I’ve run across a few utilities lately that I thought others might also find useful.

ISO Recorder is a very handy way to create CDs or DVDs from ISO files. No frills: just a Windows shell extension that works. Right-click on a .ISO file, select the drive you want to burn it to, and go. I would complain about Windows lacking this feature natively, but I think I’d rather have the simple right-click-go interface of ISO Recorder than whatever overly complicated interface the Windows design team would come up with.

I’ve mentioned Info-ZIP before. They have the best command line Zip and Unzip tools that I know of. I went to the site the other day, looking to install the tools on my new Vista system, and found that they now have 64-bit versions. Now if only we could get past the 4 gigabyte limitation.

Speaking of compression, I’ve been seeing a lot of bzipped stuff for some reason lately. Unfortunately, bzip and bunzip aren’t included in the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications tools and utilities. You can download Bzip2 and other utilities for Windows from the GnuWin32 project.

We’re using Subversion for version control here. That could be the subject for a post by itself. If you’re using Subversion on a Windows client, don’t even bother with installing the command line tools. Rather, download and install TortoiseSVN. It’s a Windows shell extension that lets you work with your version control system visually rather than futzing with the command line. It’s nicely polished, and the new version works well with Windows Vista.

Most open source or free software sites will give the MD5 hash of the files that are available for download. The md5 utility is a standard component of most Linux distributions, but Windows doesn’t include such thing out of the box. MD5sums is a handy thing to have. You can operate it from the command line, or drag files from Explorer onto the .exe. Nicely done.