While glancing over my shoulder at work the other day I noticed something very Mac like on a Windows XP machine. Now I should point out that I work in an environment that has a little bit of every flavour of operating system running in some form or other. My work environment is also highly creative and it is not uncommon for extremely strange things to be happening.

What I saw was a dock which looked very similar to the application dock on Mac OS X. I had to ask what exactly it was – it was Rocket Dock. Its a really cool little application that proves extremely useful. I tend to have several windows and applications all opened at once. In fact I tend to have so many windows across two monitors that I lose track of them all. But Rocket Dock also me to minimize windows right to the dock and keep track of them. It really is a great piece of software. Did I mention it is FREE?

Having developed “FREE” software before I know how much it really costs. As I like this little application so much I have even ordered a t-shirt. It is a karma thing, you have to support developers who develop great software. Plus you get a t-shirt to boot. Check out Rocket Dock, I am sure you’ll like it as much as I do.

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 I am sure just about everyone has heard of Skype and perhaps a lot of you are already using it. Now it is not too often that I give a product rave reviews but once again Skype has performed above my expectations.

 For some time now I have been using Skype as an instant messenger and for some conference calls. Yes that is right you can do conference calls with Skype. Not all your participants in the conference call need to be on a computer either. You can use Skype dial out service (for a reasonable fee) to call participants and involve them in your conference call.

 But what has impressed me the most about Skype is that this morning I used it for an online conference call with two other people. Now this may not sound that amazing, but when you factor in that one person was in England, the other in Japan, and me here in the center of Canada. It is pretty amazing.

 There was virtually no lag time and I could hear each person clear as a bell. In fact the clarity was much better than I have found on land line international calls. It was so clear that when one of the participants cell phone rang I almost thought the phone was right beside me and not on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

 If you are only using Skype online than you cannot beat the price, its free! If you are in North America or most places Skype has monthly packages if you are calling land lines. The price verys from place to place but I find it is extremely reasonable.

 My only complaint is that I cannot get a land line phone number here in Canada for land lines to call me. That’s right if you live in the US or England, and a few other places you can get a phone number that regular phones can call. You can answer these online or have them forwarded to a phone number of your choice.

Hopefully Skype will be offering this service in Canada soon. If you have never tried Skype, give it a try. Oh I also forgot to mention that you can also do video chats with Skype. It is an excellent piece of software that I highly recommend.

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 Do you often work in multiple languages? Are you learning a new language? Have you ever had the need to translate something quickly and on the fly?

 Well if you answered yes to any of the above questions and you are working with English/German/Russian/French or Japanese and running Mac OS X then I have a great solution for you. All you Windows users I think you should petition the author of this software to release a version for Windows as it truly is a great application.

 Jisho 2.3 has just been release I have been fortunate enough to get the author of this great software to answer a few questions for me. Even if you are not interested in this great dictionary software the author has some unique insights of life and things in general. Now to the interview….

1. Can you please describe what Jisho is?

   At its core Jisho is a Japanese-English dictionary. Beyond that though, it supports Japanese-German/Russian/French searches as well. It can also search in the reverse too, so English/German/Russian/French-Japanese.

2. Who would be the primary user of Jisho?
   Jisho is primarily intended for people who are interested in Japanese culture (video games, manga, anime, etc..) and language learners as they would have the most obvious benefit from a program like Jisho.

3. How can your users benefit from using Jisho?
   The immediate benefit that I see, and this is from my own experience, is I am more willing to look any and every word I see or hear that I don’t understand. Especially with it’s integration with OS X I can look up words by just selecting it and pressing a key command. I can’t count the number of words I have learned because of ease and speed of looking up words.

4. What was your motivation to write Jisho?
   I originally wrote Jisho before getting into university as I knew I was going to study Japanese and would need a dictionary. Since I found it quite useful I thought others might as well so I decided to release it publicly.
5. How much time would you say you have invested in the programming of Jisho?
   Oh I don’t even have a clue. A lot of time. Hundreds of hours at least.

6. Jisho has undergone many changes since its conception. Can you describe some of these and explain how the changes you have done make Jisho a better program?
   Jisho started out as a confused mess I think. The major changes is the adherence to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, and adopting some Apple technologies that allowed me to completely redesign the interface in literally a few hours and still have a fully functioning application. I actually got a post on the Sugoi Soft blog that demonstrates the differences at http://www.sugoisoft.com/blog/2007/10/02/how-far-jisho-has-come
7. Even though this is the latest release of Jisho, I know myself as a developer I am always focusing on future changes. What changes does the future have in store for Jisho?
   The future for Jisho is going to be expanding to more dictionaries to make it even more comprehensive. I also want to integrate Jisho more with the system and their life better. I’ve been toying around with making Jisho play well with the iPod and other juicy stuff like that.
8. Where/how did you learn how to program?
   I learned to program by mostly teaching myself. I did take some classes at the local community college back when I was a freshman in high school, but that was more basics and data structures.
9. What has been the best part of developing Jisho?
   The best part of developing Jisho has been knowing that I make a product that people are passionate about. That my work can help improve people’s lives is still incredible to me. Of course the monthly checks are pretty good thing too.

10. What has been the worst part of developing Jisho?
    The worst part of developing Jisho has been the dealing with criticism of Jisho. Especially after the 1.0 release of Jisho as it was my first time to take such criticism of something I had poured so many nights and weekends into. It felt like a direct criticism to myself. Overtime though I have learned to extract the valid points and steal their good ideas to future incorporation.



11. How often do you use Jisho yourself?
    I use Jisho everyday, many many times day.
12. Do you have any plans to release a version of Jisho for platforms other than Mac OS X?
    I’ve thought about it, I’ve even gotten a few requests for Windows versions, but I feel my energy would be better spend on making great software for the Macintosh.
13. How did you come up with the name Jisho?
    I wanted a name for Jisho that was different. Something that encapsulated what Jisho does in a word. Something like Dictionary is boring (and already taken). Luckily for me though foreign languages are rife of words that we don’t use in English. Thus I picked Jisho, which is Japanese for dictionary.
14. Do you have any comments you would like to share with the readers of Tenacious Creations?
    

    Yea, thanks for taking the time to read the interview and if you use a mac give Jisho a whirl. If you decide to buy, input the coupon TCTHANKS and receive 10% off Jisho through Sunday.

 If you run a mac I highly recommend that you give Jisho a whirl as the developer suggests. James Van Dyne is the man behind Sugio Soft and Jisho and I would like to thank him for his time for this interview and the discount he is giving to Tenacious Creations readers.

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 Have you ever wondered what might happen if your lap top or USB drive ever got stolen? Now granted you’d lose all your files and the information that was on your lap top or USB drive and you would have the cost of replacing the hardware. But have you ever thought about that valuable information you have stored on your hard drive in your lap top or on your USB drive?

  Okay so maybe your not James Bond, and you don’t have access to Top Secret government documents but you do have valuable information there that in the wrong hands can prove quite costly. Identity theft has been on the rise in the past few years, information that you have on your portable computer equipment could make it quite easy for some devious person to steal your identity or the identity of the of other people whose personal information may be on your hardware.

 Don’t think your windows or other operating system password is going to save you. Just do a Google search on Windows password crackers to see just how easy it is to get past the windows log in. In the case of a USB drive the information is just sitting there on the drive waiting to be pulled off and taken into the hands of the malicious thief.

  I don’t travel all that often but I do frequently take my lap top and USB drives with me to business meetings and other engagements. I often have information that if it got into the wrong hands could be costly to both myself and my clients. This can exist in the form of CAD drawings of unreleased mechanisms that have yet to patented, to financial spread sheets. If competitors of my clients got a hold of things it could be all bad.

 That is why I use a nifty free open source program called True Crypt

. True Crypt works on Windows and most Linux platforms, it has a small foot print and is very easy to use. What I have learned about computer security is you can create the most secure system in the world. But if it is not user friendly your users won’t use it and it will be worthless. True Crypt is very user friendly and easy to set up. They have an excellent beginner’s tutorial with screen shots that will get you up and running in minutes.

 But one of the best features I like about True Crypt is the fact that it provides plausible deniability. What does this mean? Well until decrypted, a True Crypt volume appears to consist of nothing more than random data. They claim that there is no way to identify the data as a True Crypt volume until it is mounted. But it doesn’t stop there. True Crypt also uses some clever stenography. You can hide a True Crypt volume with in a True Crypt Volume. Why would this be useful? Well lets say that there is a possibility you may be forced to provide a password or mount your true crypt volume. You can make one volume that has garbage data in it, data that is not really that sensitive but looks like you might want to hide it. Then with in that volume you can have a hidden volume that contains your actual data.

 While this feature may be over kill for most of us, I still think it is a neat feature to have. However True Crypt also provides another measure of stenography. You can also run True Crypt in traveller mode. This means that you do not need to actually have True Crypt installed on your portable system. You can do this by having the application on a separate disk, or use True Crypt to make a special Travellers Disk and launch True Crypt from there.

 When you have a True Crypt container mounted it seamlessly encrypts and decrypts data on the fly. You don’t even realise it is there in most cases. True Crypt also has a feature where you can hit a “hot key” and it will automatically dismount any mounted encrypted drives.

 In summary True Crypt is a handy tool to have in your tool box of computer security. I encourage you to give it a try, it costs nothing but your time.

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