updates @ m.blog

Some other weblogs I read have been making these lists lately, so I’ll throw my own recommendations into the mix. Here are some “useful tools”:

• LaTeX: For most serious writers, scientific or otherwise, LaTeX is a no-brainer. Moving away from the word processor into a tool actually designed for writing is liberating. Combine it with BibTeX and you have an incredibly powerful tool for references and academic publication. Sure, you might want to keep a copy of OpenOffice or Word around for something like writing a letter to your mother, but for publication quality work involving references, footnotes, and figures; LaTeX can’t be beat. For a good introduction to LaTeX I’d recommend “The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX.”

• GNU textutils: If run a *nix variant (including MacOSX) you already have these. If you run Windows, and work with text files often, download them immediately¹. Utilities like these coupled with the power of pipes basically let you get answers to many esoteric questions quickly.

• Perl: Technically a programming language, not a tool, but most people use it more like the latter. Learn enough Perl to be able to write one-liners for your shell scripts.

• WWW::Mechanize: Making the task of screen-scraping trivial in Perl.

• Python: For data exploration or rapid prototyping, Python rocks. The interactive interpreter basically makes Python the world’s most sophisticated desktop calculator. Highly recommended for programmers or even for someone learning their first programming language.

• Firefox + Web Developers Extension: Even if you’re not a web developer (I’m certainly not), this extension comes in handy for those of us who are hackers at heart. Many of the tools are useful for quick reverse engineering of a web page to see how something was done.

• Firefox + Adblock extension: Oh hey, I can read websites again!

• tdl: Command-line todo list manager. Definitely not for everyone. For some of us, having a command line based todo list that can be specific to the current directory is incredibly useful.

• cowsay: Debian Weekly News calls cowsay “an absolutely vital program for turning text into happy ASCII cows”.

• Tool that is going to be incredibly useful but aren’t really “out” yet: Dashboard and similar software will change the way we use personal computers. Implicit query is the future of interface design.

• Tools I don’t have but I wish I did: A good TV listings website and/or program. A calendar/scheduling program that stores all my information on the server (similar to email with IMAP) in an elegant fashion, so I can have access and edit it from any computer². A Gnome native version of something like Kile or WinEdt. Know of these? Let me know.

¹ To get useful command line tools in a Win32 environment, either get Cygwin or unxutils.

² I know about programs that will export to iCal feeds, but I’m talking about something that will use networked storage for its native format, not just export.