TortoiseSVN can be thought of as a Win32 GUI front end to the source code control system Subversion, which is an open-source software engineering tool to allow developers to easily maintain their projects.

Once you install Subversion via Windows Installer, grab the TortoiseSNV Installer. You can of course just use the svn command-line tool that comes with Subversion but there are some benefits for using TortoiseSVN instead. For one, TortoiseSVN allows you to work completely in a Graphical User Interface to manage your projects, but it does more than that; TortoiseSVN is basically a shell add-on to the windows shell, which means you can right-click on any file/folder in windows–be it on the Desktop or from within Windows Explorer–and you will have access to TortoiseSVN via the pop-up menu. What’s more is, only commands that make sense for the selected file/folder are shown. You won’t see any commands that you can’t use in your situation!

Here’s a couple hints to make your life easier:

• When you install Subversion note that the client runs on Win9x/Me but the server does not. If you use Win9x/Me then add the following line to your autoexec.bat:
  SET APR_ICONV_PATH=”C:\Program Files\Subversion\iconv” (or whatever your path to it is if not this)
  (Don’t forget to reboot windows for the changes to take effect after you edit your autoexec.bat)
• When you install Subversion it comes with documentation, which is actually the official book on Subversion. It will be in .chm format (Compiled HTML) but you can get other versions, like PDF (if you want to print it out) or both single page or multi-page HTML versions to download for off-line viewing from here. Trust me, you will want to read this if you’re new to Subversion–at least chapters 2, 3, and 1–in that order. That site also has dead-tree versions for sale.
• If you’re not a programmer but still want to use TortoiseSVN then check out this tutorial

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!

The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next year.

(via Timesonline)

Here is one more file sharing/hosting/storing site for your pleasure. This one’s called DivShare. Let’s take a peek inside!

Well, this one mostly like others: it offers unlimited uploads and downloads, there are no waiting lines for files, auto image galleries, no popups or spam, easy to use dashboard, and all files stay online forever.

Download/upload speed is good (well, this one you should check for yourself, really). Like other services (for ex. Rapidshare.de) DivShare won’t let you upload files larger than 100 MB.

Ps: you can use this service without any registration, but i’d recommend you to. Cause it’s totally free and it’ll take about 3-4 minutes of your time.

Empressr is a web application which lets you create Flash-based presentations online. So that the only thing you need is your web browser to create rich media presentations. You can also share the presentations with anyone and access them online at anytime. You can sign up for free and you can create up to five presentations at the moment, although they say this will increase in future versions.

The limits to what kind of thing you can upload are as follows:

• Images-Jpeg .JPG 100 KB
• For Flash-Macromedia Flash .SWF 100 KB
• For Video-Macromedia Flash video .FLV 10 MB

At the moment, presentations can’t be exported to other formats such as PowerPoint, although they plan to include this in future versions.

You simply email your presentation to whoever you want to show it to, they don’t even have to be registered to view it. You can check it out and try an online demo of it at the homepage here.

Most people I know these days use Firefox. It’s a fast, secure tabbed browser that isn’t made by Microsoft, so scores big with all my PC and Mac friends. But Opera has been around longer and has some cool features too. I’m currently road testing the new version to see if I’ll migrate, and not sure at the moment.

It has advanced fraud protection which protects you against sites that try to steal your personal information. It speaks BitTorrent so you can (cough) download files. You can add your favorite search engines to it easily and quickly, although most people I know only use the one, maybe two. There’s a bunch of other features like widgets, content and pop-up blockers. It’s all very good. Good enough to win me away from Firefox? Hmm, the jury is still out on that one.
For more info and a download go to the Opera Web.

Hotkeys is a free and open source keyboard productivity environment. It’s loosely based upon the idea of the windows hot key, that little windows logo key on your keyboard that pops up the start menu when you hit it.

If you usually find key combinations hard to remember, this will make things much easier. You simply hold down the windows key for three seconds or hit Win+Z (while hotkeys is running) and it pops up a keyboard layout on-screen with icons on the keys that are configured.The keyboard is highly configurable. You can change the color and layout to make it match your actual, physical keyboard. Besides support for more than 100 international keyboards layouts, hotkeys also supports Dvorak layout.You can drag the icons to different keys or drag new ones on to have it exactly the way you want it to be.

This is a pretty cool program for anyone who uses keyboard shortcuts a lot and needs a good way of remembering, changing, or organizing them.

You can download it here and read more info.

Blender is an open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation. It’s a 3D image and animation creation program that is very impressive for something that’s free. Just check out some of the example pictures and videos! It’s very capable of making the kind of 3D graphics and animations that are very popular nowadays in cartoons, advertising, etc. No doubt there’s even more powerful programs than this, but they come at a high price!

It takes a while to figure out, so this isn’t something you can learn overnight, but no doubt if you have the patience to stick with it, the results can be really impressive. So for anyone into this kinda thing, on a low budget or a no budget. This is definitely worth checking out and very powerful for something that doesn’t cost a penny!

Lots more info and the free download here.

Protopage is just one of the online applications developed using Ajax.
Ajax and Web 2.0 are the new buzz words in the Internet world these days.

Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications… This is meant to increase the webpages interactivity, speed, and usability. There are some really practical projects going on using Ajax techniques to create online applications and this is just one.

What that translates to, is the existance of more and more web-based interactive tools, some of which are reviewed in this blog.But back to what protopage is all about. It allows you to create your own custom dynamic webpage full of fresh content, your own pictures, notes, links, RSS newsfeeds, etc. All of which can be moved around on the page and resized as you see fit. It’s fun and extremely easy. What makes it even better is that you can access this page (pages actually) from any computer and everything is exactly how you left it. You can even create public pages with stuff you want other’s to see while protecting pages that you don’t want people to see.

It’s very time saving to have all your bookmarks, newsfeeds,weather, notes, widgets etc easily available on one highly customizable and easy to use page or pages. That’s one of the best things i like about it when compared to other similar services, you never run out of space because you can use more than one page.

You can check it out here to get your own free page!

Okay this is a Mac only program, but it’s really good so I have to bring it to your attention. If I had to describe it it would be that it’s a sort of offline blogging program. It sorts entries into “journals” and “entries” where a journal is like a book and and entry is like a chapter. The entries are date stamped automatically, but you can also add your own titles.

Miranda Instant Messenger is a multi-protocal Instant messenger for Windows. A lot of people like to use one program for all their instant messaging needs rather than have each different one running at once.

It supports ICQ, AIM, MSN, YAHOO, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), Jabber, Gaddu-Gaddu, Netsend, Tlen, and more. (Whatever those last ones are, yeah i dunno either). The difference with Miranda is that it’s very customizable indeed. You can change almost everything about it. There’s lots of skins available and also you can change the sounds, background images, icons, emoticons, skins, themes, and splash screens. So for anyone who likes to customize, they’re gonna have fun with this.

There’s also a plentiful supply of plug-ins available. It’s smaller and faster than similiar software such as trillian. It’s also open-source, in other words, free and always being developed!

So if all this sounds good to you, you can check out more info from the homepage right here!