The last grand cycling tour of the year, La Vuelta ‘09, has started today with a 4km individual time trial at Assen (Netherlands). This is the most international edition of the Spanish tour as it passes through three countries: Netherlands, Belgium and of course Spain. The last year winner and recent Tour De France ‘09 winner, Alberto Contador does not participate to this edition. This will allow other cyclists to fight for the first place this year.

As a software developer I use file comparison tools almost on daily basis. My favorite file comparison tool , in fact the only one I use, is Araxis Merge. You can compare files and directories with ease, have three way visual comparison, ignore different patterns of your choice (predefined like: code comments, cvs comments, … or custom expressed by regular expressions of your choice) and much more.

Sometimes I need to connect to a remote location using SFTP, FTP or SCP protocols. The best tool for this job is of course WinSCP and I think many of you are already using it. Once I am connected sometimes I need to compare a local file with the remote file. WinSCP offers a default comparison application, but if you are used with Araxis Merge you just can’t accept anything less.

For that reason, I will show you how to configure WinSCP to use Araxis Merge instead of its internal tool. Open menu Options->Preferences. At the left side you will find Commands sections. Within this section, on the right side, there is an entry that should look like that:

File Compare cmd /c fc “!” “!^!” | more &&…

How great is this ? Usually, to change the diff tool used within the current application would require just a browse operation. As you can see, here is more complicated. I can explain what that line means, maybe some of you already knows, but for those of you who don’t know and want to change the default diff tool here is how you do it.

Double click on File Compare option and replace the Custom Command text with: “C:\Program Files\Araxis\Araxis Merge v6.5\Merge.exe” “!^!” “!”

Here is a short explanation of the above line:

- the first part is the path to Araxis Merge executable file

- the second part represents the command line parameters for Araxis : “!^!” is the local file given by WinSCP and “!” is the remote file. So this means Araxis will always open with local file in the left side and remote file on the right side. You can change the order depending on your style.
I hope this was useful for everybody as it is for me. Enjoy using Araxis with WinSCP.

ATI HD4850 is part of the Radeon HD 4k graphic cards family and it features the RV770 Pro GPU which is a 965 milions transistors chip build on 55nm technology. The default clock speeds are 625 MHz for the GPU and 1,986 MHz for the memory (DDR3).

GeForce GTS 250 is actually a rebranded 9800 GTX which was an overclocked 8800 GTS. So it features a slightly revisioned version of the G92 GPU present in the 8800 series. The new G92b is a 754 milions transistors chip build on 55nm technology. The default clock speeds are 738 MHz on the GPU, 1,836 MHz on the shaders, and 2,200 MHz on the memory (DDR3). However it is now a more mature chip now and the power consumption and temperature have improved compared with the 9800 GTX.