- Operating systems: Debian Linux at home and Windows XP at work.
- Web browsers: Ice Weasel / Firefox
- Blogging tool: WordPress
- Media player: MPlayer
- Generic code / text editor: Eclipse Really good-looking, text-heavy documents such as thesis or technical documentation are just too difficult to be handled with Word or OpenOffice Writer. I use TexLive packages or docbook engines for visually demanding documents. Eclipse is a very good Tex / XML editor with some proper plugins. Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) is a great reporting tool. If the document is data-driven or has a lot of tables, I’d create it with Eclipse BIRT instead of Excel or Framemaker / InDesign / Quark. Think about it, even time tables for trains are in fact data reports.
- Bitmap editor: GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) I use it for most of my photo retouching tasks.
- Vector graphic editor: Inkscape My best-looking UML diagrams or technical illustrations are all created with Inkscape. When it comes to look and feel, I don’t know any UML tool that can beat Inkscape, not even Visio. Inkscape’s basically a drawing tool, you can make your UML elements graphically as fancy or sophisticated as you want to. And “look and feel” is very important. I hate to say it but sometimes it’s even more important than the content of the diagrams, especially when the targeted audience is not too deep into the details of your implementation ( for example, your manager’s manager who wants to know what you are programming all the time but does not have a lot of idea about programming ). And I also use Inkscape to mock up layout design of web pages or powerpoint slides. Another good usage is for drawing management artifacts such as Gant Diagram.
- Relational database management system: MySQL server and its GUI for administration and query browsing. It is sooooo good that I don’t need reason to love it.
But seriously, during my 7+ years life of programming, MySQL is the piece of software that brought up the least frustration. I’ve developed numerous layered web applications and the database layer powered by MySQL always needed least debugging effort. It works predictable, stable, and performant ( not like the JSF UI layer….). - Accounting tool: GNUCash I use it to manage my family finance. Really love the double-entry accounting feature.
- Desktop publishing tool (DTP): Scribus Sometimes I need to put together a brochure or flyer that has text as well as much graphics. In such case, Scribus is easier to use than Inkscape or TexLive.
- Collection management tool: Tellico I use it to manage our family book library. For book information such as publisher, author, price, ISBN….you don’t have to input it by hand, just type the book title ( or some keywords in the title ) in Tellico and it will fetch a list of matching books from various amazon sites. Choose the ones you own and you get a lot of additional information of the chosen book persisted in your personal library. So convenient, isn’t it?
Many thanks to the developers of these lovely software. You are my heros!
Hi,
I haven’t commented for a long time, but still read you every once in a while. Are you KDE or GNOME user ?
Cheers
Ian
Hi Ian,
thank you very much for your visits over the years. Friends like you is what keeps me writing here. Thanks!
I’m GNOME user. But it does not really matter. Since you can always install and use KDE-rooted programs under GNOME or you can always install and use GNOME-rooted programs under KDE. Important thing is, you must have a good package manager in your Linux distro. Debian’s apt-get and its graphic front end Synaptic do the job really well. With the help of apt-get and Synaptic, I’ve never had any headache with the dependency of packages.
Cheers,
Ellen
Hi Ellen,
Well, you not just answered my question, but gave me a short lesson about package managers
. Would you believe that not long ago I read comments from people who said they dual boot 2 linux installations, one for KDE and one for GNOME, so they don’t mix packages ?!!!???
.
I promise I’m not making it up
Question: Any suggestion for writing flow diagrams ?
Have a wonderful week.
Ian
Just stumbled upon your blog, my compliments, there’s some interesting articles
@Ian: you could give Kivio or Dia a try for creating flowcharts, or of course InkScape as Ellen suggested.
@Ian:
Under most circumstances it’s no problem to mix KDE and GNOME packages within one Linux installation. I do that on my Debian box. Tellico is a KDE rooted program but runs perfectly under my GNOME. And I see no point to have both installed. After all it’s just a desktop environment. You can run one more layer upon a desktop environment, for example Compiz:
http://www.compiz-fusion.org/
on GNOME or KDE, with that you can get somewhat unified look and feel for both desktop system. Save your hardware resource and just install one graphic desktop!
For flow diagrams, it depends on your audience. If the appearance of the diagram is not that important to him, I’d recommend just using Dia:
http://live.gnome.org/Dia
You can already set some background colour, font colour and font with Dia. You can save the diagram in svg format. If more cosmetic work could impress your audience much better, then open the svg file with InkScape and dress it up with stuff such as gradient, reflection, glossy surface, soft shadow, etc. etc. Before you do the art work, do a research on the taste of your particular audience. Some like glossy look some like matt cloth texture, some don’t like cosmetics for such diagram. Just feed your audience with their favourite style ( not your favourite style! ) and your ideas and code will sell best. In most cases this is really an overkill, I admit.
@Lammert,
Thank you for your compliments! I’m a very lazy person, if there’s no compliments like yours generously dropped here once in a while, there wouldn’t be any motivation to keep me going. Thank you!
Ellen