Free Tools

If you are ever designing a network or deploying a new switch that will be providing Power over Ethernet, be sure to check your power draw with the Cisco Power Calculator (CCO login required):

http://tools.cisco.com/cpc/LU.cpc

You start by selecting the type of switch you are deploying. Then you can choose how many of each type of device you will be plugging into your switch and it will tell you how much power will be required.  Here is a sample of some of the devices they let you choose from:

• 7961G-GE - 0.3071 amps (12.9W)
• AP-1200 with a+g radios (12.4W)
• CP-7971G (14.9W)

Also, if you are deploying non-Cisco phones or APs, there are several IEEE compatible devices listed toward the bottom of the list:

If you have multiple computers that have their own monitors, are on the same network and you want to control them all from one keyboard and mouse - you have got to check out Input Director.

The setup process for this application is really simple. You install it on the main computer and set it up as the "master" computer. Then you install it on other computers you want to control (preferably they are right next to each other), and you configure those systems as "slave" computers. There are a lot of settings and options you can change, but basically when you slide the mouse cursor to the edge of one computer's screen, it shows up on the next computer's screen with a little water splash animation. You can fully control the remote (slave) computer with the main (master) computer's keyboard and mouse, and it's fast. I haven't noticed any degraded performance as a result of using this tool on my systems.

If you have ever used a Unix based system to do software development or some line of work that required you to edit a lot of text files, you are undoubtedly familiar with the diff command. Diff is a brilliant little program that compares two text files line by line and tells you what's different. 

As Windows and other gui based operating systems gained popularity among the development community, the need for a gui based diff program was answered with a variety of free and paid-for options. By far my favorite of the gui-based diff applications, and the topic of this post, is WinMerge.