yowkee essential

It isn’t easy when one has promised himself that he got to blog at least once a day. Most of the time, waking up early and sit in front of my laptop — brain isn’t juicy. At night, a tiring body (after full day working) is trying to get its control center into one ship. So I stare at computer monitor, only feel blank.

The intuitive blog experience often comes when I am going to blog about me, me and me. It’s always the easiest thing to talk about yourself since you are the one most familiar with it. Ok, let’s go with it this round.

10 seem to be the magic eye-catching number, many people use to blog about 10 best movies, 10 best novels, 10 best applications.….all the 10-things stuff, and especially during the year end. We are approaching 2006 now, so I’d just follow the main stream, but as I am no any authority, I’d only talk about my favourite Open Source Windows application (well, for 2005 I guess).

These are the 10 most frequently used Open Source Windows applications of mine. I have them open daily in my desktop at least over a year now:

1. Firefox: No doubt, as the other millions users, Firefox is my main web browser. IE would be only occasionally used when there’s testing need to be done. Somehow I didn’t have the need to go to any IE-only websites.
2. Vim: Yes, to me, Vim is the most powerful text editor in the world. For office document usage, I am still using Microsoft Office as I don’t treat OpenOffice as an better alternative. But many times I’d draft my words in Vim first before I copy-n-paste to Word. Yeah, I am vi guy, so please don’t come to telling me how good Emacs is, and I could truly understand how you feel about UltraEdit in Windows and BBEdit in Mac. Vi is just the perfect match for me. The only disadvantage is when I got to use other editor like Word or even the editor in Visual Studio or Eclipse, my left hand is typing Escape key unconsciously. :(
3. putty: This is a tool one couldn’t live without if his/her main works are performed in a Unix environment and his/her desktop is a Windows machine! The best ssh and telnet clients in Windows world.
4. Thunderbird: hmm…I knew Thunderbird isn’t the best choice out there. But it’s the best alternative than Outlook which I could get in Windows world. It performs the job well, and more importantly, the improvement is progressing, non-stop.
5. GTD TiddyWiki and Instiki: GTD TiddyWiki is a single HTML page for all your personal recording/notes need, it’s a well implemented single page Wiki and designed to adapt David Allen’s Getting Things Done style. It serve some of my need since I could put this single file in a USB flash drive, bring along it any place. And at desktop Instiki could be the simplest ever Wiki installation — all you have to do is the grab the Ruby Windows installer, install Ruby, get the instiki zip, un-compress it and run “ruby instiki.rb”. Then point your browser to http://localhost:2500 and you have a Wiki well setup. Again, this is good for personal info management although it doesn’t sounds that obvious for Windows environment.
6. Filezilla: Filezilla is my choice of FTP/SFTP client on Windows. It has the speed transfering with multiple connections running simultenously. I choose it mainly because it’s Open Source.
7. 7-zip: Ok 7-zip, if you have never heard about 7-zip, then most probably you are using Winzip and still not paying for it. I don’t know how widely of its supported compression format, not sure if it’s more than Winzip. Because ever since I’ve started using it, there’s no turning back.
8. Media Classic Player: for multimedia entertainment, get rid of bloated and heavy Windows media player, use the light weight media classic player (it’d surprise you if you are using a Pentium III level PC). I use the alternative real and quicktime with it too.
9. Eclipse and GCC: I am still speaking C or C++ or gcc is every where for me (Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X...etc). I have to admit I didn’t use Eclipse that much (instead, use Vim). It’s still the best and keep improving IDE.
10. cvs: May be it should be the time to switch to subversion. CVS is the version control system good for your any plain text files — yeah I do try the best keeping everything in text files.

Vim, putty, Eclipse/gcc or cvs are probably too geeky stuff, but others are pretty a choice even for novice users. Give it a try and you won’t be regret.