w.oods.name

I am a little late to the bandwagon (1 2 3), but I have a good excuse. I recently purchased a house, so my tools have been carbide scrapers, paintbrushes, hammers, cordless drills, and wire cutters. But I was asked to share my computer tools.

For hardware I use a iBook G4 as my primary machine. When not surfing from the couch it is tethered to two LaCie D2 firewire drives, one for backup and one for extra storage. I also have a sony VIAO laptop running FC6 and Windows XP. I’ll be rebuilding it soon with whatever the newest Ubuntu beta is when I get around to it and Windows XP. I also have a Mac 10.4 server usually in the off position and and Dell that is constantly switching operating systems. I’m playing with Ubuntu 6.10 desktop right now, and I am impressed with the gui, but I have a hardtime leaving my laptop and going over the the box and really using it. I’d drop Windows in a heart beat if I didn’t need to provide tech support for ColorMetrix products.

For applications I’ll turn to my dock, which is arranged left to right in a sort of hierarchy of use. First is Mail.app, the only reason I use it is because Eudora stopped progressing the mac version of their excellent email app, and Thunderbird is slow on a Mac. I am keeping an eye on Correo as an alternative email application.

After the email apps are all my web-browsers. Camino beta, Safari, and Firefox. Camino is an excellent mac alternative build to Firefox, it is much quicker and more responsive, but it does lack all the cool extensions Firefox offers. Safari is there as the default browser mostly for testing websites.

For chat I go with Adium Beta. Adium recently hit it’s 1.0 mark and it is hands down the best chat application I have ever used. It support multiple protocols and multiple accounts. It is customizable and free.

Then comes NetNewsWire an excellent RSS and ATOM reader for the Mac. I do not know how people would stay up-to-date on websites and wikis without a feed reader. I use MarsEdit for posting to blogs and editing blogs.

For file transfer I use Transmit primarily. I also use Interarchy to access my Amazon S3 files. For other file transfer I use scp and rsync.

For text editing I use BBEdit and TextEdit. I avoid using Microsoft Word if possible, and for graphics I have the Adobe CS2 suite. Are there good alternatives to either of these?

Address book and iCal both occupy a full time slot in my dock. Both seem to be open and running all the time, but they don’t get used to much. iTunes is an obvious spot in the dock too, there are some days I wish I had an alternative to it, but overall it gets the job done.

For backup I use SuperDuper! this application makes a boot-able clone of my harddrive and an archive of all my old files onto two partitions of a LaCie drive.

Keychain access is used to manage my passwords. Who remembers passwords these days. For passwords I don’t trust to the keychain I encrypt them in a PGP disk image.

For shell access to my servers I use Terminal. I tried iTerm, but it kept constantly crashing, so I gave up. The idea of tabbed terminal sessions sounds nice.

For servers I use Dreamhost, as a quick and easy way to set up domains and mail for friends. It is slowing turning into a file dump location as it offers rsync and huge amount of storage and bandwidth for a low cost. I am moving towards using Virtual Private Servers, and I am currently using Slicehost and VPSLink. Both have proven very reliable and speedy in the last few months I have been using them.

There is so much more I could go into, but I think Adam Dewitz has a very similar opinion to Mac applications as I do. Make sure you read his list of tools as well

I just downloaded the AOL ’s release of the search queries for a half million users from the mirrors and I wanted to see if any of the sites I maintain are listed in it. So then I went to the command line and tried grep. I am big newbie to grep, so I had to read the man file.

From what I figured these work. There may be better solutions.

in it’s simplest: replace pattern with the word you are looking for, and file with the file name you want to grep. It then creates a file in your current directory called resultfile.txt.
grep -i pattern file > resultfile.txt

to search for lines that contain multiple words: (repeat the “| grep pattern” for each word)
grep -i pattern1 file | grep pattern2 > resultfile.txt

to search for lines that have pattern1 and exclude lines that have pattern2
grep -i pattern1 file | grep -v pattern2 > resultfile.txt

Maybe you know grep better, but I thought this would be a fun topic for you to try. Let me know what you find and if you have any better ways to grep thru this data.