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SQL (Structured Query Language) is the lingua franca of the database world. While there may be proprietary languages used by different applications, most of them speak SQL, and certainly the most powerful ones use this. When constructing SQL statements, it's possible to be very precise in getting what you want from a database. Unfortunately, sometimes the syntax can get pretty complicated, and it's easy to know what you want and maybe a little harder to get the result you're looking for. There are tools out there that can help you with some of the more complicated queries, or to give you a hand if you're only an occasional SQL user and can't put your finger on just the right syntax.

SQL Buddy is a web-based tool that lets you easily manipulate your databases. With an intuitive interface, you don't have to memorize tons of arcane commands to get work done. Add and drop tables, Add a column. Tweak an entry. There now, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Install SQL Buddy on your web server and you're ready to go. You need to be running PHP 4.3 or later, with MySQL 4 or better. It's compatible with Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer, so you'll really be in control of your database in a jiffy.

SQL Buddy is a free download.

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Maybe you're a web designer, and you've created the World's Best Site. Or maybe you're a business owner and you've just taken the plunge and staked out an online presence. You might be a blogger, and you've just started up the killer blog. Okay, so who cares?

Unless you've just built a site for a school project, one of the most important things you're looking for now is traffic. It doesn't make any difference how great it is, if nobody's looking at it, then it doesn't really mean anything. Your server access logs will tell you a lot about who showed up, what they did while they were there, and all kinds of other information. Unfortunately, you really can't read through raw server logs and make any sense of what's going on with them. You need a tool to help you digest and analyze all that raw data.

Webalizer is one such tool. It understands most commonly-used log formats, and it can work with archived files, so you don't have to keep a huge pile of files on your server. Configure it to generate the reports that help you to measure what you need to know about traffic coming to your site.

Webalizer is a Linux app, so if you're running an Apache web server, you probably already have everything you need to use it.

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Proxy servers are a pretty slick way to connect to the Web. Whether it's because you are trying to maintain some semblance of anonymity by shielding your IP address from your destination, or just because you're relying on caching on the server, lots of people use them. If you use multiple proxies—maybe one at work and another at home—it can be a pain in the neck to keep tweaking your system to activate one or the other of them, depending on where you are.

SwitchProxy is a tool that makes it easier to switch the proxy server you're using at any given time. A browser plugin, it's designed to work with the Mozilla-based family of web browsers and tools, including Firefox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird. (It's a couple years old, so you may want to check to see how it works with SeaMonkey, Camino, or other more recent Mozilla-based browsers.) You can set up your list of servers and access them to select or change via Toolbar, Context Menu (right click menu), or as a Toolbar Element. You can choose "regular" proxies, or select from a list of anonymous servers to use, even setting it to change servers automatically from time to time to really mix things up.

SwitchProxy is compatible with all systems running Firefox and supported Mozilla-based browsers.

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Can't get enough YouTube? Whether it's the latest viral video, some slick "how-to" program, or any of a zillion other types of content, we've all grown addicted to YouTube. Here's a tool that helps you download YouTube videos to your machine, so that you can enjoy them again and again.

Free YouTube Downloader does exactly what the name suggests: it enables you to grab those videos and save them locally. Just copy and paste the URL of the content you want, and press the button. It couldn't be easier. It supports multiple downloads as well—just type several addresses into the box, each on a separate line.

Free YouTube Downloader is a Java application, which means that it will run on Linux, Macintosh, Windows, or just about any other platform that has Java Runtime Environment Standard Edition, with Java version 1.5 or better.

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Need to do serious work, but you're trapped behind a firewall? In some corporate and other environments, security constraints necessitate locking down all inbound- and outbound traffic except for ports 80 and 443, the standard ports for HTTP and HTTPS traffic. If you need to use services like FTP, Telnet, or SSH to talk to a remote server, you're out of luck. What to do?

Web Console is one solution for this problem. Using only these allowed ports, you can now execute shell commands on your server, edit files using vi or Emacs, and all the other stuff you'd do if only you could access your server.

Installing Web Console on your server is pretty straightforward. It works on both dedicated servers and shared boxes. It's written in Perl, so your server is sure to support it. Once you're up and running, the web interface uses AJAX technology, so you are really interacting in real time.

Web Console will run on any web server that includes Perl.

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Transmission is a free BitTorrent client with a difference. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, it just has what you need and none of what you don't. Its clean interface lets you work the way you want to. You're in control, with the ability to speed your torrents up or down, depending on bandwidth availability.

It supports Growl notifications, so you can do what you need to do, knowing that when Transmission is done, you'll be the first to know about it.

Transmission is available as a Universal Binary for Mac OS X (10.4 or later), or you can grab a tarball and roll your own for Linux, FreeBSD, and others.

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Collaboration can be a real challenge, especially if your team is scattered around the office or the world. Keeping in touch with everybody can be a challenge, and running a handful of apps just to stay in contact can quickly exhaust your screen space, to say nothing of your system resources.

Spicebird is a collaboration tool that helps people work smarter together. It integrates all the tools necessary to make sure that everybody's on the same page: calendar, tasks, contacts, email, and chat are all represented. Built on top of Mozilla's Thunderbird (email), Sunbird (calendar), and SamePlace (chat) platforms, you have access to all these tools in a single application.

Individual tools are accessed via applets that sit on the desktop. You can choose which applets to activate, and customize their content, adding, for example, your favorite news feeds to the RSS applet.

Each of the individual tools boasts the standard functionality you would expect: the calendar allows you daily, weekly, or monthly views, for example. The email tool will examine incoming messages and if it spots time information, it will ask you whether you want to schedule an event that corresponds with that time. The email and chat tools let you know in real time whether your contacts are online, making it easier to ping them right now if you need to communicate with them.

Spicebird is a free download, and is available for Windows and Linux.

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Virtual Private Networks (VPN) allow you to use a public network as if it were a private one. Imagine being able to send your sensitive data across the Internet, for example, without fear that your privacy will be compromised.

While there are a number of VPN applications available, Hamachi is different in that it allows you to create a tunnel even between hosts that are behind firewalls or NAT routers. Unlike other VPN setups, Hamachi's servers help to facilitate communication between machines that use non-routable private IP addresses. Once the connection is made, the server steps out of the way, so none of your data actually flows through their network, guaranteeing you the privacy and security you're looking for.

With the ability to create up to 64 networks with 16 nodes each (or 256 networks with 256 hosts each on the paid version), you can connect a sizable number of machines even though they're spread all over the world.

Hamachi is available for Windows systems running Win 2000 or later. A console version (no bells and whistles) for Mac OS X and Linux can be downloaded also.

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KompoZer is a high-end WYSIWYG web authoring system that just happens to be free. With power like Dreamweaver and a price of $0, how can you go wrong?

Built on the Gecko rendering engine, the same one used by the Firefox web browser, KompoZer is fast and reliable. It doesn't require that you know any HTML in order to create killer web pages. It builds good HTML, not like some word processors, so you don't have to go in and fix what the tool created. With built-in validation, you can verify that you're putting clean code out there. Making extensive use of stylesheets, your code will be rendered more accurately by most web browsers. With tabbed documents, you can have multiple files open at once, and each one can be viewed in normal WYSIWYG mode, as well as HTML Tags mode, to see where the important tags are located, and even in source mode, so can see the underlying code, though you don't have to. And finally, with built in FTP support, you can use the same tool to create your pages and then publish them.

KompoZer is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

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Glide is pretty close to an entire operating system's worth of applications and tools, available online. With nothing to download or install, just about anybody with a modern web browser can take advantage of its capabilities.

Along with email, instant messaging, and a calendar app, Glide also has tools for website creation, a presentation tool (like PowerPoint), a text editor, photo editor tool, and a bunch more. There are applications that support sharing media, whether it be photos, music, videos, or documents. There is also a spreadsheet app that runs in conjunction with the Glide Sync tool.

You can also use Glide's Sync tool synchronize files living on multiple machines. This tool must be downloaded and installed and requires Windows 2000 or later, or Mac OS X 10.4+, or Linux (kernel 2.6).

With Glide Mobile, you can harness the power of Glide through your web-enabled phone or PDA. The publishers recommend it as the perfect accompaniment for the iPhone.

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