multiple channels, private messaging and channels, invitation system, banning offending users, online users, emoticons, optional Flash sound support, clickable hyperlinks, enable/ disable guest users, possibility to define opening hours for the chat, IRC style commands, flood control, automatic adjustment of displayed time to local client timezone, easy layout customization through stylesheets (CSS) and template system, persistent client-side settings, message character counter, sample phpBB2, phpBB3, MyBB, PunBB, SMF, vBulletin integration provided, realtime monitoring and logs viewer, support for unicode (UTF-8) and non-unicode content types, bandwidth saving update calls (only updated data is sent), well commented Source Code and much more.

Developed with Security as integral part, AJAX Chat is built to prevent Code injections, SQL injections, Cross-site scripting (XSS), Session stealing and other attacks.

AJAX Chat is released free of charge under the GNU Affero General Public License.

For specific programming problems, software algorithm, software tools commonly used by programmers and matters that are unique to the programming profession, visit StackOverflow.com.

If you have questions about servers, networks, ‘many’ desktop PCs (other than your own), visit ServerFault.com.

If you’re a web designer and you have questions about anything related to web and e-mail design, visit Doctype.com.

With all of these sites, if you have a specific question, it may save you a lot of time if you search first to see if your question has already been answered. Logging in is not required with any of these sites, but with registration you get to offer points to have your questions answered more quickly. These websites are collaboratively edited (like wikipedia), but all edits are tracked.

GIMP also offers various input devices out of the box, like pressure and tilt sensitive tablets, but also a wide range of USB or MIDI controllers. The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend GIMP’s format capabilities with a plug-in.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

Features are:

* Painting
o Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
o Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
o Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
o Supports custom brushes and patterns
* System
o Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
o Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
* Advanced Manipulation
o Full alpha channel support
o Layers and channels
o Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
o Editable text layers
o Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
o Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
o Foreground extraction tool
o Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
o Transformable paths, transformable selections.
o Quickmask to paint a selection.
* Extensible
o A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
o Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
o Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
o Over 100 plug-ins already available
* Animation
o Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
o MNG support
o Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
* File Handling
o File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
o Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
o SVG path import/export

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Download GnuCash here.

The interface is simple, but the software offers everything you’d expect from financial accounting software, like the ability to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. The site itself has in-depth tutorials and also glossaries for software and financial terms.

Features include:

* QIF/OFX/HBCI Import, Transaction Matching
* Reports, Graphs
* Scheduled Transactions
* Financial Calculations

* Double-Entry Accounting
* Stock/Bond/Mutual Fund Accounts
* Small-Business Accounting
* Customers, Vendors, Jobs,
Invoices, A/P, A/R

Let’s be realistic: the only way to not be tracked in any way online is to not go on online at all. Actually, you’d better leave your computer turned off, because many applications and programs on your computer automatically check for software updates and also track and record meta data.

Tor is free software and an open network that claims to help you defend against a form of network surveillance that “threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships. It prevents your traffic from being analyzed by distributing your transactions over several places on the internet, so no single point can link you to your destination.” One of the ways Tor works is by sending your e-mails through several relays, so it’s impossible to find out where the e-mail originated and where it was meant to end up. Maybe not every ISP uses traffic monitoring services – do you know if yours does? Even if you think it doesn’t, it’s a good idea to never search for your social security number and name, or passwords with any personal info.

More free security privacy resources…

Techsoup.org offers all kinds of hardware, software, security products, hosted applications, credit card processing etc. Products on Techsoup are donated, or refurbished and are ‘provided by corporate and nonprofit technology partners.’ For example, we’ve recently spotted Norton Internet Security 2009 (CD) for $15, or Office Professional Plus 2007 (Includes Software Assurance) for $20. Not free, but a great deal!

“Think of it like forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you’re not satisfied with.” The “blog posts” are generated by visitors through suggestions, comments and votes.