mateo’s musings

I’m midway through my semi-annual wipe-the-computers-clean-and-start-fresh season, and I thought just for funsies I’d detail the list of programs that go on immediately after Windows.

1. Office (2010 in this case)
2. Antivirus (Sophos since these are work computers)
3. Firefox
   • Adblock Plus (duh)
   • Firebug (so I can pretend I know what to do with code)
   • Download Statusbar (should be integrated into FF by now)
   • Xmarks (synchronize all bookmarks, passwords, tabs)
   • IE Tab (for lame sites that require IE)
   • Mouse Gestures (rocker-gestures FTW)
4. Dropbox (synchronizes all my important files between all my computers)
5. FileZilla (I move a lot of files around)
6. Synergy (two computers, one keyboard, one mouse)
7. Putty (can’t live without SSH access)
8. Pidgin or Digsby (IM programs, depending on my mood and beefiness of the computer)
9. HeidiSQL (best free MySQL front-end GUI, period.)
10. MySQL ODBC Connector (so Excel can become even more useful)
11. Notepad++ (for syntax-highlightiness while hacking)

So there ya have it. What’s on your list of must-haves?

My awesome team at work got this onesie for Big G

Posted via email from mattmetzger’s posterous

Sent from my Windows® phone.

Posted via email from mattmetzger’s posterous

Posted via email from mattmetzger’s posterous

Posted via email from mattmetzger’s posterous

Posted via email from mattmetzger’s posterous

I recently had the very unpleasant experience of not being able to use my number keypad on the side of my keyboard, whether NumLock was turned on or off.  I’m currently running Ubuntu 9.10 and apparently I’m not the only one who ran into this problem.  I found the fix buried in a forum from a user called bluefrog.

Ctrl + Shift + NumLock

That’s all it took, and I was back in business.  I’m not entirely sure how I fat-fingered that in the first place to disable the keypad, but I’m sure glad to have it back.  Thanks, bluefrog!

I finally got a Google Wave invite, thanks to my cousin Joel Runyon, and one of the first things I want to do with it is collaborate on projects that involve code.

I went looking for a plugin that would make it nicer (syntax highlighting, etc) and first came across the KaSyntaxy bot, which was ok, but I was hoping for something a little more robust.

Enter the Code Snippet gadget (wave link <- you have to have Wave access to get to it).  It’s absolutely perfect.  Very simple to insert code in many languages, syntax highlighting, and the ability to lock the code so others can’t edit it.  Here’s a little sample of what it looks like inside GWave.