Personal Information Infrastructure
Software that helps me get stuff done and the hardware I do it with.
Hardware
Hardware in use at home, network infrastructure, and stuff I carry with me.
- Vienna: My primary computer, a 15 inch MacBook Pro
- Budapest: Sarai’s MacBook Pro
- London: Our desktop computer/household server/utility machine/entertainment center, a 24 inch iMac
- Rome: an Apple Airport Extreme (802.11g) base station
- Berlin: a Cisco SOHO 91 router
- My personal space: a 20 GB third generation iPod and a black 16 GB iPhone 3G
- Travel: an unlocked Motorola RAZR V3 for overseas travel
- Two digital cameras: A Panasonic Lumix FX30 I carry wherever I go and a Canon Rebel XTi for nicer stuff
- Connectivity and services: Speakeasy DSL and a Linode VPS for web hosting.
Software
Communication
- Apple Mail
- iChat: I grudgingly use AIM but much prefer Jabber. Luckily, iChat does both.
Reading, Creating, Publishing
- FireFox
- NetNewsWire: An awesome RSS reader for OS X
- skEdit: I found skEdit by googling “dreamweaver replacement” and haven’t looked back since
- TextMate: A modern replacement for BBEdit or TextWranger, and a must-have for Ruby development
- Subversion: Version control for code, web sites, and just about anything else
- VMware Fusion: Making web sites means dealing with Windows, whether you want to or not. VMware Fusion lets me run Windows in a virtual machine on my Mac, as well as giving me an easy way to test Linux applications or configuration without experimenting on my live systems.
Operating Systems
- Mac OS X: My OS of choice for day-to-day use
- Ubuntu Linux: My server OS preference has changed from Debian to Ubuntu, which is basically Debian but more up-to-date
Web Applications
In addition to desktop software, I use a variety of web applications and services for day-to-day or more specialized stuff. Some of these are hosted services, some are applications I’ve installed and run myself.
- WordPress: Blogging application and lightweight CMS powering my personal web site (you are here)
- Backpack: Web-based personal organizer with notes, to-do lists, file storage, reminders, and a calendar
- Highrise: Contact manager for my consulting work
- Harvest and Blinksale: Time tracking and invoicing services, respectively. Required stuff for freelancers.
Windows
Because Windows is the only commonly-used OS that doesn’t include basics like an SSH client and a decent web browser, I like to keep a few things on a USB flash drive for those occasions I have to use it.
- PuTTY: A full SSH suite for Windows
- Portable Firefox: Good old Firefox, packaged to run from a single directory without having to be installed
- GNU utilities for Win32: A bunch of standard Unix command line tools ported to Windows
- MultipleIE: An easy way to get multiple versions of Internet Explorer running on a single Windows installation. Essential when making web sites.