Iperf - Bandwidth Testing Tool

Iperf is "a tool to measure maximum TCP bandwidth, allowing the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss."

This is an interesting tool used to test network throughput. I stumbled across it in an Ars Technica Forum thread.

The recommended syntax and options (from the Ars thread):
server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r

Wireshark

"Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer for UNIX, OS X and Windows. It allows you to examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. You can interactively browse the capture data, viewing summary and detail information for each packet." It's a packet sniffer.

Formerly known as 'Ethereal'. Project Page.

Scorched3D

Remember Scorched Earth? The wonderful and addictive little DOS-based game where two players operating tanks lob artillery shells (etc.) at each other?

Well, I stumbled accross the SourceForge Project of the Month for May, 2007, Scorched3D:

"Scorched3D is a 3D remake of the popular 2D artillery game Scorched Earth.
Scorched3D can be played against the computer, other players and remotely across
the Internet or LAN."

Here are links to the project page and official web site.

VMTSPatchManager

VMTSPatchManager -- "The 'Windows Update' for ESX 3.x"

"VMTS Patch Manager addresses a critical need for VMware customers, allowing automatic (or manual) patching of ESX Servers platforms."

Free and looks very slick. Runs on Windows platform using BITS service.

CDex

CDex is a CD-Ripper, extracting digital audio data from an Audio CD. The application supports many Audio encoders, like MPEG (MP2,MP3), VQF, AAC encoders.

Project Site

Pidgin 2.0 Instant Messaging Client

"Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once.

Pidgin can work with:

AIM Bonjour Gadu-Gadu Groupwise ICQ

IRC MSN QQ SILC SIMPLE

Sametime XMPP Yahoo! Zephyr

"

Formerly GAIM, Pidgin 2.0 is a feature rich client for Windows, Linux, BSD, etc.

ArsTechnica review

JAlbum - free web photo album and photo gallery software

Riley writes:

"I found a great, free, application that webifies galleries very quickly, and very nicely. www.jalbum.net"

I checked out their site and some sample galleries and it looks great! Sure can't beat the price.

VLC media player

The VideoLAN - VLC media player is a free, cross-platform media player. It supports a large number of multimedia formats, using its own codecs and can be used as a streaming server, with features such as video on demand and on the fly transcoding. It's available for Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, and Linux.

WinDirStat

"WinDirStat (WDS) is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Windows. It shows disk, file and directory sizes in a treelist as well as graphically in a treemap, much like KDirStat or SequoiaView."

Steve Bass from PC World writes:
"Find colossal files the quick and easy way. Then dump erase them to save disk space."

The SourceForge project is here.

QCad - The CAD System For Everyone

An inexpensive, simple and relatively powerful 2-D CAD package. We have used it quite successfully to create formula-driven drawings to feed our CNC controlled plasma cutter.

"QCad is an application for computer aided drafting in two dimensions (2d). With QCad you can create technical drawings such as plans for buildings, interiors, mechanical parts or schemas and diagrams. QCad works on Windows, Mac OS X and many Linux and Unix Systems. The source code of the QCad community edition is released under the GPL (Open Source)."

Wikipedia entry