Philly Mac/Señor Internacional

This is a observation. I am a web/software developer. The other day I was watching the screencast of a conference in the states about some ruby on rails stuff. The thing that made me laugh is that when the camera panned to the audience, every single people there that had a laptop had a mac. And you could see the apple logo dimly glowing from the backs of each of the covers.

It is like this has become standard issue if you want to become a ruby on rails developer.

1. Buy a mac branded laptop

2. Install textmate because in the apple world ther is no other text editor out there

3. Sell your soul to the apple machine for life, because I guess it is sort of like the mafia, once you get in you can never get out. And the few that do have to go into the os protection program.

Me myself I don’t use macs. I am a Linux (more specifically Ubuntu www.ubuntu.com) user. And what a lot of people fail to realise is that all that fancy nonsense that you can do on osx canbe done on Linux, in fact the effects on Linux are a lot better and more fancy. All of that and it is free. But you know if people want to keep spending their hard earned cash on things because of ignorance, let them.

Oh, I forgot, Linux doesn’t have textmate. Ahh well I guess I better spend the £1200 or so to get a Mac machine because of that…

I think not.

Señor Internacional

Because I am someone that would like to have “no fixed abode”, I have decided to try and online everything that I would need to work and function in a ordinary manner. So here is a list of products that I use.

1. Zoho - Office applications like word processor, spreadsheet app, etc…

2. Remember The Milk - Task/ Todo list management

3. ADrive - 50GB of secure online storage. Better than carry around a usb stick if you know you are going to have an internet conection in my opinion.

4. Tuffmail - Email hosting provider. In my mind there is no other company out there that does as good a job as the Tuffmail. I have tried many, but most of them don’t come up to the mark. Tuffmail not only comes up to the mark, it passes that mark and leaves it so far behind that it looks like a dot in the distance.

5. Google Maps - Well, you got to know how to get to where you need to go. As well as search this is their best product. But apart from these two products I think that google products on the whole are crap and lack basic features. But I will save that rant for another post.

6. Bloglines - Simple and straight forward aggregate feed reader. I used to use Netvibes, but they have been Ajax’ed to death and they have started to move in the direction of facebook, and become a social network site. they should have just stuck to what they were good at. But again I will save that rant for another post.

Well I think those are the basics I need from day to day.

If you know anyother good ones then let me know.

Señor Internacional