Best Windows registry cleaner

Of the various tools I've used over the years for cleaning the labyrinthine beast we call the Windows registry, none surpasses the Tune-up Utilities. It's not free, but if I need to repair the tangled web of the registry on a machine that's generating errors or running slow, nothing's worked better than this set of handy tools.

As always, make a backup copy of the registry before running anything that might alter it. This article can help with the backup.

Change HTTP port on Oracle XE

If you use the free Oracle XE database and run into conflicts with the HTTP port 8080, you can switch it to another port following the steps outlined in this blog post; here are the steps:

1. The default HTTP/FTP port for Oracle XE is 8080; however, port 8080 is often used by other apps (such as a local JBoss server instance). To change it, open up a SQL Plus session to your XE instance, then type the following to determine the port values:

   select dbms_xdb.gethttpport as "HTTP-Port"
              , dbms_xdb.getftpport as "FTP-Port" from dual;
   

2. The results of the query are displayed:

   HTTP-Port   FTP-Port
   ---------- ----------
       8080          0
   

3. If the port is indeed 8080 for HTTP, run this code to change it to 8090 and FTP to 2100:

   begin
        dbms_xdb.sethttpport('8090');
        dbms_xdb.setftpport('2100');
   end;
   

Nifty broadband speed testing and tweaking tools

DSLReports.com provides some powerful speed tests and tweaking tools.

Run Flash (and other videos) on your iPhone

Here's a way to add Flash to your iPhone: http://www.coderetard.com/2009/01/04/how-to-install-iphone-flash-plugin-for-safari-browser/. It uses the iMobileCinema iPhone Safari plugin: http://imobilecinema.com/

PhoneGap provides dev tool for mobile devices

If you're looking for an open source dev tool for building mobile apps, PhoneGap might be what the doctor ordered: http://phonegap.com/. For a quick intro, watch this video:

Get list of processes for a user on Solaris

This command will return a list of running processes for the specified user on Solaris:

ps -fu user_name | grep process_name

Once you have the process ID, run this command to kill it:

kill -9 process_id

This came in handy when Firefox hung up on Solaris' XWindows.

Web prototyping with Visio

This article has some great resources on web GUI prototyping in Visio: http://www.guuui.com/issues/02_03_02.php

Format code for the web and Word

If you've ever needed to create HTML-formatted code from your Flex, Java, etc. apps, here's an online tool that does just that, including color-coding elements based on the input: http://xzfv.appspot.com/s/format.html