utility

When we want to send files over the internet, we typically want to compress these files so that they take up as little space as possible. We generally also need to bundle files together. Today, the default format for doing this on personal computers is the PKZIP format, while on Unix systems we use tar to group files together, and a separate program to compress them - these days that's generally gzip or bzip2, and in olden times it was the compress program. A lot of PC users are also using the rar archiver, because for a long time it has provided the best compression.

Today, that is no longer true; the crown is worn by 7-Zip. 7-Zip is a newer archive manager which, in addition to being able to handle older archive formats at various levels (for example, it can decompress but not create rar archives, but it can both make and break zip archives) it implements the new 7z compression algorithm. This is not actually the most efficient algorithm available today, but it is the best one that has a decent application wrapped around it.

I was running BeOS/x86 R3 and it was pretty cool. I ported GNU File while I was running it. This code is so old and useless likely no one will ever give a damn, but here it is anyway.

Let's say you have a GPS and you want to use it with multiple applications. On Linux, this is easy, because basically every program today utilizes GPSd for GPS communications. GPSd connects one or more clients to one or more GPS devices, and also has support for NTP (for providing time information.) However, it does not support Windows (and in fact they are fairly nasty about it) even though it's a fairly simple trick when using Cygwin.

After spending several hours looking, however, I did finally find a free (as in beer) solution that works for Windows XP. It involves the extremely hard-to-locate (but not any more!) gpsd from gps3d...