Apps apps apps
I haven’t posted in forever. I know. I will start up again soon. But I just looked down and thought, hmm, this is kind of interesting and says something about my workflow… how many and what windows (applications) I have open. I’m currently working on the tail end of a lot of changes to prince.org 3.0, and thought it’s interesting. Here’s what’s currently open:
- Firebird (of course). A couple windows. One to work on the code for a popup, the other is the “main” one with right now, 7 tabs open (about average). The tabs are for: (1) another page I’m working on, (2) the live version of the site for comparison (3) mysqladmin on localhost (4) paypal IPN documentation, (5) google, (6) a page on mailman archives [I'm sending admin mails from the site to a qmail virtual domain to a mailman private list... oh, don't ask...] and (7) typepad.
- A couple folder windows (to the source base dir, and to the icons dir as I was tweaking some graphics with ImageReady earlier.)
- OpenOffice Writer, which has some moderation guidelines I’ve been hacking on, and list of new mods for the site.
- Cygwin bash (rxvt window). For grepping the source, running scripts, quick cvs stuff, etc.
- Cygwin bash (standard console shell). This is essentially my permanent “mysql client shell”. I would use the rxvt window for this (it’s much nicer) but the mysql client for windows does something strange to the std file descriptors and thus, gives no output in rxvt. So… the ugly console suffices.
- iTunes, for obvious reasons. Last played was Ani DiFranco ‘Little Plastic Castle’ and Paris’ new release of ‘Guerrilla Funk’. In case you’re curious, I have 7,738 songs (23days worth), according to the status line.
- Komodo, editing source files. I have 13 tabs (files) open in that. I have to close it at least once a day, it leaks 
- EditPlus. Oh, I can close that now I guess. It’s my “old trusty, el quicko” editor. I was using it on a file that I needed to do regexp search-and-replace on. Komodo seems to be lacking that
- Microsoft Virtual PC. Inside that, I’ve got a Win98 installation running IE 5.5. It’s for testing the CSS/DHTML stuff on an older browser. I don’t support anything below IE 5.5, and can test on XP IE6 and Firebird on the main environment. Only other thing I test on is a Mac browser, but that’s the machine next to me.
- Thunderbird. For e-mail of course, and a bunch of the code I’m working on today is relating to sending emails to moderators, etc…
- SecureCRT. Connected to the live machine, comparing some things in the database, etc. I prefer to do that within a completely different session and app (I could do it in a cygwin shell), because once I did that and forgot which database I was modifying and… bad things happened.
- Trillian. But it’s just doing its thing. I’m immersed in coding so I turned its sounds off, and I am only paying attention when someone from my ‘family’ group, my mom or grandparents, come online.
- At the moment I don’t have the PHP Winhelp reference opened, but I often fire it up for a minute, look something up, and kill it. It’s the fastest way to get an answer (for example, the format codes for date()…), often way faster than going to php.net/<query>.
Plenty of other stuff running, but that’s what’s actually open and getting interaction. I remember thinking when I built this machine “hey, 512M RAM will be more than enough!”. Riiiight. If I fire up PhotoShop, it goes into swap…
Anyhow, I though that was vaguely interesting. How different is your setup? I’m actually a little surprised at how much “free software” I heavily depend on; and even the commercial packages are pretty inexpensive. The Adobe stuff is the only really expensive thing, and I could probably get away with a cheaper alternative, but I own it, so I’m gonna use it. I’ll probably wean myself off SecureCRT when I next need to upgrade and pay, which seems to happen every 2-3 years with them. The rxvt shell is a decent enough ssh client.