Recently I’ve been coming across tons of software (and buying it all, of course — Bittorrent is bad!, ahem.)
UltraMon – I’m rockin’ the dual monitors now at work and it’s just confusing to have both desktops’ applications on the one task bar. Ultramon will add a second task bar to the second (third, fourth, etc..) monitor with just that screen’s applications listed. It also lets you have different wallpaper on each. (Important when you have more than one cat.)
PuTTY Connection Manager – I’m constantly SSHing into the different servers and it’s annoying as hell to have multiple PuTTY terminals open and remembering which one is connected where when Alt-Tabbing through them. PCM combines them all in a neat, tabbed interface. It’s free too. Win!
NotePad2 – This is a freeware replacement for window’s default notepad. If Notepad is a hot tranny mess, notepad2 is fierce. Perhaps even Flawless. It’s got line numbers, syntax color-coding for a variety of languages (HTML, C, CSS, etc..) It does search and replace, translates backslashes (\n, \r = [return],) as well as a ton of other cool things that come up when manipulating text documents.
pidgin – When I’m at work, my boss and I chat via MSN (yes, we’re less than 6 feet away from each other in the same office.) In order to chat with my other friends who are on ICQ, Yahoo and AIM I’d either have to run multiple IM clients (booo,) not chat with them and actually do work (booo) or find a chat client that will chat on multiple IM networks. Pidgin does that so I can login to ICQ, two yahoo account, AIM and MSN and bring my productivity to a screeching halt (yay!)
BigDump (Staggered MySQL Dump Importer) – Have a really large mySQL dump that you just can’t seem to get imported? Configure your database info in bigdump.php, upload to the server in the same (web accessible) directory as the .sql dump file and visit bigdump in your browser. I’ve imported databases as big as 2 GB with no problems. (tip: do not use extended inserts when exporting your database.) As if all that wasn’t chock full of awesome, it’s name is a synonym for a large bowel movement.