Straw Dogs

First and foremost I'm a pragmatist so the list below is constantly changing but its always worth giving credit where its due. Some of these products seem to illicit and almost religious fanaticism - not so here. Except maybe for the Dreamcast!

Firefox

I've used so many browsers its silly. It got to a point of obsession when I started reading through lists on Wikipedia trying out test and standards development browsers to see if I was missing anything. Ultimately I keep coming back to Firefox. It has its downsides (as of version 2) such as speed, memory leaks, etc. However, nothing comes close to Firefox's expandability. There's extensions for every conceivable task and for developers its indispensable: Firebug, Web Dev Toolbar, MeasureIt, Colorzilla, etc. Firefox 3 looks set to make huge improvements to speed and so far (beta 3) its looking very promising.

Vim

I'm by no means an expert as its notoriously difficult to learn. I still love this text editor - after wrestling relentlessly with it for the past 2yrs it feels like I'm breaking into 'usable' status! Every use teaches something new, some fancy way of handling a task which saves huge amounts of time. I was drawn to using it initially as it was the default on so many of the web servers I'd worked on as it comes installed as standard.

I've tried Emacs but had little joy with it. The amount of configuration I needed to do simply to get it respectable was a huge turn off. I've also never been great learning guitar as my short fingers struggled across the frets - much like my fingers on Emacs. It hurts after a while of performing the finger-splits! With Vim and its multiple modes I don't get that - so my fingers thank me.

Dreamcast

I haven't got a Nintendo Wii yet so I may well change my mind, but the Sega Dreamcast is by far the best console ever made. It was destroyed by poor marketing and stupid people! Way ahead of its time with the VMU on the controller, game play to die for and more processing power than its newer brethren (PS1). It was a sad day when Sega pulled out of the console market and its sad to see Sonic now jumping across the screens of its competitors. Alas - maybe one day they'll return! We can hope!

SliceHost

My host has reliably held this blog up and running for almost a year now and its the best hosting service I've ever had. I've managed to get through a few since I switched to using a VPS over shared about 2yrs ago and SliceHost stands out head and shoulders above the rest. Put simply: I love SliceHost!! Its built for developers with an excellent community, great control and management and wicked customer service and even a pretty funky site! Their Ajax Console access is a key selling point too - so basically when you run:

ifconfig eth0 down

As I have on faaaaaarrr too many occasions to admit too, then you can use their console to get your network back up and back into the system. "Life Saver" doesn't do it justice!!