mateo's musings » matt

Must-Have Windows Programs

matt — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:24:20 +0000

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.

Office (2010 in this case)
Antivirus (Sophos since these are work computers)
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)
Dropbox (synchronizes all my important files between all my computers)
FileZilla (I move a lot of files around)
Synergy (two computers, one keyboard, one mouse)
Putty (can’t live without SSH access)
Pidgin or Digsby (IM programs, depending on my mood and beefiness of the computer)
HeidiSQL (best free MySQL front-end GUI, period.)
MySQL ODBC Connector (so Excel can become even more useful)
Notepad++ (for syntax-highlightiness while hacking)

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

Chillin with a sleeping g-dawg while cora flits in and out of the dressing room

matt — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:49:14 +0000

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Kroger fail

matt — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:15:04 +0000

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Wear it loud and proud, baby!

matt — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:35:02 +0000

My awesome team at work got this onesie for Big G

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If anyone is sitting at my desk at work, this is what they see me working on right now (but I’m not there)(bwahaha)

matt — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:51:58 +0000

Sent from my Windows® phone.

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I figure at this rate, she’ll be ready to babysit by next week

matt — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:48:10 +0000

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Beeson telling us about the three hats the devil wears. Classic!

matt — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:12:47 +0000

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Look what @DanaMetzger found in a drawer!

matt — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:53:45 +0000

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NumLock broken in Ubuntu

matt — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:55:37 +0000

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!

Code Collaboration in Google Wave

matt — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:14:45 +0000

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.