Steve Friedl's Favorite Resources

People ask me now and then what software I like to use, and I am listing here some of the non-obvious items that I use every day. In every case, I have paid my own money for these products, and these are "happy customer only" recommendations: I'm not a reseller for these or any other products.

Quick Links

Software
Web Sites

Software

SecureCRT - Windows Secure Shell client: The Win32 Secure Shell client from Van Dyke Software is fantastic. I used their regular telnet client "CRT" for years, and two years ago upgrade to the Secure Shell version, and it's been a joy to use. The software works great, and the tech support has been fantastic. Couldn't recommend this highly enough.
Perforce - Software Configuration Management System: I have used a number of source-code control systems over the years, and my favorite by far is Perforce. The entire company is just organized top to buttom to cater to software engineers: the server is very fast and efficient, the documentation clear, and they have an outstanding branching model. Furthermore, I routinely get real live responses from a real live human in tech support via email in under an hour, and it's been less than five minutes more than once. It's just not possible for this company to execute any better than they are.

"I wouldn't use CVS even if it were free" - S.Friedl
Ping Plotter - Network tracing tool: I was introduced to Ping Plotter in early 2001 while tracking down hideous latency problems with my Pac*Bell DSL connection, and it has proven to be an invaluable tool for researching where on the internet my packet loss was happening. The software works great, and the author Pete Ness has provided excellent support. I love this software.

Web Sites

DSL Reports: This is much more than just a support site for broadband and DSL technical problems: I've been a member at DSLR since April 2001 and have found it a great home for great discussions on topics such as UNIX, Security, and Web Administration. You can find me there as user Steve and the same three-red-bricks avatar that you see as my logo on my own web site.
DialRight Software: DialRight is software that performs very smart conversion of phone numbers to reflect area code splits. This process is hard enough to do even if you keep up with it, but fixing a database in retrospect is almost impossible: once a prefix has been reassigned, you can't just blithly do a search-and-replace on the numbers.
I wrote the back-end software that creates the databases used by the released product, and it's really quite smart.