I first got interested in computers when my brother and i got our first
machine, a mythical Spectrum 48k,
after convincing our parents that we needed it both to begin
learning computer science (a partially true but secondary reason) and for
playing computer games (the real reason). From here on we started
getting better computers until the PCs era nowadays.
However, I didn't make contact with the Unix world until I started
college in 1995, and with the Linux world until 1998 when doing my End
of Career Project. From there on, thanks to my experience at iAgora, i
was lucky to work on Linux for two and a half years, in which i got to
learn a lot from my colleagues and specially from
Roger Espel,
long-time Unix hacker who is the main responsible for my addiction to
some of the programs mentioned below (mutt, vim, fvwm2...). I swear
before that i used to be a normal person who used Netscape Mail, visual
editors and stuff like that :)
So, for whoever is interested here goes a list of my preferences in
the software world. As someone once put it, this kind of preferences are
more like religious beliefs rather than objective choices, so if you
happen to prefer Visual Basic, Gnome, or Emacs that's fine with me.
Operating systems: Linux
On the technical side: gorgeous stability, flexibility and
configurability. On the ideological side: it's Free Software and a
collaborative effort from milions of programmers around the world. About
distributions, i specially like SuSE,
being Red Hat the one i mostly use at work, and then Debian for servers.
Anyway i also have a second box at home where i install stuff like
FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Win2003 just to know them better, and keeping my
mind open to everything.
Mozilla's been my preferred browser for quite a long time, and specially
since it has became quite stable, blocks pop-up windows and has tabbed
browsing. Although i admit it can be darn slow in older boxes.
Editor: Vim
At the beginning I used to hate it, now i can't live without. A little
cryptic to learn, but once you get used to it you can do wonders, you
come to realize that text editing is way faster if you don't need to
constantly switch between keyboard and mouse.
Email client: Mutt
Mutt, a very customizable text-mode client which allows me to use
vim as the editor for writing messages :) I know it can seem strange
that i don't use a program with a graphical interface, it's hard to
explain but basically it gives me a lot more flexibility.
Modular and versatile, Apache is just great, I personally consider it
the royal crown of the open source movement. If you still need better
performance and flexibility, just add mod_perl to the mix.
Basically MySQL is the one i've used the most, and it always worked fine
for me. However, I've also used PostgreSQL as a more pure database,
and I'd like to work with bigger stuff such as Oracle some day.
Programming Language: Perl
Perl is wonderful, i can't live without it. I also use PHP quite a lot,
and i have the classic knowledge of C and Java. But Perl is the one that
gives me more flexibility, it lets me do almost anything.
Others
For window environments i use a very customized Fvwm2 at work, and the awesome KDE at home. Since i got a
Palm, i use J-Pilot to syncronize calendar and
address book, and the fantastic Sitescooper to collect news from my
favorite websites and read them on my Palm. From the same author who
wrote sitescooper, i found a neat application called WebMake which lets you create a
website from a bunch of well structured templates.
For systems administration, I must strongly recommend Nagios for network and systems monitoring, the venerable MRTG for gathering
traffic stats, OpenSSH for remote shell access and a lot more,
rsync for copying and
syncronizing big directory trees... The list would go on and on, but this are the
essential ones in my opinion.
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