Some "Must-Have" general plugins for Eclipse

As a fairly new Eclipse user, primarily focusing on C/C++ development, besides the Eclipse CDT plugin, I found that there are a couple of plugins which I would recommend to anyone using Eclipse:

• AnyEdit (http://andrei.gmxhome.de/anyedit/)- AnyEdit is a "swiss army knife" for all Eclipse editors, where it adds several new tools to the context menu of text- based Eclipse editors, to output consoles, to Eclipse main menu and editor toolbar
• StartExplorer (http://startexplorer.sourceforge.net/) - offers a convenient integration of the Windows Explorer, the Windows command line, Windows default system applications and the clipboard into Eclipse

Both these plugins can be found on the Marketplace in Eclipse. So, if you require "express" setup, it does not require manual downloading and installation of the packages.

AnyEdit features

- tabs <-> spaces convertion on multiple files or entire directories and supports also file exclusion filter for tabs <-> spaces action

- automatically remove trailing whitespaces and/or perform tabs<->spaces conversion on a "save" action

- automatically create a new line at the end of the file if the last line was not terminated by new line (useful for Linux development)

- adds "Save All", "Open File" and "Show whitespace in editor" buttons to the global Eclipse toolbar

- adds "Open File", "Open Type" and "Save to file..." actions to supported output consoles and "Save to file..." toolbar button to the Console view

StartExplorer features

It adds a context menu with the following operations:

- Show resource(s) in Windows Explorer

- Start this (these) file(s) with system editor

- Start cmd.exe here

- Copy resource path to clipboard

- Custom Commands

MP3 tagging tool

TagScanner is a great free MP3 tagging tool. It has an extensive set of tools providing the ability to modify/edit tags on music files (batch and individual files), batch renaming of files using the tags, etc.

The website hosting this software:

http://www.xdlab.ru/en/index.htm

Keeping notes online and accessing them from anywhere

A great tool to keep notes online:

Evernote: http://www.evernote.com

It allows for creation of personal notes, saving of URLs, webpages, and pictures from web pages.

It allows synchronization of notes between various PCs, and so you can view your notes from any PC, even when offline.

Recover data from a failing drive (possibly with bad sectors)

ddrescue is a fabulous tool/utility available in Linux. It can help to recover data from any failing hard disk. If your drive has failed, i.e. your drive cannot be detected by the BIOS, ddrescue will be of no help and the drive would need to be sent to a data recovery expert (who will charge you hundreds of dollars to recover what ever data possible).

ddrescue is available on SystemRescueCD. SystemRescueCD is exactly what it says it is - a system rescue CD, which uses Linux, and boots up either from a CD or a USB stick. It is possibly the one most important piece of software which I would advice any PC user to have. Or course, you would need to be familiar with the Linux OS and you would need to have some basic knowledge of the Linux interface. This article will not dive into the details of the SystemRescueCD. So, let's get back to ddrescue.

The ddrescue manual can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html.

NOTE: In the steps below, "/dev/sdc" is the drive which has the failing drive. "/dev/sdb" is the good/new drive, which is the destination to copy the data to. "/mnt/usbstick/ddrescuelog.log" is the logfile which will be created (if you do not have this log file, re-trying failures or resuming recovery if the system needs to be shutdown will not be possible). Replace the above with the appropriate paths as needed for your own purposes.

Steps to recover as much data possible from a drive which has bad sectors:

1. Copy as much data as possible, without retrying or splitting sectors:

ddrescue --no-split /dev/sdc /dev/sdb /mnt/usbstick/ddrescuelog.log

2. Now let it retry previously detected errors 3 times:

ddrescue -r 3 /dev/sdc /dev/sdb /mnt/usbstick/ddrescuelog.log

3. Run successive passes like this to use the log file to only read the gaps with errors:

ddrescue -r 3 --complete-only /dev/sdc /dev/sdb /mnt/usbstick/ddrescuelog.log

4. Now let it retry previous errors 3 times, using uncached reads:

ddrescue --direct -r 3 /dev/sdc /dev/sdb /mnt/usbstick/ddrescuelog.log

5. If that fails, try again but retrimmed, so it tries to reread full sectors:

ddrescue --direct --retrim -r 3 /dev/sdc /dev/sdb /mnt/usbstick/ddrescuelog.log

These steps should be somewhat sufficient to retrieve as much data as possible from a failing drive. There is not guarantee that all the data will be able to be retrieved. Only data from sectors which do not have any physical damage will be able to be retrieved.

It helped me.

For other links on this matter, you can also refer to the following links:

a. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

b. http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

What I have not tried, which these websites suggest are the following:

- ntfsfix /dev/sdc

- fsck -t ntfs

- fsck.ntfs

Determine which application is using a particular port

Say you try to install an application which needs to use port 80. But during or after the installation, the application is not able to launch because port 80 is already in use, how do you determine which application is holding on to port 80?

In Windows, it is simple and fairly straight forward.

Follow the steps below:

1. Issue the following command to check which process is using port 80:

netstat -aon | findstr 0.0:80

NOTE: If you wanted to check for any other port number, replace the "80" in the command above with the port number of choice.2. The output could look like this:

TCP 0.0.0.0:80 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING 2920

For the example above, referring to the number highlighted in yellow, this is the process id which is using/listening to port 80. The process id is assigned by the OS to an application/service which is running (it could be running in the background)

3. Issue the following command to get the name of the process which as the process id (as shown in the yellow text above - this value can be any number as assigned by the system, i.e. never fixed)

tasklist | findstr 2920

4. This command would yield an output which would have the following format:

httpd.exe 2920 Console 0 12,724 K

Based on the example above, the application using process id 2920 is "httpd.exe".

So, from here, you can see that port 80 is being used by process id 2920, where process id 2920 was assigned by the OS to httpd.exe which is running in the background (NOTE: this is on my system - If I was to restart my PC or stop httpd.exe and restart it, the process id would highly likely not be the same)

Website to download various apps

An excellent website for downloading "stuff".

http://www.coolrelease.com

Enabling/disabling IE's proxy via the registry

The registry entry which needs to be modified when you want to enable or disable the proxy for IE is

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Connections\DefaultConnectionSettings

Byte 9 has to be modified such that if you wanted to enable it, bit 2 has to be set. Alternatively, if you wanted the proxy to be disabled, bit 2 has to be cleared.

Example 1

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Connections]

"DefaultConnectionSettings"=hex:46,00,00,00,a8,1e,00,00,03,00,00,00,6e,....

In the example above, bit 2 of byte 9 is set. This means that the proxy is enabled.

Example 2

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Connections]

"DefaultConnectionSettings"=hex:46,00,00,00,a8,1e,00,00,01,00,00,00,6e,....

In the example above, bit 2 of byte 9 is cleared. This means that the proxy is disabled.