports you need to access, you should go to your Firefox installation folder, and from there move to <your-ff-folder>/defaults/pref. Look for a file named user.js, or just create a new text file with that name if it doesn't exist already. Then add the following line:

pref("network.security.ports.banned.override", "<ports>");

where you replace <ports> with the list of all ports you want to unlock, for example:

pref("network.security.ports.banned.override", "42,87,6000");

Save the file, restart your browser, and you're done. You can read more about port blocking (and un-blocking) in Firefox in the link below.

» Mozilla Port Blocking

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a delicate science that requires many things to work together ir order to be effective. One of those things is the sitemap, which you can think of as an "index" of your site: it's a document that will tell the search engines where to find the different parts of your website, and that makes sure that the engines don't forget to parse the latest data you have uploaded in your pages.

Our free SiteMap Generator, edited by WonderWebWare, allows you to create sitemaps for Google and Yahoo. The application consists of a single window with a set of tabs that give access to the various features. You just have to enter the root address of your website and let the application crawl through its content. Once the process is complete, all you have to do is export the result to the format of your choice (Google XML, Yahoo, HTML, CSV, ...), upload the generated document to the root of your website and wait for the engines to read it. And voilà.

» Download SiteMap Generator
» Learn more about sitemaps

When it comes to vector drawing, there isn't much choice available: only a few big names come to mind, like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe FreeHand, Corel Draw or Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer. All these applications are well known, with a strong reputation and a long list of success stories. The downside is, as always, the price — often quite high — that you have to pay to get your hands on these.

Now, not everyone may know, but there are alternatives, such as open source applications that provide the same level of features and functionalities, while beeing free. One of the best available is InkScape.

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to the big names quoted above, which relies on the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format, and which provides a surprisingly powerful set of tools for creating graphics from scratch, or for editing existing vector graphics or bitmap images.

Supported features include 2D/3D shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, grouping, color management, and more. It also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, just to name a few. It imports JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports natively PDF, EPS, PNG, XAML as well as multiple other vector-based formats.

InkScape is available in multiple languages for many platforms. It runs on Windows, MacOS X and Linux, and the source code is available through SourceForge if you feel like putting your hands in the engine. A large community exists around the software, and you'll find dozens of third-party tutorials and examples to get started.

Needless to say, this is a must-have !

» Visit InkScape website
» Download InkScape
» View InkSpace documentation

If you have a digital still camera, you may take lots and lots of photos, but when it's two months since you took them, you'll have forgotten where you took them or who were with you.

Now and thanks to PhotoME, you will be able to view all the information which is automatically created by your camera, and in addition you'll be able to edit it, so you can add comments and other kind of data.

PhotoME supports the popular JPEG format, and other ones like TIFF and the following camera RAW file types: Canon RAW v2 (CR2), Canon Thumbnail (THM), Epson (ERF), FujiFilm (RAF), Kodak (DCR, K25), Konica/Minolta (MRW), Mamiya (MEF), Nikon (NEF), Olympus (ORF), Panasonic and Leica (RAW), Pentax (PEF), Sony (ARW, SRF and SR2), Creo Leaf Capture (MOS) and the new open RAW format Digital Negative (DNG), the Opanda Exif template format (EXIF), as well as 2 of PhotoME's own formats for the export of Exif and IPTC/NAA-data.

It also includes GPS support, so you can locate automatically your photos by using Google Maps or Google Earth.

You'll be amazed, it will show important info which describes perfectly the good program you are using: exposure time, ISO speed rating, image compression mode, lens focal length, zoom, flash, scene type and much more.

Finally, it's very easy to use, it even supports Drag&Drop, so you only have to drag&drop the file you want to know the info to the PhotoME interface and you'll know everything about it.

» Download PhotoME