Now, for the first time, Microsoft is giving its valuable software developer and design tools directly to students worldwide at no charge*! This site enables students to download professional-level Microsoft developer and design tools to unlock creative potential and set students on the path to academic and career success, by supporting and advancing learning and skills through technical design, technology, math, science and engineering activities (according to themselves).

Who can get this right now?

Microsoft are kicking this off in 11 countries/regions, giving DreamSpark to millions of students in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium. If you are not residing in one of the countries listed keep checking back, more countries will be added throughout the year.

* In order to get this software from Microsoft at no charge, you will be asked to establish or verify your student status once every 12 months. This process is built into this DreamSpark site itself. Verification of valid student status will enable students from around the globe to download Microsoft developer and design tools at no charge. Note: You must be at least 18 years old or have otherwise reached the age of majority in the place (province, state or country) where you live, or if not, your parent or legal guardian must accept the Microsoft DreamSpark software license terms on your behalf, in order for you to download and use the software.

So what does this mean?

Unless you are a student you wont get anything. On the other side students probably have these products already via P2P or bit torrent. I assume Microsoft are doing this to try and capture students before they turn to the free (and better) open source solutions. What’s your take on this?

Rename Master is a FREE utility for renaming large groups of files with a few clicks. Anyone that has worked with websites, file archives, or collections of music, videos, or pictures has probably spent way too much time renaming hundreds of files.

This utility will add, remove, or replace parts of the filename with ease and also supports renaming via file properties, MP3 tags, JPEG JFIF and EXIF tags. Batch renaming that’s simple to use, yet still very powerful.

Features

• Intelligent number sorting
• JPEG/MP3 tag support and many more Meta-Variables
• Auto-Preview support
• “Scipts” to save commonly used renaming options
• [*] and [?] command prompt style wildcards for replacing and remove options
• “Undo” button so a renaming operation can be rolled back
• Floating thumbnail window for viewing pictures and optional thumbnail file list view
• Optional Explorer integration for right-clicking on folders or using “Send To”

Requirements

This version is written in Delphi 6 and should run on any Windows OS - no install program is needed.

Visit JoeJoe’s freeware utilities for more information and to download the latest version.

A while back I wrote a post about the 20 worst Engrish ever. Today I discovered that Engrish.com has created a new section called Chinglish, which is well worth your time this Sunday if you’re not planning on going outside for a while…

China is apparently trying to clean up their Engrish before the Beijing Olympics this year, but this section has enough Chinglish to last way past the Olympics. Enjoy!

Nuns sitting on funny bar stools, photo by SPAM_King.

IntuImage is a little software experiment in the field of content aware image resizing methods. Such methods may produce amazing results. For an example, you may shrink the image width by a half and keep the original proportions of the important image elements. Watch this YouTube video to learn basic concept of this interesting technique.

Visit IntuImage to download and try out the latest version.