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Woken up by congested daughter at 4am. Eldest daughter sick, stays home and remains home until “fever free for 24 hours without aid of fever reducing medications” (tomorrow at least). Sprint review for Iteration 0 and planning for Iteration 1. Long day.

Mike started this off (this year, anyway) and it seems everyone else is doing this (and I’ve got time to kill while my wife finishes Hell’s Kitchen) so why not me?

The Machines

15″ unibody mac book pro, 4GB RAM, and a 120GB solid state drive. Really fast when I don’t have it connected to a bunch of slow external USB HDD.

My beast; quad core, 12GB RAM, 300M Velociraptor main disk, a few TB support disks and 4 SyncMaster 2443BWT LCDs. They’re gorgeous, probably not as pretty as a cinema display, but as pretty or prettier than the Ultrasharp Dell’s that I’ve been happy with for years now.

ScanSnap S510M – this and EagleFiler and Hazel keep me mostly paperless. Though for some clients I have to print, sign, scan just to email a signed copy back to them. I’m still looking for the secret sauce that lets me scan documents in batches, and ferries the scanned images off to be OCR’d, then dropped into the EagleFiler import folder. Currently it’s a blocking operation for each document while the OCR happens. I tried DevonThink for this but it’s just a bit too heavyweight for me.

Software

• OS X 10.5 – I haven’t taken the leap to Snow Leopard yet. It’s still sitting in the shrinkwrap, I’m waiting to finish editing all the video for BDDCasts first.
• TextMate – I actually bought my first mac, a 17″ mac book pro off craigslist just so I could run TextMate. Yeah, I know, but I’m not the only one that’s done this. I use a bunch of bundles; HAML, SASS, Cucumber, Rspec, Git are probably the most important.
• Colloquy – Pretty good IRC client on the mac. I’ve tried Linkinus and Limechat but for whatever reasons (mostly ignoring part/joins in busy channels) I keep coming back to colloquy.
• Mail.app – It’s doing alright, though less so these days. I have it checking half a dozen gmail accounts over IMAP, one with messages back as far as 2004. I’m actually seeing the ghosted image of deleted messages as it redraws the display. I’ve tried mailplane and postbox. Postbox could be a nice alternative but lacks some core integration not being a cocoa app and shows me the spinning beach ball of death all the time.
• Terminal.app – It works. I have iTerm and used to use it all the time, but I’ve fallen back into terminal and I don’t feel a need to look elsewhere.
• NetNewsWire – I paid for this to get rid of the ads once they started using Google Reader as their synchronization service. RSS readers suffer the same plight as IRC clients, imo, and this one sucks least of all. Gruml looked interesting but few can handle importing my OPML.
• Screenflow – We recorded a bunch of video for BDDCasts and did it all with Screenflow. I’m hoping 2.0 addresses some annoyances I have with this version (can’t split a recording into multiple screenflow projects, can’t export just audio — I know this one is addressed, are the big ones).
• Audacity – Great open source sound editor and recorder. I’ll use it to quickly record intros for BDDCasts and almost all of my sound editing happens here. I’m hoping with the next set of video we record I actually do things the right way so I don’t have to spend 2-3x the production length cleaning up the audio.
• Adium – All in one chat client, what else is there to say? I don’t use IRC or Twitter integration, I leave it to the other, more traditional, chat protocols.
• Tweetie, nambu and seesmic desktop – I spend a fair amount of time jumping between these 3 twitter clients. I don’t want to do twitter on the web, or use an Adobe Air client, so I cycle between these hoping one of them wins. I love Tweetie’s conversation view, seesmic column shifting, nambu’s column stuff — nope, they took that out in the new betas. I’d like to see follow messages in Tweetie and be able to interact with them there. I can tear off searches, so that gets me close to multiple columns. I’m hoping some really cool stuff starts trickling down to the mac version since they’ve made big changes on their iphone app.
• Things and Omnifocus – I keep hoping one of these will make me more productive, but they aren’t. I could probably spend some time to figure out how to integrate them into my workflow, but then I’d have to figure out a workflow.
• Launchbar – my app launcher of choice. QuickSilver got dropped from this role a while back after losing my index every few days. The recent development on QS seems to have stopped that but I don’t have a reason to leave Launchbar.
• VisualHub – It’s unfortunate that this project has been abandoned because it’s a damn fine piece of software. It does one thing amazingly well: transcodes video in all sorts of formats. This is the last step in my BDDCasts production line, I only wish I could queue up all three or four formats and just let it crank away.
• Skype – for skype.
• GitX – for perttier git history.
• 1Password and Dropbox – Probably the best pair of apps I use, keeps me sane in the online world.
• Blogo – to write my posts, this is much better than anything else currently available for offline blog posting on the mac.
• Balsamiq Mockups – Useful to communicate design ideas across remote pairs. I might sketch and scan if I could sketch, but I can’t.

Firefox

- last, but certainly not least, probably spend most of my time online in this browser. I have no interest in Chrome at the moment and Safari can’t do what I do in Firefox (and if it can, I don’t know how). I use a bunch of extensions:

• 1Password – for passwords and form filling wizardy
• Adblock Plus – we don’t like ads, well, I don’t anyway
• Clear Private Data… + – everyone is paranoid, right?
• CLEO – easy way to get all your extensions from one firefox to another
• ColorZilla – easy color picker in a space where I often need it
• Cooliris – shiny, not incredibly useful, but pretty image browser
• CustomizeGoogle – make searching better
• Delicious Bookmarks – without delicious what would I be?
• DownThemAll! – fast downloads, incredibly useful when trying to scrape a page full of coloring pages for your young children
• Evernote Web Clipper – when I thought Evernote was cool
• Fast Dial – cool little start page for firefox, like safari’s new popular sites intro
• FEBE 6.2 – this + CLEO and I can set up a new instance of firefox pretty much how I like it in a lot less time than normal
• Firebug
• Firecookie
• GoogleEnhancer
• Googlepedia
• Greasemonkey
• InfoLister – so I don’t have to do this by hand
• is.gd Creator – tiny url’s FTW
• LeechBlock – when I try to exercise some self control and get things done
• Nightly Tester Tools
• NoScript
• QuickDrag – like super drag & go ++. Probably one of my favorite extensions. Grab a bit of text and drag it. If it’s a URL it will open it in a new tab, text gets searched in google, etc. Just awesome.
• Screengrab
• StumbleUpon
• Taboo – I suffer the many tab affliction of most folks, this helps
• Tamper Data
• Ubiquity – cool, but not really integrated into my workflow yet
• Web Developer
• XPath Checker – if you’ve written a web scraper, you need to use this
• YSlow – why not?

Hosting
I really need to consolidate a few of these.
Linode – One of the original slice hosts in the rails space, I switched to them from Slicehost after the 2008 Rails Rumble.
Webbynode – We were going to use these folks for all of BDDCasts but ended up just using them to host the Brandizzle demo. It was going to be a cool little segment on deploying early and often, but we got stuck on the often part. They have a cool github story in the beginning but after that first deployment life is pretty horrible. Easier to just have cap set up to do what you need to do.
Rimuhosting – Recommended to me by Mike Gunderloy and we’ve had no problems with them. We currently host the main BDDCasts site with them. They’re supposed to have amazing customer service, but we haven’t needed to find out, thankfully.
Prgmr – I’m really hoping to keep this my little secret, cheap and stable slice with the personal attention of the owner. Right now I have all my development resources there, gitolite, redmine and whatever sites I need to stage. I’ll probably consolidate Webbynode or Linode (or both) here soon.
GoDaddy for domain registrations, mostly because they’re cheap and I haven’t found a decent place to move all my domains to yet.
EveryDNS – for my DNS management. They’re free, really free unlike zone-edit. I should probably pay for DNS Hosting but they’ve been awesome and only have had one blip in service in however many years I’ve used them. Having said that, they are donation supported, and definitely deserving.

The downside
These type posts bring out the voyeur in me and my tabs grow exponentially checking out all the cool gadgets everyone else is using.