I just found Notepad2 from a Lockergnome RSS feed. I’ve only used it for a grand total of about two minutes, but it looks pretty good so far.

What’s this?

The original Notepad shipped with Windows is probably the handiest program of all times, small, fast, without frills! Notepad2 tries to follow this principle, it’s a small, fast and free text editor with syntax highlighting for HTML and other common languages.

Features

• Customizable syntax highlighting:

• • HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, PHP, CSS, Perl/CGI

• • C/C++, C#, Java, VB, Pascal, Assembler, SQL, Python, NSIS

• • INI, REG, INF, BAT, DIFF

• Drag & drop text editing inside and outside Notepad2

• Basic regular expression search and replace

• Useful word, line and block editing shortcuts

• Rectangular selection (Alt+Mouse)

• Brace matching, auto indent, long line marker, zoom functions

• Support for Unicode, UTF-8, Unix and Mac text files

• Open shell links

• Mostly adjustable

It appears to offer more features than NotePad+, which I’ve used for quite a while. It also seems to be even faster. The “Windows 2000 Issues” page for NotePad+ is still handy if you want to replace the default notepad.exe with Notepad2, and have to get around Windows’ builtin file protection stuff. I’ll have to use Notepad2 some more, but it doesn’t look good for NotePad+ at the moment.

It’s also open source too. If there’s something that you don’t like that can’t be changed from within the program, you can edit the program itself.

http://yeti3.yetisports.org/beta/yetisports4/

Wow, these are getting complicated. Launch the penguin into the air so an albatross catches him, then flap the bird’s wings to carry him. You get three rounds, and you can upload your score when you’re done.

I replaced the SecurityNewsPortal RSS feed on the left with the Microsoft Security Bulletin feed. SNP seemed like a good idea, but they don’t seem to do a whole lot of updates, and the RSS isn’t even kept in sync with the site. I figure having MS bulletins there will be more helpful overall.

I never really got into them, but the price is right. =) They are/were very popular in some groups, and being a few years old now, Tribes2 should even run on mediocre (by today’s standards) PCs.

http://www.filerush.com/torrents/tribes_gsi.exe.torrent is the BitTorrent for Tribes1. See http://www.fileplanet.com/files/140000/140246.shtml for more info.

http://www.filerush.com/torrents/tribes2_gsi.exe.torrent is the BitTorrent for Tribes2. See http://www.fileplanet.com/files/140000/140247.shtml for more info.

If you haven’t heard of BitTorrent, check out the intro for a brief explanation. Basically, each downloader also shares the file to other downloaders. Rather than having one server acting as the sole source, the clients can each download different parts of the file from different sources. Let’s say a server has a file available that takes 100 minutes to download. With BitTorrent, 10 users could each download 1/10 of the file in 10 minutes. After everyone has downloaded for 10 minutes, there’s now a whole second copy of the file available on the network. The original server could die then, and everyone could still get the file. This is a great way to spread download traffic off one central server. The only problem is that setting up a file to be distributed via BitTorrent isn’t as easy as just plopping the file on a server somewhere. Which is another one of my great ideas that will probably never get anywhere: an all-in-one system where the owner of the server can just plop a file in a directory, and the BitTorrent server program would automatically take care of all the other related stuff.

Since there’s still over an hour wait to download the files from FilePlanet, I’m sure they appreciate me giving a little bit of my bandwidth to help out their overloaded servers. Do your part to help, and don’t use FilePlanet’s servers. =)

W32/Sasser.worm is out and about now, taking advantage of the Windows holes I mentioned in the previous entry. If for some reason you haven’t patched yet, you’d best do so. This is being compared to Blaster. If you aren’t familiar with it, even to this day, it’s such a problem that many unpatched PCs are infected within seconds of being connected to the internet.