Q Branch

for the Cybernerd

Ian Fleming's James Bond was well-equipped for his missions by the department of tricky machinery in the British Secret Service, known as Q Branch. Bond's world was a magical transcendence of the normal existence of consumer sheep in a technological machine known as modern society, because all money was play money and fancy things were made to be wrecked, blown up and otherwise put to use in a context entirely separated from their monetary and social value. He gambled with millions, drove fast cars, and obliterated at least one airliner or submarine per movie. For those who need to act similarly outside of the norms of social rule on the internet, it would be handy to have something like Q Branch to equip the budding infoterrorist.

Only a few things are here right now, but it will grow. To keep up our metaphor, it's only the first movie.

EditPad Classic The text editor for any kind of HTML work, programming, or writing of ASCII files. Runs zippily on a 486/50 and has the features one needs: flexible regex-based search, line numbers, ability to read and convert multiple formats, unlimited open files. If you get good at using this, you'll start to see Microsoft Word as a printer driver and EditPad as the tool for handling text.

Xrep32 Small utility that allows you to search for, and replace, patterns in large numbers of files. Those of you who are still maintaining static HTML websites need this. You can forge a large amount of this functionality using PERL or another scripting language, but sometimes it's easiest to just fire up an app and have a go at it, especially on Windows without cygwin.