So why do programmers respond differently to usability suggestions than to more technical bug reports?

4. 
   

   Usability is hard to measure. Some qualities of software are easily and precisely measured: whether it runs at all, how fast it starts, how fast it runs, and whether it is technically correct.

But these are only partial substitutes for more important qualities that are harder to measure: whether the software is useful, how responsive it feels, whether it behaves as people expect, what proportion of people succeed in using it, how quickly they can use it, and how satisfied they are when they’re finished.

• Google Docs: With this program from Google you can take notes online, save them, and even send them to your peers for collaboration.

If you are a supporter of the free software movement, you can easily opt for Gimp instead of Photoshop, or Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. You can also protect the privacy of your data by using the many encryption tools that are available (GPG, TrueCrypt, …).
But when it comes to web applications things get complicated.

The benefits of web apps (ubiquitous access, seamless upgrades, reliable storage, …) are many, but quite often users lose their freedom to study, modify and discuss the source code that powers those web apps.

Furthermore, we are forced to trust web applications provider with our data (bookmarks, text documents, chat transcripts, financial info, … and now health records) that no longer resides on our hard disks, but are stored somewhere “in the cloud”.

It’s not a nice situation when you have to chose between convenience and freedom.

1. Choose AGPL

Why is AGPL important? Because it means that, if you are an application service provider and your services are based on software
with an AGPL license, you have to make the source code available to
anyone that uses the service

dstat

Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat, nfsstat and ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of their limitations and adds some extra features, more counters and flexibility. Dstat is handy for monitoring systems during performance tuning tests, benchmarks or troubleshooting.

Current Stable Version :- 0.6.4

Project Home Page :- http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dstat/

iftop

iftop does for network usage what top does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts. Handy for answering the question “why is our ADSL link so slow”.

Current Stable Version :- 0.17

Project Home Page :- http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/iftop/

MRTG

The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network links. MRTG generates HTML pages containing PNG images which provide a LIVE visual representation of this traffic.

Current Stable Version :- 2.15.1

Project Home Page :- http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

moodss

moodss is a graphical monitoring application. It is modular so that the code accessing the monitored objects is completely separate from the application core. The core takes care of managing modules (loading and unloading),displaying modules data through sortable tables and diverse graphical viewers, handling user set threshold conditions with email alerts, recording and browsing data history from a database.moodss can even predict the future, using sophisticated statistical methods and artificial neural networks, and therefore be used for capacity planning.

Current Stable Version :- 21.5

Project Home Page :- http://moodss.sourceforge.net/

netspeed

Netspeed is just a little GNOME-applet that shows how much traffic occurs on a specified network device (for example eth0). You get the best impression of it, if you look at the screenshots below.

Current Stable Version :- 0.14

Project Home Page :- http://www.wh-hms.uni-ulm.de/~mfcn/netspeed/

tcpflow

tcpflow is a program that captures data transmitted as part of TCP connections (flows), and stores the data in a way

that is convenient for protocol analysis or debugging. A program like tcpdump shows a summary of packets seen on the

wire, but usually doesn’t store the data that’s actually being transmitted. In contrast, tcpflow reconstructs the actual data streams and stores each flow in a separate file for later analysis. tcpflow understands TCP sequence numbers and will correctly reconstruct data streams regardless of retransmissions or out-of-order delivery.

Current Stable Version :- 0.21

Project Home Page :- http://www.circlemud.org/~jelson/software/tcpflow/

Pimp your Amarok: 13 Scripts You Should Know About

Building a highly functional desktop with lightweight software