Hooray for Open Source!

I use open source a lot. That's not to say I'm against commercial software, having spent eight out of the last ten years working in a software house it would be a silly attitude to take as it paid my salary and I do buy computer games and other software. There's a place for both open source and commecial software. Of the open source I use there's Firefox, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQ and PHP), Subversion/Tortoise, Notepad++, Putty and TrueCrypt.

Of these last two, putty is for communicating securely across the net using SSH, and TrueCrypt provides a secure way of creating encrypted file volumes (or indeeed entire disks). A file volume is like a drive, but contained within one file on the drive. Truecrypt creates a new drive that you use like any other. Cleverly, you can't even tell that a given file volume is a Truecrypt volume and it doesn't store the password in it. Forget your password though and you'll lose everything! Truecrypt is written in C and there's a link in the C Code library.

• Link to C Code Library