If you are not already using Mozilla FireFox, you should try it. It’s the most flexible web browser yet, and the first major competition that Microsoft Internet Explorer has had since NetScape. One of pleasures of FireFox is the large collection of free add-ons that are available. Many of the add-ons are high quality, and tremendously enhance FireFox’s functionality.

Since installing a lot of add-ons that run all the time can slow down FireFox, we have focused on a few choice FireFox add-ons that have a minimal impact on the total system performance. Some are useful to everyone, and others will be more useful to programmers and developers. [More…]

The Sun NetBeans 6 IDE is a free development environment for Java, but is available for cross platform C/C++ development as well. The NetBeans 6 download is about 12MB and unpacks to about 55MB. Sun recommends using Cygwin C/C++, GMake, and GDB debugger. With some additional effort MinGW can be used as an alternative compiler on Windows machines. Users that choose MinGW will need MSYS support. This document gives a brief overview of the installation process. For a detailed explanation visit the NetBeans and Cygwin web sites. [More…]

Learning to program C++ is not what I would call a simple task. Finding books that present the information at your level of comprehension is important. Beginners need a simple step-by-step presentation that an experienced programmer is likely to find boring. The collection of book listed below is oriented towards individuals with some existing experience and programming knowledge. The texts are considered to be among the best available, and will move you through the intermediate stages and into the advanced. [More…]

A Data Warehouse is a repository for historical business data. A data warehouse is used to consolidate large amounts transaction and operational data into a form that can be queried for analysis. Typically the data in a data warehouse has been cleansed and normalized in a process known as ETL (extract, transform, and load). The data is them organized by specific dimensions and stored in a Data Cube. Dimensions include time (day, month, year), geographic locale (country, region, state, city), and product type. [More…]

Data Mining is part of the Business Intelligence process. Data Mining is centered on the extraction and analysis of useful information from large data sets. Data mining uses an extensive collection of techniques and algorithms, including statistics and artificial intelligence approaches, and also pattern recognition and machine learning. [More…]